Prague

Beware of strangers bearing gifts, I keep telling myself. Especially gifts that come in shot glasses and emit an odour that evokes memories of your 5th form afterball.

“It is traditional Czech aperatif! You will like this”, says the waiter reassuringly. He's been standing patiently over me with a platter of full shot glasses for the best part of a minute, like a puppy imploring its master to marvel at the dead rat it's just dragged in from the garden. I have no idea what's in this drink or what it's going to do to me. Never have I seen a spirit so jaundiced, murky and foreboding in colour. The waiter, Georgina, Caroline and the kindly old German couple sitting next to us at the table are all eyeing me in anticipation. The peer pressure is too much. I take a shot glass off the platter and raise it to my lips. The ethanol smell is overpowering; the memories of that horrible night eight years ago rushing back to me, just as the vomit rushed back up my digestive tract and down the front of my suit on that fateful spring evening.

I'm about to take a exploratory sip when the kindly old German man catches my eye. “In one go. You must drink in one go”, he instructs me. I frown apprehensively and he and his wife laugh, possibly already under the influence of whatever it is I'm about to consume. All eyes are still on me as I tilt my head back and send the mystery liquid down the hatch. It has a smooth, aniseed flavour and leaves a gentle burning sensation in the throat, similar to Icebreaker – the RTD of choice at Dunedin keg parties – but without the unpleasant feeling of your liver steadily accumulating toxins with each sip. It's not bad.

Tucked away on a dark, quiet central Prague street, we've found a beerhouse with an ambience as lively as you're likely to see this side of Munich. Everywhere I look, something humorous and utterly foreign is taking place. The two man polka band – a jolly fat man with a tuba and a small, wiry, moustachioed man on accordion – are performing local favourites to the delight of the drunken students at a big long table that spans the length of the room. They're singing heartily and swinging their beer glasses from side to side in the traditional European fashion, yelling more and more requests at the exasperated, sweat-drenched tuba player, who duly obliges because well, that's his job. Two men carrying massive trays of beer are gliding about the room, distributing pints for thirsty diners. One of them arrives now with a chaser for my aperatif, plonking a beer down in front of me and marking another notch on my bill. Then he's off again, somehow making the thankless task of pushing through crowds of drunken Czechs while balancing twenty pints of beer on a tray on his right hand seem like a Sunday afternoon walk in the park. He's obviously been getting tips from those African women who walk for six hours at a time with water pots on their heads.

Our meals arrive – the same flattened-meat-and-potatoes scenario I've been describing throughout my recent travels – and are washed down by more of the malty, house-brewed ales. The polka troupe are going from table to table now, giving private performances. They're playing for a party of four at the table in the corner, all of whom sport flowing and voluptuous mullets. A mother and father are sitting on one side of the table, facing a stocky young man with a porn star moustache and a blonde girl who must be his sister, or his girlfriend, or both. They all go to the same hairdresser, possibly via some secret time machine that transports them to the 1980s. At the long table to the left sits a woman who is probably the drunkest person in the world right now. Her husband is sober and has a bemused but resigned look on his face, as if he spends most of his weekend evenings apologising to strangers for the behaviour of his spouse. She's just spilled beer all over the old lady next to her, and now she falls backwards off the bench onto the floor and can't get up. The waiter with the twenty pints deftly hopscotches her with all the grace and poise of a gazelle. You can't buy entertainment like this. I finish my pint and am immediately aware of a warm, tipsy stupor coming over me. Then I look at the menu and discover that the alcohol content of the beer is 13%.

Back outside in the harsh reality of a freezing Prague night, Georgina and Caroline announce their predictable decision to the return the hostel. I don't want to waste my pleasant buzz from the two pints of beer – that amounted to a bottle and a half of wine – and I resolve to wander the wind-swept streets until I find another suitable drinking house. The downtown area is spookily abandoned and devoid of activity, as if everyone else has gone to some raging cocaine party on the other side of town and didn't think to invite me. Eventually I come across a seedy-looking bar with some pokies in the back and a sign out the front that says:
“Tonight: HAPPY HOUR 5-11. LIVE CHAMPIONS LEAGUE FOOTBALL: LIVERPOOL V MARSEILLE”.

I love a happy hour that goes all night. Besides, my beloved Liverpool is playing live on TV. My grandmother spent a bit of time there, you see, plus it's the hometown of the greatest rock 'n' roll band of all time (I am of course referring to Gerry & The Pacemakers). The barman pours me a pint of Budvar and I take a seat in a booth with a good view of the TV. It's not showing the Liverpool game though; it's the bloody Kings Road Mincers, Chelsea, against some rubbish European minnows.
“Could we change the channel, please?”, I ask the barman, who's sitting on the customers' side of the bar, smoking a cigarette.
“Sorry?”
“Liverpool game? Can we watch Liverpool game?”
“Ah, sorry, no, we watch Chelsea”. He takes another drag of his cigarette and gestures in the direction of three rough-looking Czech guys in the booth next to me, one of whom is wearing a Chelsea shirt. Looks like I'm outnumbered here.

Back in my booth, alone and vulnerable, I notice the Czech guys frequently glancing over at me and then talking amongst themselves in ominous tones. Oh God, what are they saying? My rudimentary Czech phrase book is no use to me here. They never tell you the crucial words, like “piano wire” or “kidneys”. Why is that exactly? My kidneys are the only valuable items I ever carry on my person. Not that they're worth much these days, either. Still, they don't know that, and I don't want to be one of those people who comes back from the bathroom to find that their beer tastes a bit funny, only to wake up eighteen hours later alone in a bath with a row of stitches down the left side of my torso.

I'm saved from this fate by two English football hooligans poking their head through the front door and asking where they could watch the Liverpool game.
“The Dubliner”, announces the barman without taking his eyes off the TV. Couldn't he have just told me that? “Go down street, first left, first right”.
I follow along behind the football hooligans, keeping a safe distance from them, and find myself descending below street level into a cavernous room with a bar on one side and tables of rowdy young Irishmen on stag weekends at the other. The bar is manned by a seedy Czech with a pony tail that makes him look like an out of work porn star, and a younger, hunched-over Irishman. He comes over to pour me a pint, and I notice that his eyebrows have grown perilously, almost fatally close together. It looks like a close run thing but one day, just as they looked like joining together and consigning him to a childhood of broken dreams and ridicule, they stopped, milimetres apart and in the nick of time, just like that giant crushing machine in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. He's sharp and assertive, but the wistful look in his eye tells the story of a young man who'd rather be managing a hedge fund than pouring pints for inebriated foreigners in an Irish Bar in Prague.
“Busy night?”, I ask him.
“Ahhh, it's fairly steady, like”, he replies. “So you're from New Zealand then?”. He's the first guy to have got it right.
“You bet. You ever been down there?”

We're about to have a potentially interesting conversation when a pushy American couple around the side of the bar call him over and ask for drinks. He dutifully obliges, then is forced to stand and listen as the Americans – clearly oil barons, judging by their tacky clothes and thick southern drawl – regale the bar staff with outrageously embellished horror stories of their travails through Europe and Asia.
“I just couldn't believe it”, I can hear the wife saying. “When they had us at gunpoint and were ordering us out of the bus I really thought they were gonna kill us”. She moves seamlessly from the tale of this apparent hijacking to a near miss with a sword-wielding mugger in Istanbul, followed by an unfortunate run-in with gypsies in Romania. And so it goes on, the gathered crowd listening wide-eyed except for the cynical Irishman, who occasionally looks over to me and rolls his eyes as if to say, “can you believe these people?”.

They're still blabbering on about their various near-death experiences as the game finishes and I make my way back out onto the now even colder, more deserted, Prague streets. The Americans' anecdotes have made me wary of Czech gangsters lurking in alleyways, poised to strike out at my precious kidneys, but regrettably the two-minute walk back to the hostel passes without incident.

***

Everybody loves a good riot, and the hardy folk of North Dunedin are no exception. From its humble origins as a bogan pilgrimmage down the 360km of State Highway 1 from Christchurch to Dunedin, the annual Undie 500 race has become the pretext for a weekend of rioting, looting and debauchery so wanton and depraved that I'm both disgusted and secretly amused just thinking about it. Every time August rolls around, the tough-talking starts. No one wants to see a riot, say the students, the media and the police in a delicately-contrived joint statement intended to douse fears of an imminent societal regress into anarchy, but secretly they all do. The media because they know the public loves a good student beat-up story; the police because it gives them something to do; and the students because, well, who doesn't enjoy honouring our pagan heritage by getting naked and setting fire to things once in a while?

I believe we would do well to spare a thought for the 15,000 students who descended on downtown Prague on the afternoon of November 17, 1989. On that day, while Dunedin's best and brightest rioters-to-be were flapping about in paddling pools and riding on trainer wheels, Prague's students conducted a peaceful protest march down Národní Street to mark International Student Day. Growing ever more frustrated at the iron-fisted rule of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party, they'd seen the wall come down a week before in Berlin, and now seized upon the chance to make history for themselves. As it happened, they were brutally beaten, bullied and shot at by state police, sparking nationwide strikes and protests against the increasingly unpopular government.

On November 28, with communism collapsing across Central Europe, the Communist Party relinquished power and the single-party state was dismantled. Six months later, Czechoslovakia held its first democratic elections since 1946. The students had won a stirring victory against their erstwhile tormentors; their deeds coming to be immortalised by the phrase “Velvet Revolution”. The young warriors of that day are now old and becalmed, and I reckon on the very unlikely chance that they picked up a paper and read about students in Dunedin rioting over what amounts to a few beer bottles and a half-eaten lasange topper, they'd have mixed feelings about the direction their revolutionary ideals have taken.

It's difficult to fathom that these seminal events took less than two decades ago on this very street upon which I stand. That these pavements, now adorned with hot dog and kebab stalls, once flowed with the blood of Czechoslovakia's young and idealistic freedom fighters. I'm on a self-guided walking tour of the city that has taken me – largely by accident – past Prague's iconic astronomical clock, down Národní Street to the epicentre of the protest. Prague is not one of the more carefully-planned cities in Europe, its sidestreets and alleys shooting off in every direction and twisting and turning every which way. Eat a bowl of spaghetti and regurgitate it upon a blank piece of paper, and you have a fair approximation of Prague's street layout. A couple of times already this morning, I've found myself taking a wrong turn and, in spite of close consultation with my map, finding myself back at the same spot from which I'd departed ten minutes hence. It would've been quite exciting to explore back in the olden days, but nowadays the risk of rounding a blind corner on foot and being cleaned up by a speeding care takes a bit of shine off the adventure.

Once I've regained my bearings, I head north along the right-hand bank of the Vltava River to one of Prague's most famous and remarkable tourist attractions. At ten metres wide and over half a kilometre long, Charles Bridge is a remarkable feat of architecture – not least because it was built over 600 years ago of Bohemian sandstone and egg-enriched mortar. The bridge established Prague as an important trading hub, played host to fierce battles and skirmishes between conquering forces, been battered and broken by countless floods, survived looting of its many famous statues and ballustrades, and still holds firm under the weight (in every sense of the word) of foreign tourists and the associated bottom-feeding rip-off merchants that line either side of the bridge.

Across the bridge and atop a steep hill rests the city's most famous attraction, Prague Castle. I'm not going to go to it, because I'm sick of the sight of castles and even more sick of the sight of package tourists (Prague is the sixth most-visited city in Europe after London, Paris, Rome, Madrid and Berlin). Instead, I follow a less-travelled path through the woods and gardens that surround the castle, pausing to admire the view of the city across the river, with its myriad towers and churches. The forest of baroque-era spires are enhanced by a brilliant blue sky on this cold but crisp autumn day. The path takes me behind the castle and into a peaceful, wooded glade. My only company appears in the form of a small red squirrel, snacking on something in the grass a few metres away. It looks up and sees me, then lets forth a terrified scream and scuttles away up the nearest tree. Something I said, perhaps?

After dusk I find myself again wandering the quiet city streets, and once again inevitably gravitating towards The Dubliner. It's the soft option I know, but this is a city where one wrong move in a bar could mean spending the rest of your life on a dialysis machine, and I'm happy to pay the little extra for a beer in an Irish pub if it guarantees peace of mind for my kidneys. I'm pleased to see that Monobrow is behind the bar, and the guy sitting to my right – a shaven-headed Englishman in his late 20s – is the same guy I sat next to yesterday. Since we were not formally introduced at the time, however, we pretend not to notice or recognise each other.

There's four different games of football being shown simultaneously on four different screens. The score in every game is 0-0 approaching halftime. Given their fierce passion for a sport in which something interesting usually happens once or twice in ninety minutes, it strikes me as odd that cricket doesn't appeal to Europeans. I suppose they are hamstrung by their deep-set and at least partially-valid suspicions that anything invented by the English must be shit. Every so often an excited cheer will go up from one of the tables of men on stag dos – they too appear not have shifted an inch from last night – signalling that something interesting may be about to happen in the particular game they're paying attention to, but I've yet to experience the boisterous singing and beer-spilling that would no doubt occur in the unlikely event that a goal is ever scored.

A scruffy looking middle-aged Irishman takes a seat at the bar next to me. He summons Monobrow over and orders a Heineken. “Bollocks!”, he barks, taking his pint, although it's not clear what he thinks is bollocks. He sees me gazing randomly at one of the TV screens and swivels his seat around to do the same. It's a full five minutes before he realises he's blocking my view.
“Fock! Sorry lad”, he says, hastily shifting his stool backwards.
“You're alright. I'm not missing anything”.
He asks what I'm doing here by myself; I tell him I have no mates and ask him what he's doing here. Turns out his wife has been kind enough to stay in the hotel room and look after the kids this evening while he gets drunk and watches football. Like any conversation between two half-cut strangers in a bar, the topic shifts around unpredictably before settling on an earnest exposition of the various crimes and misdemeanours committed by the fairer sex.
“One thing you'll learn, son, is that women don't give a fock about you. They don't give a fock about nothin', so. I've got four children by three different marriages, and believe me, I know”.
In spite of his blatant sexism, there is an endearing quality to the man that extends past the mere fact that he's Irish. I can tell by the conviction in his voice and the sadness in his eye that he loved all three of those women deeply at one time or another.
“I was gutted when the first one left me. Fockin' gutted. But ya know, I got over it, and I got another one. And funny ting is, two years later, fock me dronk, the first one was comin' back after me again! That's fockin' women for ya. Always wantin' what they can't fockin' have”.
We both turn back to the screen for a long while, sipping our beers and glancing around the room just to ensure that nope, no one has scored a goal in any of the other games either. Then he says, “ya know, I fockin' hate Arsenal. Anyway, better get back to the missus or I'm in trouble. Good luck, lad”. I'm not sure whether that was directed at me or Monobrow behind the bar. He looks like he needs it more than I do.

***

As much as I've enjoyed Prague, today I'm forced to put my Central European jaunt on hold for a few days and fly back to to London where my older and wiser brother, Adam, awaits my arrival. Part of Adam's current job involves travelling around the world and organising massive piss-ups on behalf of the beer company that employs him. This weekend he's taking the travelling beer show to a disused carpark in east London where, according to the media briefing he's sent me, “East meets West at this cultural fusion showdown which will flip the creative compass, redraw the musical map, and forge an international alliance of art”. Sounds like some Asians and some honkies are gonna meet up, get shitfaced and lay down some tunes, I conclude, before lugging my hastily-packed bag down to reception. I'd be silly to miss it.

Now, I've witnessed (and participated in) my fair share of awkward in moments in my lifetime, but nothing that can compare to the situation that greets me as I open the door to reception. There's a lady, who I recognise as a receptionist, seated at a swivel chair behind the desk. She gasps with surprise at my entry, prompting a male head to pop up inquisitively from between her legs. For a moment we all look at each other in sheer dear-in-the-headlights panic, then I pretend my shoelace is undone and crouch down in front of the desk to “tie” it while I regain my composure.

What the hell just happened? I feel like an unwilling participant in a low-budget porno flick. Maybe I am an unwilling participant in a low-budget porno flick.
“Can we help you?”, asks the man, who has swiftly recovered from whatever it was he was doing and is all smiles.
“Ummm, ahhh, um”. I can't even speak anymore. “Hope I'm not intruding on anything!”, I say, feigning nonchalance.
“Oh, no no, not at all”, they assure me in unison, even though we all know that a plainer lie has never been spoken.
“Well, errr, it's just that, I was wondering how to get to the airport”.
He tells me the name of a metro station that I immediately forget, and instructs me to take it for four stops to some other station whose name I immediately forget, and then take a bus whose number I also forget, which will drop me off at the airport. I don't even care at this point. I have to get the hell out of the room before the man plucks up the courage to ask, “hey, have you ever held a camera before?”, or something to that effect. My flight back to England, where public displays of affection are punishable by death, cannot come quick enough.

Thirty minutes later, by a random series of miraculous coincidences I find myself stepping off the bus outside the main terminal and negotiating my way past approximately thirteen McDonald's outlets and seventeen Duty Free stores to the main departure hall. Evening flights are departing Prague for every imaginable corner of Europe and beyond; except, conspicuously, London Gatwick. I check for my 9.40pm flight, but it is not displayed where it should be. Feeling my angst levels increasing exponentially, I scan up and down the board but no, it is simply not there. There's flights to godforsaken places I've never even heard of – Hurghada, Ekaterinburg, Thessaloniki, Lanzarote – but none to Gatwick.

Panic rapidly sets in, then gives way to a kind of detached, fatalistic stupor. I've come to the airport on the wrong day. Or just the wrong airport. Or more likely still, the flight for which I have a ticket probably never existed in the first place. So does that mean I don't exist either? I'm hovering outside my body now, watching myself crumble and disintegrate into the ether like the Wicked Witch. I know what's going to happen next. I'll realise that this whole journey was just a dream, that my culinary rampage across America and my hazy, pilsner-fuelled escapades through the streets and alleyways of Europe were just a fabrication of my Blue Powerade-addled brain and any moment now I'll wake up in my freezing cold, shitty Dunedin flat to the realisation that I still haven't handed in my bloody thesis. I stand frozen on the spot, but nothing happens.

Suddenly I realise what I must do. It's a crazy old scheme, but it might just work. Using what little reserves of initiative I have left, I divert my gaze from the Arrivals screen and turn my neck slowly to the right, such that I am now looking at the Depatures screen. And there – as promised and on time – is my 9.40pm flight to London Gatwick, departing from gate 23.

They do say travelling alone can be a dangerous business. Especially when you're travelling with me.