All Hail The Mighty Goat!

Beer Guzzling With Bleating Goats at a Czech Village Brewery.

Each year in June, thousands descend upon the otherwise quiet village of Velke Popovice to drink beer with live goats. Den Kozla or Goat Day, or Day of the Goat (which sounds decidedly more wicked), is a yearly celebration at the Velkopopovicky Kozel Brewery. Most beer labels in Europe have a dead king or an overweight noble dandy on the label. In the U.S., all the beer containers are as boring and bland as the beer inside. But not my favorite Czech beer, no sir. It's got a goat. A big, hairy bastard with twisted horns holding a foaming beer glass.

Spinning for beer and fabulous goat swag

I don't have too many rules binding my life, but I have beer rules: 1) in Germany, drink beer with a monk on the label, 2) in Czech, drink beer with a big wicked goat on the label.

Maybe I love the Mighty Goat because he reminds me of a simpler time when my religious parents forbade me to listen to hard rock music, so naturally I went to the music store (when they had those) and stared at the heaviest metal albums I could find. And they all enticed me with their red and black covers blazing with pentagrams and goats. Apparently, the goat represents the devil.
Hell yeah!

Den Kozla: Ancient Pagan Ritual of Beer Swilling

What are they feeding those goats?

Normally the wife likes to drag my lazy ass out to the woods to climb giant, slippery rocks or to get attacked by ticks and mosquitoes. If I don't feel up to plummeting to my death or contracting lime disease, I am always free to suggest a cultural event worthy of a discriminating European. Like a gypsy stomp. That's about as discriminating as it gets here in Czechia. But I tend to avoid organized hate rituals like we have in the States (tiki torch Nazis ferfuckssakes), so we just have to conjure up some culture from dead composers and artists in dull mausoleums.

Until the dawning of the Day of The Goat. Then we pagans don black robes, gather in a field, tie up a goat, dance around the writhing, bleating beast, rip its heart out, and then summon hellfire. Or we drink heinous amounts of goaty beer and suck down more sausages than a train station hooker. One of those. Either way, the shadowy figure of Pan smiles on us.

Despite its sketchy image in dark music, the Den Kozla goat fest rages on every year, and I've now been to three out of 26 of them. They never cater to metal heads by making a goat shirt with a pentagram, nor do they play headbanger music. It would certainly draw a crowd, as evidenced by the metric fuckton of mullets in this country. They would still make buttloads of money on beer. But maybe having a bunch of hopped-up headbangers chasing the goats around with meat cleavers is a bit awkward. So Czech folk music will have to do. And it does.

Helter Skelter in a Summer Swelter

It was a blazing June day at the brewery and shade was scarce. As an industrial building complex made up of mostly brick buildings and cement roads, shady spots were at a premium. People were crowding into small swathes of shade cast on metal fences along sloping lawns. Since I left my stained, rain-soaked old straw hat on Palatine Hill in Rome last month, I would need new head gear, pronto. The alternative is a hat-less fat dude drinking beer for hours in the hot sun. What could go wrong?

The Kozel Times

I grabbed my Den Kozla straw hat for 99 crowns. I would not bake my noodle in the sun and suffer heat stroke after all. What a bargain. I bought a Den Kozla shirt as well, not because I worship the Mighty Goat, not because I revere goat beer as the nectar of the gods, but because they actually had a shirt in my wide-ass size. I usually ask for size WBJ (Wide Body Jetsetter) or TFA (Tall Fat American). I am usually disappointed. But not this year! I found the only 3XL t-shirt within 500 kilometers. Maybe some genius finally figured out that some of the types of dudes who inhale beer and sausages all day might be a bit on the big side. Or maybe they've always had fat bastardware in my size, but all the fat dudes show up at 8 AM to buy them all. Which reminds me of yet another beer rule: I never drink beer at 8 AM unless I happen to have stayed up all night long drinking beer til 8 AM.

Coke or goat dark, kid?

As the day sweltered on, the cold refreshing goat beer was all that stood between the crowd and dehydration. I was right at that moment of the magical balancing act between the dehydrating effects of sweating in the sun and the diuretic effects of alcohol. One would think that after 6 or 7 beers, one would need to go to the toilet. One would be wrong. My plan was to slowly replace the liquid in my sweat glands with golden goat beer. After hours of walking around in a foggy haze of heat and alcohol, I stumbled into a cold stream of water spewing forth from the side of a fire truck. Children were splashing and running through the water jets chasing rainbows in the mist. It was suddenly like Harlem in the 1960s. With much better beer.

Den Kozla: Refreshingly Hipster Free

Brother from another mother

Nowadays you can't swing a dead cat around for more than five minutes before it sticks in some hipster's greasy beard. The beardos tend to congregate and coagulate around street food stands, 'farmers' markets serving up nothing ever eaten by farmers, and any event promising overpriced craft beer. But the Mighty Goat is keepin' it real: only three kinds of beer are tapped at Den Kozla: goaty original, goatesque amber, and goatacious dark. Served cold and cheap. One of the best things about Goat Day is that each year they release a new goat beer which is only served at the GoatFest. Once it has been tapped, drunk, and pissed into the bushes, it will never be seen or heard from again. This year's Goat Special was called Mistrův ležák (master lager), a pleasing amber lager with a crisp start and a smooth, refreshing finish.

No kale or gluten free hipster hovno here; the food stands are 100% Czech: pots of goulash swinging on chains over fire, deep friers cranking out massive potato pancakes, and enough klobasa to choke a dozen donkeys. You will not find one single avocado smashed on toast.

OGG: old gangsta goat

But you will find plenty of live goats and costumed goat people at Den Kozla. You can also visit Olda the Goat, the official mascot of the Velkopopovicky Kozel Brewery. He stands behind a fence under a shade tree waiting for your selfies while munching grass. This year, Olda seemed much older. He had shed some of the wild, curly goat hair of his youth, his goaty goatee was looking a bit gray, and he didn't seem like he could hold a foaming beer stein like he used to. I feel ya, OG.

We middle-aged old goats gotta stick together. I 'kid' you not.

Libeň La Vida Loca!

Life in a Grungy Industrial Prague Suburb

The corridor from Prague Libeň through Prague Holešovice has a reputation as being an ugly, dodgy section of Prague best avoided (say 'Palmovka' to a local and watch their face twist). This is mainly due to the dearth of abandoned factories, plants, manufacturers, and other industrial-age relics left behind when Soviet communism died a vodka-soaked death in the Eastern Bloc. These areas are now mostly inhabited by the poor. You can still see the tall, round brick smokestacks left behind in empty dirt lots, like phallic totems of the mighty proletariat.

I moved to Praha-Libeň quite by accident. I've lived in many areas in Prague over the years, including Strašnice, Bubeneč, Smíchov, Žižkov, Nové Město, Zahradní Město, Stodůlky, Řepy, and Letňany. A lot of expats prefer to live in more central, popular areas like Staré Město (Old Town), Vinohrady, Malá Strana or Žižkov. I prefer not to give the landlord parasites most of my earnings, so I live slightly further afield.  It also means I can live in cheap neighborhoods completely devoid of pretentious expat douchebags, which is its own reward.

Libeň la Vida Loca: a Micro-brewery and a Mexican Food Store

Even though I tend to live in unpopular areas relegated to the poor, unwashed masses (like me), I have a truffle-pig snout when it comes to rooting out the good shit in every area I've lived.  I used to take trams and buses to poor, punk, working class Žižkov all the time just for a drink, but many of my favorite bars there shut down. After moving to Libeň, I was very surprised to learn that there are some decent digs for food and beer right in my own dreary working class suburb.

I never thought a taco-teased, burrito-bombed California dude like me would find a place for real Mexican products in Prague. Then I stumbled down a narrow passage one day after a fried cheese binge and found Mexicali Mercado. There I found:

- Restaurant quality tortilla chips.
- Real corn tortillas in several sizes, from enchilada to street taco.
- Refried black beans, chipotles in adobo sauce, enchilada sauce, and mucho, mucho mas.
- A fresh food kitchen in the back. Admittedly, I skip this as I prefer to make massive amounts of comida Mexicana en me casa. Plus they once put red cabbage on my taco. Fuj.

Sadly, that once-mas-fina Mexican joint has succumbed to all the usual greed, incompetence and rudeness famous in Prague. I watched many of my favorite products double in price overnight, got bitched at when I questioned the padded bill, and mucho attitudo in general.  Chingala! I guess I'll have get my vida loca elsewhere. Fortunately, the Albert store in the nearby Harfa mall stocks the same tortilla chips for only five crowns more, plus half-price jalapeños.

In my day, they called small, non-industrial breweries 'micro-breweries.'  Now the term seems to be 'craft beer breweries.'  The difference is simple: micro-breweries make their own beer in many varieties and serve it to discriminating beer consumers for reasonable prices.  Craft breweries make their own beer in many varieties and serve it to fucking hipsters for twice the price.  Yes, I can say that because I am a discriminating beer consumer.

I like to walk along the path by the creek from the park and approach Kolčavka Pivovar from the back. I'm sneaky like that, plus I love the sound of burbling creeks to whet my appetite for beer. Kolčavka brews dark beer, strong dark beer, light beer, strong light beer, IPA, summer ales, winter ales, Irish red ales, bitters, bittersweets, seasonal beer, super strong beer and a partridge in a pear tree.

Libeň: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

There are still signs of the usual poverty associated with cheaper and uglier areas.  I'm lucky enough to live on a nice street surrounded by older buildings with fancy facades that remind me a bit of the Old West towns in the States. Adjacent streets have ubytovny (boarding houses for imported Eastern European laborers), gypsy slums and service warehouses.

Once I took a long walk on a dodgy trail on a hill overlooking Libeň, prodded along by my wife, who is allegedly concerned with my health, yet likes to prod my ass up dodgy trails to slippery precipices at every opportunity. I was just looking down to my left to avoid sliding down the hill, when she said 'watch out for needles! Junkie camps ahead. Junkie camps? What ever happened to your garden variety homeless camps?  I paused mid stride to evaluate my chances of either trodding on an HIV needle or sliding down a hill onto cold steel train tracks below, and I looked up. The sun was just setting over Libeň. I could see the train tracks below, and old warehouses and buildings with plants growing through their roofs. I couldn't see our flat, but I could easily see the O2 Arena, where I once heard Ennio Morricone conduct an orchestra playing his greatest movie hits of all time.

Several other islands of goodness are scattered across the landscape. A Chinese joint on Sokolovská offers an all-you-can-eat lunch buffet (11 am – 3 pm) for 109 crowns. My favorite local Czech pub, Kovářská, has the best fried cheese in Libeň. This area also features a high concentration of Vietnamese grocers and discount food outlets (aka Food Crypts), if you're into that sort of thing.

Libeň and the Winter of My Content

Once I took a Sunday stroll for a Sunday smažák. Zero degrees celsius with cold winds nipping at my nose and Jack Frost chewing on my ass.  I like cold, but Jack needs a muzzle.

Visions of dark beer and fried cheese dancing in my head; no dark beer today.  I've always enjoyed a dark beer on a cold day ever since my London/Dublin daze.  In Czech, you have to get used to things running out at any given time.  Kolčavka always rotates the beer stock, and offering Summer Ale in December seems like a perfectly Czech thing to do. So I ordered an IPA. They were not out of fried cheese. Those lucky bastards got to live another day.

This Californian has seen many snowy winters in Europe, and I still thrill at the first snow. Leaving Kolčavka that night, the previous wind chill was replaced by the pin pricks of ice crystals in the face.  I grinned and let them melt on my teeth. There were a few days in the last weeks where it only threatened to snow; barely-visible flecks of white dancing on the wind but never sticking to the ground. That shit doesn't count.  This was a right proper snow with white powder on the ground and  black footprints breaking through to the pavement. Along my path home, winter boot heels left their mark with tiny dog paw prints alongside. I could see the history of the snow dog's walk, his tiny feet breaking stride with his master to leave the path and mark a bush, or to bolt 90 degrees opposite to greet an oncoming human.

I walked by my favorite creek-side path passing under the fractured columns of the broken bridge, its blackened surfaces standing in stark contrast to the tiny snowflakes and brownish-black evening sky. The creek burbled and sang along with the thumping boot tempo of my bustling feet.

The Euro Train Dining Car

Or How to Avoid the Huddled Unwashed Masses in Style

Photo via Flickr by EURIST e.V.

I am one of those traveling fools who wants to have his seat and sit in it too.  But this is not so easy on the Euro trains.  Oh no. You need to book well in advance to get a good deal, then you need to reserve your seat.  Then they will assign you the wrong seat on the wrong train in a missing row of seats in a wagon that doesn't exist.  After they charge you extra, of course. Through the arguments with train conductors, conflicts with fellow passengers, standing in lines for refunds for botched seat assignments, I've learned one important lesson: skip the seat reservation.  Roll the dice.  You may as well, you get roulette-table odds on your seat reservations anyway. Best case scenario: there are empty seats on the train for you, for free. Worst case scenario: you don't buy the seat reservation, all seats are taken, and you get to sit in the dining car and spend that 10 bux on booze.

Your Seat or Your Cajones

I've made the train journey between Prague and Berlin at least 40 or 50 times for work (I'm a photographer, lucky me!) and no trip is ever the same.  On one crowded train, I had plunked my ass down in one of those ubiquitous Euro train compartments with the bench seats facing each other.  I didn't have a reservation on this particular trip, mainly because I was still bitter about how my last seat reservation had left me wandering the corridors aimlessly.  An older Spanish couple sat across from me, and from the get-go they were waving the arms and rolling the tongues.  I love Mediterranean types.  I gathered from my shitty high school Spanish and their body English (heh), that they were not sure of their seats.  The woman pointed to their tickets and their seats, and I understood that she was concerned about the reserved status of these particular seats.  I only heard the word 'cajones' and I completely reconstructed their entire conversation from the bottom up, as it were.

Photo via Flickr by fireboat895

"Husband, we are not in the right seats!

"Que?"

"If someone comes with a reservation, they will force us to leave!"

"They don't have the CAJONES!"

Enter: tall blond German man with square jaw and beady blue eyes, accompanied by a buxom blonde with Heidi braids, showing the couple his ticket for those exact seats.

"Entschuldigan sie, bitte, das is mein platz."

"QUE? CAJONES?"

The Spanish couple left. No cajones were shown or compared, but if you have the winds of the Blitzkrieg and the Holocaust in your sails, this will suffice. So getten sie fick aus mein sitz, bitte.

Roll the Dice: Skip the Reservation

I used to buy the seat reservation.  But after receiving reservations for a wagon that didn't exist, a row of seats that didn't exist, and/or seats that crushed my knees into garbage cans, I gave up on the scam. It's even worse when there's an empty fucking train. All of your reservation money went straight down the train toilet boghole onto the tracks.

Don't buy the damn reservation.  Just take a chance. Between Prague and Berlin, it's 5 EUR per seat, per person, each direction.  For that price, I'd rather pour that money down my gullet by way of booze in the dining car. Avoid the huddled masses. Pass the rolling bistro on wheels pushed by a person waiting to be put out of their misery, step over the 600 metric fucktons of luggage and sprawling hippie backpackers, pass the toilets, and you will see the light: the dining car.  The most romantic part of the train.  They've got those little globe lights on the tables by the windows—even in broad daylight.

Big Sir's Tip o' the Morning

Czech Railways offers dining car happy hours with nice discounts on food and drink.  There's a long list of the hours and train numbers of each train offering the discount, but this is confusing as fuck.  Rule of thumb: if you are on the train and inside the Czech borders, you get a discount.  Once you leave Czechia, the prices double.  So if you are leaving Prague on a morning train, you'll have to start drinking early to save money.  Even if you don't need to save money, drink booze from morning til night anyway, in or out of the dining car. You're on a Euro train.  This is not only totally acceptable, it is mandatory.

Photo via Flickr by miroslav.volek

Tales From the Food Crypt

Wading Through Aisles of Expired Food in Prague

If you're just passing through Prague, you won't notice them. They're harmless looking grocery stores that you would easily pass in favor of supermarket chains like Albert, Tesco, Kaufland, or Lidl. You would be correct in your passing. But I'm here to tell you how the other half lives.

Welcome to the wonderful world of the levne potraviny, aka 'cheap groceries.' These places are just chock full of expired goods and bads from rich Western countries. And people shop there. And more of these stores open every year. People are too poor to care, so they shop, they buy, and they suck down more old sausages than a train station hooker.

Top 10 Least Successful Food Chains

I'll never forget one of Letterman's Top 10 Lists, which featured names of the least successful food chains. But I could only remember 'Food Crypt' and 'Risky's.' So I Googled the motherhumper:

Top 10 Least Popular Supermarket Chains - May 3, 1990

10. Pick 'n' Lick

9. Larva Town

8. Food Crypt

7. Risky's

6. Price Hiker

5. Rex Reed's Grocery Rodeo

4. The Expiration Date Grab Bag

3. I'm-Not-Wearing Pantry

2. Hitler's

1. Bag This!

Since Germany and Austria border Czechia, it's probably too soon to open a Hitler's. But The Expiration Date Grab Bag is open for business, and it's turning a brisk trade.

Prague Suburbs: Industrial Wastelands and Soviet Housing Blocks

It wasn't always this way. In Commie Times, Czechs huddled in their cozy concrete high rise flats with fizzling sparks of socialist joy warming their cold hearts. There were exactly two shops: the one where they bought all of the usual Czech sludge: goulash, dumplings and cabbage, and the one where they stood in line for hours to get oranges, bananas, or any other fruits from warm countries outside of the frozen Eastern Bloc.

I've lived in a few panelaky, or gray, Commie housing blocks. They crush the soul, truly they do. Now I live in an old 1900s, pre-Soviet building in an industrial suburb, as usual, not because I can't afford to live in the tourist-besieged Prague center, but because I like cheap rent. And quiet nights. I live in Praha-Liben, a downtrodden neighborhood that is slowly looking up. My Libenese neighbors are mostly poor working class folks living in a few old, crumbling buildings.

The sprawling O2 Arena and mall complex are at the end of our street, and in between us and mass consumerism are some newfangled apartments for a mish-mash of various nouveau-riche slobs from Slobovia, One street over, there's a few ubytovna buildings, or dorm housing for Ukie laborers. And there's your garden variety poor Czechs who pine away for the good old days of Communism in their absinthe dementia.

The Expiration Date Grab Bag

Czechia has long been a dumping ground for inferior goods from richer countries. What's worse, the exact same German brand of juice you buy in Germany for 1 EUR is 2 EUR here. And it's worse quality. And Czechs make half what the Germans make. But one thing is certain: they don't throw away their food here like in Western countries. They just drop the prices.

So we go to the Food Crypt or the Risky's. There are at least three in our neighborhood, which tells you all you need to know. I buy expired food and I'm not ashamed. It's radically reduced in price, and mostly familiar Western brands. So what if the box of Kellogg's Special K breakfast bars are a few months after the sell-by date? There are enough preservatives in those little chocolate bastards to embalm an elephant. And they cost a quarter per box, rather than 1 EUR. Now THAT's economy. I save money on both food and embalming.

Not all foods are expired. Some are past their 'best by' date, and some poor products are just victims of bad marketing or differences in consumer tastes. Central Europeans hate spicy things, so there is a dearth of spicy sauces, Cajun whatsits, South American marinades, and exotic BBQ sauces at discount prices. I buy them all. My wife thinks I'm mad. But no two BBQ sessions taste the same, I tell ya.

Shopping With Various Slobs From Slobovia

The Food Crypt is full of a fine cast of characters. We don't have Walmart. We have the Food Crypt. I can show up in my worst clothes, unwashed, hair sticking up, tartar sauce on the crotch of my trousers, and nobody bats an eye. The other day I entered the Crypt. A hunched homunculus with a walrus mustache, coke bottle glasses, greasy ball cap, and a fake gold chain crossed my path. He was wearing a faded t-shirt with English lettering (a perennial favorite here): Czech Made Man. It was almost like the cover of that Fat Boy Slim album. He and the usual assortment of gypsies, tramps and thieves were wandering the aisles. I don't know which of those categories I fall into, but I'm leaning toward the tramp.

Sucking Down More Klobasa Than a Train Station Hooker

I pick up a box of my favorite expired breakfast embalming bars, skip over the expired chips and dips, and head to the meat section. There is always a human clog in the meat section at all times. Not just because Czechs are big meat eaters (heh), but because there is an actual law the prevents the selling of expired meats in the EU. So there I head, looking for discount salamis thrown over from Germany. My favorite brand of smoked salami is Houdek, a Czech-sounding-yet-made-in-Germany brand. They're extra smokey and delicious. And the meat is of a higher quality than the usual tubes of lips and assholes you buy in Czechia.

Score! There, wedged in between the slab of greasy bacon and the hunk of unidentified meat! Houdek kabanos, with cheese! My favorite! Whoa, mama, I could hardly find these babies in Germany, they were so popular. There they were 2 EUR for a pack of two. Here they are only 75 cents per package. So I bought almost ALL OF THEM. Why not? They don't expire til the end of November, and I have a big freezer.

So I swaggered out of the Food Crypt with an armload of German salami and a 3-liter box of Italian wine. All for less than a tenner. I don't plan to live on this diet for too long. And if it keeps up, I probably won't. But I am a Wide Body Jetsetter living LARGE in Post-Communist Czechia. And a Czigga's gotta eat.

"Get Your Old School Cartoon Bombs Here!"

The Swine Club

A Blunt Instrument Best Used in Hand-to-Hand Combat

The first rule of The Swine Club is: you tell EVERYONE on the internet about The Swine Club. You just need to know the secret code: Pečene vepřove koleno (petch-eh-nee veh-przhovee koh-leh-no). This is Czech for 'roasted pork knee.' It is a massive chunk of swine flesh served on the bone, au naturel, on a board with a knife sticking out of it. Czechs don't merely cook their piggies. They get medieval on their knees.

Photo by Gabriela Sarževská

I've had several friends ask me for the code when they were about to visit Prague for the first time. It usually went something like this: 'Where can I get that piggy-thingamajig on a piece of wood?' To which I replied, 'Oh, you mean the large, greasy piece of roasted swine that you pick up by the bone and use to club uppity vegans into submission? That would be the koleno. And you are in luck, my carnivorous friend: you can get that almost EVERYWHERE in Prague (or at least everywhere vegans fear to tread).

You might be thinking, 'Why would I want that? I'm happy with fast food chains and safe food options.' I'll tell you why. Remember the Medieval World scene from The Cable Guy? Piles of meat on the plates, scraps and bones on the floor. And jousting. And a disenfranchised chick saying 'I'm your serving wench, Julie.' You know you'd pork that.

Der Schweinenhammer

Bohemian and Bavarian cuisine (if you can call a diet based largely on beer and pork 'cuisine.' It is also known as Muslimsbane) are similar. In Bavaria (Munich und freunds) they call my dear Pork Mallet Schweinshaxe, also badly translated as 'pork knuckle.' Who the fuck puts knuckles on pigs? Anywho, I prefer the more barbaric word der schweinenhammer, or pork hammer. Don't worry. You won't have to remember that one because it's not on the menu. I just made that shit up because it sounds cool. That's what we wordsmiths do. We hammer words until they squeal. Sometimes we kneecap the bitches, and occasionally, but only rarely, we get medieval on their asses.

But whether we call it koleno or haxe, they both have the same effect on you. After you eat it you will feel like you've been pounded in the stomach by the red hot hammer of a medieval blacksmith. This feeling is what your humble culinary servant WBJ calls The Hammer of the Gods. It hurts. It hurts so good.

Baskets of Bread and Other Useless Shit

The Pig Cudgel usually comes with mustard, sauerkraut, horseradish and a huge basket of bread. Don't fill up on the bread. Trust me (think: stomach hammer). This beast is 1 kilo of meat, fat, grease and bone. Use the bread sparingly, just to absorb the greasy blow of the swine club, use the mustard and horseradish as an antiseptic balm for the roast beast, and tip the server. He/she just might know the Heimlich maneuver.

You can find koleno in most tradtional Czech hospodas (pubs) or restaurace (guess). Make sure it's served on the board with the knife. You will feel like either a viking warrior or a klingon. Unless you're a vegan. Then you'll feel about as useless as an asshole on an elbow. Or a knee. Or a knuckle...

Smažený Sýr!

One Wide Man's Comfort Food

Fried Cheese. It's the stuff of life. Or at least the stuff of my life in the Czech Republic. Everyone needs to find their vice, their relief from the pain and suffering of being mortal. Some choose heroin, meth, crack, hoes, or heroin-addicted, methed-up crack hoes. I do not judge. For me, my vices are The Beer and The Sýr. I guess I would call fried cheese my comfort food. But that's not saying enough. It doesn't 'comfort' me in the way that macaroni and cheese comforts a white trash stoner. My smažený sýr (pronounced smazheny seer) experience is more like trying to stuff a slab of greasy cheese into a hollowed out knitting needle and jam that bitch into my tongue. I'm almost ready to seek help.

Tourists and travelers alike want to know what Real Czech Food is. Yeah, you can have gulash, but the Hungrarians already had that, and sure, you can score some chunks of roasted meat and sauerkraut, but the Germans probably invented that shit as well. If you want something so real, so tasty and so gawdamn decadent that Czechs themselves swear it's the FIRST thing they eat after returning from abroad—it's the fried cheese.

Photo by Gabriela Sarževská

'But we already have that,' a skeptical American friend said. 'Au contrare, mon frer,' I corrected, you have your mozzarella sticks. In Czechia, they take 2 fuckin' SLABS of cheese, batter the beJAYzus out of 'em, then chuck 'em in the deep fryer right next to your order of fries, then throw it all on a plate with tartar sauce. Occasionally there are small strips of sad sauerkraut or shredded parsley on the side as a garnish. You can safely ignore that shit and dive right on into your hunka hunka burnin' cheese.

Fried cheese is like sex: the worst fried cheese I have EVER had...wasn't bad. It was served in a train station, lukewarm, rigid, rushed and served with no enthusiasm by an old woman who clearly hated her job. And then there was the fried cheese...

The Smažený Sýr Zine

Back before weblogs became blogs, feckless writers who couldn't be published in magazines wrote zines. These poorly crafted tomes were oftentimes the alternative mini manifestos of whatever subcultures were popular before the iphones made zombies of our chilluns. I wrote one of those things, hand printed in pen and ink, to be released in Prague in the late 90s in the height of the (sticking fingers in air in ridiculous quote signs) Prague Literati (unfingerquote). There was just a metric fuckton of American wannabe writers (and Brits as well) living in Prague, sucking up the fried cheese, cheap beer and doe-eyed babes like a whale sucks brine through baleen.

My Smažený Sýr Zine was subtitled 'A Toxic By-product of the Prague Literati.' At the time, too many poetry readings were being given by thin, twitching vegans under the banner of Beefstew. When I first arrived in Prague in '97 with 400 bux in my pocket, I was also a misguided vegetarian. My last girlfriend in the States had warped my brain and stomach into a new diet without meat. Since then I have discovered that the vegetarian diet doesn't work for large men. All the tofu in the world won't fill the protein void. And kale? Gofuckyerself.

I chose cheese. It was in a restaurant near Karlovo namesti where my cheese cherry was first heated, stretched, and broken. The joint was full of smoke and beer and just the kind of apathy that made me comfortable in my own skin. I took the unintelligible Czech menu from the unintelligible Czech waiter and pointed to the plate of the man at the next table The man was cutting into a fried, breaded pillow of something which oozed onto a pile of french fries. 'Is that vegetarian?' I asked. 'It's cheese,' he replied. Then he brought me one.

And with that, Craig Robinson was in love.

I needed to tell the people. They needed to know my love. I wanted to start cults of fried cheeseheads which would put the Green Bay Packers fans to shame. And I wanted to smear the sýr all over the local newspapers and shout cheesy yelps of joy from the rooftops.

The Smažený Sýr Zine project withered in the udder. I had hand printed one—all 4 pages of it (double sided A4, folded in half) and all I needed was the money for a copy machine. I would print HUNDREDS of these cheesy little bastards, change the global diet, and jam my middle finger up the collective noses of all those wannabe 'Prague Writers.' Maybe the project died because a good friend of mine read it and called me a fucking idiot. Or maybe it died because the world wasn't ready to embrace a radical deep fried cheese diet, one which would throw the Earth off its axis from our sheer heavy human MASS. Or maybe I didn't have fifty bux to print the damn thing. You and I will never know. Oh, the bullet we dodged.

In the meantime, I attend cheese church religiously, looking for my sacred cow. Many times I have thought about writing reviews about where to get the best fried cheese in Prague, but the lack of culinary consistency in this country makes me think the cooks are on a rotating prison work furlough. You can get a perfect fried cheese in a pub one day, and the next—total fucking hockey puck. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason.

Cheese Spotting

As mentioned before, bad fried cheese and bad sex are still better than a sharp stick in the eye, so fried cheese reviews might seem pointless with such a non-gourmet food. But after a few thousand pounds of cheesy goodness washed down with cheap, delicious Czech beer, I can offer the following fried cheese guidelines with absolute authority.

1. The cheese must be at least 40% fat in order to melt well. Otherwise you are eating a rubber hockey puck. You can often get 3 or 4 diffferent types of fried cheese: the basic eidam, the snooty camembert, and the risky blue cheese. My staple is the eidam (eidamer in Deutsch).
   
   
2. The fries must be cut thick and fresh on the premises and fried to a golden perfection. Anything less is just frozen fast food fries. The better joints even let you choose the style of your fries: traditional, 'American' (wedges) or boiled potatoes. But don't order the latter unless you are a starving Russian author just released from prison.
   
   
3. The tartar sauce must come in a mini gravy boat with lots of little green herbal chunks. If they try to fob off a package of tartar sauce, you can feel free to deduct that shit from the tip. Cheap-ass-bitch tax, I call it.
   
   
   
4. If a menu has fried cheese and french fries on it, but doesn't include the tartar sauce in the price, keep walking. These cheap ass Czech fucks like to charge for condiments. Hell, they even charge 50 cents for each ketchup packet in McDonald's or any other American fast food joint. The nerve.
   
   
5. Hit the lunch menus between 11am and 2pm. It's a few bucks cheaper. Some of the more enlightened restaurants extend those golden, cheesy hours to 3 or 4pm, knowing that some of us don't get up at 5am, work in factories, and eat lunch at 11am.
   
   
6. After all I've said, you still might be tempted to get one of the meat dishes from the lunch menu. Don't do it, I'm telling you. Unless you like eating three tiny, outdated, discount market chunks of stringy, fatty, grisly, dried out meat served in a sea of universal brown sauce and a metric fuckton of dried out dumpling paperweights. Trust me, life is too short for that shit.

The blogger is chock full of fried cheese as he posts this. But he still needs to ask you:

Where did you have your best fried cheese in Prague? 
Where can I find that tasty shit?

Photo by Gabriela Sarževská

Amsterdam: Not Just Hookers and Weed

(But It's a Solid 70%)

I've read that in Amsterdam you get your fries from a vending machine, your weed from baristas and your hookers from window displays. As a serial expat, lifelong traveler and a Wide Body Jetsetter, naturally I was intrigued and titilated. I fucking LOVE fries, and I really wondered how a mere machine could possibly pull off that particular culinary coup without spraying hot oil on hapless customers or shooting mayo goo on their shoes.

As my flight started descending out of the clouds into the Netherlands, I could tell from my view out of the thick plastic window that the reason for the name of the country was clear: this spongy bog was clearly the nether regions of Europe, the waterlogged goop where Vikings feared to tread. From above it reminded me of a soggy green sponge. It also reminded me not to do dishes at 5am before an early morning flight. It was seriously fucking with my metaphor.

An airport is certainly not the best place to get first impressions of any culture. But Amsterdam tries so damn hard to be weird, so it is worthy of mention. After what seemed like an hour walking through the airport in the direction of the baggage hall (well, I stood on those floor escalators like a blob, so that might have skewed my sense of time), it became clear that the Dutchies were all completely high. At all times. At least the architects and designers are. Bizarre mutated pumpkins and squashes with hideous faces loomed out at me from metallic walls and giant, mushy-looking alien blobs were bent over backwards, leering at passersby. Just when I thought one of these alien critters was a cushy leather couch beckoning my butt, I had to slam on the knee brakes to keep from plopping down on solid metal painted and distressed to look like leather. No sooner had I got back into the cadence of the airport march than I saw a large alien hand grabbing an actual rental car. I'll wager that small Euro-cars are in huge intergallactic demand. That or the entire advertising department of Hertz is completely stoned.

A visit to the Amsterdam airport restrooms is also a unique cultural experience. Upon entry to one of the busy relief stations (WC, toiletten, the bog), a large Eastern European woman with a mop stood there staring at me. Ten years in Prague had prepared me for the experience of seeing female restroom cleaners at inappropriate times (like busily mopping behind a row of urinating men). This particular character is usually a female senior citizen, lovingly referred to by the Czechs as hajzlbaba (crapper granny). So to be greeted by a middle aged woman with a mop wasn't much of a surprise. But I wondered what kind of service was being offered when she threw open a stall door and beckoned me to enter with the sweep of her strong arm. Fortunately, the stall could barely fit my luggage and my wide body, so I didn't have to worry that she might saunter on in after me and offer me the XXL Red Light Menu.

After only 30 minutes in the Amsterdam airport, I was already giddy and paranoid. Maybe I will be skipping the weed.

--

19:00, Amsterdam Schipol Airport (5 days later, high as I write this):

I'm just coming down from the weed. 24 hours ago I went to my first and only Amsterdam Coffee* Shop. I told the chilled out skater dude behind the counter that I was temporarily returning to the rastafarian recreational regime after 20 years, and that I was a bit of a weed wimp.

"No problemo, Dudo Grande (no, he didn't speak Spanish)," he reassured me and asked me exactly what kind of depth, breadth and height of a high I wanted.

Photo by Gabriela Sarževská

"Glad you asked, mini dude. Y'see, it's like this: give me the mildest form of weed you've got. I'm a lightweight (ironically enough) and I have a flight to catch. I don't wanna be found in an alley sitting on my luggage playing bass notes with my own drool strings or anything like that. If you've got a scale of fuckuppery on your weed menu, like Nirvana being the highest and Diggety Dank being the middle, I want the lowest lawn. Just yer garden variety White Boy Grass. Nothing to get me noticed as I plow my way through the chips, mayo, pizza and airport snacks."

"Well," he said, "we are actually known for our strong weed."

"Ok. I'LL DO IT."

Dude had only two pre-rolled joints and a metric fuckton of various strains of weed—that you have to roll yourself. So I opted for the weaker of the two pre-rolled spliffs. One joint of 'Yellow Lolipop For Beginners' or something like that and 24 hours later, and I'm back on the ground. There were miles walked, cyclists dodged, hookers gawped at, fries, pizza and burgers eaten, and long gaps of time stretching between them. If I had opted for the OTHER joint, the stronger of the two, I might have been fished out of a canal with a smile on my face. Trust your weed barista. He knows what you need.

--

A brief moment of clarity at midnight as I looked up from a spicy garlic sausage and gorgonzola pizza (my 2^nd in 24 hours) delivered to my botel: are they looking at me? Am I playing bass notes on cheese strings stretched from my bottom lip?" Aaawwww, the old familiar self-conscious feeling again. But no paranoia. So I resumed devouring the pizza with a face plant and serious snorfling sounds.

--

Something or things happened between landing and takeoff. I will try to reconstruct these experiences piecemeal from memory. Bear with me. My memory is like sieve at the best of times. Always has been, even before the decades of global pub crawling.

Ladies of the Evening (and Broad Daylight)

'Enough talk of you gorging on fries and pizza, you fat bastard. What about the hookers?!'

Glad you asked. Our first hotel was on the edge of the Red Light District, which was the inner circle, if you will, of a spider's web of canals which expands outward from the harbor to to the edge of the old town. If you'll turn to the imaginary Amsterdam history book in my head...

'Do we have to?'

Yes. The only thing I planned on this trip were the flights and the hotels. I didn't Google or Yelp a damn thing about The Dam, just like I used to do in the Daze Before The Internet. I like to just show up in a new country and dive in headfirst, experiencing and living and finding all the good stuff by sheer chance. I highly (snigger; I said highly) recommend that all of my readers do the same. Your trip will give you exactly what you need, not what previously-visiting strangers need.

Oh, the history. I'm guessing that this massive harbor leading to the North Sea trafficked just a buttload of sailors on shore leave. What do hard working sailors need? Vice, baby. Hookers, booze and weed. I don't think Amsterdam is any more liberal than any other Eurocity. When the foofy painters in poofy hats finished their run in the 1700s, the industrial age brought in the goods. On boats. None of these swarthy seadogs were buying paintings to take home. They wanted hookers, weed (or whatever drug was the predecessor to the Mary Jane), cheese and fried foods. And so that is what you get in Amsterdam to this day. I have never seen so many snackeries dealing in nothing but carbs, fat and oil in my entire life. It blows American mall food away. Deep fried sour balls? Check. Fries with dozens of dips? Check. 50 Shades of Waffle? Check. 50 kinds of cheese from the same cheese chain shops located every 200 meters? Check. The verdict: an entire city with weed munchies.

As in most Eurocities, the Euroweenies who inhabit them are in impossibly good shape for their diet. Germans live on bratwurst and beer and they are largely thin. Amsterdamers eat cheese, pizza, waffles and deep fried food (I could find no other foodstuffs in the week I was there) and mostly look like fashion models in hippie clothes. It's the goddam bikes. Both Berlin and Amsterdam are flat, marshy lands with no hills in town. This means that you don't have to be a Tour de France cycle nerd to navigate the city streets. Slide into 3^rd gear and dive headlong into traffic.

Oh yeah: the hookers. Get your map (electronic or print; they all have the Red Light district highlighted in red) and dive on in. My wife and I (yes, we both wanted to gawp at hookers in windows) strolled the boisterous streets over canal bridges and into the thick of the night. Coming in from the southwest side, we saw mostly large ladies of color in windows. Once we hit another side street, the flavor changed to ladies of the Asian persuasion, then on to Slav street. If there are dozens of strains of weed in Amsterdam, there must be hundreds of flavors of tail.

All of the hookers in The Dam mostly rent tiny cubicle cubbies with glass windows and white tiles from floor to ceiling inside where they wriggle like bait on a hook (hence the historical origin of the name 'hooker'). The wife commented that it all seemed so clinical and sanitary, like standing in a hospital shower stall. I guessed that all that sends out the right message: cleanliness and godliness and all that. But there was definitely a weird vibe beyond the obvious voyeuristic one. It's hard to look at something in a window display and not want to ask about the sales and discounts. Fortunately, we didn't have to. An Asian man walking in front of me suddenly succumbed to temptation and tapped on a window. The door swung open, the lady slapped a smile on her puss and leaned out. I heard the man say 'How much?' and watched the woman stick out her hand with five fingers, which could mean almost anything.

A) No way is a hooker 5 EUR.

B) No way is that hooker worth 500 EUR.

C) Talk to the hand. No fucky-sucky with Asians (racist whore!).

Maybe he only asked for directions. That would be worth five bucks.

Being Chased By Smarmy, Swarthy Pimps (In My Mind)

The sun must rise and the ladies of the evening must retire, the white tiles are hosed down and the morning shift checks in. Amsterdam must keep up with Vegas in the 24 hour party cycle. The only thing more ubiquitous than the rows of window women are the signs that scream NO PHOTOS! everywhere nearby. We were near the end of our trip, our last day in The Dam before the airport shuffle began the next day. I remember craving only one thing in this city of vice: having a beer while looking at a canal. Previously, it was 'munching fries while watching women writhing and wriggling in windows', but every seat was taken. So I resigned myself to the daytime tourist blob leaning against wrought iron railings overlooking party boats slithering by with old rich guys dressed as sailors hosting bored women with buckets of slowly warming champagne. It was good. It was perfect.

I had read that you don't want to be caught photographing the hookers in the windows. Smarmy, swarthy pimps will chase you. I must have subconsciously wanted this type of adventure, because I found myself innocently taking pics of canals and rows of bikes and people and coffee shops and and and...suddenly the row of houses I was photographing had windows with legs and stockings and cleanliness and godliness sticking out. At this point it is wise to mention that I had had another puff of coffee. I was getting paranoid. So I high(snigger)-tailed it out there just in case. My pimp fu is not very good after a puff or two.

Avenue Anarchy and Bicycle Road Warriors

Just as in Berlin, cyclists seem to have the right of way at all times. Only worse. They seem to have the Dam Right to shoot out in front of cars, pedestrians and other cyclists alike—with impunity. I asked one of my kindly drivers about it as he was driving down a one way street with an obstinate hippy obliviously biking on the left hand side of the road directly towards him, with only a hair's breadth between the cars, the bike, the canal and mayhem. "Yeah," he smiled, "They're not supposed to bike against traffic...but if a car hits them—it's always the car driver's fault."

Meh. I HATE one group having more rights than another. It's like Apartheid or senior citizens on Prague public transport. And the hits don't stop there. The swirling mass of cyclists in Amsterdam was larger than anywhere I have ever seen; Berliners are like babes on trikes compared to the Dammers. So as I strolled through the city center snapping photos, I was constantly under threat of grievous bodily harm as bikes flew by me in all directions at all times, narrowly missing my lens, nose and other protruding appendages with only a PING! Sound as they strafed me. It was total. Fucking. Anarchy. How is it possible that there not constant accidents? It reminded me of driving in Tijuana in a giant circle of dirt and mud with cars entering the high speed vehicular tilt-a-whirl at top speed randomly. There were no traffic lanes. And there were no accidents. It defies reason.

Maybe I'll have to rethink the whole anarchy thing as a viable human political system. When bikes and cars dive pell-mell-into-the-breach-balls-out, it somehow seems to work. Maybe humans only need to be left totally alone to succeed.

I just realized: I never did get fries from a vending machine. Oh, I saw them. I was just too high to operate coins at the time.

*Coffee is Dutch for WEED.

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