We booked Black Elephant Hotel almost by accident, a last-minute find after our first choice sold out, and it turned out to be the kind of discovery you can’t plan for. Tucked into a 700-year-old building in Prague’s Old Town, just three minutes’ walk from the Astronomical Clock, the hotel wears its history unapologetically. Original Gothic vaulting arches over the breakfast room, a wooden roof structure said to be among the oldest surviving in the country, and walls that have quietly witnessed the comings and goings of astronomers, presidents, and diplomats long before we arrived. Five nights here meant we never had to rush, no repacking, no racing the clock, just the rare luxury of letting a city unfold slowly. The room wasn’t flawless (a portable air conditioner hummed through our first night, and the elevator stops obligingly at the second floor, no further), but it was honest, warm, and unmistakably itself: mismatched teacups from a nineteenth-century German tea house, cream-coloured bedding instead of hotel-standard white, breakfast eaten beneath ceilings that have stood since the 1300s. What I didn’t expect was Lukas, the concierge who became a friend over Georgian food and late-night walks to the square, standing with us as the clock struck eleven and the crowd applauded, as if watching it for the first time. That, more than the architecture, is what I’ll remember: a city that lets you in slowly, through a door that’s been open for seven centuries.