Praha, Pivo, Prosim

I know, I know, you might all be surprised to hear that I’m at home on a Saturday night. And I don’t even have any beer to keep me company. A serious consideration is hot tea at the moment. Yes, I am living the dream!

NEWS and EVENTS

The biggest news is that my birthday is on Tuesday and I bought an off-camera flash for my DSLR today. I’d rather focus on the latter part of the last sentence as it’s more exciting than the getting older part. But alas, I’ll address both…

The flash–it’s an off brand therefore it is less than the pricier Nikon variety. I wish I could drop some serious cash on super quality equipment but funds are tight and I can’t go spending frivolously; as much as I’d like to do the aforementioned, I have to be aware of how much I have and where it is going. Budgets suck. Boo. Thumbs down budgets! Either way, I’ll be fooling around with this new toy tomorrow so I’ll post some photos in the future. Oh, and to answer anyone that might ask–why is it necessary to buy this kind of flash when most cameras have a built-in flash? Well, that’s a simple one. On camera flashes make people look like fucking shit. Horrible. Skin tones are horrible and complexions look like hell. An extra flash option adds for the possibility of angled lighting or diffused lighting thus making human subjects look human and less like pasty beasts.

The birthday. Ah, yes. Getting older. Those of you that know me, know my age so we’ll leave it at that. However, I will say that I certainly don’t ‘feel’ my age nor do I necessarily ‘act’ my age, either. The number attached to an age is kind of arbitrary but it’s that pesky reminder of just how long we’ve been trotting the globe and making memories.

Important history lesson…. Nov. 17, 1989: The Velvet Revolution, Czech Republic. The end of Communism. As the 20th anniversary of this historical event approaches, the city is preparing many activities and celebrations to commemorate such a momentous time in this country’s history. A Czech friend (and student) told me an interesting story last night. We were out drinking wine under the Charles Bridge at a cute little bistro and she said that her university was located near Vaclavske Namesti (Wenceslas Square). Vaclavske was where much of the Velvet Revolution action happened. For fourteen days she and her fellow students were locked in their rooms. They could hear shooting and shouting but had no idea what was going on. The Berlin Wall had fallen earlier that month and now the time had come to Czechoslovakia. It was their turn.

I now know a substantial amount of locals and/or those raised behind the Iron Curtain and it’s really fascinating to hear stories about the Communist Era. Although, they certainly don’t see it as such because they were living it, there are so many little things about ‘western’ life that I have taken for granted. Things that I would never even think about were unavailable or unknown here during that time. For example….. I was talking to another Czech friend and colleague about how my sister (thanks, V!) would give me green olives but she would SAY they were green cherries. Like a fool, I believed her and ate them only to spit them out. My Czech friend then told me that the first time she had olives was when she was 15 and in Greece because olives were just not available here at that time. She also told me how everyone wore the same shoes. And how the queues (lines) for fruits were extremely long. And how they ate Cuban oranges which are more yellow than orange. Hmm, interesting–importing the other Communist oranges. How apropo.

I’M IN THE MOVIES, BEYOTCH!

I’m hopefully getting a copy of my world premiere film tomorrow. No, no, not porn. Nobody would want to see that. Don’t worry, I’m not going to go all Carrie Prejean and tell Larry King he’s being ‘inappropriate’ when he asks me about it. (And as an aside…and I apologize I’m about to use this word but…. Wow, she’s quite the entitled cunt, isn’t she?) But anyway, I should be meeting Libor and Petra so they can give me a few copies of the documentary. I think there should be an official screening with a red carpet, popcorn and media. Who can I call? I wonder if Povich and Chung are available for press?

FOOD

Here’s something anyone out there could possibly help me out with… The backstory: Ok, a Czech friend (the first one mentioned above) grew up in a small village. She goes to visit her parents frequently. But, because this village is so small, many people grow crops and raise animals so as to provide for themselves. I had known that her parents have chickens and that she often brings free range eggs back to Prague. But, I did not know that there are also rabbits, goats and even friggin’ beehives. Yes, beehives! I want to get my hands on some real organic honey. Being the food geek I am, I was very excited by all this bounty she was telling me about. So, I made her a deal. If she can bring me some organic goodies, I offered to cook. It’s a good trade, really. I get to play with high quality organic food and cook and she gets some free English. The challenge: So, here’s what I’m thinking….. if she brings some awesome eggs, I would like to make a souffle. For anyone that has never had a souffle, trust me when I say they are delicious. And if you love eggs, go find a restaurant that serves them now! Souffles are just big fluffy, eggy goodness. I think cheese souffles are the most ‘go-to’ but there are various savory options as well as sweet. If anyone out there has souffle experience, I’d like to hear about it. What did you make? How did it turn out? Tips? I’m always down for making new recipes so getting feedback would be most helpful.

Wine. It’s good for you.

It’s made from fruit.

Saturday September 19

Wine has quite a history throughout the world and here in the C.R., it’s no different. Every year in the late summer/early fall there are harvest festivals. These festivals are for a specific kind of wine called burcak. It’s young wine that is also fermented. It doesn’t taste like any wine you’ve had before. It’s available in both the red and white varieties.

2pm

So, cut to last weekend I went out with a bunch of people to the local burcak festival (there were actually several all over town that weekend) at Havlickovy Sady (a city park). The even at the park was really quite cool. Aside from tons of people, there was a big main stage as well as various tents/vendors for drinks, food & miscellaneous knick-knacks. The theme of the festival was some kind of 19thC. thing. I don’t know how to describe it other than saying many people were wearing period costume. There was also even the old-fashioned giant bikes; you know the ones with the huge front wheel and the teeny back wheel. To the side of the main stage was also a performance area (we happened to be sitting to the immediate right of it) where several Cirque du Soleil-type acrobatic performers did cool stuff throughout the day.

8 or 9pm

After the events at Havlickovy Sady, we headed over to Jiriho z Podebrad. There were yet more tents with more alcohol as well as several bands playing.

10 or 11pm

Off to Riegrovy Sady beer garden. Oy, the events get hazy at this point. Good times. I can report that some random drunk passed out guy was sitting across from me and the new TEFL kids decided to fuck with him so I snapped all kinds of hilarity.

1 or 2am

Next stop a bar in Vinohrady. Wow, I’m too old to do this power drinking. Yikes. I need to go home. But not until I finish my requisite pivo!

230am

After midnight the metro stops running and the trams change routes, numbers and times. I walked home. Most excellent. It’s good for circulation. That’s what I kept telling myself……’it’s for health….it’s for health!’

The verdict?Burcak is mighty tasty stuff.

*Burcak is sold in various quantities: ,33l ,5l 1.5l or 2lAlthough it looks a bit ghetto to be carrying around a 1.5 or 2l plastic container of wine, everyone does it. It’s in the pictures. You shall see.

Friday September 25

Another Friday night at Riegrovy Sady beer garden. It was rather chilly that night at not many people were out drinking. But perhaps that’s because it’s a three day weekend. I write this at 830 on Monday morning when I would normally be getting ready for work. Woo hoo for holidays! Nobody knows what the holiday actually IS today but we don’t care; it just gives us all another day off.

After Riegrovy we went to Akropolis. This is some random club/restaurant/bar in Zizkov. I’m normally opposed to paying a cover charge but this place was a paltry 30Kc. Oh well. I bit the bullet and did it. From what I saw the place wasn’t that fantastic. Although it looked quite large and also looked to be another one of those ‘how-many-rooms-in-the-basement-of-this-building-are-there’ kind of places. We ended up there with a friend of Sean Hardy’s who is hardcore French and introduces himself as (seriously), ‘Hello I am Freddy and I am ready.’ With the super thick Frenchie accent it’s even more hilarious than it reads.

Saturday September 26

I got a text message from Natalie and Jack saying they were going to Karlstejn Castle that day. Sweet! I hadn’t been there yet so I was game.

The Round-trip train ticket is only 109Kc so why not, right? We got on the 12:41 and headed out.

Tons of people got off at the same stop and we just figured that they all had the same idea as we did for a Saturday afternoon. Karlstejn is probably the closest castle to Prague that isn’t IN Prague so it’s quite a popular day-trip. Anyway, we soon realized that all these people were going to Karlstejn because of the annual burcak festival!! Sweet! I love this fucking country. We hadn’t planned on this extra bonus event! We were stoked.

Karlstejn is a really cute little town just W/SW of the city. It’s a good 2mi. trek up the castle but it’s right up the main street of the town so it’s by no means a difficult walk. Along the sides of the road were of course burcak vendors as well as lots of local trinkets, etc. Additionally, there was this big medieval theme going on, too. The castle was built in 1348 so there were tons of people dressed in period costume, etc. From the program information we read that at 230pm there was to be the ‘royal procession’ to the castle gates and then after there would be various performances inside the castle. Oh excellent!!! We made it up the hill to the gate and waited for the procession. I’d say there were a good 150-200 people involved in the procession. There did not mess around. Once inside the castle there was music, bellydancers & faqir as well as a court jeser/juggler/comic who the kids loved. Pretty cool stuff!

Along the way we guzzled a few beers and purchased a nice huge 1.5l of red burcak. The previous week I only had the white burcak and my personal rating of the red is higher than the white. I was told burcak tastes like cider or juice and I didn’t think the white tasted like either. Both versions have an obvious smell of fermentation and both are bubbly. (Actually, bottles of the stuff can explode from the bubbles. I nearly had the remaining red I have explode all over my yellow walls last night. I avoided disaster with my ninja-like skills.) The red burcak actually DOES taste more like ‘juice’ than anything and I can understand why it’s so easy to drink massive amounts of the stuff. Danger Will Robinson, danger!

We got on the 636pm train back to Prague and I was home by 8pm. All in all a fantastic start to a three-day weekend!

Sunday September 27

Since the day before we did a spontaneous trip to Karlstejn I was feeling the urge to do more. I consulted some online resources and travel books and waffled back and forth between Melnik, Krivoklat Castle, Kutna Hora & maybe Tabor. In the end, I decided on Tabor. Tabor is a town in Southern Bohemia. I had some friends go the day before and I got the thumbs up that it was a good trip so I went by myself.

I made it to the train station at noon and bought my ticket for 241Kc. The train departed on time (as everything does in this country) and I was off. The train was a (not really) nice old Communist-era clunker. It was old and rusty and had plenty of graffiti.

Arrival in Tabor was at about 2 and I made my way into the ‘old town’ area. Although I had no map, I’m usually quite good with directions (despite my possession of a vagina) and can make my way around places fairly easily. Along the way, I made the correct judgment calls and I found the old square with no problems. The main square of Tabor is really cute. I know centuries old cities shouldn’t be referred to as ‘cute’ but I’m a female, so it fits. Around the square are cool old buildings as well as a clock tower and an old church with an even bigger tower. I hiked up the church tower for 25Kc and it has a freaking fantastic view of the town. The walk up the tower is interesting. Up old stone steps and then to rickety wooden stairs that are quite steep. The rope ‘railing’ looks questionable but it seems to work. Additionally, I’ll note that you have to bend way down and walk UNDER the giant church bell to continue to the top. Ha ha nice! My Nikon was happy once I got to the top.

Back down in town I continued to walk around for a few hours and have a few beers. I even managed to get a Wi-Fi signal at a restaurant so I started Facebooking. A girl has gotta have her priorities. For those interested, I had garlic soup (oh yeah, good stuff) and roast pork knee on toast with cheese (also yummy). The main beverage in town is Budvar (where American Budweiser gets the name) but this is the ‘original’ stuff and people get pissed if one assumes the Czech and American versions are the same. Budvar is made in Ceske Budejovice which is a bit more south than Tabor. Ask the Google.

I decided to get on the 7pm train back to Prague and I was home by 9pm. Another good day!

Monday September 28

The last day of my long weekend. Did I stay in? Nope. BBQ, baby. It was the ‘Goodbye to Summer’ BBQ so there were many men grilling the meat while we woman foraged for berries and tend the fire. Ha, no not really. But something like that.

A GREAT WEEKEND!I’m going to post a bunch of photos to Facebook rather than here. Photos can only be loaded individually here and they also need to be resized. I want to share a lot of them so it would take a lot of time on my end to do these things. A mass upload on FB is in order. Stay tuned.

I’m doing the classic/lazy copy/paste on this because I wanted to share this here. I sent this to a friend last night and I’m passing it along to all of you (albeit with a few minor edits)….

I just experienced something that for some reason I thought you would appreciate. Sure, many people could appreciate this but I think you would be one of the few who would ‘Oh damn, this IS amazing’ with me on this one…

I just returned from Letna Park. Of course you have no idea what or where Letna Park is located….. Allow me to explain Letna Park and a bit of Prague first. Prague has been built on 7 hills. These hills aren’t vast mountains spanning across echoing valleys but they can certainly make navigation on foot a pain in the ass. In addition to these hills, the Vltava River also cuts through Prague. Two of Prague’s nicknames include The Mother of Cities and The City of a Hundred Spires. Needless to say, this is a very old and a very weathered place. Perhaps one could say that Prague is even the ‘heartbeat’ of what one would consider to be a Gothic city; we’re talking 1K years here. It’s practically everywhere you look and I love that. From the small little architectural details to the street signs and such, the age of Prague is inescapable. But the funny thing is, I don’t want to escape it; I don’t know anyone who does. Here it’s old stuff with a past. But it isn’t just age or something from a history book, it’s years and time and it’s effortlessly timeless. There are so many historic structures and so much history here, both known and unknown, it’s crazy. The darkened alleyways and cobblestone streets have so many stories and secrets to tell. I would like to hear them all.

Anyway, back to Letna Park…. Letna sits on one of the seven hills of Prague. The park is across the Vltava and directionally, it’s N/NE(ish) of the Old Town area. Letna also has a fucking great beer garden. Yes, I said beer garden. Those are fantastically useful words when used separately but when in unison, it’s as if the clouds part and God Himself is speaking to you. Jesus is your bartender now, pull up a stool.  The beer garden at Letna is hugely popular, especially on warm summer nights. That’s when the beer is the best! Sitting in Letna park at a table right by the railing overlooking Prague is just pretty damn amazing. Because of the geography and the short distance across the river, you can see so much; you can see everything and yet it isn’t enough. More is what you want. You can look left and you can look right and see the spires of centuries old buildings all while enjoying a gloriously golden Czech lager. The beer is tall and inviting and calling your name.  It’s cold and bubbly and tastes so very good. You can silently wonder to yourself who has done the same thing in that very spot on a night just like this and be humbled by it all. It’s a moment of GD perfection, if I do say so myself. And although I have been to Letna many times before, the view doesn’t get old. Ever. It’s something new everyday even if only slightly so…. it’s another day added to the calendar of this beautiful and historic place.

Tonight, I was there during twilight. You know, twilight is that that special time of day when the light is just so and everything flickers just a bit, it lends to this etherial kind of glow and mystery. The shades of blue are everywhere; and some hints of orange and red still twinkle in the streetlights below and in the reflections in the windows. I really smiled a big smile when I was taking it all in and I just know you’d have done the same. I’d equate it to one of those, ‘Damn, it’s great to be alive,’ moments.

Sometimes it’s just those silly little things that make us smile.So, I raise my beer (pivo) to you and send a big na zdravi (to your health!) across the big wide pond known as the Atlantic……until we meet again!  After reading that I pose this query: who is ready for a visit?!