Most visitors to the Czech Republic spend their time in its near-mythical capital, Prague, the Golden City does exert siren pull, and you could spend endless hours-roaming through the maze of its Old Town, discovering its back-street secrets, getting to know each stone saint on the Charles Bridge. But don’t miss out on the rest of the country, its stately old spa towns, fanciful castles, spruce forests and subterranean caves. The Czech Republic is a feast of art, history and heart-attack food-abandon your vowels and tuck in.

April to June (spring)-or during the halcyon Prague Spring of 1968 (preferably before the Soviet tanks rolled in)

Getting up early to cross Prague’s Charles Bridge at dawn Drinking slivovice at an all-night bonfire party on the DAY OF THE Witches Hiking through the crenellated sandstone of the Adrspach-Teplice Rocks Contemplating your mortality under the bone chandelier in the Ossuary Chapel of All Saints in Sedlec Catching a classical music concert in the underground caves of the Moravian Karst

Read Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, in which the absurdity Bruce Chatwin’s Utz, a novella about porcelain and alchemy set in Prague’s Jewish quarter

Listen to Dvorak, everyone’s favourite Czech classical composer; or The Plastic People of the Universe, the psychedelic but oppressed heroes of the Prague Spring

Watch Divided We Fall, Jan Hrebejk’s uneasily funny film about a couple who hide a Jewish man in their apartment during the Nazi occupation; Jan Sverak’s Kolya, about an aging Czech musician who has to care for a small Russian boy

Eat sma eny kvetak s bramborem (cauliflower fried in breadcrumbs, served with boiled potatoes and tartar sauce); svickova na smetane (beef in cream sauce with dumplings and lemon or cranberries)

Drink Budvar (the original version of Budweiser and one of the most famous of the Czech Republic’s famous beers) or absinthe (very green-very mean)

Ahoj (hello, informal)

Beer; castles; crystal; dumplings; folk art; acid rain; American students; impenetrable language

The word ‘defenestration’ is derived from incidents in Czech history where Catholic and Hapsburg councilors were flung out of windows during disputes in Prague; Czechs love the sun; it is possible to eat vegetarian

…it’s not just about sights, sounds and splendour. It’s also about people, and it’s about connection. Strike up a conversation at a bar (over a pint of the best beer in the world) and you’ll find an intelligent, engaging and friendly person at the other end.