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More than 70 athletes, including nine prisoners and one ex-offender, are set to run in the Yellow Ribbon half-marathon in Prague at the weekend. The first of four races, the event highlights the importance of supporting the reintegration of former offenders within broader society upon completing their sentence. The charity race takes place on Saturday as part of the broader Sportisimo ½ Marathon.

Jan Jašek and Richard Belžík are two friends and chilli fans from the city of Brno. A few years ago, they turned their chilli growing hobby into a business and started producing hot sauces, salsas and chutneys. This year, their barbecue sauce with dried tomatoes won a first prize at the prestigious World Hot Sauce Awards in Louisiana.

‘Every public transit stop in Prague’ is an unusual blog created by US student Guy Tabachnik, who spent a few years in the Czech capital studying Czech language and linguistics. His unusual project, which maps all of Prague’s 2,500 tram, metro and bus stops, helped him to discover the city, from the centre all the way to the outskirts.

A young Czech couple living in Australia has launched a successful online application which enables people to recycle their kitchen waste. Through ShareWaste, people wishing to recycle their kitchen scraps but without the means to do so can connect with their neighbours who are already composting.

Since his studies, Indian filmmaker Shivendra Dungarpur has been fascinated by the work of Czech director Jiří Menzel. Eight years ago he started making a documentary dedicated to the Oscar winning director as well as other Czech New Wave filmmakers. The seven-hour-long documentary is called ‘CzechMate: in Search of Jiří Menzel’ and features 85 interviews with close to 20 Czech movie makers, including Miloš Forman and the now deceased Jiří Němec and Věra Chytilová.

Jan Stodola is an outdoor skating enthusiast and one of the authors of an unusual guide to natural ice skating in Czech Republic. I met with him to discuss his experiences with Nordic skating in the Czech Republic and about some of the country’s best spots to skate in the outdoors:

For nearly 20 years, the Multicultural Centre Prague has been involved in promoting human rights and respect for cultural diversity. Their activities and projects focus on the social and economic advancement of migrants in the Czech Republic or inclusion of socially disadvantaged minorities. I met with the centre’s director Zuzana Schreiberová to discuss some of their activities, including a project called Prague Shared and Divided or the recently published Prague-Warsaw newspaper:

An exhibition marking 200 years since the introduction of post boxes in the Czech lands is currently on display at Prague’s Postal Museum. On display are mailboxes from various periods of history as well as related objects. Among other thing, visitors can see the country’s oldest existing post box, dating back to the 1830s.

Where are the most unusual places to have a drink in Prague? What are the city’s five best small breweries? And which five river islands are worth discovering? A new book called ‘500 Hidden Secrets of Prague’ gives answers to all these questions and more and invites both tourists and locals to discover places off the beaten track.

Twenty-five years since the Czech and Slovak republics split in the Velvet Divorce, both continue to share remarkably close ties. Not surprisingly, tourism plays a key role, with Czech visitors, for example, making up for more than a third of foreign tourists in Slovakia a year. While the Czech Republic may have the edge in the number of castles and chateaux, sites such as the Tatra Mountains or Slovak Paradise remain major draws for Czechs.