Getting My Jab

Spinning the Wheel of Vaccines in Prague

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Sorry I haven't written sooner. COVID didn't kill me, but all the lockdown restrictions surely beat the hell out of my joie de vivre. I've had a full-time writing gig for the past 2.5 years, so my blog posts have been few and far between.

It's like when I was a photographer and I never had time to take 'fun' photos in my spare time. Or no creativity left. It's like that with writing, too. Recently I've been moved to a new project at work which is much less writing and much more image-oriented work.

For the past year and a half, I've lived under the shadow of a pandemic reportedly so serious that Czechia was rated as a 'red state' in terms of emergency status. Not commie red or redneck red, nothing so sinister, mind you. But I couldn't travel. And for a Wide Body Jetsetter, that's almost as bad as taking away my beloved fried cheese.

The Wheel of Vaccines

There has been a shortage of vaccines in the Czech Republic as well. While the government 'leaders' (I use this term loosely; more like a gang of former commies caught with their hands in the cash register of Capitalism) hemmed and hawed about 'what to do' every other week, the rest of the world began inoculating their peeps.

But in a country with an unapologetic drunk for a president and a parliament full of smarmy used car salesmen for politicians, it's a wonder we got a vaccine in Czechia at all. But we finally did.

And then the vaccine ran out. So they had to order more from other countries. And in came the flood of unknown, never-before-heard-of vaccines that would put a Prague knockoff shoe salesmen to shame.

There was no Pfizer, so they had something called Moderna. Followed by Johnson & Johnson. Then Nano-Bio-Something. Then AstraZeneca. Then the Russians had to ooze out from beneath their radioactive tombs and dump something called Sputnik on us. Nyet, privyet.

The difference between the vaccines is probably like Coke & Pepsi. They each do the same thing: quench your thirst, rot your teeth, and make you morbidly obese after 40 years of drinking the stuff. Mind you, I am not morbidly obese due to Coke or Pepsi. Smažený sýr and pivo are solely responsible for my morbid obesity.

Each vaccine ostensibly protects you against COVID, but each one has its own unique side effects. How much of this is based on actual research and Facebook memes is uncertain. But you get the idea.

I've heard that Moderna might kill a small number of people. Or wait, was that BioNTech? I do have it on good authority that a woman who works with my wife heard about some women from another neighborhood who got red bumps all over their junkal regions after receiving the AstraZeneca jab.

Gimme the Pfizer

I did the usual amount of reading up on vaccines till my eyes glazed over and I needed a drink. Then I started listening to all the recommendations proffered by the hearsay of third-party old wives tales.

The Czech government said we don't get to choose our vaccine flavor, but I got the inside scoop on where they were serving up the cool vials full of Pfizer. And THAT was the place I registered.

As it happens, the Vinohrady hospital set up a special vaccination site not far from their main block of clinics, conveniently located near a massive cemetery. Nothing like walking a kilometer past a sprawling cemetery to get in the mood for your jabs. And if an American has a bad reaction from the jab, they can just chuck 'em over the cemetary fence for the krematorium proletariat to clean up.

I don't know why I favored the Pfizer. I just hadn't heard any stories of crotch rot or infections of the junkal regions associated with it.

Sputnik? Are the Russians serious with this thing or what? Sorry, I'm not injecting something called Sputnik into my bloodstream. Even if it's 50% vodka and gives out a killer buzz.

The last time I heard of Russian needles, millions of poor malchiks were slamming something called krokodil into their veins. It got them high, twitchy, nervous, and crazy, just like any other street drug. Except that this shit turns the victim's skin into something resembling crocodile skin. Hence the name of the drug.

Somewhere between the Soviet Sputnik spacecraft in the 60s, growing up in the Cold War 80s, to the Crocodile junkies littering the streets of Mother Russia, I lost the narrative.

First Jab

The vaccine is administered in two jabs one month apart. I'm not sure if this is due to lack of supply, safety, or what. So I got my confirmation, went to the site (they didn't even give me a street address. I had to Google that shit), and sat down waiting for my needle.

I finally did my registration, shuffled the medical info, and was sent to an vaccination box. The whole parking lot was filled with what looked like a dozen shipping containers retrofitted for medicinal purposes. It looked like the first scene of your basic zombie apocalypse movie right before the infected monkeys escape from their cages.

The staff members were nice, but one of the questions struck me as odd.

“What country are you from?” asked the nurse with the computer.

“America?” I replied. Suddenly I sounded like a fucking Millennial. You know, how every sentence ends with an uncertainty. 'Um, like, I'm in a hurry? Cuz I'm like, going to work now?'

Upon hearing me say 'America,' the needle nurse perked up and presented the needle. I rolled up my sleeve and she plunged the needle into my left upper arm. Then she cackled Death to Americans! and began stabbing me with the needle over and over and over and...

Sorry. I've been cooped up too long. And I was sitting in a parking lot full of shipping containers located near a cemetery for fuck's sake. That will get the old imagination churning.

After my injection, I sat with a few dozen others in a special waiting area. If you didn't keel over 15 minutes after your jab, you're good to go. Anyway, no serious side effects so far. The old sore arm routine, not much else. The crumpled sign on the injection box I entered said 'Pfizer' on it. Did that mean that we were getting the Pfizer vaccine, or that the parking lot was sponsored by the Pfizer company?

Well, I'll let you know if I develop any clusters of boils on my junkal region or if I suddenly sprout crocodile skin.

Don't Know What You've Got Til It's Gone:

Day 2 Without Running Water in the 21st Century.

I had just coughed, sneezed, hacked, hawked and spit my way through Day 5 of my Yearly Common Cold when the water went out in the building. I desperately wanted to wash every trace of rhinovirus from my fetid skin, so I turned on the shower. Drip, drip, fffsssssst. Nothing. Fuh. Kin. Ell. Suddenly the need to shower felt dire. My clammy skin started feeling itchier, and I imagined my rhinovirus reinvigorated and running rampant on my entire epidermis, teeming and multiplying and bashing into each other with tiny, infectious horns.

The wife had just called on her way home from work and she was hungry. I never know if she's going to come home hungry or grab something on the way home. Such is the mystery of my life. But I do know this: if She Who Must Be Obeyed gets hungry, She gets MEAN. So I managed to drizzle leftover water from the morning coffee pot into a cooking pot, add rice, and begin the boiling process. Fortunately I had some frozen, microwaveable Iceland Indian curries in the freezer, or I don't know what the fuck I would have done.

The Long Line For Water 

Nothing screams communism like a long line waiting for allotments of rare commodities. When a water pipe bursts somewhere down the road at 9 pm on a subzero night, the substance that covers two thirds of the Earth suddenly becomes as rare as a brain in a Republican White House. “Get some containers to fill with water! We're going out to get fresh drinking water!” She commanded. Apparently, She had done this before. We were not the only ones without water. The entire block was down at the end of the street gathered around a tanker truck with the words PITNÁ VODA (drinking water) painted on the side. We gathered a bunch of plastic containers and proceeded out into the cold, after a brief debate on whether or not the containers were clean. I saw drops of stagnant water on the bottom and squelched.

“I don't know...this doesn't look clean. Could be old bacteria,” squeaked my germ-addled brain.

“This ain't MEXICO! Let's go!” She prodded. No, I thought, it's Praha-Libeň, the rusty-dusty, moldy-oldy industrial suburb. What could be cleaner?

So we left. Halfway out the door she whirled around on me: “Go back and get a bucket!” She ordered. “Why?” I questioned, “Duh! Toilet!” She barked. Oh yeah. Even the toilets won't flush. How do people live like this? We dropped our plastic payload on the wet cobblestones and waited. There were people milling about the water tanker in desperate clusters. How can people in a European city run out of water in the 21st century? It was like we were suddenly thrust into an African village, with a UN aid truck dispensing water in the sub-Saharan desert. Only we were much colder. And much whiter. A woman in front of me fumbled with tiny glass jars until one of them hit the ground in an explosion of shards. She immediately started picking up the pieces of glass with her bare hands. I stifled the warning forming on my tongue. Maybe I wanted to see blood running on the cobblestones; the usual arcane thoughts crossing the mind of a bio-bag made up of flesh and 98% water.

My turn to fumble. There were two taps on the truck to serve about 20 or so people. The line was growing, but my turn came. I was trying to bend over and stand up the 5-liter plastic drinking water container while maneuvering the large black hose from the truck into position. I needed another hand. Suddenly the valve turned above me and the precious, life-giving, waste-removing water began to flow. All over my shoes and up my legs. I yelped and wrestled the hose into the container. I looked up and saw a grinning Czech man with his helpful hand on the water valve. The passive-aggressive fuck. Děkuji! I thanked him, pronouncing it more like dickweed. The wife asked the water truck driver about the situation and returned with the news: no water until the next morning. Maybe. He couldn't be sure. He was just the driver.

A Rude Awakening

8 am this morning, pounding and thumping on my ceiling. Great. Some more of that ubiquitous renovation that begins exactly at 8 am (7 am in East Berlin), continues for 30 minutes, then stops. I like to call it the Communist Rooster, the swaggering, proletarian cock which crows to announce the beginning of the dark new day, and the bane of my existence as a freelancer who craves sleep.

I threw the sheets off and splashed the drinking water from the 5-liter container into the coffee pot. The water was still off. After my coffee I ventured into the water closet to check on the toilet situation. The wife had already left to work before I woke up, and I wondered if she had any trouble hoisting that water bucket over the toilet to flush it in the morning. I opened the WC door. Mother of all creatures, great and small! It was like someone had slaughtered a water buffalo in there. Water all over the floor, pieces of TP everywhere, bucket half empty. I sympathize with you ladies. Y'all have to wrap your arms in TP every time y'all go to the loo. And hoisting a heavy bucket? Motherfuckit. I mopped up a bit and took my turn.

Libeň La Vida Loca

The drinking water should last for a few more hours, and the toilet bucket for one more flush. Before I went to bed, I managed to find a package of wet wipes in the bathroom, and that was my 'shower.' Since those little soapy baby wipes are about the size of a 20 dollar bill, and I am 6 foot five, 280 pounds, I had to use half the package just to clean my priority regions.

Day 2 of no running water, piles of dishes in the sink, wads of used baby wipes on the bathroom floor, mop, bucket, and a dead water buffalo in the WC. Yes, folks, we are indeed Libeň La Vida Loca over here. And paying cheaper rent always has its price. I just found out that the water won't be repaired until late in the afternoon. There's only one thing for me to do in these type of apocalyptic scenarios: go to the pub for pivo and smažený sýr.

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.

Smells Like Czech Spirit

There must be at least one metric fuckton of internet advice for cheap travel and how to do the whole Eurothang on a tight budget. They all talk about cheap hotels, cheap flights, etc. But then they neglect the obvious. What if you move to another country and stay there? What the hell do you do when you run out of money and get that nervous twitch that screams GIMME BOOZE?

I'm not an alcoholic, but I played one on TV. As your Wide Body Russian general, I command you to drink vodka if you happen to be stuck in Russia. You'll need it. That Putin is a scary fuck. Especially when he's shirtless on horseback. But if you happen to be stuck in Prague, as many of us are, take my advice: drink the local spirit. Find out what it is, drink it, live it and love it.

The Beer Spirit

But Big Sir, ain't beer the Czech local spirit? No. Beer is not a spirit, Junior, but it most definitely is the most popular beverage in Czechia, the one which earns them the dubious honor of being the country with the most per capita beer consumption in the world. Per capita is pig latin for dividing the total beer sales with the total population, every man, woman, child and baby, to get a number that sounds very impressive. It's lazy math. Most of the babies here don't drink beer, and if they do, they can't handle it at all. And nobody is willing to go door to door to survey the beer consumption of the common peeps.

Proof that per capita stats are bullshit: Germany held the title of being the biggest beer drinkers in the world for at least an eon. It's true. Some of them are HUGE. That's why they invented bucket pants. But the Artist Formerly Known As Czechoslovakia had a velvet divorce, the husband kept the beer, the Bohemia, and the tourism, and that poor bitch Slovakia kept their wine drinking and the velvet Elvis paintings. Now Bohemia was suddenly promoted to the King of Beer Drinking simply due to long division and lazy bullshit numbers.

One thing is true though. Czech beer drinking is legendary. They first started brewing beer in Bohemia in 993 at the Břevnov Monastery in Prague. You can still go there today and drink beer. Fuck yeah. Euro-monks started beer, perfected beer and made it holy. WBJ beer rules: if a bottle of beer has a monk or a goat on the label, I drink it in the name of the father, the son, and the holy goat. Beer brewing during medieval times was a healthy alternative to getting dysentery from drinking the Gothic water. That's when children started to drink beer proper. So maybe the whole per capita thing started then as well.

Drunk as a monk

Sage Advice From the Godfather of Expat Alcoholics

One year I decided to leave the brisk Prague winter for the warmer climes of Cyprus. It was easy math: I wasn't making any money over winter, I was spending all my time in the Tiki Taky bar pining for the sun while drowning my sorrows in sunny beach drinks. A friend lived in Cyprus at the time and invited me to drive around Cyprus in his caravan. I was immediately worried. The flights were cheap enough, and crashing on the floor of his van would cost me gas and beer. But Czech beer was about a buck. Everywhere else in the world it was 5 bucks.

“Wherever you go, learn to drink the local spirit,” said the drunken expat sage. I later discovered that in southern Cyprus, Zivania was the cheap local spirit of choice. Zivania is a cheap brandy distilled from grape skins or something like that. When faced with five dollar beers, my friend and I chose to spend that same five bux to buy a bottle of 'Nirvana' as we called it. On brief forays into North Cyprus, the Turkish Cypriots smiled and shared their raki with me.

The Prague Spirit: Gargle and Swallow

Of course they have local spirits in Czechia, and it is my duty as your attorney to inform you that they are all cheap and disgusting. But if you are faced with sudden twitches from debilitating alcoholism or the fear of gluten in the beer, you may need to suck it up, buttercup. After you choose to stay here and your travel money runs out, you are faced with some very harsh choices:

1. Teach English
2. Work in a call center
3. Pimp your juicy booty out to pay the rent
4. Learn to cut your booze budget

I've tried all the above except the sales of my juicy booty. I'm saving that for marriage. I've tried all of the local Czech spirits, for medicinal purposes y'understand. The most popular ones are (in no particular order) Becherovka, Fernet, Slivovice, and the Mother of All Hooch: Absinthe. While each spirit varies in its ability to gag you, tie you up and torture you til you vomit and/or shit your guts out, they're all cheap enough to fuck your ass up on a budget. The bad news: most of these spirits taste like either mouthwash or cough syrup. The good news: if you are the kind of ninja who has rifled through your medicine cabinet at home looking to get an after-hours fix from your Robitussin or Scope, you would be perfectly at home in Prague.

Becherovka

This is often described as either herbal, aperitif or digestif. That means they want to sell it to hippies who drink it both before and after each meal. It is made in Karlovy Vary, aka Karlsbad, home of a major film festival and a more major Russian mafia presence. It's the only town in the Czech Republic where I've seen more Russian newspapers than Czech ones. To prepare for the Becher experience, imagine throwing a shot of mouthwash at your throat. Gargle, rinse, repeat. If you are desperate, swallow that swill.

Aparently, Becher's got a bunch of herbs n shit, so it's supposed to be a healthier way to get you blotto. I once knew an American expat who was addicted to Becherovka. At the end he was seen curled up in a fetal position clutching an empty Becher bottle, gently rocking back and forth and staring at the bottle with red eyes. They had to ship him back Stateside in a basket, but his breath was minty fresh.

Fernet

Shoe polish?

The choice of the proletariat. It's normally about a buck a shot, compared to 3-to-5 bucks a shot for anything remotely drinkable. This shit is 40% alcohol and 100% cheap at a buck a shot. If you're in the average working class Czech pub (and you should be, what are you, a bistro bitch?) and you see a Czech man with a beer and a shot, chances are it's a Fernet. Unless it's his birthday. Then it might be a shot of Slivovice.

Slivovice

You'll find Slivovice (plum brandy) in two types: the respectable kind sold in normal Czech bars with pictures of plums on the label, and the homemade variety, offered willy-nilly at someone's birthday party. Domaci slivo is most likely made in the bathtub of an unemployed truck driver. Sure, the booze may kill all bacteria in the bathtub, but who wants to drink dodgy chunky style booze unless they are constipated and in dire need of a super colon blow cure? ExLax ain't got nothing on this shit.

Absinthe

Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder.

Absinthe is one of those rare liquors that get banned by the Powers That Be. Too many people were getting fucked up on a major hallucinogenic level and too many artists were getting inspiration. While this type of behavior flew in France for la bohème, the Prague commies forbade it in Bohemia. Maybe it was banned due to its association with wormwood, hallucinations and rebellion in general. I can't be certain, but maybe lighting a match under a spoonful of absinthe and a sugar cube was too much like a heroin ritual to be allowed to permeate the general masses with impunity.

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Gentle reader, I sure hope my medicinal advice finds you well. As your Wide Body Jet Setter, your Personal Jesus, and your attorney, I advise you to enjoy life with a pinch of salt, a shot of the local spirit and a liberal application of the liquor arts.

The Czech Beer Revolution

Did They Really Need One?

For the Czech Republic, beer is king. They are the number one beer drinkers per capita in the world. Per capita is a fancy-shmancy term where they take the amount of beer sold in a year and divide it by the entire population. It's easy math wherein even babies drink. Per capita is the only way to get a decent head count, because some countries are bigger than others, and because some people can drink 10 times more beer than a baby. So it goes. You probably thought Germany would be the largest beer consumers, what with the lederhosen and that Oktoberfest thing. Well, they were. But Oktoberfest is more than half foreigners, so that shit doesn't count. That and Czechoslovakia split in half and the Czechs dropped their wine-swilling Slovak cousins into the dust while listening to Bohemian Rhapsody. When a city map is redrawn into specific districts in order to favor one political party, this is called gerrymandering. With beer consumption and countries, it is called beerymandering.

Photo by Gabriela Sarževská

Back in The Day (the day I first arrived in Prague, a fine day in 1997 to be exact), every Czech pub was pretty much the same: smokey, wall-to-wall wood paneling, small tv high on a corner shelf, and full of young and old drinkers from opening to closing. There were slight variations of course. The most notable was the type of beer offered. You could walk down a single street in working-class, punk rock, gypsy Žižkov and see at least a dozen different beer signs from an equal number of Czech towns. They had 3 things in common:

1. they were all good
2. they were all cheap
3. one day a week topless bar babes served you the beer.

The reason the beer was (and still is) cheap is simple. Czechs would overturn the government if they levied a beer tax and/or raised the price of beer too much. So beer was classified as 'liquid bread' so as to be taxed as a basic foodstuff, a necessity, a staple, and a mainstay of Czech existence. Clever bastards. Topless beermaids.

DIVERSITY

So many beers back in The Day, so little sobriety. There were pubs every 50 feet and a different beer sign sticking out of each one. It was like staring down a row of colored squares on a life-sized Beer Monopoly board. There was Pilsener Place, Gambrinus Gardens, Kozel Avenue, Samson Street and Budwalk. I saw it as a challenge to try them all. At about a quarter per pint (back in The Day, nowadays about a buck fiddy), the only challenge was not to get too wasted before noon. I never used to be a daytime drinker before I lived in Prague. But you can't pay double for a soft drink. It's bad beer math. One thing hasn't changed: Czech beer is cheaper than water. And who the hell would pay 50 cents for a small glass of warm, flat Coke with no ice when you can get a tall, cold beer for a quarter? Only a MADMAN, I tell ya.

BEER WARS AND THE END OF CHOICE

Prague survived all the major world wars intact by just giving up and being annexed by whatever bastard sons of bitches were in power at the time. This saved all the old precious buildings and even more precious breweries from being leveled. But Czech beer was in true jeopardy when all of the breweries were being bought up by foreign beverage distributors. UK's Bass company held sway for awhile, then sold off the Czech breweries it had owned to the Japanese. ABMiller bought up many of the major Czech labels, and as is always the case with corporate conglomeration, something gets diluted in favor of profit. Globalization equals Bud/Coors/Miller. Anhauser-Busch, the purveyor of the worst and most popular bilge water beer known as Budweiser, takes the And How's Your Douche Prize for stupidest legal move. They tried to sue Czech Budvar, the original Budweiser (from České Budějovice, aka Budweis in German) for use of the name Bud. Oh yeah, that went over really well. Hey, Douchebags! Czechs invented Budweiser in 1785, a hundred fuckin' years before your piss even passed the first Bowery bum's bladder. All they managed to win in the suit was the right to keep American beer fucking close to water. Again. Budvar beer is renamed 'Czechvar' when imported to the States. Wouldn't want to confuse the rednecks with actual beer.

So just like in the Monopoly game, that previously-colorful Žižkov pub street became one massive Pilsener Place, with every sign becoming Pilsener Urquell and Gambrinus (owned and brewed by Pilsener). Every pub started serving the same beer. Even the topless beermaids started to look a little tired and droopy. Pubs started closing (or worse, being sold and turned into biddie bistros where squared headed, burgundy-haired, middle-aged women met over cheap wine and squealed about how they got the house and car in the divorce).

BEERENAISSANCE

I left the Czech Republic and lived in Berlin for 6 years. They have more breweries, and many of them are run by monks. Especially in Bavaria. Ohhhh, mighty monk beer.... A nice German guy told me the best (and probably only) German joke: 'How are sex in a canoe and American beer the same? Both are fucking close to water.' Damn right. So I dove into the monk beer and was baptized in the rheinheitsgebot (German beer purity law of 1516).

On several return visits to Prague for photo jobs, I started to notice a change. On one particular visit to my favorite pub district of Žižkov, there was a new phenomenon brewing: the Czech craft beer. One pub I stumbled into had not only the usual 3 Czech beers, but a whole line of 9 taps serving beers I had never even heard (or dreamed) of. There were even a few microbrewery mainstays like IPA, the once-staple strong ale of microbrewery fame. There were porters, stouts, ales, bitters and blondes, all foaming at the mouth and screaming for my attention. It was about. Fucking. Time. Apparently the peasants revolted. Didn't want the same 3 beers. Hated the corporate oligarchy. Missed the days of old.

Since that glorious day, I've seen a host of microbreweries, craft beer pubs and guest beer tap lists sprouting and hopping up around Prague—even in the outlying areas. My latest cheap-ass apartment in the run-down, industrial district of Praha-Libeň houses several such fine and dandy beer bases. You can sip a strong stout in the cellar bar Napalmĕ at Palmovka Metro (or sit ouside in sunny weather), or you can even go to the Kolčavka pub just up the road, where they are raking steaming malt and hops out of steel cauldrons right in front of you while you sip your ale. It's like a 3D film for the beer enthusiast. With smell-o-vision. Something fondles my nostalgia when I smell beer being brewed. It's like Mom's Malt-O-Meal or oatmeal on the stove mingled with the smell of burning coffee. If I were to ever get rich and famous and be in need of my own fragrance line, that would be it.

Today I went to the Pivovar Kolčavka brewpub up the road. As it was lunchtime and I have no compunction whatsoever about daytime drinking, I sampled 3 different beers. I also had fried smoked cheese to wash the beer down with. Cuz I am all about the smazhak. The first (and best) beer was the Summer Ale, 13 degree. Czech beers are sold by degree: 10 (most common), 11, 12 and... you get the pic. The degree is something about specific gravity or something hoppy or jumpy—I don't care about the geeky bits. I just drink the stuff. But the higher the degree, the stronger, which is all a beer mathematician needs to know. The 10 degree is about 4% alcohol, and it goes up about a point per degree. All of the beers I sampled had that fresh micro brew taste. I can't describe it without getting all nostalgic about Malt-O-Meal again, but that flavor is exactly the same in Sacramento or Praha-Libeň. Except Czech beer is 5x better. Add to that the various types of hops and malts offered in each type of beer and you get beer perfection. I also had something called Best Bitte, which I thought was German, but it was in fact a bitter beer. They also had a hořka, which is Czech for bitter. Then there was the IPA, famous for hoppy bitterness. Apparently you can't be bitter enough. There was also one called Mrtvy Kostelnik, translated something like 'dead friar.' It was the strongest beer on offer. As tempting as that was, I had to pass, as fried cheese, french fries and 3 strong ales is already enough to kill a bull moose.

I oozed home along a winding path by a creek and I stopped to listen to the water burbling off the stones. I thought about how a small country won against imperialist brewers and purveyors of cheap swill to the growing global economy. Half of the major Czech breweries and most of the minor ones are still owned by Czechs in spite of the best efforts of Big Beer. But in a country that has been brewing beer since about the year 800, that makes all the sense in the world.