Letter from Prague | All stories

As of next year our wallets are going to get a lot lighter. Not because of the January sales but because, as of March 1st ,the amount of small change in our purses and wallets should be reduced by the absence of 10 and 20 heller coins. The Central Bank has decided to take them out of circulation - for the simple reason that they don't circulate.

Accession talks with the European Union are continuing successfully, and if everything goes well, the Czech Republic will become an EU member in spring 2004. Although we are being assured that our lifestyle will not change, I'm pretty sure that it certainly will. In fact, it has changed a lot over the past few years.

Prague architecture: Baroque, Gothic and Cubism? I confess that even though I've lived in Prague for over two years, I knew little about this intriguing style. But such a distinctive artistic movement, which has influenced everything from street lamps to saucers, certainly deserves closer study.

It was dubbed the event of the decade. Forty-six heads of state descending on Prague for one of the most important summits of the last ten years. For months beforehand we were force-fed details of the NATO summit, the first to be held in the former Communist bloc. With a war against Iraq looming, many people believed the Prague summit would produce a huge demonstration of anger against the United States and her allies. With this in mind, the Czech authorities were taking no chances: 12,000 police were to be deployed on the streets to deal with

Until 1989, the 17th of November was only remembered as International Students' Day in Czechoslovakia, commemorating the student resistance in the streets of Prague against the Nazi occupation in 1939. Thirteen years ago, the date took on a whole new meaning, although students had a lot to do with it too. On that day a peaceful gathering of university students was brutally cracked down by the police, an event which set the ball rolling and turned into what was dubbed the "Vevet Revolution".

A lot of foreigners complain about the Prague winter, but I have to say - coming from Ireland, a country where it never really gets cold - I've actually come to enjoy true brass monkey weather. Of course, weeklong smog and blanket grey will bring a fella down, but give me minus five to ten degrees and clear skies and I'm a happy man.

Despite the fact that I am Czech and have always loved to travel, there was one place in the country that I never bothered to visit - until last week, that is. North Moravia - the city of Ostrava to be precise. It's not because I never had the chance to (in fact I have relatives who have been living there for tens of years) but rather because I didn't want to. The truth is that many Czechs, especially those from Prague, have not bothered to visit Ostrava because it is believed to be a dirty, grey, and very unattractive place, dominated by its mining

After thirteen years in office as Czechoslovak and later Czech president Vaclav Havel is preparing to leave Prague Castle and the Czech Republic is now faced with the task of electing a new head of state. But, while Havel the dissident was the obvious choice back in 1990, it has now become clear that Czech political parties will be hard put to agree on who should replace him.

It has become a matter of course that many factories changed the products they used to make in the past for new ones, just because their owner changed. Some of them launched the new production easily and are going on successfully, others had problems and their assembly lines came to a standstill.

There is an architectural style that is common to Prague, Vienna and Budapest - a style synonymous with the Austro-Hungarian empire. Then there are the more recent buildings one finds in Prague and in any number of cities around the world - the marble-floored shopping malls and the office blocks with shimmering glass windows that are the monuments to capitalist prosperity. But the last century also left a mark on Prague that is more Vladivostok than Vienna, more grey than gold - the structures designed under the label of socialism.