Here is what I wrote in my book after my first half-day in Prague:

Prague smells of vomit and fried chicken. Children everywhere are screaming; the tourist hordes descend on Wenceslas Sq. like a pack of ravenous dogs. We got ripped off at dinner [ed: this was mostly because we misread the prices on the menu, though in hindsight the beer was indeed a ripoff], and wandered the streets to find the lone Deutsch bank ATM; it was broken.

We’ve been here two days since, and things have improved considerably. Prague has many of the comforts I’m used to, and when it doesn’t, things are easy enough to fake. When the cashier rings up my groceries, I don’t understand her words but the register shows the price clearly, and I can mimic conversation with use of “ya” and “no”, more often “no”—I imagine they are giving me smarmy sales pitches for whatever promotion is currently running, e.g., “Do you have an Air Miles card” or “Would you like to Supersize It™ for just 50 Kč more?”; they certainly are not asking me this, of course, which is another reason to love Eastern Europe.

The Czech capital is sort of uniformly pretty, without many striking buildings, and indeed contains a great many tourists in the city centre. But it also has absurdly cheap beer—about 80 cents CAD for a half-litre—and the locals express their approval of the market economy’s effect on beer prices by partaking in cold pivo at all hours of the day. For example, this morning I saw no fewer than three people enjoying a cold pint in the train station at 7:30 AM, for God’s sake. And these were not downtrodden street people, but ordinary folks catching the train to Plzen or Bratislava. Czechs have a great deal of energy; Prague nightlife begins quite late at night, and after a day of sipping the ubiquitous Pilsner Urquell, it amazes me anyone can a) keep his eyes open, and b) stand.

Finally, tonight I am heading out in search of a tankovna, a type of pub that has been given a special license to serve unpasteurized Pilsner Urquell. If I end up with tuberculosis as a result of drinking the stuff, well, there’s only the Czech government to blame.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 6th, 2007 at 12:24 pm and is filed under Czech Republic.