One of the things about the last day of summer—it may turn out to be the next-to-last. You never know. There’s a compounding effect, as each one is more appreciated than the one before. I was back on the hill Sunday, enjoying perhaps the last warm day of the year for a second time.

The people I was with were well-traveled individuals, putting my wandrings to shame (although, not being players of the ex-pat game they never tried to put me to shame). I asked my drinking companions, “Have you ever, anywhere, ever seen a more beautiful place to sit and enjoy a beer?”

Beer drinkers enjoy a sunny afternoon in one of the world’s best places to sip a pivo.

Uker, who’s been around (he was traveling with the first person ever to be diagnosed with malaria in Mongolia), thought for a while and said, “Nope. There’s nothing like this.” Or something like that. I wasn’t taking notes. I have in the past asked this question of other folks who’ve been around and about. They will look out over the city, think about it for a while, and shake their heads. There are some nice places out there, but this place is a mystical convergence of beer, peace, beauty, and people who love beer, peace, and beauty.

I know some people who could make a case for their own back porches as the best place on the planet for sipping suds (I have had such a porch myself), and those people are fortunate indeed, but for the sake of this discussion I think it necessary that we limit the contenders to drinking and eating establishments that a traveler could visit without an invitation. Ultimately, compiling a list of the most beautiful places in the world to have a drink may be the greatest service this blog ever performs.

So now I throw down the gauntlet. Do you know a place that can compete with this? If I get any responses (especially with pictures), I’ll set up a special page to list the best the world has to offer. I may add a couple more myself. There are some damn fine places out there.

Sweet!

Thanks!

I typed the previous entry on Friday night at a little place called Gurmán, which does not cater to the kids and so is crowded and smoky at different times. I wandered in out of the soft rain and chose a small table. There were a few guys leaning on the bar, but only one table was taken; a guy in a blue windbreaker that identified him as a transit worker sat at the opposite end of a row of three small tables. With a glance I surmised that he had been there for a while.

Normally I start with tea, but Gurmán doesn’t really seem like a tea sort of place. When the girl finally decided to stop by my table I ordered a Mušketýr (rhymes with “Musketeer” and with “beer”), and after coming up dry for new words to write I set to work editing some older ones.

The guy two tables over asked me something in czech. I thought he wanted to know what time it was, but I was a bit tentative when I answered. I’m pretty sure what I said was correct, but he apologized and asked me the time again in broken English. I answered again, he thanked me, and turned back to his beer. For a few minutes, anyway. Before long he was back. In czech he told me his name, Petr, and I told him mine, Džerý. In english he asked if I could look at something on the Internet for him. “Promín, nemám Internet,” I said, or something like that. He returned to his beer.

A short time later, when we were both wondering if the beer girl was ever coming back, he called out my name. I don’t remember what he opened with, but it was obvious he just wanted to talk. Wait — I do remember. He called me a workaholic. I explained in a mixture of languages that I had been lazy all day, so now I needed to work. This time there was no avoiding that the guy wanted to converse. We began to chat, but my eye was on the dwindling battery meter on my computer. I really did want to wrap things up before I ran out of electrons. Finally I did something which is very difficult for me; I asked the guy to give me ten minutes while I finished my work. He was a little affronted, I think, but more apologetic. “Deset minute,” I promised.

The battery actually lasted longer than ten minutes, but in the meantime Petr joined the guys at the bar and some of them moved to a table. I kept working and a few more people came in, and the service went from “rare” to “almost never”. After perhaps twenty-five minutes the computer surrendered to entropy, just as I had managed to score a precious beer after intercepting the beer girl on her way from the bathroom. I felt the covetous eyes of those around me as I nursed my hard-won nectar. I let my eyes be dazzled by the flickering lights of the American action film playing on the plasma screen at the far end of the bar (not that far away), sipped my beer, and let my mind wander. This was my state when Petr passed my table on his return trip from the bathroom. “May we please buy you a drink with us?” he asked, very earnestly. Obviously I had no choice.

And so it was I found myself sharing a table with tram drivers, sharing almost no words between us. They were pleased that I identified the Becherovka by its smell. I tried to ask them if it was my fault that the tram barn doors were closed, but once they realized that I wanted to know more than just what the tram barn is called in Czech (I never found out), they thought I wanted to take a picture with the doors open. I never did explain that the doors to the barn had been closed ever since they chased me and my camera away a few months before. (It seems there was a terror alert at the time.)

It was getting late, and before long it was just Petr and me at the table. Petr was quite drunk, and the beer girl had implemented the “cut off through bad service” policy. It took me a while to realize that we had lost the “almost” in “almost never”, and not long after that I wished Petr a good night and made my way out into the cold and dark.

At that moment, I didn’t feel like going home. There’s nothing wrong with home, but I decided to continue my downward trend and turned left out the door and headed for the Herna by the Metro Station. I should look and see what the name of that place is someday. I don’t go into that place often. I’m received warmly there, but it’s difficult to work. Often when I go there, I stay too long. Friday night is a case in point.

I was happy to see that Pavel was there, and a couple of other faces I recognized. I had been drinking, but they were way ahead of me. There was a debate going on over which Irish whiskey was better, and there had been quite a bit of research. One guy, let’s call him Martín, has always been a cheery conversationalist, but this time his head was on the bar and he was not moving. “He’s fine. He just needs a little nap,” Pavel explained. I sat and while the debate continued to my left, the guy to my right struck up a conversation with me. His tone was oddly aggressive, however, and before long I let the action on the other side of me absorb my attention.

I began to feel a strangely hostile vibe in the place, but as long as I had friendly people to talk to, I was all right. Eventually, after I had reviewed the Jameson side of the whiskey argument myself, another guy on my right struck up a conversation. He was much friendlier, but I think I might have annoyed him by not being impressed enough when he told me that he worked for the big movie studio here in town. When he told me some of the movies he had worked on, I said, “You must know my brother!” and described fuego’s jobs on those same films. I think he took that as one-upsmanship, even though I really just wanted to find out if I had run into a mutual acquaintance. So that potentially friendly conversation died young.

Pavel slapped Martín’s back and his head popped up like a jack-in-the-box. “Džerý!” he said, and happy conversation resumed for a while.

I may have things out of sequence, because I suspect I was talking to the movie guy when the fight broke out. I was looking down the bar in that direction, at least, when the scuffle started behind me. I turned and Martín was in a hockey-style grab-jackets-and-swing-fists-without-aiming type of scuffle with another patron. Pavel moved to intervene and I backed him up, gently pushing the newcomer back while asking “Proč?” over and over. It didn’t really matter why, and I wouldn’t have understood if he told me. He seemed to be alright so I turned and put my hands on Martín’s shoulders and drove him back.

Before long Pavel had Martín in a taxi, the other combatant was back at his table (one of the few nestled between the slot machines in that place) with his friends, occasionally mouthing off to other people around him. Not long after that another guy started a conversation with me, this time making no attempt to disguise that he was trying to provoke me (a singularly pointless exercise in those circumstances), or trying to get me to say something he could use as a provocation. Eventually after about his third declaration of “I don’t speak English” (after he had initiated the conversation in that language) I tried to use as much Czech as possible, which was so slow that eventually he made one last gambit by accusing me of snubbing the German language, then went away partway through my tortured, multilingual explanation of why I chose French in school. After all, he could hardly use my attempts to speak Czech as a justification to be offended, and I simply wasn’t capable of putting together a sentence complicated enough for him to take the wrong way. Or much of any sentence, for that matter.

After that things mellowed, but the air of hostility was still there. I was just on the edge of it; I get the feeling that most of the anger was between groups or individual regulars, but they had enough left to throw some my way. I was even caught up in it a little bit toward the end, annoyed at those people for working so hard to be annoyed by me. As they say in Get Crazy, “Anger is a bummer, Neal.”

I don’t know what time it was when I got home. I puttered around for a bit and tried to pour as much water into my system as I could, but before long I flopped unceremoniously into bed, unscathed but not particularly looking forward to Saturday morning, which fortunately came along not long before Saturday afternoon.

Sweet!

Thanks!

I spent a long time at the Little Café Near Home today, and as I result I am more than just a little wired on caffeine. Even at one tea per hour, you stack up enough hours and things get a bit on the twitchy side. It seemed like a beer was called for, but I was done with that place. I bought some water and some wine to go and turned my toes toward home.

I didn’t get far. One street up from Little Café Near Home is the Budvar bar even closer to home. On Tuesdays all the staff wear shirts, so I figured conditions would be tolerable. (“Conditions”, in this case, meaning air, and “tolerable” meaning breathable.) I stopped in and grabbed myself a desitku.

It seems that Tuesday night is card night. There are a couple of games going, and fortunately for me people are too busy playing cards to smoke. There are however, several very, very drunk people here. Walking is a dicey proposition for some of these folks, which means the delay the stroll to the relief station as long as possible. I have now witnessed two distressed marches across the room, picking up speed as they go, the pilgrim leaning progressively farther forward and hoping his feet will somehow stay underneath. It is a terrible race, feet handicapped, bladder insistent, and there can be no true winner.

On the TV there is a documentary of some sort. It’s about a festival, and large women in peasant garb have formed a disassembly line to render chickens into chicken parts. Cleavers are flying and you do not want to reach for the wrong bird.

The chemicals, it’s the chemicals. I forgot to post this when I got home. Here it is, (marginally) better late than never.

Sweet!

Thanks!

I was instructed by the benefactor mentioned in the previous post to spend his largesse on beer. This is a mandate I take seriously, and, since if I spent the whole lump on beer I’d be besotted indeed, I decided that some of the lovely lucre could go for pizza and I’d still be within the spirit of his request. There’ll still be some left over, even so.

To Bowle & Bowling, then! It is quiet in my neighborhood, and the short walk was a pleasant one. I entered the bowling alley and the first thing I thought was, “wow! there are a lot of pretty women here today!” And there were. I made my way inside and the next thing I thought was, “wow! It’s loud in here today!” down below on the lanes there is a horde of kids, forty or more on the six lanes, roiling in noisy confusion, bowling occasionally. It is a party. One of the big tables up where I am has a spread of food and a birthday cake, and the women are chatting with one another, sipping cokes, and occasionally looking down to determine whose kid it is shouting this time.

This place is, I realize, ideally suited for this sort of party. There is bowling, there is pizza, and parents can watch the kids discretely while staying literally above the fray.

It’s not so good for writing, however. I could handle any two of the noise, the hivelike activity below, and the milling of the pretty women, but all three is just too much. And now, a beeper is beeping. An alarm of some sort, with that shrill icepick-in-the-brain tone. Nobody seems to notice. It is time, I think, for the Budvar bar. Most likely I’ll be the only one in there on a Sunday evening.

Sweet!

Thanks!

As I write this I am sitting under a large umbrella, listening to the rain patter against the fabric. We are in a park; from where I sit I see only trees and slightly dilapidated picnic tables. It’s not raining hard — at least not yet — and it’s nice out here. If the deluge comes, we will move into the big tent. There is a pretty girl whose job it is to bring me beers.

This is summer in Prague. It is the way life should be, they way it is in longing stories of exotic places. The palapa on the deserted beach in Baja California, the tree house bar in the jungle. Beer is always just a little more civilized when consumed outdoors. This is why I want a transequatorial lifestyle, so that wherever the beers are served with a side order of fresh air, borne to me by pretty girls in miniskirts, that’s where I’ll be.

True to a theme we’ve explored here recently, I am already shuddering as I think of the coming Prague winter. I just want to stay right here, just like this. But even if I stayed still, the world would continue to move, leaving me behind, floating in space on the Sirius side of the sun. Overall, not a good solution.

Sweet!

Thanks!

There’s only one thing to do on a hot summer day in Prague. Yes, you guessed it; a day like today is made for sitting in a beer garden on an untrafficed street, well-situated to watch passers-by, ordering a tall, cool pivo, and opening up the ol’ laptop to get some work done. How much work I manage we shall have to wait and see; Prague on a warm day makes for some mighty fine people-wataching. Long women in short dresses; uptight businessmen refreshing their cologne; people with packs and guitar cases strapped to their backs; stroller pushers and shopping cart pullers; inept parallel parkers: guys with purses: a woman whose hair matches her magenta dress and makes it all look good; an old man with his glass of dark beer drifting past, his knobby white legs dangling out beneath his shorts — all these people and more have passed by in the time it took me to write that sentence.

I can see the Cheap Beer Place across the corner of the square from here, and the beer is definitely more expensive here, but the shade is better and there are far fewer cars on this street. It’s much more peaceful.

Until, as I wrote that, two things happened. The old electronic song from the seventies, “Popcorn with Butter” (I think it was called) came on the radio. This is a tune the ex had stuck in her head for the first two years I knew her. Dangerous stuff. Fortunately(?) the song has been completely drowned out by the arrival here on the patio of two more guests, one of whom is American and while not particularly loud is particularly annoying.

To be fair, most (but not all) of the things his is saying are not obnoxious at all, but my ability to turn off the conversations around me has atrophied in the time I’ve been here, since I can’t understand most of the things said around me anyway. Up to now I think most of the other patrons have been German. So now I have to dive in deep, maximum concentration, or put in the earphones. I really don’t want to lose the singing birds and snatches of czech conversation floating by, however.

And now, several minutes later, one of the other patrons has started whistling snatches of “Popcorn with Butter”. Učet, prosím!

Sweet!

Thanks!