Prague’s Roxy/NoD

Posted by Cindy on January 31, 2010

I’d heard that there was something interesting happening in Prague.  Of course, anyone who’s been paying attention understands that it’s been a kind of sudden hot spot for at least 4 decades, and maybe the news comes not as news, but as surprise that it’s still this way.  I was newly in Berlin, couch surfing in flats, and it wasn’t getting old.  I was looking for the next heartbeat, because the places I’d lived seemed to run out of breath lately.  Berlin is a great place to live on the cheap, and it’s not a secret, but maybe it should be.  There are a lot of expats living here, but the hassle of working with the German authorities to get residence here keeps everyone but the determined out.

I’d saved up enough for the train ride, and this site here introduced me to some great lodgings, and very reasonable.  So I took the chance of losing my place on the couch in Mitte, and went over.  It’s a short ride, and the city is a little similar to Berlin in some ways.  There’s a remarkably romantic gloom here that everyone talks about, but is still hard to describe, so I’ll leave it to the literary Czechs to do that.  I was curious about the art scene here, because in Berlin it was pretty good, and I’d heard Prague was even better.  On the first night I literally just happened upon Club Roxy, and was carefully optimistic.

The Roxy part of this is a great bar with incredible music.  DJ Sasha, Skinny Puppy, and Natacha Atlas have all played here, and there’s something nearly every night, it seems.  The crowd is fun, beautiful people in the counterculture sense of the word, which means its like L.A. but without surgeries, and more interesting hair.  The real appeal for me, however, was the NoD part of the club.  This is the floor where you can see new experimental theatre, and it’s also a place where you can have one of the most life-changing conversations in your life.  At least, that’s how it worked out for me.