THE Prague PARADOX

In rolled the train from Berlin one evening last month, and out I stepped. Dragging my bags along a path traced by hundreds of travelers every week, I crossed the terminal floor and stepped outside to hail a cab.

A leather-jacketed, weary-faced driver nodded me into his gray taxi, and in a flash we were rolling along to the medieval city center, exploring the limits of my Czech and his English.

A left at the Hilton, a dash through a tunnel and lo, we emerged amid one of the most admired urban landscapes in Europe. Within walking distance lay the Charles Bridge, Prague Castle and the Old Town’s 12th century tangle of narrow alleys and ancient stonework. At first sight, a stranger is likely to love it here.

But first sight isn’t everything. When we pulled up at a curb just around the corner from my hotel’s lobby, the driver pointed to the meter and charged me $30--for a one-mile taxi ride that legally should have cost no more than $6.

That’s Prague, city of medieval wonders and art nouveau gems, of Franz Kafka and Vaclav Havel, of holdout American expats, of galloping commercialism and of persistent treachery against tourists. Taxi rip-offs like this one, most locals and veteran visitors will tell you, are business as usual. So, they agree, are restaurant overcharges and subway thievery.

Ten years since the Velvet Revolution that ejected communism and elevated Havel from dissident prisoner to president, Prague remains the tourism sweetheart of Eastern Europe, one of the prettiest cities on the planet. But Prague is also a case study in what can happen when mass tourism comes to town. Alongside the wonders lie the ironies and the rip-offs. I had a grand time in my five days there, and I’d go back again (if I could avoid summer weekends), but if you’re on the tourist path, you can never be sure whether you’re about to be cheated--or charmed.

Consider, for instance, the evening that followed my taxi misadventure. Once I’d settled into the Pariz Hotel, I wandered across the street to the Obecni Dum, a municipal structure that houses a symphony hall, three restaurants and enough stained glass, ironwork, mosaic tile, frescoes and crystal chandeliers to make it one of the most striking examples of Art Nouveau design in all of Europe.

When I noticed a rustle of preparations at the box office, I did a little investigating, then raced back across the street to fetch a tie and jacket. Minutes later, I was making my entrance into the annual Municipal Ball.

Men wore tails, tuxes and dark suits. Women wore jewels, pink taffeta and crimson satin. It was a grown-up Czech prom, really, featuring three orchestras (including the Prague Symphony) and a jazz band led by “the Czech Louis Armstrong.” Everybody waltzed and drank a lot of beer. For hours, I slipped from room to room, grinning like a dope and reminding myself what it had cost. The municipal ball ticket: $6. A beer: 80 cents. A heavy snack: another 80 cents.

In other words, a Prague taxi ride may cost $30 per mile, but an orchestral orgy of food, drink and dance in a gilded hall goes for $1.26 per hour.

Eight years ago, Alan Levy, editor of the local English-language weekly, the Prague Post, surveyed the scenery, noted the mounting number of artsy young Americans and declared this “the Left Bank of the ‘90s.” Of course, it was never that simple.

But in many ways, Prague is merely lurching through the same transformation that overtook European cities and towns from Assisi to Stratford-on-Avon in the decades following World War II. Down on its luck and alert to Americans bearing strong dollars, much of Western Europe turned to trading on its history and became largely dependent on tourism.

The difference with Prague is that the process only began in 1989. And once these changes had begun, they advanced more quickly because tourism is a bigger business now, and because selling Prague, from the cheap beer to the brooding architecture to the playwright-and-prisoner-turned-president, was so easy.

“Prague used to be a town of real people,” tour guide Lucie Militka, age 21, told me one morning. “But now prices are so high that people can’t live here. Shops like bakers are being replaced by souvenir shops.” At a development company where she used to work, Lucie said, the business plan was “waiting for the death of old people,” then buying their flats and leasing them out as office suites.

Despite widespread building and renovation, there’s still a shortage of hotel rooms in the $60-to-$100-per-night range, which forces many travelers into rooms more costly or more rustic than they prefer. But other tourists’ needs have been seen to in spades.

In the city center, souvenir shops and restaurants have crowded out most other commerce with their marionettes, floppy jester hats, Kafka T-shirts, art reproductions, beer steins, old Soviet pins and Bohemian crystal bric-a-brac. U Flecku beer hall, probably the most famous restaurant in town, is a sprawling brewery and eatery that dates back to 1499, swallows busloads of tour groups each day and holds 1,200 customers at a time. In the train station, dubious characters congregate and slot machines rattle. (Gambling is legal, as are prostitution and possession of small amounts of marijuana.)

The latest batch of pastel storefront paint jobs impresses visitors as well--but even that can be viewed with suspicion. Preservationists fear these acrylic coats will not only ruin the district’s historically monochromatic, earth-toned look, but may trap moisture, posing a threat the structures never faced, ironically, under communist control. Citing the risk, the World Monuments Fund added central Prague to its 1998-’99 list of 100 “most endangered” sites.

National tourism tallies show that international visits to the Czech Republic, dominated by Prague, nearly tripled between 1990 and 1994. Since then figures have been flatter, but capitalism is still sinking roots. The first Prague McDonald’s opened in 1992, since followed by several others.

Another irony is that the carnage in Yugoslavia may well slow the tourist traffic to Prague and other points in Europe this summer--even though the Czech Republic is shielded from the Balkans’ troubles by Austria, Slovakia and Hungary. In fact, Prague is farther from the fighting than Venice or Vienna, separated from Kosovo and the flow of Albanian refugees by 500 miles or more. Petty crime is a more immediate issue for most visitors than NATO policy.

The dishonesty of Prague’s cabdrivers has been an issue since the first years after communism’s fall. American budget travel guru Rick Steves once labeled them “the most dishonest taxi drivers in Europe,” and in 1997, after city officials dropped regulation efforts and left drivers to charge whatever they liked, prominent Czechs in America and elsewhere launched a petition campaign, charging that the drivers were ruining the country’s good name around the world.

In 1998, city officials reinstated limits on what drivers could legally charge, but it’s unclear how much has changed. Whenever possible, shrewd visitors walk or use public transit.

That public transit system, however, plays host to a second tourist menace: pickpockets, who work in teams during the moments of jostling when passengers are boarding and exiting. Often, says Weston Stacey, executive director of the American Chamber of Commerce in Prague, the teams are made up of two young men and a grandmotherly woman. In the space of four Prague days last June, tourist Don Morris of Pismo Beach reported in a letter to this section, his 45-person tour group was victimized by three subway pickpocketings and one purse theft.

Then there are the restaurants. The issue is not the cuisine, which has begun to gain in variety from the standard Czech trio of pork, potatoes and dumplings. And it’s not the slow and ill-tempered work habits that endure from the Soviet era in many dining rooms. It’s dishonesty again. In a 1998 study by the Czech Commercial Inspectorate, inspectors found 15% of restaurant meals ended with a falsely inflated bill.

I had no such problems in my five days of dining out, but I was alone and wary. Crooked operators are said to prey most often on large, heavily drinking groups.

Still, no catalog of changes or list of civic problems can cancel out the sensation that strikes a newcomer upon seeing Prague Castle across the Vltava River at dusk, lights upon its turrets and a mist descending.

The Charles Bridge may teem with foreigners on summer nights, but so do Cuzco and Katmandu. On any afternoon, you can linger over coffee and ice cream with raspberries in the splendor of the Obecni Dum’s ground-floor cafe. You can climb the hill to the castle, inspect the soot-black buttresses of St. Vitus Cathedral inside, perhaps admire the uniformed guards, whose tassels and epaulets were designed, at Havel’s behest, by Teodor Pistek, the costume designer for the film “Amadeus.”

You can duck down a side street in the Old Town and savor the weirdness of stepping from medieval cobblestones into the cave-like barroom of O’Che’s, an Irish-Cuban pub with Guinness on tap, the cartoon network on the television and a Cuban flag on the wall. O’Che’s barroom may not be precisely why Havel and company fought for freedom, but here it is.

On any evening, there will likely be several affordable church concerts, some jazz, a few marionette shows (one long-running program is based on Mozart’s opera “Don Giovanni,” which premiered here in 1787). Also, there will be the usual at hundreds of traditional Czech watering holes, where the cigarette smoke hangs heavy, the word for beer is pivo and the customers have a reputation to keep up: Brewing executives have labeled Czechs the greatest consumers of beer per capita in the world.

On Monday nights, bohemians and Bohemians alike gather for English-language readings of poetry and prose at the Radost FX cafe and lounge. My timing was wrong for that, but for $12, I did catch a chamber quartet of Mozart and Beethoven. While rain pounded outside, about 100 of us joined the musicians in the Clementium, a gilt-rich, high-ceilinged church near the banks of the Vltava.

On Bartolomejska Street, in the secret police building where Vaclav Havel and other suspected dissidents once were interrogated and tortured, a budget hotel and hostel now does a booming business. You can even rent the metal-doored cell where Havel once was held (room P06, with two bunk beds, about $15 per person), then nip next door for a 75-cent salad or a 50-cent beer at Cafe Konvict.

Wenceslas Square, where demonstrators massed during the last days of communism, is a semi-seedy but heavily trafficked hub. Its main attraction is probably the gorgeous curvilinear Art Nouveau facade of the Hotel Europa. Step inside the cafe or slip upstairs to look at rooms, and you see how glory fades when a spectacular hotel is neglected.

The wealthiest tourists find their way to U Maliru, one of the oldest and priciest restaurants in town. Founded in 1543, its six-course, fixed-price menu is set at $50 a head. The expats stop by Jo’s Bar & Garaz on Malostranske Namesti or the Globe, an English-language bookstore and cafe on Janovskeho street. Among the Globe bulletin board notices:

Guitar wanted (acoustic). Call Russell.

Help. I’m Czech man looking for somebody to realy advanced in Englisch. I can offer the same in Czech language.

“I followed a girlfriend here, so . . . I didn’t expect to become a painter or anything,” said Brad DeLange, 35 and formerly of Huntington Beach, from behind the Globe’s counter one day. “My girlfriend went back after six months. And I stayed. It’s exceeded all my expectations. . . . It is a kind of utopia in a way--compared to Los Angeles, at least.”

By the end of my stay, Prague had defied my expectations, too--for better and for worse.

One morning, I signed on for a walking tour of the oldest quarter of the city. Though I was the only customer who showed up, Lucie Militka gamely led me street to street for 90 minutes, explaining the Astronomical Clock in the Town Hall Tower, pointing out the cemetery in the old Jewish ghetto, pausing at a home where Franz Kafka once lived. The tour price was about $8. When I tried to tip Militka about $1.50, she refused it, saying it was unmerited.

Perhaps 15 minutes later, browsing at the windows of Hrzanska Passage, I was approached by a young man with a briefcase. He held a wallet open.

“Much money,” he said. “Yours?” And he fanned a stack of German deutsche marks and U.S. dollars. The bills included at least one clearly fake $100 note.

“Look,” he said in conspiratorial tones. “It’s not yours, it’s not mine. Let’s split it.” And he started counting off bills. Clearly another scam.

Again I frowned and walked away. But just a few minutes later, we happened to come face to face again in Old Town Square.

“Ciao,” said the con man, grinning like someone who knew the future was going his way.

I couldn’t think of anything to say. But I’m hoping he needs a taxi soon. I have just the driver for him.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

GUIDEBOOK

Prague in Person

Getting there: Connecting service only (one plane change) LAX-Prague on Lufthansa, KLM, Alitalia, Swissair and British Airways. Fares begin at $840 round trip.

Where to stay: All lodgings listed include breakfast with room fees.

Hotel Pariz, Obecni Domu 1; tel. (800) 888-4747 or 011-420-2-221-95195, fax 011-420-2-242-25475, Internet www.hotel-pariz.cz. Grand 1904 Art Nouveau building with 93 air-conditioned rooms and two restaurants at edge of Prague’s oldest district. Brochure rates for doubles start at $270 nightly.

Hotel U Zlate Studny, Karlova 3; tel. or fax 011-420-2-222-20262. Six old-fashioned, antique-furnished rooms in the heart of the Old Town. No elevator. Rates: $120-$140.

The Cloister Inn/Pension Unitas, Bartolomijska 9; tel. 011-420-2-232-7700, fax 011-420-2-232-7709, Internet www.cloister-inn.cz. Part budget hotel (about 25 rooms), part hostel (about 100 beds) in central location. Rates from $16 (bunk in a quadruple room with shared bath) to $105 (double room, private bath).

Where to eat: For great seafood and a big bill, Restaurant Rbi trh, Tynsky dvur 5; local telephone 248-9544-7; main courses, $35.

For artsy American expat atmosphere, take lunch at the Globe Bookstore and Coffee House, Janovskeho 14, Prague 7; tel. 667-1261-0. Nothing over $3.50. For a late-night, beer-soaked version of the same scene, Jo’s Bar & Garaz, Malostranske namesti 7.

For more information: Czech Tourist Authority, 1109 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10028; tel. (212) 288-0830, fax (212) 288-0971, Internet https://www.czechcenter.com.