U Fleků - Friday, 19. August, 1994
Friday, 19. August, 1994--
It's pátek (Friday) already. The weekend
is already here. Man, the time really flies, and I've been here only a week!
Today should be considered historic, for it begins the first of my numerous pub
crawls. This is, after all, a grand part of the culture, and one does not learn
the culture by sitting back and watching it pass by!
The adventure began at U Fleků. This is
an old, traditional pub dating back to the Middle Ages. It was just a year ago
that I began getting ideas about going to the Czech Republic, so how
appropriate that a year later I should find myself at the famed U Fleků.
Radka and I secured a table in the beer
garden and we began gulping down our 11º beer. (Czechs measure their
beers in degrees. A 10º beer is about 4% percent alcohol by volume,
12º is about 5%, so 11º would be about 4.5% alcohol by volume.) This
was a nice dark beer, brewed right on the premises. And there were plenty of
German tourists here. I think they come here to get cheaper (and dare I say
better!) beer than they'd find back in Germany. A group of five older
women--Czechs, most assuredly, sat in rumpled stockings at a table directly
behind us. Let me tell you, they were having the time of their lives! They all
must have been in their 80s, and all of them were already well-oiled, at least
they were by the time we received our first beers. The waves of hysterical
laughter that washed over the beer garden! In between the steady heaves and
sighs of the "oom-pah-oom-pah" of the tuba playing polka music, the
women's laughter rang as clear as a church bell on Sunday morning.
Before long, three Germans joined Radka
and me at the end of our ridiculously long table. These men were having just as
much fun as the 80-somethings were. The men's hysterics soon got Radka and me
laughing too, and it was because of one of the men's corny facial expressions.
He looked to be the eldest of the three and he was not particularly handsome.
He introduced himself to us as Garbage Face. Enough beer will do that to you. A
man dressed as Švejk was walking around the beer garden with a squeezebox. He
sported an old Austrian-style uniform, with baggy military trousers and a
frumpy grey cap. He strode past us, hugging and squeezing that dear old
accordion, and he gave us a hearty "Ahoj!" Another man with a
sousaphone wrapped around his body like a metallic boa constrictor about to
devour him was dressed in similar World War I garb, and it was like 1918 all
over again.
As the evening wore on, a few Czechs
(who seemed to be among those who had not fled the city to escape the throngs
of tourists) joined us as well. One of the men in this group had a round face,
bulging green eyes, and a bow-like mouth. He looked quintessentially Czech to
me, if you could call Dan Aykroyd and Steve Martin's "Two Wild and Crazy
Guys" skit quintessentially Czech. Nonetheless, for this man's charm, I
had a warm impression of him. He was articulate, too, and he later offered to
buy Radka and me a round of drinks. We offered him the shots of Schnapps our
waiter had brought us as a courtesy. The man with the buggy green eyes gulped
them down with a vengeance. When his own beer finally had arrived, he held it
aloft to propose a toast, then put it down on the beer mat as his eyes were
suddenly drawn to some imaginary speck on the wall. Suddenly he burst out
laughing. His antics were hilarious, and he made a funny face as he lit up a
cigarette. Finally, he went off into a long intellectual debate with his
comrades as Radka and I went about drinking our beers.
Now my attention was focused back on the
Germans. When at last it came time for them to settle their tab, they were in
shock by the amount--it was well over 2,000 Czech crowns! The youngest of the
three turned to us and said in crisp English, "I shan't be able to eat
after this." He took a piece of bread from the basket on the table,
wrapped it in a napkin, and slipped it inside his sport jacket. He proceeded to
rummage through each and every coat pocket and his wallet for every scrap of
spare change he could find. His buddies chipped in whatever they had, and when
all their money had been accounted for, the man licked the tab and slapped it
to his forehead. Everyone at the table burst out laughing, including Garbage
Face. The younger man then added, "Ja! And Garbage Face is his
nickname!"
After they paid the bill, the three
Germans needed to ease their pain a little, so they asked the waiter for a
final round of "medicine" (shots and a final round of beers for Radka
and me). At last, U Fleků closed for the night and they set us all out on the
street on our drunken keesters. We thanked Garbage Face and his colleagues for
their hospitality and watched them stagger off in the opposite direction. The
Czech man with the bulging green eyes and his party had already said their
goodbyes and had gone.