I never wrote about my Prague, Vienna and Budapest trip from March 2025, which is strange because it has stayed with me more than almost any trip I've taken. I am writing this after nearly a year.
I went to these cities very deliberately for their history and classical music. I wanted to walk through old European streets, spend time in churches and museums, and be somewhere where music still felt woven into everyday life. I loved that I could walk into a church and find a Mozart performance happening inside.
Prague was also Kafka. I loved being in his city and suddenly having a writer I loved attached to actual streets and buildings around me rather than just pages in a book.
But more importantly, there was Opera. This art form had always eluded me - because I only ever heard it on radio or on record players. I never enjoyed it through audio listening. I remember a few years ago a dear friend told me she got hooked to Opera and it was the most incomprehensible thing to me. Anyhow, as an afterthought, because I was in in Prague I bought tickets to the double bill of Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci.
I stepped into the magnificent opera house 10 mins late because I got confused and ended up in the wrong theater before finding my way to the right one. I did not like Pagliacci. It was so over the top that I laughed at it the first few minutes. All this OTT singing and jealousy and betrayal and drama was nothing subtle. I thought: This is opera?
After the first intermission I settled into my actual seat and an uncanny thing happened. I was drawn onto the stage and fell under perfomers' spell. Somehow the music and the voices and all that ridiculous drama had gotten under my skin. It was almost like hypnosis. I liked it inspite of myself. I was obsessed and booked 2 shows for the operas in Vienna.
I was happy to say goodbye to Prague. Overall, the food was hard for me as a vegetarian. The heritage hotel I stayed at was spooky because a nun was buried or killed there 300 years ago, and there were rumors that her ghost still wanders the hallways. That did me in. Prague to me felt crowded and somewhat grungy. I did see Bill Nighy on Charles Bridge; I read later on that he was in the city for some shoot. I am ok not visiting Prague again :P
The train journey from Prague to Vienna was picturesque, winding through the Czech countryside.
In Vienna at the historic State Opera house, there was Norma. It was a standout performance. I took it all in—the music, the voices, the orchestra, the whole strange and beautiful experience. Then I saw La rondine. That was it. I was done for.
It was beautiful, but also incredibly inventive. I remember a typewriter being used as part of the staging while something else was happening at the same time, and being fascinated by how many layers there were to watch and listen to. It was playful, clever, modern and visually creative while this gorgeous music was happening underneath it all. Whatever spell had started in Prague grew stronger with Norma and La rondine. Transformation was complete. Opera gave me a new way to appreciate all the overtures and interludes by my favorite composers: Mozart, Rossini, Verdi and Bellini. It opened a new dimension to appreciate their works.
Vienna itself was everything I had hoped for in terms of music. Mozart, churches, concert halls, pianos, performances—it felt completely natural to build a day around music and then just keep wandering. Their cathedral and the hospitality of Park Hyatt. Sacher Tote and the cafe where it was invented. I experience the coffee houses that the intellectuals of the 19th and 20th centuries would congregate and of course the dark history of WW2. I ate at TIAN, the Michelin-starred vegetarian restaurant. A beautiful tasting menu built entirely around vegetables felt exactly right for this trip. I will definitely want to go to Vienna and just do opera all days.
Then I got on another train and went to Budapest.
Budapest was also Franz Liszt. By this point the whole trip had become this wonderful trail of composers, music and history—Kafka in Prague, Mozart in Vienna, Liszt in Budapest. Incredible art deco buildings everywhere took my breath away.
I didn't see an opera there, but I toured the Hungarian State Opera House, and it was astounding. The gold, the frescoes, the grand staircase, the auditorium. Just ridiculously beautiful.
In Budapest there was another special dinner, this time at Babel. Another Michelin-starred tasting menu, another evening where I could get dressed, go somewhere beautiful and simply enjoy being there.
I had traveled solo before, so this wasn't about proving that I could do it. But this trip felt like a new height. Three countries, three cities, trains between them, beautiful hotels that I still think about, opera at night, Michelin-starred dinners, Kafka, Mozart and Liszt, music in churches, and wandering around completely on my own schedule.
There was something deeply luxurious about it—not just the hotels and restaurants, although, uff, the hotels! It was the freedom of the whole thing. Waking up somewhere beautiful and deciding exactly how I wanted the day to unfold. I remember feeling incredibly well and maybe that is why this trip has stayed so present in my mind.
More than a year later, I can still pull up those memories so easily: a hotel room in Vienna, getting on a train to the next country, walking through Prague, sitting down for an opera, finding music inside a church, a beautiful dinner by myself, the ridiculous beauty of the Budapest Opera House.
On bad days, I find myself going back there in my head. Maybe good memories work that way. You don't just enjoy them while they're happening. Some of them stay somewhere in your consciousness, quietly reminding you that you have felt this free, this curious, this well before—and that you will again. I went looking for history and classical music and I came home loving opera so much that while in Budapest, I had looked up imminent Mozart Opera performances and booked a trip to LA to watch the Cosi Fan Tutte at the LA Opera house.
More than a year later, opera is still with me, but so is something else from that trip—the memory of how completely well I felt. Curious, independent, comfortable in my own company, moving through the world and filling my days with things I loved.Maybe that is why I keep returning to this trip in my mind. Some trips are wonderful while you're on them. A few somehow keep giving back long after you've come home and this trip was one such.
