Considering the sheer quantity of beer we’d drunk the day before, not to mention the triple-porker-whammy of pig for lunch, dinner and second dinner, we were all remarkably sprightly the next morning, untouched by hangover or gastric distress. To kick off a day of sightseeing, we took the metro over to Malostranská near the castle and followed the stream of tourists up the sloping approach road.

The castle is an odd place. It’s more of a walled town than a castle, at least compared to a typical British example, and the diversity of the architecture inside is mind-boggling. The main square has Romanesque colonnades, the none-more-Gothic bulk of St. Vitus’ Cathedral, and pastel baroque facades all over the place. We ordered thimble-sized coffees at a café in the shadow of the cathedral and flicked through the guidebook to work out what to do that day.

After a stroll around the castle square, we decided to head onwards to Letná Park, a tram ride away to the east and apparently home to the best beer garden in Prague. Until 1962, Letná also boasted (if that’s the right word) the largest statue of Stalin in the world, standing 15m high and weighing 17,000 tonnes. Completed in 1955, it was dynamited seven years later as Khruschev tried to erase Stalin’s imprint from the Soviet Union and its satellite states.

The marble plaza where the statue once stood is a pretty decrepit place these days. In the statue’s place there’s a giant, industrial-strength metronome which hums back and forth to symbolise the passing of time, but in aesthetic terms it’s a bit of a disaster, looking and sounding more like a chairlift than a work of art. The marble blocks were graffiti-covered and broken, and their edges had been worn down by the trucks of the skateboarders who have colonised the place. Here and there, discarded needles lay in the cracks between paving slabs.

It should have been depressing, but I was caught up in a weird sort of appreciation for the history of it all: the Stalinist mania of the giant statue and its hasty destruction only a few years later, and now the feeling that the city has turned its back on this particular corner of Letná Park as an unwelcome reminder of unhappier times.

We found the beer garden at the other end of the park, looking a little run down and almost devoid of people. We decided instead to eat at a swish little bistro opposite before heading onward to Petřín Hill.

Jez had suggested Petřín to us, telling us we should “walk up Petrin Hill, next to the castle, beautiful part of Prague,” adding into the bargain that it was “good for girl watching.” I’d love to make a fruity comment at this point about the laydeez, but the truth is that I was far more excited about not walking up the hill but rather taking the funicular railway to the top. And the funicular was covered by our three-day travel passes to boot — bonus!

Yup, I’m a dork.

There was a minor drama on the way there (read: Jeff and I laughed like drains, Josh frowned resignedly) when I mistakenly decided to get off the tram one stop too early. Jeff and I leapt nimbly through the closing doors, only to turn around and see the tram moving off with Josh still on board. We caught up with him at the bottom of the hill, took the funicular up and walked back down, stopping at a café on a terrace overlooking the city. We ordered three beers and the waiter came by a few minutes later to deliver them.

“Ah, great. Thanks. Děkuji!” I said to him.

Looking blankly back at me for a second, he replied, “You’re welcome. Prosim.”

I turned to Jeff and Josh. “You know, every time I try to say ‘thank you,’ whoever I’m talking to looks at me like I’m mental. Then I ask them how to say ‘thank you’, and everyone pronounces it a little differently.”

“Maybe you have the pronunciation wrong,” Jeff replied. “Maybe instead of ‘thank you’ you’re actually saying ‘suck my balls’.”

We walked back to the flat, crossing Charles Bridge and clutching our wallets and passports as we did so. Every single guidebook mention of the bridge screams “pickpockets! Pickpockets!” in a hysterical tone and so we crossed it in military fashion, each man covering the next and staying vigilant against this criminal scourge. We were, of course, perfectly fine.

After stopping off in the flat to put on our party pants we headed out for the night, watching that night’s game over dinner (sadly, we managed only a double-porker on this, our second day in Prague) and then wandering out of our Old Town comfort zone to try out a few bars at Jez’s recommendation.

This did not go according to plan.

We decided to start with Pivnice U Rudolfina over by the Rudolfinum concert hall. In his pre-holiday pep talk, Jez had characterised this pub as “a trad Czech beer hall, filthy cheap (like 30p a pint), great beer, you get thrown out if you drink at less than a pint every 15 mins. You will be the only non-Czechs there.”

“Sounds like a challenge,” we thought, and set off to find it. And find it we did, shuttered and dark, having closed half an hour earlier. On our way there we’d passed Tretter’s, another of Jez’s suggestions, but it had been quiet and intimidatingly flashy looking. With no real idea of where to go, we chose a nearby middle-of-the-road bar for a couple of consolatory pints and then headed back out.

Finding ourselves just south of Charles Bridge, we came across the queue for what was clearly a very popular club. This was the line for Karlovy Lázně, a multi-floored, super-sized European version of Espionage and by some accounts the biggest dance club in Europe. My kryptonite, in other words.

The queue was long enough to make us go next door instead, to a place called Klub Lávka set in an old building overlooking a weir running across the Vltava. We wandered inside and spent fifteen minutes being ignored at the first bar we came to, before realising that we’d somehow managed to walk straight past the door staff without paying the cover charge. Not that it seemed to make a blind bit of difference; the staff at the next bar further into the club served us without a second glance at our armband-less wrists.

We cleaved to the bar for a bit, spent a while watching a latin dance competition in one of the rooms upstairs, with Josh cutting a mean rug between competitive dances, and then moved downstairs to the main area for…more dancing. I am a categorically awful dancer, but if the music is acceptable then I’ll get drunk and make a half-hearted effort to avoid being a complete party pooper. For a while at least the music in Lávka was reasonable, and the bar provided us with a steady stream of sickly sweet Desperados to satisfy the other half of the equation: Jeff and Josh danced; I “danced”, and everyone was more or less happy. We even started chatting to a Russian girl in Prague on holiday who enthusiastically encouraged me to shake my hips.

God, it makes me shudder even to think about it.

Anyway, we danced/”danced” some more, and with his masterful dancefloor skillz, Josh actually seemed to be getting on rather well with this young lady. Jeff and I raised our eyebrows significantly at each other.

Then she said, “Excuse me, I must be going,” and left. Just like that. Shortly afterwards, the bar ran out of Desperados. It was a sign to leave, and we took it.