Hotel Bohemians

When I was in Prague I stayed at the Hotel Bohemians.  It was cheap, convenient, comfortable, and quiet, which is pretty much all you can ask for in a hotel.  The hotel is about 100 yards from tram stops in either direction and is on a fairly busy road, which made it seem reasonably safe, even when I was walking back late at night.  If you click on this link, you will see a picture and a map showing the relative location of the hotel.  In the photo, the tower in the distance is the Prague Castle.

I asked for, and received, a river view.  While it is not as spectacular as the view further up the river, it is still very Czech looking and there was a little castle (well, probably a little church) just across the way.

There is also a view of pretty pastel houses on the side of a mountain--at least by Dutch standards.

The hotel is a Soviet era building, so it is a little older but it is still nice and reasonably sized.  The hotel is actually on the second and fourth floors of a large building.  I don't know what the bottom floors are used for.  The hotel has the old kind of elevator--it was teeny-tiny with a maximum limit of three people.  If you had a really large bag, you probably wouldn't even be able to ride up with it.  I did the whole trip--Thursday through Sunday--with just my regular, small backpack which meant that I didn't have to worry about the elevator (except for the fact that it always seemed to land hard) and that I was really proud of my ability to pack light.  If you click on this link you will see a photo gallery for the hotel, including the rooms and the breakfast buffet (but not including the elevator).  In the picture on the top right of the "Hotel Interior" pictures, my room was the first door on the left.  I like European breakfast buffets.  This one had a couple of kinds of breads (and the Czechs do bread pretty well) cold meats and cheeses, honey, jam, and marmalade, real yogurt (it tasted like homemade yogurt), hard boiled eggs, pound cake, coffee, tea, and a couple of varieties of Tang.  They always had a radio playing in the breakfast area which had American music and American Christmas music playing, with Czech and German commercials and Czech newscasts.  One thing that surprised me, though, was that I never once heard "Good King Wenceslas" played.  I was going to ask if the Czechs like that song or if they had ever heard of it but I forgot.  But, since they played almost exclusively American Christmas carols you would have thought that they would have really liked a song about THE Czech king and patron saint.

I almost didn't stay at the Hotel Bohemians, though.  I almost stayed on a Botel, instead.  Botels (hotels on boats) are apparently pretty popular in Prague, since the Vlatav River goes right through the center of the city.  I passed at least four on my way into town every day.  I thought it could be pretty neat and kind of a unique experience to stay on one of those and the prices were comparable.  I decided not to go with a botel because 1) I was a little afraid that, if it was choppy out, I might get sea sick and I thought that would be a bad way to start each day and 2) in reviews  of the Botel I was looking at, everybody loved the experience and then would throw in things like "as you might expect, the rooms were small but the bathrooms were minuscule.  I was afraid I would get stuck."  And I decided that adding a claustrophobia attack to sea sickness just might take the fun out of the trip altogether.  Having been there and seen the locations, I am still pleased with my choice.  At least on my side of the river, to get to the hotel, you had to go down a tiny, narrow stairway to get to river level that looked kind of spooky and not very safe.  Also, the road that runs along the river is fairly busy and I bet that you can hear a lot of road noise in the Botels (in the Hotel Bohemians I couldn't hear any road noise but I was on the opposite side of the building from the road) which probably wouldn't make for a restful night's sleep.  Also, I think one of the big advantages to the Botel would be that, over supper (or breakfast), you could sit on the deck and watch the river and the city--which would be a pretty spectacular view, I admit--but I think you would need much warmer weather to make that worthwhile.  If you want to see what Botels are like, here are the websites to three of the ones I passed every day.  The Botel Racek is the one I had thought about staying at.  It has a virtual tour of the boat (which probably needs a lot of internet speed to make worthwhile) which you can see here.  This is the Botel Vodnik and this is the Botel Admiral.  Those all link to the English pages, so they should be pretty easy to navigate.