On his walks through Prague, Badalec steers clear of the picturesque ancient castle. Nor does he stop on the centuries-old Charles Bridge, a bustling attraction for the average visitor.

Instead, the 55-year-old veers off the well-worn cobblestones and into the rougher edges of the Czech capital, a side of one of Europe’s most visited cities that many would rather avoid.

“I didn’t choose to be homeless,” he said after completing an evening tour.

“But I’m trying to do the best I can. I don’t steal, I don’t cheat people, I don’t abuse welfare benefits. The tours are great. They are a chance for me to explain myself better.”

Since August, about 430 people have paid 200 crowns to visit the places where some of Prague’s homeless gather.

Half of the proceeds go to the guide and the rest to student-run agency Pragulic, set up after it won a 1,500-euro social entrepreneurship award.

SAFETY NET DISAPPEARING

Prague’s homeless population, estimated at around 4,500, has not changed significantly in the last three years despite two recessions in the Czech Republic during that period.

Yet a common sight for tourists arriving at the city’s main railway station is groups of homeless people sharing cartons of wine.

There are around 600,000 homeless people in Europe, with about a tenth living “rough” on the streets, according to estimates cited by the U.N. Human Settlements Programme.

In ex-Communist countries like the Czech Republic many have been sheltered from the worst of the euro zone debt crisis due to cradle-to-grave state welfare systems, but as that support is eroded there are fears that their numbers could begin to grow.

On a recent soggy evening, Badalec showed up to meet his tour group across from Prague’s bus station rolling a large suitcase filled with books.

To make extra money, he collects discarded books from garbage containers, something he was prevented from showing his clients due to the rain.

Instead the group headed over to a largely forgotten plaque next to the bus station commemorating the death of nine homeless people and two dogs in a fire in an abandoned building in 2010.

Other than that, Badalec spent most of the time smoking old cigarette butts and sharing stories about life on the street.

After losing his job in TV news production and going through an acrimonious divorce, Badalec ended up jobless and homeless around a decade ago. He tried finding work, but to no avail.

“Nobody will employ someone who is homeless,” he said, standing in a bridge underpass next to a small homeless camp along the Vltava river where he took his visitors.

DRUGS, SEX, STEALING

Eurostat data shows that in 2011, of all 27 EU members the Czech Republic had the lowest share of people at risk of poverty or social exclusion.

Yet the number of personal bankruptcy filings each month in the country has more than tripled in the past two and a half years, according to Creditreform.

For Tomas Jan, director at Prague’s Centre for Social Services, the big risk is people holding loans locked into high interest rates. “These people are at considerable risk of social exclusion,” he said.

Another Pragulic guide, Karel Lampa, whose street name is “Karim”, demonstrated to tourists the spiral a person can fall into when cast out on the street.

His tours start at Prague’s main railway station, where Lampa first showed up in the city of 1.2 million people after running away from home some 20 years ago.

The 38-year-old, his eyes outlined by black makeup and fingers covered with jewelled rings, explained how he learned many lessons “on drugs, sex, stealing, life in the sewers, on train wagons, money from prostitution, jail and AIDS.”

The alternative tours and part-time work at a volunteer theatre are new outlets after years of prostitution and drug abuse.

“I’m showing people the other face of Prague, dark places of prostitutes, pimps, gangs of thieves, drug dealers, junkies and everything that normal tourists rarely see.” (Writing by Jason Hovet)

Bulgan airport in the southwest part of Mongolia reminds me of a small train station from the spaghetti western film “Once Upon a Time in the West.” It’s slow, hot and once a week people wait for an airplane with no more then 20 passengers on board to arrive.

The day of July 17, 2012, was different.

The Czech Army plane Casa brought on board four Przewalski mares. They are endangered animals with a sandy brown coat and faintly striped legs, extinct in their homeland since the early 1970s.

Now the animals were landing on a dirt tarmac after a 6,000 km (3,728 miles) flight from the Czech Republic. It was a challenge for the pilots, required extra airport staff and was an attraction for local residents. It’s hard to say if the customs officer was taking pictures for professional reasons or just for himself as a souvenir from the unusual event.

The horses went from an air conditioned plane to the hot air of their predecessors’ homeland. From green grass to dry desert and after more then 17 hours on the plane, their journey had not finished yet. Another 250 km (155 miles) in old, unreliable vehicles awaited the animals, with over 70 kms of those on dirty bumping roads. Several dozen villagers came to wish good luck to their beloved animals – and they really needed it. After just a few minutes of driving one car stopped with a broken cooling system. Rangers quickly reloaded a box from it onto another car which already had one horse on board.

Time passed quickly. The sunset arrived and we were still on the asphalt.

We hit the dirt road deep in the night, dust went everywhere. The car convoy traveled at less then 30 km (18 miles) per hour and slowly approached the final destination of Takhin Tal reserve station in the Gobi desert. It was 1am when we arrived.

Boxes were unloaded off the trucks, the cages were quickly opened and the horses slowly left their unpleasant prison and went into a vast unknown drought plain.

“Horses don’t eat stones, let’s take them back, there is a plenty of good grass back in the Czech Republic”, said a soldier from the flying crew as he looked around the place. As soon as the horses disappeared into the night the group made their way to their traditional Mongolian yurt in a camp, under the incredible sky full of stars with the milky way shining all around it.

Nobody really knows how many lived here before, but Takhis, (the local name for horses) became extinct in the wild as hunters on the Chinese-Mongolian border shot them and forced them off their traditional territories.

The Prague zoo followed up on previous international efforts to reintroduce the endangered animals back to their home land and organized the air transport from Czech Republic to Mongolia.

The herds here number in the dozens rather than in the hundreds but so far the animals are slowly regaining their original instincts.

I’m not sure if they will learn how to eat stones to survive but I’m pretty sure that they belong here. And I, like the locals, wish them good luck.

Yeah, yeah, yeah 4-1 loss for the Czechs against Russia in Wroclaw. The Russian fans left the city for Warsaw after that and ended up fighting Polish supporters. Wroclaw is calm and quiet. Here the fans like each other and the city center is calm and full of friendly faces. The spotlight moves on, but there is still work to be done.

After the next round the Czechs became a decisive opponent for Poland in advancing from Group A. Its a championship and the teams need to keep sharp, away from the headlines, and for photographers there are images to be made that tell the story. Eyes on the prize.

As in previous EURO competitions I’ve been assigned to cover the team, and shooting training is a hell of a lot of work, even when everyone else is looking elsewhere. Let’s see what they look like even when there is “No Coverage” in the picture planner.

You come to the stadium and wait for the heroes or losers, depending on what happened on match day before. Several hundred people including school pupils are there to see their next opponent.

Today luckily, heroes arrived, welcomed by applauding spectators.

First of all the goal scorers. Petr Jiracek and Vaclav Pilar, are imminent targets of fans’ interest and because they played yesterday they can share a little of their practice time to sign photographs, balls, spikes and other items for fans and kids. All part of the job.

You are always looking to take pictures of team stars or story making players and obviously the coach. Michal Bilek does not have it easy. He is not very popular among soccer fans in Czech Republic and this tournament will probably decide his future.

So when you are done with mandatory faces you try to do something from practice itself and you want to make nice pictures, features, whatever you can to look a bit different and show that we are actually at EURO2012.

After practice a regular press conference with selected players tops your daily work and you can finally go for a late lunch.

Slowly the media attention returns as kick-off approaches, spectators fill the seats and televisions back home come to life. Finally we are back in action and there to record the crucial moments, tomorrows losers or heroes.

One of the pioneers of modern architecture, German-born Mies
van der Rohe completed the three-story house in 1930 for Fritz
and Grete Tugendhat, wealthy Jewish industrialists who gave him
free rein over the design and construction of the villa in Brno,
130 miles (209 kms) from Prague.

The result was a revolutionary flat-roofed villa containing
an iron framework, that allowed him to dispense with supporting
walls, and enveloped by glass windows that helped to create a
flowing interior swimming in space and light.

Perched on a slope with a view over the gardens of Brno
Castle, it also features a thick onyx interior wall that changes
colour in winter months when hit by the sun at certain angles.

“The building is timeless and has its own atmosphere,”
Michal Malasek, who oversaw the reconstruction, said on
Wednesday at a Brno ceremony attended by one of the Tugendhat’s
children.

The City of Brno now owns the villa whose restoration was
overseen by an international team of experts at a cost of some
$9 million. It reopens to the public on March 6.

INSPIRATION

The Tugendhat family only lived in the house for eight years
before fleeing Europe to escape the Nazis. During the Second
World War it served as a Gestapo headquarters before becoming a
stable for horses used by Russian troops.

Later used as a dance school and a rehabilitation centre,
the villa first opened to the public in 1989 following the
Velvet Revolution, and three years later hosted the talks that
led to the split of Czechoslovakia.

It also inspired ‘The Glass Room’, a novel shortlisted for
the 2009 Man Booker Prize.

“The location of the structure, its location in relation to
the sun, the layout of the spaces and the construction materials
are the essential factors for creating a dwelling house,” said
Mies van der Rohe in 1924 when designing the villa.

“A building organism must be created out of these
conditions,” said the architect, who fled Germany under pressure
from the Nazis.

The Tugendhats never returned to the former Czechoslovakia
after the war and their children were unable to reclaim the
villa from the city following the end of communism.

(Writing by Michael Kahn, additional reporting by Robert
Mueller; Editing by Sophie Hares)

It is the first week of February and all of Europe is squeezed in a deep cold. Everybody is tired from freezing temperatures and the forecast for upcoming days is not good. The photo wire is full of suffering homeless people, steaming chimneys, frozen water and so on.

Thinking of how to illustrate this winter differently I remembered that the traditional Shrove festival was taking place around this time. That Shrove site I decided to take pictures of is known for its Shrovetide masks and cultural traditions listed in UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

I came to the Czech village of Vesely Kopec early morning as temperatures were lower then 23 degrees Centigrade. Revellers accompanied by music started to parade, dance and sing through the village dressed in light costumes with white gloves on their hands. Trumpeters had to often stop their music due to their frozen instruments. And everybody needed a warming up drink.

The revellers walked through the village house by house, and everywhere the same procedure was repeated. At each house they were welcomed with bread and fed onion, and of course offered welcoming drinks. Then dancing and singing and teasing girls, who actually liked it. There were plenty of visitors all around, plenty of amateur photographers, not to mention several television cameras. It was just hard to shoot a clean image of the tradition.

And at the end, when you can’t hold your camera in your frozen fingers anymore, and you don’t want to upset many more people by refusing more drinks, they all gather in front of the last house to play, dance and sing one last song.

Mountains, snow, wind, cold, sun, dogs, sleds and mushers. Those are elements you meet in various combinations when you go to cover the Sedivackuv long dog sled race in the Czech Republic’s Orlicke mountains. It’s a beautiful place. I’ve been covering the race since 2005 and I always look forward it. You need to get well dressed for that, we call it double-full-full. I remember temperatures of -20 degrees Celsius (-4 degrees Fahrenheit) with strong winds.

There is always the obvious problem of how to cover the same event differently every year, especially as we don’t have giant mountains with high summits and there’s not always bright sun. But I think that nice pictures showing the event and describing its atmosphere can’t hurt once a year.

You go to the start line and take some pictures of excited dogs. They already know what’s going on, what is ahead of them. They bark as they rush up the hill and disappear in the horizon to face the next stage which over four days counts more than 240 kilometers (149 miles).

Then you head up to the edge of the hills with a view into the valley where you can see the dogs running through tunnels made of trees covered by snow. You just want to have nice images and therefore you must go a little higher than where the start is. You go by car to a place where you can walk to a track of the race to see them in action.

Because of a good relationship with the race organizer, I was promised to be able to ride on a snow scooter to get further on a track and see more of the race. The scooter arrived but when we wanted to go, the engine died – tough luck.

So, you walk and shoot and shoot and walk, trying to find a nice spot for picture. Rolling in the snow to get a frog perspective (have your leather cloth ready to clean your lenses). After some time, when your gloves are totally wet and the majority of dogs already ran past you, you walk back to your car. I was lucky – I stopped one musher who took me on a sled which made my way back shorter by almost a kilometer.

Drive your car to a place where all the racers stop after their first 40 kilometers (24 miles). Have your fast brunch, because there was no time to eat in the morning. After a quick cup of tea and a cold sausage, I went to see the first mushers arrive at a stage break to rest and feed their dogs before another 30 kilometers (18 miles) in the day’s stage.