Czech Mate
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Seven Wonders Of The WorldChapter 6: Czech Mate free porn video
I wound my way around Central Europe for the next four weeks. Hungary. Croatia. Slovenia. Austria. Slovakia. Little side trips into the country. Baroque concerts in palaces. Long hikes up mountains. Museums, museums, and more museums. Castles. Lots of pretty girls, but none that made me wonder about the world. Beer.
Two things happened as I made my way north. The prices went up. The beer got better. About the time I left Vienna, I’d almost quit drinking wine and was drinking beer every day. By the time I got to the Czech Republic, it wasn’t that unusual to have a beer with breakfast. Or for breakfast. A friend reminded me there was a difference. I saw lots of people standing at the coffee bars nursing a beer in the morning while I was ordering my first cup of coffee.
And that brought me to Brno. Guess how to pronounce that. I had to.
For some unknown reason, I’d had a lot of trouble finding an Rent-a-Bed room in the Czech Republic. I’d spot something that looked interesting and request it only to have the request expire unanswered in twenty-four hours. This happened four times before I finally came upon Anna’s apartment. I’d moved my search out from Prague to the surrounding cities. Even tried hotel rooms, but they were listing ‘nearby’ as being within fifty miles of the train station. Anna’s request also expired after twenty-four hours, but she responded the next day that she’d been out of town and had a room if I still needed one. I did and we agreed to meet at the apartment after she got off work at five-thirty. Having a place to stay and nothing else determined my next destination as Brno.
It’s only a three-hour train ride from Bratislava to Brno and border crossings were becoming much more casual. The conductor looked at my ticket and ignored my passport. I didn’t see a border patrol. After all, Slovakia and the Czech Republic had once had their borders forcibly eliminated and only got them back in the revolutions of ‘89-’91. That meant that I was in Brno by two in the afternoon. I spent a good hour getting Vodafone to make a tourist SIM work in my phone and in spite of all the fussing around, when I got into the street I discovered that I had no data access so my maps were worthless. Fortunately, I’d downloaded a Brno map to my tablet, so I could at least see the city, even if I didn’t have the advantage of pinpointing my location.
I’d changed $200 to Czech koruna at the train station and they gave me five 1,000-koruna notes. A koruna is equivalent to about four US cents. I thought it was strange that the Vodafone store couldn’t make change for me but they didn’t have a cash register and I figured it was just a shop that dealt in credit cards only. It happens.
I’d read about a place on TripAdvisor that was supposed to be the best coffee shop in Brno. It took a while of wandering around the rough streets with my pack, but I finally found the coffee shop on the street level of the Grand Hotel. On advice of the website I ordered one of their pastries and coffee. I was not disappointed in the least. I had a feeling I was really going to enjoy this little town—the second largest city in the Czech Republic.
I had a lot of time to kill, so I connected to WiFi at the coffee shop and caught up on email and Facebook. Eventually, I decided I needed to walk around a little more before I found my way to the apartment. My waitress was nothing short of cute with dirty blonde hair, blue eyes, and slightly crooked front teeth. She cheerfully brought me my bill when I asked for it.
For a long time while traveling in Asia and Central Europe, I thought it was something about me that kept waiters from bringing me my check at the end of a meal. I’d sit at a table for fifteen or twenty minutes waiting for the check. Finally, I’d wave at someone and ask to pay. It had taken me eight countries before I realized that rushing to the table with the check at the end of the meal was an American thing. Even in a busy restaurant, I was never rushed to pay and leave. After all, I might want another cup of coffee ... or a beer.
I handed the waitress a thousand-koruna note and she looked at me like she was going to cry. That was not a sight I wanted to see. She’d been friendly and chatty, asking where I was from and what brought me to Brno. “Do you have any coins?” she asked. I hadn’t even seen a Czech coin yet. She checked through her wallet, then went to the bar and the barista checked through his wallet. Then another waitress checked. Finally, my waitress came to the table and said, “We don’t have change for that.” Okay. I did some quick calculating and thought I had it right. My bill was 150 koruna or roughly six dollars. I was offering her the equivalent of a $40 bill. It was obvious that my waitress thought she was going to be stiffed for the bill.
“Do you take a credit card?” I asked.
“Yes!” she bobbed her head up and down enthusiastically. Well, the bank would still charge me a buck for the foreign currency exchange, but it was worth it just to see her smile again. I paid the check with a credit card and added fifteen koruna as a tip. Ten percent is pretty standard through most of Europe. I found that in some countries, if what you tender for a bill is deemed close, the waiters just don’t bother bringing you change.
Well, my waitress was very thankful that I’d consented to using a credit card and touched my arm and my hand frequently as she apologized for the inconvenience. She wasn’t the drop-dead gorgeous type of girl I’d seen through most of Romania, Hungary, and Croatia, but she was pleasant and friendly, and she asked me to please come back again. Well, just for the service, I would do so. Besides ... Did I mention she was cute? I made sure I affirmed my pleasure in her service and company by returning her touches on the arm and holding her hand in both of mine as I said goodbye to Karin. In many restaurants, the waitresses don’t wear nametags, but when they do, I call them by name.
I still had five 1000-koruna notes. And a warm hand.
A Long Time Ago: One with the UniverseThere used to be a bar in Uptown Minneapolis called William’s Pub. I saw it go through several name changes, but I’ve lost track and don’t know if the place is still there or not. When I was doing grad work, it wasn’t unusual for me to make William’s my go-to place when I wanted a little treat—like the best burger served in the Twin Cities.
During one of my frequent trial separations from Paula, I sat in the pub licking my fingers and nursing a beer. That’s when I met Robin. She didn’t hover around my table as a waitress, but she had the same habits as Karin when she was there. She would lightly lay a hand on my shoulder while we talked, or steady my hand as she refilled my water glass. She was sort of cute in a gawky kind of way. It was a bit like she had grown a nice body but didn’t know exactly how all the controls worked. Maybe the body had been possessed by an alien.
By the time I had malingered at the pub for a couple hours, we had chatted about everything from the weather to the spiritual journey described by Guru Garumnala or some such.
“I feel like I’ve known you a long time,” I laughed as I stood to leave. “Have we met before?”
“Maybe. Not on this plane.” We weren’t flying, so I assumed she meant a metaphysical plane of some sort.
“We should see if we have met somewhere else then,” I said. It was a joke. Sort of. Not like I wouldn’t want to meet her again, on this or any other plane. I wasn’t expecting her to pull her apron off.
“I’m off work now,” she said simply. She followed me out of the restaurant and we walked down by the lake.
‘The Lake’, in South Minneapolis-speak could mean Harriet, Calhoun, Isles, or Cedar. All were technically within walking distance, but our path led us around Lake of the Isles. Calhoun and Harriet are essentially round lakes. So is Cedar, but unlike the other downtown lakes, most of the land around Cedar Lake is privately owned. The little strip that isn’t functions as a late-night nude beach. Lake of the Isles wanders around with bays and inlets that make the path around much longer than Calhoun’s two miles. There are a lot of little concealed places where two people can sit and ‘talk.’
Robin and I found such a place and settled in facing each other, knee to knee. Some people would simply say she was an airhead. Having been raised around hippies, I chose to consider her a free spirit. Sounds much better, doesn’t it? She was among those who had adopted an aura of mystic contentment under the guidance of a guru instead of the influence of drugs.
“I mean, like wow, we’re all part of the same fabric that makes up all of time and space,” she said with wide-open eyes that would lead you to believe there was someone home inside. “Ravi—that’s Guru Garumnala, but he lets us call him Ravi—says that when we make love, there is no other person. Sex with another is the same as sex with yourself, so you don’t have to be concerned about what society says or about popular convention. It’s like masturbating. It doesn’t hurt anyone and it feels so good.”
I was pretty much speechless. The whole time she was telling me about Guru Garumnala’s pronouncements, she was unbuttoning her shirt and pushing her pants down around her ankles. When she started playing with herself, I decided to help remove the garments. I glanced around to see that we were, indeed, fairly concealed from the path and our area was reasonably free of goose poop. In the low light of a summer’s evening, I was pretty sure no one would notice our brilliant white bodies.
“You see,” Robin continued as she opened her pussy and played with her clit. “No one cares if you play with yourself. Go ahead and try it,” she suggested. She assisted me in removing my clothes. We sat on our shirts, but continued to face each other with our knees touching. I’d been watching an ethereal young woman playing with herself and even though I didn’t object to her pleasuring herself, I still responded to it. “You already got started. But now you can just stroke yourself and experience the pleasure.”
I’ve managed to get myself into some pretty weird situations, but when it comes to downright strange, I hold this encounter with Robin as the gold standard. I’d met my waitress about three hours before and now we were sitting out in a public park, naked, masturbating in front of each other. It was surreal.
“Since we are all one being, you could stroke yourself inside me and it would be just like masturbating, only it would feel better for both of us.” It would ... I could ... What???
Robin leaned forward and crawled up onto my lap. I didn’t resist as she lifted herself and sank onto my cock with a hot, wet, incredible pussy.
“Sex is the great equalizer. We are one with each other. We are one with the universe. Ravi says sex is the first step to enlightenment. I know that if I have sex enough, one day I’ll become enlightened like Guru Garumnala.”
Fortunately, she lost her train of thought, engine and all. When the drive toward orgasm overcame her, I sort of lost the caboose. Yeah. I could understand being one with the universe when I was coming inside Robin. There were certainly no other thoughts in my head.
Our relationship lasted almost two weeks and included becoming one with the universe daily. It ended when I declined to join Guru Garumnala’s ashram and make a donation to his ministry.
Back to BrnoBrno is not a big town. The old town is only about eight blocks square and was filled with a great deal of activity. Musicians were playing on the town square. On the market square, two blocks away, a huge group of international students, complete with a banner for their conference, posed in front of a statue that had one figure at the top wrapped in blue plastic. I didn’t understand exactly.
Eventually, I made it to Anna’s apartment and texted her that I was at the door downstairs. She met me in a couple of minutes and led me through the entry way to the stairs. Her apartment was on the fifth floor. There was an elevator to the fourth floor. Oh, and in case you aren’t familiar with the European way of numbering, the ground floor is zero. I later found that taking the stairs was 110 steps. This is how I worked off the beer.
Anna was delightful and the room was what I was learning to expect. It was under the eaves. Not as low as the Bohemian attic room, but still a sloping ceiling with a skylight and exposed wooden beams. Most importantly, the bed was comfortable. Anna led me on a tour of the flat and then sat down with maps and brochures to help me plan my visit. When I mentioned my love of coffee, she immediately circled three locations on the map and wrote out the names and addresses of her favorite coffee shops. Her boyfriend joined us and did the same thing for the best places to have a beer.
It was pretty obvious that I wasn’t going to get much in the way of wine while I was in the Czech Republic. I was told there were some good Moravian wines, but there was such a wide selection of great beers that I would just never get around to them. I was beginning to get hungry, so figured I’d head to the first place on the list before long. Then Anna hit me with the rules of the house.
“Most of our rules are pretty much what you expect. Be quiet at night. Clean up your own mess in the kitchen. Wipe down the tub after you shower. If you have a guest up to your room, remember that you are responsible for his or her behavior in the apartment. And if she stays overnight it’s fifteen euros.” I was nodding along with what she was saying. Then... Guest? Overnight? Was that common? There was another guy who was staying in the room next to mine. Anna and her boyfriend had a portion of the apartment sectioned off and it contained their living room and bedroom which they kept locked. The rest of the apartment was shared by the guests.
Beer in Moravia is an entire culture in itself. The first bar/restaurant I went to had seven taps and a chalkboard that said what beer was in each tap. Not that I could really read the chalkboard, or Czechboard as I started calling it. I just asked the waiter for a dark beer, which was a term he didn’t know. My German kicked in and I said “Dunkel.” He shook his head and said they didn’t have any this evening, but he had a lager I might like. Sure. Nothing against Pils, but I prefer the darker, heavier beers. I asked for a menu and he pointed to another board that had ‘chili’ and ‘schnitzel’ on it. I ordered the chili.
The beer was great. The chili was outstanding. What a surprise! Stefan, Anna’s boyfriend, had told me I’d like this place, but I’d kind of taken that as simply local pride. But this was really good. And conveniently located at the corner of Beethovenova and Dvorakova by the school of music. I was seated at a table that had three nice-looking young women at it, but we didn’t engage. I was too busy with the chili and the huge loaf of crusty bread that came with it. While I watched, one of the waitresses erased from the chalkboard the name of the beer I was drinking. She wrote up another undecipherable name and a guy crawled out from under the bar rolling a keg out the back door.
“We have a dunkel beer now,” my waiter said. “Would you like one?” I swallowed the remains of my lager and accepted the glass of nearly black, foamy liquid. I probably could have used a knife and fork and had the beer for dinner instead of the chili. It was so rich, I sat there sipping at it for nearly an hour. I was glad I assuaged my thirst with the lager. This was not the kind of beer you just downed and ordered another.
I discovered, occasionally chatting with the waiter and other patrons as they shifted around the tables, that it was quite common in Brno for the bars to order just one keg of several different beers and when that keg ran out, they shifted to a different kind of beer. What a difference between that and my first experience ordering beer when Treasure and I visited Germany. That was back in the days when the most important feature in any new town was the quality of the bed we jumped into.
A Long Time Ago: Drinking BeerI bought a Volvo for European delivery years ago. The price was so much lower than buying it for U.S. delivery that Treasure and I—that’s future ex-wife number three—could use frequent flyer miles to fly first class to Sweden, stay in hotels, drive around Europe for two weeks, ship the car back to the U.S. from Amsterdam, and still save money on the purchase price of the car. We were flush in high-tech jobs and, like most people our age, thought the money would never stop flowing. Don’t ask how I got from playwriting to high tech. That’s a different story. Nonetheless, the prices in Sweden floored us. Twelve dollars for a hamburger? Unbelievable. And everything everyone said sounded the same. “Flingen flangen flungen fleur.”
We took delivery and headed south. Getting off the ferry in Denmark was worse. Not only could we not understand the spoken language, there were so many extra marks and accents and slashes through the letters, we couldn’t make out any signs. We just kept driving.
And then we crossed into Germany, headed for Lübeck, and a miracle happened.
With my year of high school German and two years in college, I could read the road signs. It was like having been blind and being able to see. I drove straight to Lübeck and stopped at a petrol station to ask directions to our hotel—auf Deutsch. I got an answer in German and I understood. Immer gerada aus. Just keep going straight ahead. We got to the hotel, found a comfortable room waiting for us and immediately celebrated our arrival by getting naked and fucking like bunnies. We hadn’t been married all that long, you know. But we decided eventually that we were hungry so we dressed and went to a bierstube we had passed along the way. Of course, we ordered beers. And food. Limited menu. Wurtz and fries. My wife was a vegetarian. She ate the fries. But it was impossible to ruin our mood. We were in a country I’d never been in before and enjoying a beer, food, and each other. We were having such a good time that we decided to have another beer, so I flagged the waitress.
“Ein anderes bier, bitte,” I said in my best German. She scowled at me and then at my wife.
“Wir haben kein anderes bier.” Everyone around us was happily drinking beer and our waitress was telling us she didn’t have any more? I paid the tab and we left with the waitress scowling at us.
We were about a block away when I looked at my wife and the light came on in her eyes. We started laughing. German/English, English/German. I’d asked for another beer. Perfectly logical in English. But in German, ein anderes; or another, means a different one, not ‘one more.’ A bierstube is like a brew pub. They only had the beer they brewed and no others. Frau Doktor Meier, my German professor, would have been unhappy with the way I insulted the waitress.
Treasure and I went back to our room and fucked some more.
Back to BrnoI was thankful I carried a flashlight with me at night because I couldn’t find the light switch on the stairs when I got off the elevator for the last flight. I crashed quietly in my bed under the eaves.
The next day, I stumbled out to find the next coffee shop on Anna’s list only to find that few places open before noon. Believe it or not, though, there’s a Starbucks in the main square. I explored the market and then headed up the hill to the Spilberk Castle. The old castle had been converted to a prison in the mid-1700s and was legendary for the screams of tortured prisoners. It took nearly an hour to tour the walls of the castle and at the end I knew entirely too much about imprisonment and torture in the 1700s. The castle walls would hold upwards of 250 prisoners the way they stacked them in.
But the museums above in the castle proper were nothing short of spectacular. Room after room of artwork and breathtaking views of the city and countryside from the battlements. I even managed a bit of chlebová polévka (bread soup) in one of the cafés, with a welcome beer. Back down in the city I managed to find a quiet place to sit and write for a while, getting into my do-over story, Not This Time, with some new twists.
I grabbed a nap late in the afternoon, and about eight o’clock, headed out to Vycep Na Stojaka, a popular bar next to St. Jacob’s Church. The name of the bar translates to ‘the standing bar.’ By the time I got there on a Saturday night, it was clear to see why. There was a line in one door and people coming out the other with beer and some food. The choices were even more limited for food than at the previous night’s bar. I got a beer and French fries and was shuffled out the other door. There were no seats. There were half a dozen tall tables outside, but each of those had several people already standing around it. And in the little plaza, there were about two hundred more people—each happily sipping a beer.
There were a couple of other restaurants on the plaza and people could order food at them, but most people were content with their French fries and beer. They stood on the sidewalk, in the street, on the steps of the church. They sat on curbs and steps and leaned against lamp posts. Some musicians were set up on one side and were playing for tips. It was noisy, but because we were outside, it wasn’t all that bad. I was enjoying just being within the crowd and listening to the conversations, often in two or three different languages.
I cycled through the bar again and chose the second tap, which was really the only way I could differentiate what was being offered. I got an unfiltered wheat beer, which isn’t necessarily my favorite kind of beer, but it went down pretty smoothly. I was probably going to have to find a toilet pretty soon, but that could wait until I actually found a restaurant to eat at. I figured I should do that before ten.
A blonde bundle stumbled into me and yelled “Ne! No!” at a couple guys a few feet away. “Jdi pryč!” Apparently the guy was being a prick. She was pretty well blocked from further progress by the wall of the church where I was leaning and the lead guy got into her personal space, touching her arm and apparently trying to get her to go with him. She shook his arm off and gave him a push, repeating the words. He moved in again.
I stepped between them.
What a fucking, stupid thing to do!
“Hey! She said no!” I snapped at the guy. He answered in what I assumed was Czech. “I don’t care what language you speak. No means no.” I could feel the girl hanging onto my shirt behind and wondered if she was using this distraction to lift my wallet. I was not in a good situation. The guy in front of me was handsome, well-dressed, and young. With backup. I had at least twenty years and twenty pounds on him. Dressed in jeans and my one long-sleeved shirt with hiking shoes compared to his spit-shined loafers. In the very best of times, I’m not really the picture of the guy you want coming to your rescue.
A Long Time Ago: GroundingKnow who Robert Bly is? Minnesota poet, but also the founder of a men’s spiritual movement that typically involved a bunch of guys running around naked in the woods, drumming, and telling stories. He wrote a book titled Iron John: A Book About Men a few years ago. New Age shit. I’m just new age and pagan enough to have attended a men’s retreat with him once. Hell, I run around naked all the time. And it was great fun. Men together with no women, free to let go of old stereotypes and embrace the Iron John within us.
Robert told us a bunch of stories, recited poetry, and led us through exercises that were supposed to get us in touch with the man inside us who wasn’t ashamed of who he was. One of those exercises was, he said, based on Aikido. He said that one of the reasons that men reacted badly to spouses, bosses, and even police was because those people triggered the shame reflex in us and we didn’t know what to do with it. But by using the Aikido technique of grounding ourselves, we could flush the negative responses out of our body by letting them flow through us and into the ground.
Hey! I already told you this was a bunch of new age crap. But it promised to open up a path of discovery one way or the other, so we were paired up in the room and told that we were supposed to insult and shame each other. When we were insulted or shamed, we were to focus on having our feet firmly on the ground (like they’d be somewhere else) and let the shame and hurt flow out into the earth beneath us.
My friend Bill was my partner for the exercise. We knew each other pretty well as neighbors but it really wasn’t part of my nature to try to hurt people. I made some lame insult up about him giving the needle to more pets than he treated at his veterinary clinic. I knew better than that. There was really no one I knew who cared more about animals than he did. He kind of shook his head and laughed off the weak attempt at an insult.
“Is that the best you can do?” he said. “The only way you’ll ever have a creative bone in your body is if you get fucked by an artist.”
God damn that fucking son of a bitch! I’d written three books and volumes of poetry. I had a degree in playwriting. And awards. And he has the goddamn gall to challenge my creativity! I could feel my stomach tying itself into a knot. It had always been like this. Even my first ex-wife had poo-poohed my goal of getting a degree in playwriting and wanted me to continue in tech theater where I could possibly earn a living. I ended up divorcing that bitch, who couldn’t even go to sleep at night if she had to go to work in the morning. Neurotic, sniveling little bitch. She was just like my mother. Always putting me down.
I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked up into Robert Bly’s eyes.
“Let it go,” he said softly. “Let it flow out of your body, through your feet into the ground. The earth is thirsty for your pain. Let it have it.”
Fuck! Zero to sixty in five seconds flat. I’d gone from an insult a friend gave me in an exercise to resurrecting all the pain of my first marriage and right back to the shame my mother inflicted on me in less time than it took to accelerate away from a stop sign. I took a couple deep breaths and felt the anger and tension drain out of me. I guessed I still had some work to do on the shame issue.
“Whenever you feel that hurt—that tension in your stomach that you know will burn a hole through you—let it flow out of your body and into the ground,” Bly said as we wrapped up the exercise.
Back to BrnoI was pretty sure Bly was only referring to emotional pain and not the fist that was buried in my stomach.
I felt that hurt, that tension in my stomach that made me want to throw up. I let it flow out of my body.
And heaved.
I’d just drunk a liter of beer. Granted, a lot of it had already moved into my bladder, but there was enough still in my stomach to flush the remains of my lunch out of my mouth and all over the preppy’s white shirt, pressed khaki slacks, and high-gloss sneakers. He backed away from me with a look of disgust on his face, shaking his hands out and moving as far away as he could get as he pointed at me and jabbered away in Czech. There were tears in my eyes and I was only vaguely aware that the girl I’d so nobly saved was still there and had her arm wrapped around my waist to support me.
Then there were the cops and the pain in my stomach took a different tinge. Just what I needed. He started in Czech and I answered that I only spoke English.
“Papers,” he barked at me.
“Do you have your passport with you?” the girl whispered to me. I nodded and unzipped the secure pocket in my shirt to pull my documents out. After checking it quickly he handed it back and said something in Czech. The girl answered. The cop pointed at the vomit on the steps that everyone else had stepped well away from. My assailant was long gone. The girl answered again and the cop shook his head.
“Five hundred koruna,” he demanded. “Each.”
A shakedown. Damn! The only good thing was that five hundred koruna was only about twenty dollars. If it had been Hungary, I’d probably have been hit for a hundred. He called this a fine for soiling the church steps, but it was really a pay-off for letting him not take us to jail and call the embassy and all the other crap that comes with getting arrested in a foreign country. Friends in Thailand had been stopped on their scooter and shaken down for a thousand baht by the cops because they were driving without an international license—something that isn’t a requirement in Thailand, by the way. My host in Bulgaria had talked her way out of a shakedown when she’d driven with no lights on at night, but she’s insanely cute.
The blonde pushed my hand away from my wallet and pulled a thousand koruna note out of her purse to hand to the cop.
Jo
- 11.08.2021
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