Entertainment à la Czechia
By Kamal
Sunavala
My Czech
friends tell me that a lot of what I see everywhere
in Praha shouldn't surprise me. After all it has come from
the West. I agree with that opinion most of the time as
I walk down Můstek with Marks and Sparks on my right and
Tesco to my far left. However I do protest against the
general assumption that everything in Prague has been imported
from the big bad West.
When I moved here in September 2002,
apart from worrying about the language barrier and wondering
whether the metro
speeds past Smíchovské nádraží, naturally the
other weighing concern was, will I find something to do
on Saturday nights?
If you're Czech you're going to look at me as if I were
crazy or sadly blind. I take my hat off now to the gazillion
pubs and bars that you have in your city. I haven't even
come close to sampling all the varieties of beers that
you proudly brew, the fame and glory of Czechia beer is
still something I marvel at, along with the gusto and the
ease with which you down it.
However, as the magic of beer wore
off, I began to search for more entertainment. Several
thousand
crowns poorer,
I began to look for the usual round of nightclubs and jazz
bars and 'expat' hangouts, pardon the term. Not only did
I find an abundance of these around Staroměstská and Václavské
náměstí, but what I found therein gave me the first ground
for my mild protestations.
Picture this. Demínka, a
well known club at I. P. Pavlova masquerading as a respectable
restaurant
by day and early
eve. I walk in with my anglický friends and we already
adore the sheer size of the dance floor as well as the
split level bars. A couple of Becherovkas later we are
pleasantly lulled into a bit of hip swaying to familiar
tunes from New York and London. Just as we are about to
break into an enthusiastic stomp over Nelly and his belly
button, we see two largish girls wearing very tiny clothes,
on the floor gyrating to an entirely different tune. Naturally,
you, my dear friends, Petr and Ondřej and Olda (I hope
you are reading this) assume that the enthusiastic performers
are from the 'liberal West' where this sort of thing happens
everywhere, all the time. Meanwhile Jana and Jana - for
those were their real names - proceed to reveal body parts
where no man could have possibly gone before but now he
sure as hell is attempting to. I have absolutely nothing
against lesbianism, infact I could make arguments for it
theoretically speaking. Needless to say, after that continuing
display, with apparent encouragement from the whooping
crowd we moved on.
We moved on to a darling little place called
Bugsy's which is 'very expat'. Here we discovered
that there were more
EU citizens huddled in groups than in the EU itself. The
atmosphere was wonderful and charged and so were we. Gin
and tonics (the Englishman's second favourite) were flowing
when suddenly a self introducing Brno boy named Mirek comes
right up to our table and asks my friend and me if we would
like to have sex with him because he finds certain upper
parts of our anatomies very attractive. Naturally he sweetens
his offer with two glasses of sekt. As hard pressed as
we were to refuse, sadly we had to because, well, English
girls don't sleep with boys they have just been introduced
to.
However, we winked over all this and persisted
in our search for good entertainment, thinking, ah, we're
young
and these things happen everywhere (although no other place
comes to mind) and off we plodded to Radost. Having sampled
their exquisite weekend brunch we were convinced we had
finally hit the right spot. Alas, it wasn't to be. There
was a full scale brawl going on there as someone's girlfriend's
brother had hit on the girlfriend's boyfriend's sister
in law who had freshly arrived from Olomouc and was not
well versed in the ways of nudity or drunken hazes and
the rest of the boys and girls decided to jump in because
it was more entertaining than the music being played by
the unconcerned DJ. Now I'm in for a good fight most of
the time but unfortunately I wasn't dressed for the occasion.
An amusing night, you might say. I won't
dispute it. Now if you could just explain to me the popular
opinion - all
this comes from the west - I should be very obliged. Take
your time, I'm not going anywhere.
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