Where to look for Clementin, the narrowest hotel in Czech Republic merely 3.28 meters wide, how to chose between Pilsner Urquel, Krušovice and Gambrinus, when to feed gold-colored carps and why tram 91 has no peer? Elvira Matrosova learned about these and more. And despite the fact that this city stands on Vltava (Wilth-ahwa – literally means Wild water), it is aristocratic, consistent and calm yet far from Puritanism.

About Picasso as a distinctive artist, graphic artist and sculptor, we know to some extent everything. Meanwhile, his other incarnations are pushed into the background. Ilya Ehrenburgh once very concisely described Pablo Picasso’s relations with his era: “20th century found in him its own dynamite expert, its own philosopher and its own poet”.

If you spent half a day enjoying chips with mayonnaise, herring, eel and cheese; your imagination managed to find solutions for all the riddles of the universe while waiting for hours in endless queue to the Rijksmuseum; and within a couple of hours you were almost knocked down on the road thrice, it means, no doubt, you were spending that day in Amsterdam.

Boarding passes and a passport warm your hand pleasantly, and your luggage has long been turned by someone's deft hands into a monument of polyethylene. By unfortunate coincidence, it is in this cellophane captivity that magazines, books and crosswords, which are stored up in case of a chronic boredom attack during a flight, can remain.

What was the secret of the first French fries with hamburger’s cost being 15 cents and why a flywheel of the first and only fast-food of 1960s wouldn’t have been set in motion if it hadn’t been for… mixers seller? Maurice and Richard (Mac and Dick) McDonalds, just like us, didn’t know answers to all these questions when they moved from New England to California in 1927. And behind the Great Depression was rubbing its hands expressively, at the edge of bringing to naught all of their aspirations. And then...

He earned his first pesos dancing tango and the Charleston. Worked as a welder in Buenos Aires and stopped at nothing to collect his start-up capital. Obsessed workaholic, he always tried to look snob. Smiling with clients and unbearably demanding with colleagues. On birthday of Zino Davidoff, read in OUTLOOK a story of a Ukrainian-born budding violinist who gained for his brand quite literally royal audiences.

If your medical record can rightly accommodate a pencil-written diagnosis “shopaholism” with a florid symptom “I don’t know why I need this, but I’m buying it” – I have bad news for you.

African music is fettered by checkered stereotypes thickly as hyleas situated in the same place are covered with lianas. The reality, however, is that in skillful hands anything can tune up in variations of overtones. These were the motives that originated in hot tropics that influenced establishment of bands all over the world.

A series of features “An hour before…” from Outlook offers you to glance at “staff only” areas, to visit restricted backstage zones, to trust only professional prejudice and to get in through service entrances alone.