Wannabe writer/critic currently selling PCs - and my soul - at PC World. Spent a lot of time crashi...
Wannabe writer/critic currently selling PCs - and my soul - at PC World. Spent a lot of time crashing intellectual parties in Prague. Now being nice on Ciao! UK.
Member since:13.12.2000
Reviews:116
Members who trust:39
Two days after we get back from Prague, and it's +2C in Ipswich. The previous week we were walking around in -10C in Kutna Hora, and it barely touched us. This island cold soaks through your bones, and you want to be back in that picturesque snowscape again.
This is post-holiday blues, of course. Last time I was in the Czech Republic, I was on a mission to get the girl. This time I was purely on a mission to have a great time, so I carted my mate off to Prague to sample the nightlife. He wasn't too sure - after all, the Czech Republic would hardly feature in most people's top ten destinations for pubbing and clubbing. Well, those people have no idea what they are missing...
Most people will mention the prices, and how ridiculously cheap it all is. Out in the villages, you might pay around 20p a pint. People also moan that Prague is becoming more commercialised and expensive - and they're right. Those fiendish prices on beer have jumped up at least 50%, to around 40p a pint. Your wallet soon feels the pinch when you return home and find yourself paying two quid again.
Prague is a mixture of the old, modern, absurd, magnificent, astonishing, and just plain ugly. Everything within spraying distance is graffitied. For a capital city, it is quite small, and anything you should want to see is within comfortable walking distance. If not, the trams and Metro allow access to most areas, once you've deciphered the signs and maps. Czech is not an easy language for beginners to get on with.
Via internet we booked Apartment B-35, on a street named Belehradska. Initially we were worried, peering out of the tram windows and seeing the quality of housing deteriorate as we neared our home for the next four days. Jumping off in a deceptively grotty tenement style area, we were fearing the
worst. Once we were past the barricades, portcullis and drawbridge, the apartment could not have been better. Newly furnished and well equipped (including TV, Stereo and microwave) it's hard to imagine getting anywhere better for twenty quid a night.
Our local restaraunt, Hostinec na Belehradska, was perfect for our kind of gig. After three years of package tours in places more British than Britain, we were determined to seperate ourselves from the tourist element as much as possible.
You walk into this place and you can't see the far wall for smoke. Once you've felt your way to the table, the barman/waiter gives you your choice of meal, because there is no menu. You can have pork or beef. This saves precious minutes poring over extravagant extras such as menus.
When it comes, it is basic and very tasty. The pivo inevitably flows, because it is so ludicrously cheap. The toilets are the worst I've ever seen. You go through a couple of doors and piss in an alleyway. It's not quite Hilton standard, and Egon Ronay won't be having any wet dreams about the cuisine, but it has a pleasing tang of reality to it, and I'd recommend it to anyone.
Time for some nights out, and the Absinth helps get you rolling. At 70%, this is a fiery little number with a bouquet of mouthwash, although it tastes more like paraffin. I read once that Van Gogh sliced his ear off while shitfaced on this stuff. We decided he probably started on the beers around two, had something to eat in the early evening, then got showered, dressed, and went out with his mates. More beers followed, then they decided to go for a carvery. Van Gogh, visibly unhappy about something, started caning the absinths, and after dancing in a lewd manner on the bar in a club, decided to get rid of his ear because it was "fucking irritating him". This is all speculation, of course.
Into the clubs, and the greatest thing about clubbing in Prague in the middle of winter is there are NO ENGLISH!!! No loud brassy slags in their identical shoes, skirts, tiny tops, caked on make-up and attitudes. Women look so much better when they're not behaving like barmaids in a Benny Hill sketch. No red faced twats in their Kickers shirts, spilling pints down themselves and cracking onto every girl in sight.
Foreign girls have clearly fallen for the stereotypical image of English blokes. One night I decided to opt for scruffy - trainers, tatty jeans and my khaki shirt with a Union Jack on the chest. One drunken Czech girl, openly flirting with me, kept slapping the flag saying, "You English - no sex!" Our reputation abroad clearly preceded me...
That time of year, we met mostly Russians. The Russian girls seemed titillated by either our rowdy idiosyncrasies, or perhaps just our general Western-ness. I spent around three hours talking to one called Olga, in a fractured mess of English, Russian and French...it took about 20 minutes to get even the simpler points across, but we got there in the end. She was beautiful. With my underbite and her overbite, we made the perfect skull.
Olga eventually mugged me off for some twat dressed like a painter and decorator, but who was clearly fluent in either Russian or French. My parting shot was giving her a pair of wet ankles - a casual back-handed flick landed my plastic pint glass between her feet, and the explosion of lager had a blast radius of two metres. Such a rash action should have landed me in all kinds of ugly bother, but nobody seemed to care. Even Olga, with her pivo-drenced legs, smiled at me as I walked off. Maybe that's a form of compliment in St. Petersburg...
Roaming around the back streets of a strange city at four in the morning wouldn't normally be advised, but it gave us the opportunity to mix with all kinds of low life. One particularly weird incident had us menaced by a bulky tramp who must have stood around 6'5"...but before he could even open his mouth, a tiny guy dressed in long black coat and shades appeared out of nowhere, picked the bum up by the throat, threw him into a doorway, and started raining body blows in on him. What was even weirder was ten minutes later, we saw them walking along side by side, like the best of friends. Perhaps there was some peculiar opposites-attract homosexual tryst going on there, and we had wandered straight into the middle of a nocturnal lover's tiff.
Next came the prostitutes. They gang up on you and try to tempt you into business by frisking your pockets, while simultaneously kneeing you gently in the bollocks. They don't know much English, so keep repeating "Mwah-mwah-mwah-sexy-sexy-blowjob".
Around eight quid for a night of gritty sex had a certain sordid appeal, but my one had supernatural strength and I had to dig my heels in to prevent myself getting dragged into an alleyway. She could've tied me in a knot. If I could've knocked her down to about four quid, we might have talked turkey, but we were having real aggro shaking this one bunch. I soon found the key, shouting; "GET YOUR F**KING HANDS OUT OF MY POCKETS!!" did the trick, making them scatter so quickly we could barely believe they were there.
After four nights hob-nobbing with assorted nationalities in the capital, we headed down to Kutna Hora to stay with a Czech friend and her family. Kutna Hora is a beautiful town east of Prague, most famous for it's grisly ossuary, which features pyramids and decorations made from thousands of human bones. It's a shame the town is noted mainly for this, because in the snow that arrived at the same time as us, the spires and rooftops looked as pretty as a fairytale.
Here we were delighted to accompany the family to a ball. This was my first ever ball, and I had no idea how to even waltz. It was a High School leavers ball, and the kids were showered with coins. A lot of drunkeness was going on here - a high school dance is a high school dance, be it in Kutna Hora or Ipswich. The lads who can't dance get wasted, and start smashing chairs across each other's backs around ten-thirty.
We seemed to stand out as foreigners, and got a mixture of reactions. Perhaps it was our comparitively larger-than-life behaviour - most Czech blokes are taciturn and serious. Or perhaps it was our clothes. A lot of men we saw tended to dress like escaped prisoners, assembling their outfits from items found in a lost property box.
Despite a few threatening looks, we recognised this as the unique opportunity it was. Here with Veronika's family, we got the chance to infiltrate another culture, and get right in the middle of it. Not just passing through as tourists, but sitting with them, drinking with them, eating with them, the opportunity to see how they lived and laughed.
My birthday was the day after we left, but the family celebrated it for me. I don't really celebrate my birthday, but here I had no choice. They had made me a cake with my name on it, and twenty-three candles. They gave me gifts and sang to me in Czech. I was totally overwhelmed by this, and it was my best birthday ever.
I hated to leave them, and so did my friend. We spoke no Czech, and they no English, but they took us in and made us part of the family anyway. When it was time to leave, the mother gave us a packed lunch she had made, and both parents blessed us for the journey ahead by marking a small cross with their thumbs on our foreheads. We hugged and kissed the whole family goodbye, and we were whisked away to the train station.
England, and I awoke the next morning to the sound of rain hammering against the window pane. I begrudgingly showered and prepared for my first day back at work, half-awake, half-dreaming of Veronika and our wonderful friends back in the Czech Republic.
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An excellent and detailed opinion. That Absinth is lethal
moose 16.02.2001 14:03
Total irrelevant comment here but....I didn't write my op on COT to get people to trust me - but I thought that it may help others. However I do think you write good opinions - this one is excellent! You would get many more reads if people had heard of you - I will certainly come back & read more if this one is anything to go by! Good luck :-)
moose 16.02.2001 13:48
Excellent opinion - a real giggle to read. I think English girls could learn a great deal from the Czech girls (they've really summed English blokes up well!).
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Advantages: Cheap food, beer, lovely scenery in countryside and cities Disadvantages: Hard language to learn, some people not tolerant of non-Czech speakers
Itssteps 05.02.2001 (05.02.2001)
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: helpful
Review of General: Czech Republic
Advantages: value for money, easy to get by in prague ,good for sightseeing Disadvantages: pickpockets in underground stations, some taxi drivers will overprice you
sansilver 30.07.2008 (30.07.2008)
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: helpful
Review of General: Czech Republic
Advantages: value for money, easy to get by in prague ,good for sightseeing Disadvantages: pickpockets in underground stations, some taxi drivers will overprice you
sansilver 30.07.2008 (30.07.2008)
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: helpful
Review of General: Czech Republic
Advantages: Fantastic city, plenty to do and see, beer still relatively cheap Disadvantages: City is loosing some of its authencity by becoming Westernised with the likes of McDonalds popping up
Feb 6th, 2001
very helpful by (100%):
