The sun is up and Burke and I head out to the park near our house. Maisy is in fine fettle, running and stopping short. She stops to smell urine wherever we go. I’d like to talk to her about this, but she ignores me. We cross the road to the other side of the tracks. The part of our neighborhood that we wouldn’t let the dog go smell pee on her own. The rundown shacks and the boarded-up shops.
We tried to go to a pub there once and were greeted with the same welcoming attitude as Clint Eastwood does in ever Western he’s ever been in. Hands went to holsters. Bartenders gasped. But today we walk past those dim locales, for we are on a pilgrimage. The goal: 2006.
If you are Czech or have been around el Praha for a couple of decades, then you have probably noticed that beer has risen about 125%. Oh, there are some things which have made life easier. Peanut butter is everywhere. Pizza is edible. They deliver food now, even though you can tell it kills them to make things more accessible and convenient.
But with great convenience and change comes gentrification and culture-killing uniformity. You can’t swing a dead cat around without hitting a sushi hut or a Vietnamese place where one can not only get Pho, but have your pronunciation of said meal denigrated outside the place by a white guy wearing a skull cap in August. Yes. Civilization.
Oddly enough, it’s become harder to find decent Czech food. For 500 Koruna you can get a ‘rustic’ sandwich, which consists of two slices of dry toast bread and a piece of ham in between them. But svickova, gulas, not as easy as it once was. Along with this minor frustration is the price of beer. When I arrived here in 2004, a pint of beer was about 25 Koruna. This is a dash over a dollar. There were people who moved here for that simple mathematical fact. One of those people might have lived in my old flat and then my more recent flat. Nowadays, you can’t get a beer for under about 45 Koruna and they are usually around or over 50 Koruna. A Pilsner is in the mid-60s. Now to you Americans who have the internet, you’ll soon scoff us for complaining about beer that is a drop over two dollars. But that’s a big jump.
But today we are hiking to the Cheap Place. I can’t remember its name (wouldn’t tell you it anyway, go find your own Cheap Place, you bastards). It’s near the house, but it just so happens that about six pubs exist on the path from home to there and I – for reasons unbeknownst to me – seem to get sidetracked and then tired and then I’m at home eating frozen pizza still in the box. But not today. When we arrive, the place is quiet. A few people at tables outside. A waitress who rolls her eyes at our arrival.
Yes! This is exactly what I was hoping. Had she greeted us warmly, I would have cried and drank. But in this case I smiled, grabbed a coaster and a cushion from the box (to protect our aptly-protected buns from the wooden slats of the bench). Also, this signified that I planned to be there for a while. She came over and asked what we wanted. She winced at my Czech. Not easily swayed – another good sign. We are drinking Radegast today, a tasty bitter beer – which I love. I don’t want my beer to be any happier than I am, so the bitterer the better.
The locals ignore us. We order a klobasa and pickled Hermelin. All is well. A few shots of Becherovka are up the pike.
I don’t just want cheap beer. I want nostalgia for the Czech Republic I came to. I love my adopted country, but there’s no doubt that it was a harder place to live in as a foreigner than it is now. Most people speak some English, the stores, malls, restaurants all still have that intangible “Czech” quality, but it lacks what it had before. In the early-mid-2000s, the waitresses were angrier, the places grittier, the locals unimpressed with our presence. I came for that. Or maybe I just wanted to pretend I was 34 again, which would also explain day drinking on a Sunday.
Properly tipsy, I call for the check, which is the cheapest one I’ve had in a decade. Could it get any better than this? I take out my card.
“Cash only” she tells me in Czech.
That’s it. I thank her and tear up as I walk off to find an ATM nearby, fully ensconced in a world of nostalgic scoldings. If it’s out of money (this being Sunday), I might have a full-on cry in public.
