About
A lifestyle for the curious. Discover the Prague many locals have never seen, keep your fitness up, learn new skills — and actually feel the difference. You don't need luxury to live richly.
Photo: Unsplash
The idea
Every city has two maps. The first one is everywhere — the guidebooks, the Instagram posts, the things people tell you to see before you die. The second map is harder to find. It's the city underneath the tourist layer: the hilltop neighbourhood nobody crosses to, the valley nature reserve the tram routes don't advertise, the suburb that's been quietly extraordinary for twenty years while nobody was looking.
Kiez Traveller is the second map. Thirty-eight locations that don't appear on the first one.
The bigger picture
Most people don't realise what completing Kiez Traveller actually adds up to. It's not just 38 nice days out. However long it takes you — 19 weeks, six months, a year — when you finish, you will have:
That's not a travel guide. That's a personal challenge with a clear structure, measurable progress, and results you'll actually notice — however long it takes to get there.
None of this is compulsory. You don't have to work out or prep meals if that's not your thing. But for those who want a routine — something consistent to build around — this is what the structure is for. Do as much or as little as works for you. Just don't stop.
Where this started
Kiez Traveller started somewhere else. I've lived in Weißensee for years and somewhere along the way I stopped exploring. The same coffee shop, the same park, the same walk to the U-Bahn. Berlin is one of the most interesting cities on earth and I was seeing about 400 metres of it.
So I made a rule: one new place every week, no more than €2 in transport, no days off work. Just relocate a Friday — bring the laptop, find a café in a neighbourhood I'd never been to, let the streets do the rest. Thirty weeks later I had 60 locations, a lot of notes, and a completely different relationship with the city I thought I already knew. That was the first Kiez Traveller field guide.
Prague is next. The same idea, a different city — and Prague has more layers than almost anywhere.
Prague is one of the most architecturally extraordinary cities on earth and most people who live here see about 2 kilometres of it. The same commute, the same neighbourhood, the same Saturday trip to the supermarket. Kiez Traveller exists to fix that. It's a field guide for people who already live here and want to actually know the city — the valley nature reserve the metro doesn't advertise, the hilltop neighbourhood tourists reach only as far as the tower, the former industrial quarter that's been quietly changing for twenty years while you weren't looking.
You don't need to take a day off. You don't need to spend money. You don't need to plan anything. Every episode gives you the route, the history and the context — the discovery is yours. Two new locations a fortnight, a packed lunch under €3, and Prague starts to feel enormous again.
The locations in this guide are places the Prague tourist industry doesn't cover: a river valley within tram distance of the centre, a working-class neighbourhood whose pubs haven't changed since 1985, a Baroque hillside park the tour groups have never reached. Not hidden — just ignored. Prague rewards the curious.
Not the Old Town Square crowd. The adventurous, health-conscious traveller who does this wherever they go — who finds the Náplavka lahůdky stall instead of the tourist restaurant, who runs along the Vltava before breakfast, who wants to swim in Divoká Šárka where nobody else on their flight has been. The kind of person who wants to keep their fitness up while travelling, go somewhere genuinely off the map, and come home having actually learned something — a new recipe, a new neighbourhood, a new way of moving through a city. If that's how you travel, Prague is one of the best cities on earth for it. And this is your guide to it.
A completely different product from anything the Prague tourist board, Lonely Planet, or any influencer is selling. They sell the highlight reel. Kiez Traveller gives you something that outlasts the trip — the experience of becoming someone who knows how to find their own highlights. Anywhere. In any city. For the rest of your life.
Another way entirely
You didn't choose this neighbourhood. Something else did. That's the point.
Surprise me — one button. No plan, no deliberation, no second-guessing. The city picks somewhere and you go. You won't know what you'll find until you're there. You won't know who you'll meet, what you'll stumble into, what will happen on the way. Some of the best days in any city only happen because you stopped choosing. There's something almost like instinct in it — the card falls where it falls, and you follow. Chance locations. Chance meetings. The kind of afternoon that could only have happened today, in that place, because something sent you there.
The Kiez Deck works the same way — a physical card drawn at random, a neighbourhood you've never thought about, a reason to go. Like tarot, but the city is the reading. You don't know what it means until you arrive. The card might send you somewhere you know very well. It's telling you to go back. There's something there you haven't seen yet.
What's on — instead of choosing a location and finding what's there, you start with what's happening right now. A film screening at Stromovka this evening. A jazz session at a Žižkov hospoda until late. A pop-up market on Náplavka until 2pm. Real-time events, the kind of thing you only find if you're already looking. The city is always moving. Some days you just join it.
Use the challenge when you want structure. Use Surprise me when you want to be led. Use What's on when the city is already calling. You never know till you go.
Most travel guides give you a list of spots. Kiez Traveller tries to give you something harder to package: a sense of a place. Every episode is built around four layers.
The people. The večerka owner who's been there since before the Velvet Revolution. The retired tram driver on the same park bench every morning. The Vietnamese shopkeeper who's served the same street for thirty years. A neighbourhood without its cast is just architecture.
The history. What was on this corner in 1938, 1948, 1968, now. Prague carries more political sediment than almost any other European city — you can read a hundred years of history in a single block if you know what to look for. The building that was expropriated three times. The street renamed under four different governments.
How to read it. What a faded shop sign above a modern fascia means. Which tram stop name is a remnant of a name that no longer exists anywhere else. Why that building looks out of place on an otherwise intact street. The signals a neighbourhood gives off once you start paying attention.
The rhythm. The same street at 7am and 11pm is two different places. You already know your own neighbourhood's rhythm. Part of exploring a new one is learning when to go.
For locals working from a laptop, the killer feature is that the work doesn't care where you are. Relocate a Friday — bring the laptop, find a café in a neighbourhood you've never been to, let the streets do the rest. For visitors, any day works. The principle is the same: instead of a tourist agenda, you have a Kiez agenda.
Kiez Traveller is designed to remove the planning. Every episode gives you the route, the café options, the Wi-Fi situation, the workability notes, and what's worth the detour on the walk back to the metro. The rest is up to you.
Bring a packed lunch. Spend the day somewhere new. Be back in time for dinner. That's it.
The guide is structured around two episodes per week. Monday is nature — valley reserves, hilltop parks, riverside paths, swimming lakes, the forests and countryside around Prague. Friday is urban — former industrial quarters, authentic neighbourhood pubs, suburban corners that didn't make the tourist map.
Monday and Friday work well because they create two fixed points in the week that become a habit. Nature on a Monday resets the week. Urban on a Friday gives the end of the week somewhere worth being. Done this way, 19 weeks and you're done. That's the ideal.
But the days are yours. Do both on a Sunday if that's what works. Do a Monday episode on a Wednesday. Do two in the same weekend when you have the time. The labels describe the type of episode and the spirit it was written in — not the day you're allowed to go.
Monday episodes are free. Friday episodes are for subscribers — they go deeper, include full workability notes, and cover the places worth being protective of.
The only rule
The challenge is 38 locations. Not 38 locations in 19 weeks. If six months is the pace your life allows — one episode a fortnight, both on a slow Sunday, a gap when things get busy — that's a Kiez Traveller. The city isn't going anywhere.
Most challenges fail because people miss a week and feel like they've already lost. Kiez Traveller doesn't work that way. There's no streak to protect, no schedule to fall behind on, no version of this where you've failed as long as you're still going. Pick it back up. The next episode is always there.
The people who finish are the ones who didn't quit — not necessarily the ones who went every Monday and every Friday without exception. Nineteen weeks or a year: when you hit thirty-eight locations, you've done it. Same map. Same patch. Same city that now feels like it belongs to you.
Every episode includes transit directions and an approximate travel time. Use these as a guide — Prague's DPP network (metro, trams, and buses) means most locations are reachable from anywhere in the city within 30–60 minutes. Find your nearest connection and the journey time will be similar.
The "Near me" button on the homepage will sort locations by distance from wherever you currently are, so you can always find what's closest.
Use the My progress page to mark locations as visited, write your thoughts and upload your own photos from each visit. It saves on your device — no account needed. Over 19 weeks you'll build a personal map and journal of the city you actually explored, not just the city you meant to.