Czech Republic

(Due to fast typing on an English keyboard I have left off the many haceks and accents that accompany the letters of many Czech words. Really crap of me but it takes forever to find those shortcuts.)

I left Paris a little sore and tired and I hoped that I would have some rest in the Czech Republic but no such luck. Instead of rest though I did have a lot of beer and wine and sometimes that made me feel even better than rest might have. Other times I wasn’t quite so sure it was doing the trick.

Prague was cold and wet when I arrived but that did not deter my uncle from showing me around the graveyard and walls of Vysehrad. With sopping feet and a frozen nose we sought shelter and sustenance at Café Slavia, a grand, old, art deco restaurant facing out to the river. Czech cuisine seems to consist of pieces of meat in a creamy sauce with dumplings or potatoes. I think that when I was in Prague 12 years ago it was high summer so warm, creamy sauces were unappetising but looking out to Prague Castle and Karluv Most through the rain on a cold day a warm, creamy sauce was exactly what I needed. Along with wine. Now, I gave up smoking last year and I pretty much gave up drunk smoking early this year but there is something about being on holidays and being in Europe that just makes smoking seem, not just appealing, but somehow right! And in the Czech Republic you can still smoke inside not just bars, but restaurants. I don’t think I’ve done anything in recent years that has felt quite so taboo as lighting up a cigarette at a table inside with people eating nearby.

After one broken down bus outside of Zlicin, my uncle Michael and I got on a functioning bus to Zatec. Michael gave me a grand tour of the town although I made rather quite the poor tourist; my back by this stage was in spasms and sending shooting pain from my right hip to the second little toe on that foot. We had lunch at a café new to Zatec that serves organic food. Between my uncle speaking a little Czech, me speaking a little German and the waiter speaking just a little German and English we worked out that on the menu that day was Thai food. Now I can’t say it rivalled some of the Thai food I’ve had in Melbourne but it was very nice and my uncle told me later that the café has an initiative to employ a percentage of people with disabilities so I was glad that we ate there.

In the evening my uncle was keen to introduce me to his good friends, the people who had first invited him to the Czech Republic 13 years earlier. So I went to their house where I was offered food. I was about to say no, feeling like I didn’t want to impose and make them go to any trouble but then I wondered if perhaps refusing would in fact be construed as rude. I am so glad I said yes. Delicious soup with dumplings, potatoes with bacon and cabbage and frozen strawberries for dessert. Again food that might have been a bit heavy in warmer months but on a cold April night, just perfect. We stayed late, drinking wine and playing a game of Go Fish with the two young boys. When we were preparing to leave we were asked to come back the following night for more food. This time I didn’t even hesitate to think if I was imposing and said a very enthusiastic ‘yes’.

We stopped in at Michael’s favourite bar for a nightcap and it was quite a funny little place. It has an entirely wooden interior, there are American number plates hanging off the wall, lines of gold (plastic) trophies on a high shelf and MTV blaring from two TVs. It felt very much like somebody had decided to open a cool, American sport bar in Eastern Europe, which I suppose is exactly what did happen.

The hotel I was staying at, U Hada, overlooks the town square and I had a very comfortable room there. There was a buffet breakfast included which had on offer crusty bread rolls, these sausages which were a lot more like frankfurts than chipolatas and mustard and cheese… so yes, basically I had a hot dog for breakfast. Accompanying that was an orange drink I took to be juice. Nope, syrupy cordial. So after that when I realized there was a basket of pastries, including a very donut looking type thing, I thought that I should round out my unhealthy breakfast with one of those.

Michael showed me around more of the town; the old synagogue, the art gallery and the beer and hops museum. We stopped to sample one beer from the brewery there before making our way back to the town square where we had the great fortune to find that one of the local schools was having there school dance concert. There were some quite unique numbers; boys in elaborately decorated hosen dancing with axes, girls in checked shirts, hats and mid-calf, white, lace-up boots twirling and tossing batons. Then there were the dances that must be almost universal. Tiny tots doing the chicken dance between distractedly waving to their parents in the audience. There was also the hokey-pokey and the Macarena. And then there was a group of nine or ten year old girls in head to toe pink who danced to Bang Bang by Jessie J and Ariana Grande. There was plenty of out of time shoulder shimmying, hair flicking and popping. It breaks my heart to see girls that young trying to dance sexily, emulating their pop icons. Too young girls learn that being sexy is paramount, that dancing in certain ways drives men wild, that their bodies send powerful messages. What we don’t teach them is that they can’t actually control that power ninety-nine percent of the time. Once you’ve shaken your butt the power goes to other people to decide that you are a type of person or that you are deserving of certain behavior. Or if you decide to stop shaking your butt then you’re accused of being another type of person and you’re deserving of a certain type of behavior. Girls and young women need to learn that it’s ok to be sexual but they need not be primarily sexual. And they also need to be able to insist on when they’re not being sexual and that needs to be observed and respected. Sorry, this paragraph has turned into an issue of ‘Lessons I wish I’d learnt when I was younger’.

In the evening we met another one of Michael’s friends in a café reputed to have very good ice-cream. I’ve never really considered the combination of drinking red wine and eating ice-cream but I’m glad I was open to the idea. We then went to our dinner engagement where I was treated to the best homemade potato pancakes. I don’t want to know how much oil or butter it takes to make them that good but if it shaved a month off my life I’ll still say it was worth it.

The following morning we said ‘Ahoy’ to Zatec (which actually means hello or goodbye – in this instance it was goodbye) and caught the bus back to Prague. We hit the streets again, this time in much more clement weather and wandered across the Karluv Most (Charles Bridge) and around to Kampa, a little parkland on the river where were meeting some more of Michael’s friends for a celebration called Carodenijce, which means something like the burning of the witches. From what I gleaned it was traditionally a pagan celebration where homes were swept with brooms and the brooms were then burnt to ward off bad spirits. Over time the connection between witched and brooms emerged and so now they ceremoniously burn straw witches on a bonfire.

For the celebration at Kampa there were quite extraordinary festivities afoot. When we first arrived there were mounted police playing a soccer match with their horses, there was a hand-cranked merry-go-round, a shooting range with wooden crossbows, every type of sausage you might imagine on sale, beer tents and a stage with a brass band playing. I met a number of new people, many of whom by the end of the night were pledging to assist me in permanently relocating to Prague. I drank, oh, just so much cheap, delicious beer and roasted a sausage over a bonfire.

There was a procession to the central bonfire with a straw witch being carried aloft. There were many women, young and old, dressed as witches and I was advised that more than a few of them are actually very serious about being real witches (followers of Wicca I would believe rather than graduates of Hogwarts) and this is the time of year when they proudly display who they are.

The crowd was enormous to see the witch being burnt. From our spot at the back of the crowd we were mostly witness to a lot of smoke and a partially obscured glimpse at the witches head. As the night wore on there was a change of bands. A Blues Brothers cover band provided the soundtrack to the latter part of the evening. It was after 11pm when we left at which time there were still almost as many children as there were adults running amok.

We stopped at Café Slavia for a nightcap and back at the hotel I fell into bed, barely remembering my head touching the pillow.

Today Michael and I took a walk through the Jewish Quarter before meeting some of his friends (and I suppose my new friends) for lunch at another superb restaurant, The Louvre. Pork and potatoes in an asparagus cream sauce washed down with my last Czech beer (for now).

And now I’m typing this on the train to Vienna. I had a wild panic at the train station because they didn’t have a desk for the ticket company I had bought my ticket from. Despite the instructions in the email saying I could collect my actual ticket at the train station it turned out that was not the case. In the end I had to stand on the threshold of a Burger King to use their free wifi and download the ticket app as the announcement was being made to board the train. It was only a minute or so after the train had departed that the app finally downloaded on my global roaming (so my guess is that free app cost me $5 dollars in international 3G charges) and I was able to show my ticket to the conductor when she came through a minute later.

I might sign of now and perhaps go and treat myself to a coffee in the dining car and appreciate some of the scenery. Next installment will be from Vienna.