Memoirs of a Pub Adventure
Based on a diary I started keeping in the Czech Republic in August 1994, I came up with Memoirs of a Pub Adventure. There's so much culture in the Czech Republic built around the pub. I'd read some of Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk--in fact, I was reading it when I arrived in Prague, and a lot of that story takes place in pubs. In fact, it's said Hašek wrote some (or most?) of the story in the pub! Beer is a part of Czech life, and I'm always up for a good glass of beer, so it's natural my adventures, too, would include beer and pubs.
Why the Czech Republic? This was a country I had no strong intention of visiting, much less working in. Rather, it came about as an alternative to the hassles of arranging a work permit in Italy, where I had really wanted to work. In 1994, the Czech Republic was a newly freed country and I wanted to give it a try. It was my first experience in a former communist country. And I loved it.
The original journal from 1994 still exists, but in a box in my mother's garage back in Oregon. I only wrote in it for the first month or so after my arrival, and not necessarily on a daily basis. Then in 2001, while living in Poland, I came back to visit the Czech Republic, and with my friend Tomáš, I started another journal of adventures in the pub, various pub crawls, even notes about the kinds of beer I sampled, and so on. This, along with the original 1994 diary, plus subsequent other travel notes from around the Czech Republic, got smooshed together into the volume Memoirs of a Pub Adventure, which will start my Eurotraveller adventure.