Letter from Prague | All stories

"You're in Prague, not home. But home for now!" It was a line in an email I received a few days ago, from someone I met while on vacation recently. He wrote to say that he hoped I'd had a good trip home—or to Prague, that is.

It is difficult to stay away from the weather in my Letter from Prague this week as the unusually long heat wave seems to be dominating everybody's life right now. It is not fun travelling on public transport, or just moving from one place to another in the capital. There is over 30 degrees Celsius in the office and at home it is not much better, not even during the night.

Just by I.P. Pavlova metro station there is an unusual "museum" - a shop there which sells mobile telephones and paraphernalia has set up a display cataloguing the history of mobiles in this country. Its most prized exhibit is a classic early 1990s "briefcase" phone, which as you can imagine is as big as a briefcase, though considerably heavier at around four kilos.

Prague is wilting. Although summer is short and precious in this part of the world the present heat-wave with temperatures around 33 degrees Celsius appears to be more than most people can cope with. There has been a mass exodus from the city to country cottages, the embankments of the Vltava river are crowded with swimmers and breweries are working overtime to meet demand.

Coffee is just one of those things that North Americans and Europeans will never agree on. Both claim to be the originators of contemporary coffee culture. Europe has been importing and serving it in its cafes since the 16th century; however, it was probably the mass coffee shop chains of North America that made the activity of "going out for coffee" a part of the everyman's daily routine and a form of entertainment as commonplace as going to the movies. The only thing that both cultures do agree on, it seems, is that coffee is delicious.

I'll give you an instance of how an afternoon in Prague can work itself up into something special, even from a dull start. It was a Friday. I had finished a meeting at 2.30. It was wet and grey, but I suppose I should point it was Good Friday. I was taking the cut through the old monastery garden that gets one to the Wenceslas Square tramstops when I had an idea. Instead of waiting forty minutes at Masaryk Station for my next train, I could pop in to Our Lady of the Snows, the vast, tall monastic church, across whose ancient garden I was now hurrying.

In less than a week's time, the 41st Karlovy Vary International Film Festival will start in the west Bohemian spa town, named after Emperor Charles IV. For centuries the town has been sought out for its mineral water sources. Close to the border with Germany, it grew into a wealthy resort visited by people from either side of the border as well as from further afield.

The Czech Republic is dominated by smokers. This is a line that you've surely heard me repeat time and again in the seven years that I've been here at Radio Prague. But an incident that I witnessed recently has made me reconsider. There seems to be light at the end of the tunnel for me - a staunch non-smoker!

Time shifted into hyper-drive the day I saw the metronome swing at Letna Plain. Tick. Tock. Tick tock. Ticktock. Was it moving faster? Those first few weeks in Prague had crept by. I'd arrived, got to work and...waited. For friends. For things to do. For the day I could figure out how to shower sitting down (there's no wall mount for the shower head in most apartments - it must be a Czech thing).

According to the BBC, a Bavarian company producing the mascot for the upcoming football World Cup has gone bankrupt, with reports saying demand for the product - a lion named 'Goleo' dressed in football gear - has been weak. The BBC speculated in an article recently that the lion as symbol had little relevance in Germany (which favours the eagle) but pointed out that three lions were the symbol of Germany's traditional football rivals, England. But England is not the only country in the competition with the lion as its symbol. The Czech Republic