My train was supposed to get in at 4:30 AM, Tall Peter was already in Prague and had an Airbnb, he said that he would meet me at the train station. I told him he didn’t have to, 4:30 is a ridiculous time to be awake and meeting somebody. He said he didn’t mind, he had been going to bed around 5 AM anyway so it really wouldn’t have any affect on his schedule at all.

Well as per usual my train was late…I don’t get it, how long have they been doing this shit? Shouldn’t it be dialed in by now? Anyway my train was more than two hours late, putting me in at 6:35 AM…There was no wreck and no explanation for the delay we just showed up two hours behind schedule as if that was normal. Anyway most of the train ride I didn’t have service and Peter didn’t have an international phone, so there was no way of letting him know what the hell was going on, as if I knew anyway. Haha, I guess he waited until 6:30 and then walked back to the apartment. I messaged him at 6:45, he had just walked into the building and replied and sent me his location. I felt bad so bad hearing he had waited around the train station all morning, when he could have been at a perfectly decent bar all night and morning instead…So I took a cab to the pad and sure enough Tall Peter was standing out front with a smile on his face. That’s a good friend right there! Stayed up the entire night just so I’d have a place to crash at when I got there. Solid dude!!

He had spend roughly three weeks in Prague at the start of his trip, so he knew all the rad spots. We stayed in a neighborhood called Zizkov, it was sweet! There were two epic bars just up the street from our place. We went to them every night. One was called Malkovich, like the actor John Malkovich. It was super laid back, felt like you were having drinks in someone’s living room rather than a bar.

The other one was nicer and more high end, it was called Bukowski’s, after the American writer Charles Bukowski. They made really really great high end cocktails at low price, loved that bar.

I don’t usually drink beer because I am allergic to Wheat, Barley, and Oats…Which are essential ingredients in 99% of beers…But luckily for me my allergies aren’t death allergies, they just tear my stomach up causing mild to severe discomfort and make me feel very lethargic. Pilzen, a city in the Czech Republic, it is where the sweet, delicious, heavenly, golden nectar known as Pilsner beer was created. I knew that consuming this liquid joy would hurt my stomach, make me very sleepy, and substantially increase the probability of me randomly shitting myself at any point in time, absolutely destroying any clothing, furniture, and/or human relations at that precise moment, all things considered….

What can I say? I like to live dangerously hahaha it was worth all the pain and lethargy. I was back on the beer wagon and loving every drunken minute of it, emphasis on the drunken, as the mornings were filled damn near unbearable stomach pain. The only thing that kept me going was the very thing killing me in the first place…sweet delicious Czech Beer. It was a very vicious cycle to get into, but I was in the right city to do so.

Original Bud, don’t worry it wasn’t that shitty Anheiser Bush shit.

We took a historic walking tour of the city which included all you can drink beer, score! Met of bunch of cool people and I even got to tag a wall!

USB port faces, long before USB’s existed…This Architect was a forward thinker…Babies will be connected from birth was his message.

These very strange massive metal babies were created by an architect and designer. One day he had placed about 25 of these massive metal crawling babies all over the city, in parks, in the middle of roads, pedestrian walks wherever. Over the course of a few months the babies were moved around the city, most were getting closer the tallest building in the city, as if drawn in by its massively tall ugliness, eventually a few of the babies were found climbing up the tallest tower in the city. It was a communist building originally designed to jam all radio signals so that the communist party could control the information broadcasts across the city. Unfortunately for the communists, communism fell before they ever got to jam any signals, and unfortunately for the city of Prague the hideous, Ill-fitting eye sore was erected before the fall of communism. Fortunately for the city of Prague their government allowed for these random months of baby moment across the city as a massive practical joke In attempt to lighten up the contempt for the presence of such an ungainly communist structure to be visible on the Prague skyline. And fortunately for me this hideous tower once served as a guiding beacon home after a hell of a night, more on that later.

The walking tour ended up turning into a pub crawl afterwards. It was a solid night, but ended in a place where Peter and I were out of our elements, a massive EMD club, so we just went back to Bukowskis for a night cap.

I was over talking to one of the bar tenders from Malkovich’s when I hear Peter calling my name, I look across the bar and see Tall Peter sitting on a bar stool drinking a beer….shirtless…He was laughing and waving. I was pretty tanked due to the drunken walking tour and pub crawl, I had no idea what was going on or how long it had been going on before I noticed about 6 other people with their shirts off, Peter wasn’t the only one…I thought this was the high end bar??

I was confused but laughed and resumed my conversation with the bartender from Malkovich’s. The next time I glanced across the bar I thought I had to be so drunk that I was seeing things, which would have been a first, but, I swear I was seeing a full blown topless chick sitting at the bar…I must have stuttered or been visibly showing how utterly bewildered I was at this point, because the person I was talking to said “yes, that is a naked girl.” I don’t even think I asked, she could just read my astounded expression. We were in a normal bar, one of the more high end bars I’ve ever been in, what the hell was going on??

I think I mumbled a few sentences in bewilderment and then resumed the conversation turning my back to nudity, so that I could hold a decent conversation with this bartender…Out of nowhere a dude strolls past us with nothing other than shoes and socks on….Johnson proudly swaying about as he passed by…

The normality of our conversation stopped at this point…I said something like what the fuck is going on here?! Is the normal??Can people do this here? Are there any laws in this country? Am I seeing shit? The Johnson sighting was the final straw.

It was a packed bar, limited personal space, she wanted to leave and I was quick to join, on my way out I passed a few more people completely naked, head to toe, amongst other normally dresses bar goers. I remember one chick I passed by literally having nothing on at all, not even slippers or something, not a shred of clothing or dignity for that matter. I was mind blown. We got out of there grabbed some food and I walked the bartender home…I woke up to the dawning sun on a lawn chair on the sidewalk in a semi-commercial area of town…

Oh man, I thought, I better get home, thankfully I still had everything of value….The difficult part was navigating my way home, I had zero idea of where I was, I could just make see the massively hideous communist built radio control tower with babies crawling up it as a reference point off in the distance.

I made it home and slept for a few hours until Peter woke up. I asked him if it was all a strange dream whether there were really naked people in the bar the night before…It was no dream, 100% reality. I guess it went on for about 15 minutes before the bartenders at Malkovich put the kibosh on the whole nudist scene…Only in Prague could this shit happen.

So Peter and I got up went next door and had some very good Korean food and then wandered into old town to explore some of the touristic attractions I had yet to see. The astronomical clock was pretty rad.

The streets and buildings of Prague give the entire city a vibrant and cool vibe, I would highly recommend this place.

I really really liked their Parliament building, it was so clean an beautiful. I loved that they just build their Parliament around a 500+ year old Cathedral. This Cathedral was amazing. After 3 months of touring around you get used to seeing things like this, but this particular building was really magnificent.

After walking around a while we went to Hemmingway’s bar, I don’t understand their obsession with naming bars after American writers and actors, but I never found somebody that I thought would know the answer to the question, so I never asked…Anyway Hemmingway’s bar is consistently rated as one of the top 5 cocktail bars in the world. This place knows a lot more than how to make a tasty bev. The atmosphere is perfect, they nailed it, from the music to the lighting to the staff, it’s like you stepped back in time, to a very high end romanticized American bar in the early 1900’s. Bar tenders wear suspenders, they spend 5 or more minutes measuring and prepping everything that goes into every single drink, each drink gets specific and proper glassware, all the while the bar tenders have dope bar flare and provide very knowledgable alcoholic information.

There are rules in this bar.

1. Every Guest must be dressed nicely
2. Every Guest must have a seat
3. No electronics on the tables or in your ears
4. You may only talk to the people that you came with
5. If you’d like to buy someone a drink, you must have the bar tender ask them if they would like a drink from you first.
6. You may talk to them only if you’re invited to do so, which would be communicated by the bar tender

There were 10….I can’t remember them all…But you get the point they maintain high standards and keep a very controlled and sustained atmosphere. It’s bad ass, the line to get in only got longer as the night went on.

It was my last night in Prague and I was literally in bed asleep at 9 PM, I woke up at 10:30, Peter was still there and awake. He asked if I wanted to go out or just go back to sleep…I really wanted to just go back to sleep, I was exhausted, being on a beer bender didn’t help my cause either. I laid there and contemplated what to do for a good 10 minutes…Then, as my buddy Jayce Huemiller likes to say, you can sleep when you’re dead, I took it to heart, shot up and said its my last night in Prague let’s ride!!! We went up the street to our normal bars, I intended on having a few drinks at each and calling it a night, being content that I at least made it out for one last round at the bars we’d come to frequent. I saw three cute girls at Malkovich’s, but the setting there just isn’t fitting to strike up a conversation…It’s literally like a big open living room haha…So we move on down to Bukowskis. We are sitting there for a while and I look over to my right and sitting right next to me where those same three girls from Malkovich’s…I struck up a conversation, Peter was quick to by a round and before we knew it it was 3:00 AM, last call, there were giving us all the boot.

Turned out the girls were from France, but 2 of them were living and working in Czech and the other was just visiting from France. They insisted that we go to another bar…I told them I hate techno, House, EDM dance club shit…they said they did as well, but knew a place with “good music.”

Fuck it, we had nothing to loose and decided to roll with. We get to this underground bar and I was welcomed to the sweet familiar melodies of…

Ya, that’s right Two Princes from the Spin Doctors was playing when I walked in, beers and shots were a dollar. I was so pumped! There wasn’t a single song played that night that I didn’t know the words to…It was my scene, The Chili Peppers, The Offspring, ACDC, Blink-182, The Crüe, all that music that I love and that everyone knows the words too. It was sick! Peter and I lost track of time…

We hailed a cab, jumped in beers and all, as this country literally has no laws, went to a 24 hour burrito joint got fat dilla, and walked home to the sunrise with a cold beer in one hand, a hot dilla in the other, and respectable people leaving for work. Hahaha and to think I was going to just go to bed at 9 PM that night.

The next day or rather that day we caught the 3:30 PM train to Cesky Krumlov, the city where, ironically, they filmed a lot of the movie hostel. I saw ironically because the city is so beautiful and charming, far from anything depicted in that movie.

Not much happened other than going to the sister bar to Hemmingway’s it was called Zapa’s bar where I had the best drink I have ever had in my entire life…I would go back to that city just to have that drink, it was called the CK Sour, see photo below for ingredients, and the final product.

Unfortunately there is no possible way for me to attempt to recreate this tasty bev…The beer they used is a stout that is aged in a charred scotch barrel giving it a slightly smoky flavor…all of these ingredients cannot be copied or recreated it’s a must visit spot if you to the COUNTRY of Czech Republic, I mean it, the drink was that good and the surrounding city that rad!

The next day I rented a bike and did a 16 miler, got lost quite a few times and realized how out of shape I have become during my travels, but it was sweet!

As I rolled back into town I found Peter standing on a bridge, we went got changed and jumped in, it was like a massive lazy river.

Liter-o-Kozel

The lesson I learned in Czech were, You can’t plan for rad random shit to happen, but you certainly can sleep when you’re dead! Oh and the beer was worth all the pain haha

◦ -Cbutter