Letter from Prague | All stories

Regardless of how it may have gone out of fashion elsewhere Prague remains a city of smoking and smokers. If it is the city of a hundred spires it is also a city of a thousand pubs - and in every one the bluish-brown smoke wafts close to the ceiling as you enter. Say you don't smoke? In Prague, friend, you will. Hell, this is the only city - the only city - where I have ever seen a bicycle courier lighting up. A bicycle courier.

Recently a Prague court convicted but did not sentence four players from the Northern Ireland international football team who two years ago were involved in a fight with staff in a "strip club" off Wencelsas Square. Now what's interesting to me about this case is that the establishment in question, named Atlas, is not just a strip club but is also a brothel. How ironic is that? The members of the Northern Ireland football team, who famously can't score, getting arrested in a brothel.

If someone were to ask you to list five national symbols of your country, would you be able to name them? Of course, the most common are the national flag and the national anthem but what else represents your country? I attended a discussion on this topic the other day and realised that the very thing that Czechs have always been known to be proud of - their nation - is losing its defining symbols...

There's not much in the way of consumer protection in the Czech Republic and believe me that thirteen years after the fall of communism the consumer still needs a lot of protection. Most of us are still so impressed by the incredible variety of goods available that we are happy to overlook a buy that does not quite meet our expectations.

The last few days have been marked by various events here in the capital Prague, all of them in some way connected with road transport and traffic, as the past week was designated European Week of Mobility. One of them was a race - with people trying to get to the city centre from various places by car, bike and public transport. On each occasion public transport and bikes proved faster than the car, although some drivers complain that the race fixed and the result was a foregone conclusion. In another event, mothers with prams and buggies raced

The opposition right-wing Civic Democrats have begun collecting signatures among party colleagues to back a proposal to hold a vote of confidence in parliament, which it plans to submit to the lower house at its next session. But what are they trying to achieve, when the chances of them meeting their goal of a no confidence vote for the current coalition government are so low? Politicians from the ruling coalition do not feel threatened and have labelled this attempt as a waste of time, stressing that the opposition would only be shooting itself

The recent electricity outage in the United States and Canada reminded me that during my childhood, blackouts were quite common. Of course, they never lasted more than a few hours, at least as far as I can remember. I never saw power being cut off deliberately, for saving purposes, like my parents back in the 1950s. It would then be announced on the radio that power would be cut in certain regions and people filled up their kerosene lamps or just sat around in the dark and told each other stories.

Every morning, on my brief walk to work, I risk death or terrible injury performing what should be a relatively safe task: crossing the road. So far I've emerged unscathed: but each year, thousands of people end up in hospital and hundreds end up dead.

You may recall that Radio Prague ran a competition earlier this year in which we asked who you considered the most interesting Czech, living or dead. Someone from our Russia section told me something interesting: they got a few letters in which people chose the Czech football captain, Pavel Nedved. As almost every single player on the Czech national team plays abroad, it occurred to me that many people's only connection with the Czech Republic might be that their favourite team features a Czech player, be it Petr Cech at French club Rennes, or

It's amazing how a single animal can rivet the public's attention as we all saw last weekend with the christening of a small seal named Abeba at the Prague Zoo. This creature's claim to fame: that she was the pup of the famous Gaston, the adult male who escaped from the zoo last year when the Vltava river broke its banks and Prague saw floods it hadn't experienced for five hundred years. During those dramatic August days we surveyed Gaston's run for freedom, making it all the way to Dresden before finally being recovered by zoo keepers to be returned