It’s a 20 minute taxi ride from the airport to the Pension Manes on Manesova Street, through leafy suburbs with mansion-style apartments that remind me of South Yarra and Elwood in Melbourne. There are trams here, too. The traffic seems light for a capital city. The cars are mainly sedans and hatchbacks - SUVs are very few and far between, and the streets look better for their absence. Melbourne, take note.

Manesova Street is lines with 19th century and Art Nouveau buildings. Pension Manes sticks out - it has an undistinguished brown facade, more recent looking than its neightbours, but inside there’s a lovely mosaic floor and a staricase with a gold-painted dragon’s head on the end of the banister.

The pillow on the bed is like a small thick square quilt that can obviously be folded in half to make it thicker. Looking at it I feel dubious, but it’s surprisingly comfortable.

It’s 6 o’clock and I plan to take a short nap and then go out, but lost sleep catches up with me and I wake at 1 a.m. and sleep on and off until morning light comes through the trees out the window.

Living in Bangkok, I’d forgotten what a crisp clear early autumn morning feels like. I lean out the window and treat my lungs to the fine air and a honey cigar.

Walking towards the old town, one of the first things of interest is a shop selling cannabis vodka and several kinds of absinthe. The only absinthe I’ve ever had tasted like I imagine window cleaner would, and didn’t even make me hallucinate. I’ll have to ask my Czech publisher if any of this stuff is really worth it.

Towers, oriel windows, wrought iron balconies, Art Nouveau doorways, atlantes, onion domes and other architectural eye candy keeps me rubbernecking as I walk along. It’s about 9 - in Bangkok, the air would be pungent with the smell of frying chillies and the streets would be busy. Here it’s quiet, reminding me of Melbourne again.

Intermission: I’ve just noticed there’s a small didgeridoo hanging on the wall down beside the desk in the internet cafe where I’m typing this. I wonder if someone here plays it when things aren’t busy. The guy who’s just sat down at a nearby ‘puter gets his friend to turn off the light. I ask if he wouldn’t mind turning it back on.

“You will see better with it off,” he says in a Teutonic accent.

“Actually, I find I see the keyboard better with the light on.”

“You don’t need it,” the friend assures me mystically. I expect him to tell me to use the Force. I wonder if I will have to beat them up with the digeridoo, but the friend turns the light back on. Good boy.

On with the show

I head for the Vltava river. I like any river that’s calm enough to float a boat on, and particularly rivers flowing through old cities and towns, for the sense that they give of carrying history known and unknown in their flow.

By the time I get there, clouds have covered the sky. The modest-sized river looks like liquid steel, all clean ripples in shimmering black and silver. It isn’t wide enough to dominate its banks as Bangkok’s mighty, muddy Chao Phraya does - rather, it’s dominated by the splendid buildings lining its channel; over the other side, immense Prague Castle hunkers up on its hill. Though it’s the biggest attraction in the city, I don’t feel like going there just yet. I feel like idling around the old town streets. After a frothy capuccino at the handsome Kavarna Slavia (there’s a great array of fancy coffees, and as usual when I’m confronted with a large choice I feel fatigued and choose something simple and familiar), I head for the Old Town Square.

Intermission 2: The Germans have gone. A guy is cleaning the monitors with something that smells like absinthe. The lights are off again, but this time in a noble cause - photographing a sculpture incoporating a mask (the cafe doubles as an at gallery) which, with a light shining through it, casts the shdow of a stranger on the wall.

The streets between the river and the square are an almost insanely picturesque cobbled labyrinth, full of tourist shops selling Bohemian crystal, marionettes and Kafka t-shirts. There are a few art galleries around the aquare. I choose one with two exhibitions, Alphonse Mucha and Jan Saudek. Saudek’s photographs of people at different stages in their lives affect me, particularly those of women, whose bodies display those ravages deemed unseemly, wrought by childbirth and plain unkind old time. Here are puckered bellies, caesarean scars, swollen or flaccid breasts. It has occurred to me before now that we glorify male wounds and deaths, but not those intrinsically female ones that are the wages of motherhood. Where are all the monuments to women who’ve died in childbirth? Why isn’t a ceasarean scar as honourable as a duelling scar was for an old-time Prussian junker?

My favourite picture is a set of two depicting a wedding. In one, everyone is clothed. In the other, everyone’s naked - and they’re all women. I like the idea of playing dress-ups, using the imagination to change your body and loosen up the self the way you did when you were a kid.

After wandering through the remains of Jewish Prague and stopping for a cup of tea at the Franz Kafka cafe - very atmospheric inside, with wonderful wood-panelled booths - but when did the practice of serving tea as a teabag - Lipton’s at that - with a glass of hot water start, and more urgently, when will it stop?

I finished the day by going to Mozart’s requiem at the wonderfully gorgeous Art Nouveau Municipal House concert hall. I’m no music critic, so I’ll just say that it sounded pretty good to me. Prague is a city of music - concerts and recitals every night. It’s raining, so I catch a taxi back to the Pension Manes and fall asleep with an orchestra playing in my head.