In other news, I have learned that Czech beer has some outstanding properties that trigger the endorphins in your brain to make you happy. I wonder if they ever thought about marketing it that way. Drink pivo! It's the key to happiness! It will make you feel and act like a teenager again, without the raging hormones! Bliss!
Despite the truth (beer here is just much stronger and much better tasting), having a beer was my savior this past weekend.
After a long night of 'I'm too sexy for my ____' (fill in the blank), Beastie Boys, Vanilla Ice, Madonna, and other quality 90s music, I had accumulated a pair of sore quads, four hours of sleep, and a pounding headache by Saturday morning at 9 a.m. At least someone was motivated. My roommate woke me with the sound of snapping fingers next to my face and Feist's 'The Limit to Your Love.' She knows I hate being woken up by ANYONE in ANY WAY but if you ARE going to wake me up then good loud-ish music is the best way. We made it to the bus station, past the money collecting man, and into some relatively cozy blue-orange-yellow patterned fabric seats. Off we were. And off to dream land I was.
I woke up to shaking and yelling. "JICIN!" I guess we were there. The lifeless tone and the empty roads around us gave it away.
This was supposedly 'bohemian paradise,' but all I could think about was how my eyelids wouldn't leave my cheeks and how badly I had to pee. I still can't really figure out why they make you pay to use the public bathrooms. It's not like they use it to pay for a cleaning lady, and it's not like they ever have soap or toilet paper for you to use, so I think it's just sitting there waiting for some bum to break the lock and take it all. I guess he could use it more than I could.According to a very small and disproportionate map, we were supposed to go West to get to the hiking trail. Someone had the brilliant idea that if you point one of the hands on your watch to the sun and one to something else you have a compass or something. So we started walking. And walking. And walking. And we found a bus stop! Supposedly there was a tourist bus that takes you to the top of the hill and then there's the trail, so we stopped and stared at the timetables for a long time. They mean absolutely nothing I swear. Luckily, some jolly men across the street were yelling in our direction. They were working on some holes in the pavement and one spoke Russian so we could actually understand each other and they drew us a map that looked just like this:
Sweet, I know. What was sweeter was their uninhibited smiles and their desperate attempts to help some foreigners who they had never even seen before and would never see again. No one in New York would do that. And then I saw the Gambrinus empties on the edge of the driveway. Pivo!On one of the tours I went on they told us about how they didn't have clean water in Prague for such a long time, like longer than other countries, so they only drank beer and wine until they introduced the water pump. Beer soup for breakfast. Mmmm. Everyone had a buzz all the time! Everyone was happy!
It was five kilometers, fresh plums, apples, and pears off the trees, and some sandstone rock formations that made me realize it was going to get dark at some point. I also assumed someone with a chicken and a cheese grater would be coming after us any minute for eating their week's salary from the trees. Maybe people don't realize this, but I have about 38 different fears, one of them being walking in a forest in the dark and getting raped/eaten by ogres. So I realized that at this point it was too late to make it back before the sun went down, considering the time it took us to get there, so I made a decision for the group: pitstop.
I never ate so much meat. Or so many different types of meat. And by that I mean that since I have been in Prague I have taken up eating sausage because I actually want to be fat, and I have no idea what kind of meats they put into the huge hot dog/kielbasa I had just ordered OR what they put in the ketchup and mustard to make it taste soooo gooooood. I also don't know whose idea it was to take a square slab of cheese and deep fry it to make gooey salty crunchy deliciousness. Maybe the reason everything was so orgasmic was that I had basically chugged a Staropramen because I was so damn thirsty from all the 'hiking.' I see what they mean about not drinking water. Why spend $1.50 for a .2 liter bottle of water when you can spend $1 on a .5 liter of beer? Talk about opportunity cost...
As I said before, but didn't say to my hiking buddies, the reason I wanted to make the pitstop was to get beer. I needed it for two reasons: A. I wanted to be tipsy so I wouldn't be scared of getting raped on our trek home in the dark, and B. it was getting really cold as the sun was setting so I needed the warm tinglies I always get as soon as alcohol hits my tongue. The worst part, and possibly the only negative side effect to drinking pivo, is it makes you pee. And we all know about breaking the seal. Had I been with only my roommate this wouldn't have been an issue, but it was the boy in the group that made me feel extremely manly and embarrassed of my small bladder as I frolicked off for the second time to find a bush that would hide my white ass as I held all my stuff in the air and tried not to pee on my shoes.
I don't know if it was the asking for directions, eating the fruit off the trees from other people's yards, the kielbasa/fried cheese, or the potty stops that made us miss the last bus back to Prague. I was using my knowledge of the Secret and my long gone practice of Paganism to try to get a bus to appear in front of us as we sat on the benches shivering. Just as we had accepted the fact that there weren't going to be any more buses that night, fireworks began to boom and crash above us, creating spastic flashes of multicolored light as if to welcome us to an evening in Jicin. I huddled into my roommate's skin as the moon rose above us and realized the combination of pivo-induced events and the beauty of the bohemian paradise made it an unforgettable journey, even if we were forced to find shelter in a bowling alley hotel.
The adventurers looking to the top of the mountain... we had a long way to go...
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