Prague: The Real Budweiser

We catch a train.  One of the last ones out of Berlin to Prague that late afternoon.  Zach took off with Corinna and Dajana and Toni to Belgium for his last few days before flying back to Boulder.  The girls kiss us on each cheek, and we do the same, and hi-five "fare thee wells" to the Colorado Kid.  He leaves me with a book he's finished already, All the Sad Young Literary Men. What a champ, that guy.  But hey, we're going to the Czech Republic now, Eastern block almost, and sleeping off the festival for most of the ride.  Just one or two transfers, and we arrive at Prague Central a little after 1:00 in the morning and the place is empty and our footsteps bounce off the high ceiling as we shuffle down stairs and out the glass door entrance.  A guy's holding it open waiting for us to leave.  Outside it's Monday morning, and the city's dead.  No host.  "Well... we made it guys," and we all look at each other.  Max and Grant look spent.  I'm sure I do too.  Grant locates the nearest hostel on his phone, and we hump off with our packs into the late, late Czech night.  Of course, we get lost for about twenty minutes because all the roads are forking and splitting off this way and that.  When we finally find it, tucked away around the backside of some building on whatever street, I don't even care how much the bed costs, and I don't remember.  "Three beds, please," and we sign some shit and take our keys up to our room on the third floor with a fiending anticipation of this pack not being on my back and my head pillowed.  In the room, the motions seem mechanic.  Put pack in locker.  Walk down hall to brush teeth.  Come back, unwrap pillow and sheets.  Take off pants and lights out.  And as my ear's on the pillow, top bunk, eyes closed, I hear the Nation of Gandwana still thumping in my mind, and I drift off.

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Morning comes when we wake up, and there's some breakie supplies downstairs in the tiny lobby.  Wolf down the bread and cheese, and some milk and cereal with some Aussie girls, and then it's time to go romping.  Exploring in the most Tom Sawyer sense of the word, just walking towards the center with no map, towards the old shit.  I love it.  Prague castle looms on the hill in our minds (we've seen pictures, obviously), across the Vltava and Charles Bridge.  We'll get there, eventually.

Walking Prague is like walking back in time.  Half the city's older than our country, five times over, the buildings are so Gothic-old and wise.  The ones that you remember anyways, humming with that dull violin of history that still shrieks with spires and rusted-green and -grey bronze gargoygles abound to the blue skies of the day, perfectly-clouded fleets of lovely puffs that danced all at once into the slow west in rhythm.  Together now, past the Powder Tower all goth-ed out and reeking of age,and  across the old market square, by Tyn Cathedral towering over the thin facade of young building around it.  And the old man in bronze with his rop all green from time and white from birdie doo, birdie doo from a bygone time.  Around old Town Hall and the Astronomical clock and down some ancient cobblestone streets and ah, there she is.   Pausing for a moment on the far bank of the River Vltava, the castle catches a frame of itself between the shore tower and baroque statues.  It's one of the first buildings, definitely the most striking, to look physically daunting, like some fearsome fortress.   The hum of the crowds dim, just for a second, and try to imagine how it must've been, some wretched foot-messenger walking through the city with a message for the Emperor.  Across Charles Bridge, the castle's a straight shot up the hill, sitting on it's natural throne, towering over the land.  From the grand, old stone staircase wrapping up the hill, we can see all of old Prague, red-roofed with tiles, stretching out before us, The new city with it's blacks and grays, and it's skyscrapers lay off to the distant south down the Vltava.  It's a puff up the stairs.  Thank god we didn't have any weed with us, because doing it high would suck.  At the top we're greeted at the castle gates by two Gothic kings, I'm assuming, with a huge sack of hair on his balls beating the crap out of what looks like some helpless medieval peasant on one side, and on the other, stabbing another with his mighty sword of stone.  Very welcoming.  And the guards don't move from there little barber-shop-stripe painted guard-boxes, they don't move a muscle, and we walk through.  Walking out into the courtyard, the Cathedral kinda jumps up at you.

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It's this monstrous old hunk of twisted, intricate Renaissance-goth wonder.  Preserved in Prague's castle courtyard, some relic of the past, and the "oohs" and "aahs" sound off in my mind.  That beauty of old.  My feets are in that marching mood though and we're soon off, through the castle gardens, back down the hill on the back side, and across the Vltava.  It's beer time.  We've earned it with all this walking.  We pass the opera house and it's golden, angel chandeliers of old-timey street lanterns.  It's a quick pass, back through the centuries, back to the present, and we find a cafe with seating outside and plop down, and all order bottle of Budweiser.  Oh, no American Budweiser though.  This is some antique Czech recipe, and it's crisp, and it's flavorful.  As I sit there, the clouds shuttling over the single tree in the square and the high flat-buildings around us, I try to think of my last red-canned American Budweiser with an ankle on my knee, leaning hard in the metal chair.  From the retrospect, from the old Santa Cruz days, the memory sticks to the top of my mouth with a taste as if someone pissed in the Keystone.  I gotta wash it down with that old Czech original.  I love it here, thing's are just better over here, even without the amenity of knowing what's going to happen next.  It's so beautiful, and the age of it all is refreshing, cognizant the Redwood mountain air, and we start a-hankerin' for that good spliff high.