Hradec Karlove in Review

Just popped in a couple overdue loads of laundry. Can’t wait to for them to be dry next Monday. Until then I’ll be wearing my Looney Tunes pullover, the same pair of jeans, no underwear, and for shiggles, crocs. Should be a good week.

The past week has been good as well. This weekend I made it to my very first mandatory CIEE excursion, which makes me 1 for 4 on mandatory CIEE excursions. Earlier in the week one of the CIEE officials had possibly jokingly hinted that I would be sent home if I missed this past weekend’s trip, which, even as a joke, was as good a threat as any, because there is NO WAY I’m trading gallivanting around Europe for sitting in my basement alternating between ESPN News and being called a failure by my parents. So I made it on-time, the thrill of which was easily most exciting thing that happened to me all weekend.

Our destination was a city named Hradec Karlove, which is about 2 hours southeast of Prague. The theme of the trip was linked to a CIEE class named “Art and Architecture,” which I am definitely not enrolled in. I don’t get art, and I appreciate architecture to the extent that it keeps me out of the cold. Otherwise, not my bag of tea. But the economics overnight trip got cancelled for some reason, so I had free rein on my trip choice. And so did most of my dude-friends, so we all chose Hradec Karlove.

Poor choice. Mostly because I had people who do not speak very good English in my ear about art and architecture the entire time, but I made sure to locate a few more things to complain about. First and absolutely foremost, our “dinner” on Friday night.

After an exhilarating day of castle or villa or whatever touring, we arrived at our hotel in Hradec Karlove and got introduced to our “buddies,” who were all medical students at the nearby university and who were supposed to take us out to dinner (CIEE gave each person 250kc to cover dinner). It makes sense now that medical students didn’t have a good grasp on the preferred social or culinary establishments in their area, and instead decided to take us to a musky, dirty, awful Czech version of Medieval Times. Like all historical-period-themed restaurants, this place was cool for about 7 minutes (except Johnny Rocket’s, which is and always will be cool). And then my eyes adjusted to the light and I noticed that the ceilings were 6 feet high and the white stucco was dark brown in most places.

And on top of all that, they didn’t serve beer. They served grog. I don’t think I even need to say it, but grog sucks. There’s a reason it was phased out in the 12^th century, and that reason is it tastes like honey-flavored Twisted Tea that someone left out in the sun all afternoon. And on top of the grog, our medieval waitress got my order wrong, so instead of meatloaf (I love meatloaf) and sauerkraut, I was served sautéed chicken strips over a bed of creamed spinach. Fuck creamed spinach. I would have rather purchased a canister of cheese whizz and took the rest of the 250kc to the roulette table. The only upside to not being served what I ordered was that I didn’t have to hold in sauerkraut farts for the rest of the night.

So after we got the figgity fuck out of that abomination of a restaurant, I went back to the hotel for a 30 minute sit, and then we took it upon ourselves (i.e. left our medieval Czech buddies behind) to explore the town.

Our first stop was a sports bar that at first I thought was a really nice bonfire because of all the cigarette smoke in the air. But it didn’t take my lungs long to get accustomed and let the secondhand smoke knock a few years off the ol’ life. And then we all watched one of our friends, Joe, have a nice hour-long run on the automated roulette table (first time I’ve seen an automated roulette table. Pretty fucking cool. It was a good thing I forgot my debit card at home) only to lose to it all in the end. Weird, right?

Second stop was a random pub. We settled into a back room and polished off a number of beverages, during which a very exuberant, probably friendless, Czech guy sat at our table and talked about how he liked American football and how he’s a bouncer somewhere and an MMA fighter and Batman and lots of other things that I’m sure were not true. I wasn’t really listening to him because he kinda looked like Lurch from the Addam’s family. But then he offered to take us “to disco,” and we accepted his kind offer. This is where things got interesting.

Earlier in the day, when we arrived in Hradec Karlove, one of the CIEE teachers said that the city was recently named the best place to live in the Czech Republic. I didn’t quite get it then. It was a perfectly fine town, but nothing about it screamed move here. Well I soon found out the screaming was suppressed because all the women were indoors.

Lurch very eagerly walked us somewhere for about 10 minutes, and after we waited in line for another 10 minutes (at which point my expectations were very low because of the pigpen assembled outside), we were in. I’m not exaggerating when I say that all but maybe 10 women in this club were bona fide dime pieces. I was in shock. Excluding the very minimal presence of fat grenades or the odd gaggle of older women desperately trying to be young again, this club looked like what I think radical fundamentalist Muslims dream of for their afterlife.

And it’s kinda what I’ve started dreaming about for my afterlife too: beautiful Czech women, not completely outnumbered by Czech dudes, boogying to Swedish House Mafia and Ya No Speak Americano and some awesome Twist and Shout electro remix and just a general club-euphoria that even after an aggressive six weeks in Prague I had not encountered until last Friday. But there was one problem: they all wanted NOTHING to do with Americans. And I mean nothing. I made maybe 3 attempts to shimmy up to girls and each time I wound up dancing with my American friends who had been just as unsuccessful. At the time, I was focusing my frustration on the fact that not a single one of them spoke a single word of English, but I now realize that easily could have been a ploy to get all of us to stop dancing near them. Whether it was or it wasn’t, it worked. I left the club in a language-barrier-hussy about an hour after I entered.

Stop number four was a hole in the way place that made gyro-burritos. And they were fucking delicious. Easily the best late night meal I’ve had in Europe. I think it might have been the sauce, but it also could have been the electric shaver they were using to strip the “leg” of genetically modified “lamb.” I was so impressed by this shaver that I had to take a video.

Didn’t feel the urge to surreptitiously snap a few pics of the Czech smokeshow population, but I was sure to document a fast-food appliance I’d never seen before. That says more about me than I'd like to think.

Time to make some more Czech notecards.