After a few whiskey/lemons and a little over half of my Midori mixed drink, which I could not finish for reasons of being disgusted, Abby and I were chatted up by a nice boy next to us with gauged ears and lots of tattoos of Catholic symbolism. He talked to us about motorcycles and the movie "Easy Rider." Of course he was French, and of course we would go all the way to the Czech Republic to meet another French boy. But he was nice, and to give us a break from rolling our unfiltered cigarettes all night, he readily distributed them to Abby. At this point, I was getting a little freaked out by the bar playing music from Grease: the Movie and could not handle even one more Tom Petty song, so we decided to get on outta there and explore a bit more.
Walking back through Old Town square was pretty sweet, since it was late and dark, but still well-lit and very very literary-looking. I really wanted to plop down with a notebook and start to compose, but alas we needed fuel! So we stopped at a very well-lit place positively full of Czech people and a bartender who did not speak English, so I pointed as the whiskey and Abby charaded "lemon" (how? I'll never know) and we sat in the corner looking around and making more Eastern European puns.
There wasn't a cheap enough drink menu nor enough party focus to keep us there, though, and we proceeded back in the direction of our hostel and stumbled upon a bar we had passed en route to dinner called, simply, "Music Bar." So, after a cheery greeting to the very large bouncer-men at the door, we proceeded inside and ordered yet another round of whiskey/lemons, which we quickly followed by champagne and vodka (a Parisian classic), which in hindsight was probably not the smartest of ideas). Sitting in the very back of a large room mostly empty of people save 2 couples having some type of exclusive "dating" type of conversation. Blech. The other bar-goers were lingering around the bar and on the dance floor in the other room, and when they started playing Daft Punk, we joined them.
Next thing we knew, we woke up a bit before 11am Saturday morning with Abby missing her toothbrush and both of us missing our towels. Though we found the towels, we never did find Abby's toothbrush, adding it to the list of mysterious things that happened in Prague. We got ready slowly, putting on makeup and showering in the teeny-tiny shower before the European boys made moves for the W.C. in their tiny briefs. Then we walked literally across the street for breakfast at another Juliet-recommended locale, The Globe, a little English-language bookstore/cafe with myriad "brunch" options (truly after an American heart after 2 months of bread and black coffee in France). I ordered the breakfast burrito, a water, a fresh-squeezed orange juice, and organic Indian black tea. All of these liquids were nowhere near enough to quench my dehydration resulting from my unexpected hangover, but it certainly helped. The burrito had jalepenos in it, my first foray into them since my interpretation of my father's salsa in the weeks before I left NC. Joyous.
After breakfast, we walked to the Prague Castle complex (oldest castle in the world!) across the (sadly under construction) Charles Bridge and through the crowded and extremely steep streets up to what had to be the highest point in the city. We, being well-trained capitalists, thought that we for sure needed tickets to get into the castle, so we bought them from a cute boy who spoke about 300 languages, switching from Czech to English for us and then to French after he saw our student IDs. I don't regret the purchase just because he was too cute to not have met. Then we waited in a very long line to explore (another great recommendation) St. Vitus's Cathedral, probably the coolest cathedral I've seen in Europe. I have no photos of the cathedral since my camera's battery had just died, but when I can convince Abby to post her photos I will drag them to the blog as well. Unfortunately, she was feeling a bit ill while we were visiting the castle and exploring the other bank of Prague, so we decided to head back to the hostel to rest for a little before dinner/going out to recommended spots in the East of the city.
After our rest, we got ready for our evening and decided to wing it for dinner and eat wherever we found that looked good. Amusingly, it was pizza that seemed the most attractive and so we had pizza, beer, and bottled water for dinner. After dinner and on our way to where I seemed to think we needed to go (always my job to be in charge of the map - this is not a surprise, it has always been this way), we stopped for a dessert and an Irish coffee at Cafe Louvre. This place had been named the best cafe in Prague more than once in the past few years, so we figured that it would be a cool place to go. In Prague, they don't believe in having a special section if you smoke, but they do believe in having a special section if you don't smoke. I tell you, this city was seriously tugging my heartstrings by this time. So in the glorious Cafe Louvre, I got to smoke with my coffee and we ordered a traditional apple strudel (for me) and a blueberry cake on traditional Eastern European dough (for Abby) that were delicious and still unbelievably cheap. Of course, as old-school Parisiennes, we absolutely would find the Cafe Louvre in Prague.
So, stuffed absolutely full of delicious coffee and dessert and general revelry, we had quite a trek in front of us. I am a large fan of walking as far as possible, and on this particular occasion Abby was as enthusiastic of a walker as me, so our voyage past the train station and through various back streets and past Place Winston Churchill was quite nice, brisk, and cheesily happy. Passing some drunk Praguians (?) on the street, opening their beers on street signs was comforting. We had to be going in somewhat of the right direction! So we climbed another street and saw right in front of us the invisible entrance to Blind Eye bar (the best possible recommendation, Juliet, I felt right at home immediately, THANK YOU). The bar was almost jet-black and cheap beyond belief and we plopped down across from two native Czechians chatting in their indecipherable tongue to smoke cigarettes (indoors!) and look at pictures on Abby's camera. After a bit of exploring in the bar, we realized that there were a bunch of rooms that were hardly lit at all (and pretty much exclusively by candles). I got a drink called a Zizkov Liberator, which was enormous and tasted kind of like cream soda, but was too sweet for me to finish. The beer was Czech Budweiser, which I was into, and the very cute bartender was from Prague but spoke better English than me. Embarrassing.
I met a couple of guys at the bar who were happy to hear that I loved Prague and thought that South and North Carolina were the same place (I corrected them) and they told me that the Prague train station (where we had traversed to find this bar) was "the sketchiest part of the entire country." I told them I didn't find it sketchy in the slightest and they said exactly, the whole country is safe and it must be hard for me to understand coming from America. I said yeah, but it's mainly fear tactics and racism. They laughed. They were in the vein of all of the Czech people I had the pleasure of meeting, very very sweet and friendly and didn't hate me because I was American. I wanted to come to the Czech Republic after all!
Abby and I had agreed that we were both pretty tired and we did have a long walk home, so we weren't going to stay out too late, especially considering our obscenely early flight (9:30, but I am NOT a morning person). However, this was quickly reassessed when we met this group of Germans and Canadians who invited us to play foosball (thank god for all my years at afterschool programs) and swiftly to finish our drinks and accompany them to a secret techno club in a Cold War-era nuclear bomb bunker somewhere on this side of Prague. We had a map but their Czech friends had abandoned us, so we pretty much just had the instincts of one of the Germans (named Arne, but he said it would be easier for us to call him Bob, so we did) and this vague vague map. So we walked even farther, past a church, a grocery store, a TV tower covered with metal babies (weird, Juliet, I thought you were kidding but wtf) and chatted with the Germans and one boy from Austria wearing an Amsterdam t-shirt and the Canadians, who had been friends since they were young and were seeing one another for the first time in years, deciding to meet randomly in Prague.
We found the club, completely nondescript except for a bit of graffiti outside, under an overpass and a park. Walking in, the graffiti grew and filled all of the small, empty concrete rooms of the entrance to this club. After descending a long metal staircase past a climbing wall (?) we made in to the bottom and since I don't speak any Czech and the people at the door didn't seem to speak English, I illogically switched to French, asking how much the cover was and asking the pierced girls if they were having fun. Of course they didn't know what I was talking about but the cover was 30 Crowns (a little over 1 Euro) and huge beers 26 crowns (1 Euro). The club was almost empty, but I was just awed by the fact that I was actually in a Cold War nuclear bomb bunker where there was now very bad techno music and graffiti and people partying. The very few people that were there were very Czech and smoking what looked like crack, and later large amounts of hash and weed. My ability to dance to techno music without a beat (which you might think is oxymoronical - it's not) is pretty hard to harness, so I just sat with one of the Canadian boys and smoked cigarettes/drank beer and talked about lots and lots of things, including tattoos, traveling, the internet, cooking, beer, and in short, almost all of my favorite subjects, while Abby and the other Canadian danced. I have no earthly idea what time it was when they turned on all of the lights in the club, but we had been there for a couple of hours probably and decided to get out of there.
Luckily, in all of Europe they do a thing called "Non-Stop," which means 24-hours. This includes some grocery stores, sex shops, but the best of all is that it includes bars. So leaving the techno club and waving goodbye and (me still stupidly saying "bonsoir") we began to trudge back in the direction of Greater Prague in pairs. We stopped at a bar near Old Town and got a couple of beers and watched VH1 with the bartender, who did not speak English but for whatever reason, let us in for drinks and refused to let in anyone else. He was very funny and reading the paper/smoking cigarettes, and the four of us got personal and made fun of the Culture Club and David Bowie videos, along with the very bad version of classic Beatles that Paul did solo. After a while, we decided to continue to walk to the hostel where Abby and I were staying, since it was now very late and foggy and we weren't actually very far away anymore.
I was once again in charge of getting everyone to where they were going, my favorite thing to do at 5AM drunk and tired, taking advantage of the time change at 2AM (fall back! An extra hour in Prague!). We found it, stayed up for a while talking, and fell into a fitful sleep on the couch in the "Fun Room" of the hostel at about 6AM. At about this time, the Canadians awoke and decided to get back to their hostel for some real sleep. Lucky bastards, we had to meet our driver at 8, so our night was pretty much done. They were really wonderful and funny, and I am disappointed that life works the way it does, i.e. being extremely unlikely that we will ever meet either of them again. Oh well, now I know something about the geography of Canada, which, as an American, I had never ever been taught.
The next few hours went by in a huge blur of packing, getting on our plane, sleeping badly, taking the bus back to Paris, taking the metro home, and at about 1:30PM on Sunday I arrived back in Montreuil where my host family was having a little party for Mathieu's 21st birthday! I bought him orange juice, cigarette rolling papers, and gummy candies and hid it in his room yesterday. We both stayed up very late on Sunday night, him making architectural models and me doing my Cinema midterm, which I didn't finish until 10AM yesterday (class is at 11:30), and we watched CSI in French and smoked cigarettes at about 3AM. Wonderful.
All in all, Prague was a huge success, making me look extremely forward to Marrakesh and Amsterdam (bus tickets = 26 Euros!) in December. And Camilla from Governor's School/NC State will be here on Thursday, so that after my looong day of assignments and French presentations, we will get to go out together. I am so excited I can't even handle it. Now, if only I could get a little bit more well before then. My 13 hours of sleep last night probably helped.
Thanks for reading, as always.
A bientot!
