They only let him go so wrong out of kindness, I suppose…
I’ve felt kinda "meh" for a while now. I suppose it’s the sudden slow-down from all the things that were happening in the last month. Sorry about that. I know I owe things, and I haven’t been much fun to talk to. It’ll turn around soon.
--I was cruising through the MPREG archive because Something Awful had it up as the awful link of the day. I’ve been there before, although it’s been a long time. I do tend to wonder how some of these fandoms lend themselves to mpreg. Harry Potter and LotR aren’t hard to figure out; you just have some batshit fans and unfortunately pretty characters there. But Blues Clues? Phantom of the Opera? Oz? What the hell, man. Although in all fairness, Oz was only listed as a broken link and I did not actually see any Oz mpreg. So, it might still yet be untouched.
As long as I’m talking about Oz, I’m going to offer the opinion that most hardened convicts don’t quote Sarah McLachlan lyrics at each other during sex. I mean, not unless they’re really hardened. Although you know, this is one of my few fandoms where I have yet to encounter tentacle rape of any kind. Spoon rape, yeah, they had that. But no tentacles.
Mpreg in general doesn’t do much for me. I think half of the appeal of it tends to be rooted in the way it ties into domestic bliss fic, which is something else that I like but in moderation. And the other half of the appeal might tie into the femming up, so to speak, of the knocked-up character in question. Intellectually, I can sort of squint at it and see the appeal. But man-breasts (moobs, if you will) and trying to figure out where the baby is going to come out of aren’t really my cup of tea. Then again, one of the most screamingly funny yet touching stories I ever read was an mpreg story, so go figure.
I’m actually curious about what people think of mpreg. I mean, whenever I read it, it’s mostly for the humor/horror value. I wonder if I know anyone who seriously gets titillated by it.
--I read a Star Wars/Silent Hill crossover the other day, or maybe a Star Wars/Silent Hill blend since the author hasn’t seen fit to actually say that it’s based on Silent Hill yet. What I remember is the casting: Obi-Wan for James and Anakin for Mary (snerk). I think Anakin-James and Padme-Mary actually makes more sense within the context of creepy obsessive love, but I do admit to being vaguely hopeful that it will reveal that Obi-Wan whacked off all of Anakin’s limbs out of love and then forgot it.
--Battling poor health and harsh conditions, Mother Theodore Guerin led a group of French nuns across the American frontier to the woods of Indiana in 1840 to set up a Roman Catholic school for women. On Sunday, she and three others were named saints.
"The church rejoices in the four new saints," Pope Benedict XVI told a crowd of several thousand in St. Peter's Square. "May their example inspire us and their prayers obtain for us guidance and courage."
Hundreds of Indianans traveled to Vatican City for the ceremony, including Marilyn Wheeler, 65, of Terre Haute, who said Guerin helped her survive breast cancer. When Wheeler went into surgery in 1999, her surgical cap included a patch of fabric that had been touched to Guerin's remains. Wheeler now wears the fabric over her breast.
"I feel so close to her," she said.
Man, Catholics. We’re so creepy.
--Rock singer Sting has made a big impact in the charts with an album of 16th century lute music.
There’s a joke here. Somewhere. I’m just not sure where.
More Czech stuff.
In the morning, I was supposed to meet my mother, the bride, and the bride’s mother for a manicure, which I think is another ancient bonding tradition. The only problem was the directions left for me: “Go to the Square, and we’ll be in the third floor of the yellow building on the corner.”
Now, the Square has yellow buildings on all the corners. Fortunately, when we were making our drunken way home last night, the bride had waved vaguely in the direction of the place, so I could narrow it down to two corners. But there were three yellow buildings, all of varying hue, on one of the corners, and another yellow building on the other corner. And it all gave me terrible fits, really-“Is that yellow or cream? Light gold? Maybe it’s tan? Oh God, I need to sit down.”
Fortunately, I was walking down my third unsuccessful try when my mother came down the nearby stairs to figure out where the hell I was. I got hauled up the stairs just in time to wave goodbye to the bride’s mother and see the bride sitting on a chair, getting her feet massaged before her pedicure. She glared at me a bit woozily.
“Tell your brother I hate him,” she said.
“The one you’re marrying, the best man, or the one who has purple hair?” I asked
“The one who told me to keep ordering that drink.” She closed her eyes.
Katerina learned a lot of her English by being an au pair in Ireland, so she speaks English with a half-Czech, half-Irish accent. It gives her a very interesting lilt. She loves learning dirty or inappropriate slang, using it in front of my brother, and then pretending not to know what it means so he has to explain it in public.
I’m terrible at taking care of my nails, so I only get them done if I’m about to go somewhere important, which pretty much limits it to weddings, business conferences in other cities, and the occasional odd formal. Like a massage, it’s usually a fairly pleasant although mildly painful event; the two sensations are joined in my mind so that if it doesn’t hurt at some point, I feel vaguely as though something’s gone wrong and I haven’t gotten my money’s worth. But still:
Manicurist: *something emphatic in Czech while waving scissors*
Bride: She wants to know if it’s okay to cut off your cuticles.
Thorne: That is like a whole bunch of not okay.
Manicurist: *more Czech, waves scissors about in menacing fashion*
Bride: I think she’s going to do it.
Thorne: That’s very kind of her and it’s not like I don’t appreciate it especially if this is some Czech wedding tradition that I’m unaware of but I’m pretty sure you’re just supposed to push them back and not actually cut them off which seems like it would be sort of painful and OW SHIT.
Manicurist: *something stern in Czech*
Bride: She says that if you move your hands when she’s cutting you might bleed.
Thorne: Man, you think?
After all cuticle mutilation was accomplished, I said goodbye to the bride, who had to go work out the wedding dinner seating arrangement with the groom. It was apparently time for more castles. The problem with keeping track of the castles was that I can pronounce them vaguely phonetically, but trying to spell them correctly is impossible. I’m nearly certain I was at Hluboka Castle this time, though.
I didn’t go to a single castle that I didn’t have to make a lengthy walk uphill to get there. I’m beginning to see the point of building castles on hills though. If I were an invading army, I sure as hell wouldn’t want to have to do that climb just to get to a point where I was within range. And apparently, the folks within the castle would make their calculations so that whoever was approaching would have to come at the castle from a clockwise spiral direction, figuring that the typical soldier carries the sword in the right hand and the shield in the left, therefore leaving their right side exposed to the castle and vulnerable to archers or whatever. Nice bit of trivia there. At any rate, attacking a castle is work.
I’m pretty certain that this is why European women are so thin. They spend all their time trying to siege castles.
The tour of the castle was entirely in Czech, so there’s probably a lot of very important history about it that I didn’t get. I was distracted by-okay, I totally grok being comfortable with your body and maybe wanting to go natural about it. If you don’t want to shave certain bits, that’s entirely fine by me; if you want to wear nothing but all-natural fibers dyed with berry juices, that’s great; if you want to eat meals consisting of granola and deep-fried candy bars, hey, knock yourself out! However, I am of the firm stance that one should use deodorant, especially if you’re going to be in small windowless rooms with large groups of people on warm days. This isn’t a personal expression of self thing here-it’s a hygiene thing. You have a right to your body odor, but I have the right to my goddamn ability to breathe while surrounded by .
This is not a Europe-only thing, either. People at home, especially you people on the DC Metro and all the wannabe hippies on my college campus: You have to use deodorant. This is one of the things Louise has violent opinions on, although I don’t know if she has any opinions that aren’t violent.
After the castle, the for-now docile GPS unit led us to the Budweiser Budvar factory. This is the beer that has fought endless battles with the American Budweiser brand; in America it is marketed under the name of Czechvar. You can arrange for tours of the factory, and in fact, my eldest brother had attended actual parties held inside the brew rooms themselves. The last time he was at one of those things, there was an unfortunate vomit incident that we still needle him about today.
The tour is actually a lot like something at Disney world. You walk from room to room and they have little videos and almost-rides. Like, there’s this one part where you stand in an elevator-like apparatus and it takes you to “the deep underground springs” where they use the purest water for their beer. Or something. There’s, like, glass display cases with beer history memorabilia, and the whole thing concludes with a movie that is supposed to be 3D but really isn’t. Regardless, we all wore the 3D glasses anyway because it seemed a shame not to. Some of the beer trivia is great though-for example, the Pilsner-Urquel museum (which we were not at that day) has a crystal keg that was used to deliver beer to the Vatican. Being the pope means you got beer delivered to you in a solid crystal keg.
I mean, dude. It’s good to be the pope.
The movie is, by the way, a parody of a Mission Impossible film, and involves all this espionage between the Czech Budweiser brand and the American Anheuser-Busch Budweiser brand, as well as some hearty endorsement of the town itself. You can kind of figure out who comes out the winner in the film. It’s actually pretty funny for sheer camp value.
Then, a Budvar worker takes you through the whole plant itself, step by step. You go to where they cook the hops, where they ferment it, where it’s mixed, chilled, bottled, shipped out, etc. The guide told us that people tend to either love or hate the smell of the hops cooking; I think I fall on the hate side, but people around me had rapturous looks on their face while they breathed in big whiffs, so I’m probably in the minority there.
Through the bottling plant, millions of bottles zooming over the conveyer lines. We were actually there on a washing day, so instead of seeing the beer go into the bottles, we saw the recycled bottles get washed out and made ready for rebottling. Crates and crates of bottle caps everywhere, noise like you wouldn’t believe, and salivating tour groups passing by every few minutes.
As we crossed from one section of the plant to another, my brother leaned over and pointed out the exact spot that he’d had his unfortunate vomit incident in to me. We took a picture.
They are extremely generous with their free samples, and that was probably the best part of the whole thing. They don’t quite end the tour with the free samples of cold beer, so by the time you’re tired of walking up and down ramps and stairways, you at least have beer to drink along the way in order to distract you. Good planning on their part. Then, they dump you right outside the gift shop and leave you to blow your money on two-foot high beer steins, and of course you’re a bit liquored up by then and willing to buy anything which is great planning on their part.
The beer itself was very good. Ice cold, which was just what everyone wanted, and you could taste the freshness of it. This was also unpasteurized beer, I think. Not too bitter, which I liked. I am not too fond of the bitterness that seems to be more pronounced in a lot of the light beer served in the Czech Republic.
We actually had a tourist in our group who was from the American Budweiser company. He hadn’t been on the first part of the tour yet. We told him to be sure not to miss the 3D movie.
Of course, the only thing to do after touring a beer factory is to go out to dinner and drink more beer. David, Nick, and my brother came to collect us again; the bride was back with her family since it was the night before the wedding. We ended up at a restaurant where the menus were entirely in Czech and German, so we all just sort of pointed randomly at things. I ended up with a fish of some kind; it was either trout or carp. One of my brothers ended up with the Czech version of chop suey-and don’t ask me what an Americanized imitation of Chinese food is doing in a German restaurant in the Czech Republic-and one of my other brothers got what I can only describe as “various types of fried cheese.”
Dalibor arrived at the restaurant to present us with a box full of elaborate Czech cookies that the bride and her family have made. This is another wedding tradition: many tiny and delicious cookies are made beforehand. There are heart cookies tied together with ribbons, shell-shaped cookies held together with cream, round ball cookies dusted with sugar, flat wafer cookies decorated with little silver balls, big cookies and little cookies, simple cookies and decorated cookies, icing swirls and little sprinkles, and the purpose of them is to be eaten. For tradition. Good stuff.
My youngest brother-this is the one with purple hair-was feeling a bit under the weather and went back with my parents to the hotel after the meal was done. I stayed with my two other brothers, along with their friends, and we sat around shooting the breeze and drinking for a while. Like I said, the waiters pretty much fill your glass until you forcibly stop them, and they just make a tally mark on a piece of paper at the table. At the end of the night, they add up all the tally marks, and you pay accordingly.
Since we hadn’t been able to give the groom a bachelor party, we were doing our best to get him drunk. He was wary of us though, and kept in control. I ended up meeting one of his students who came to join us at the pub, who I think was named Pavo or something like that. He had been sitting at another table and walked over when the meal was finished. I had no idea who he was, but that was not exactly a new thing, so him sitting down next to me out of the blue didn’t come as much of a shock. What did throw me a little was what he said, which turned out to be “I see you in picture many years ago and I say, ‘Pavo, you must meet this girl.’ And now I meet you!”
As it turned out, when my brother was teaching English in the Czech Republic four years ago, my mother had sent him a bunch of family pictures. And the only person who will really understand this is Louise, because the pictures my mother decided to send were of the Halloween when Louise and I both decided to dress up in vaguely slutty fashion, which mostly meant black leather with too much eye makeup. And my brother had shared these with his students and so-yeah. A bit awkward in terms of first impressions.
Here is where I have to stop and apologize to all the Czech guidebooks. My mother bought, like, six of them for this trip and made me read every damn one. And most of them said perky things like, “You will probably encounter such-and-such questions from Czech residents once they find out you are a tourist! Here are the sort of PC and diplomatic answers you should give!” And it gives you a brief rundown on politics and which cities have the most corrupt taxi drivers and if people will kill you for mispronouncing the name of a town and how to play down the neon blinking signs of TOURIST that we were probably all sporting.
And right up until that night, the guidebooks hadn’t done me any good. But Pavo asked me every damn question the guidebook predicted and was basically the template Czech citizen that it had outlined. So, I need to apologize to the guidebook, because it actually was useful for reasons other than maps for once. Pavo and I had a fairly nice talk, except he kept trying to get me to pronounce Czech tongue twisters. I have hardly a hope of doing those sober.
Eventually, we left the restaurant and methodically went to the 61 Highway bar, then to the Blue Door bar, then to the Sahara bar, all of which were filled to capacity. Friday nights in small towns fill the bars up fast, I guess. Eventually, we were successful with getting into Club Zeppelin which is a bar/dance club on top of a building. We were still trying to get the groom shitfaced, and he still wasn’t succumbing, even to shots being bought and pressed upon him.
After a while, we all ended up standing around doing shots of Becherovka, which is a Czech herbal liquor. It is flavored with anise, cinnamon, and a bunch of other herbs, and it tastes like fermented Christmas holiday trimmings. It’s like someone just took Christmas, shoved it in a blender, let it ferment, and then poured it in a bottle. There’s no other way to really describe it. It’s not exactly a bad taste, but it’s a weird taste; doing shots of it is sort of “I’m not sure why I keep drinking this but I guess it could be worse.” It’s supposed to be served cold, but it takes so long to get back from the bar that it was fairly warmed up by then. But drinking it room temperature doesn’t really do too much to change the taste, so.
I wish I could say that we got the groom to do something highly embarrassing, but it just never worked out that way. He’s all responsible now; it’s very strange. Pavo showed up at the bar again, and went on a twenty minute diatribe about how Czech beer was the best beer in the entire world, even better than Germany, and finally asked me what I thought. I promptly agreed with him that Czech beer was indeed the best beer in the world; you don’t argue with a six foot guy holding a beer stein and standing at a fifty degree angle to the floor.
“You are beautiful girl. I teach you to speak beautiful Czech,” he told me drunkenly, and then dozed off standing up for a while. With all this attention, my ego may soon grow uncontrollable.
Around one in the morning, we headed back to the hotel, since we were all supposed to be awake again in about five hours. It's another one of those weirdly clear memories: someone smoking, someone trying to sing "Life on Mars", David trying to ride his bike slowly so he could keep the same pace with us, my second brother arguing with my oldest brother about hiring a taxi for him to ride the rest of the way to his apartment, my oldest brother insisting that he didn't need a taxi, Nick brooding about seeing his ex-girlfriend back at the last pub, and so on.
And then, my brother, waving goodbye when we got to the hotel and walking away with David towards the apartment he was spending the night in. My second brother and I unlocked the hotel gate and then turned to wave back as they retreated. There were lots of awnings casting shadows down the street that he walked away in, dark enough to swallow him completely. It was suddenly uncomfortably metaphorical, and so we went to bed.
I had a conversation with Louise the other day that ended with, "Hang on, the car’s on fire, I’m going to have to call you back."
…Meh.
--I was cruising through the MPREG archive because Something Awful had it up as the awful link of the day. I’ve been there before, although it’s been a long time. I do tend to wonder how some of these fandoms lend themselves to mpreg. Harry Potter and LotR aren’t hard to figure out; you just have some batshit fans and unfortunately pretty characters there. But Blues Clues? Phantom of the Opera? Oz? What the hell, man. Although in all fairness, Oz was only listed as a broken link and I did not actually see any Oz mpreg. So, it might still yet be untouched.
As long as I’m talking about Oz, I’m going to offer the opinion that most hardened convicts don’t quote Sarah McLachlan lyrics at each other during sex. I mean, not unless they’re really hardened. Although you know, this is one of my few fandoms where I have yet to encounter tentacle rape of any kind. Spoon rape, yeah, they had that. But no tentacles.
Mpreg in general doesn’t do much for me. I think half of the appeal of it tends to be rooted in the way it ties into domestic bliss fic, which is something else that I like but in moderation. And the other half of the appeal might tie into the femming up, so to speak, of the knocked-up character in question. Intellectually, I can sort of squint at it and see the appeal. But man-breasts (moobs, if you will) and trying to figure out where the baby is going to come out of aren’t really my cup of tea. Then again, one of the most screamingly funny yet touching stories I ever read was an mpreg story, so go figure.
I’m actually curious about what people think of mpreg. I mean, whenever I read it, it’s mostly for the humor/horror value. I wonder if I know anyone who seriously gets titillated by it.
--I read a Star Wars/Silent Hill crossover the other day, or maybe a Star Wars/Silent Hill blend since the author hasn’t seen fit to actually say that it’s based on Silent Hill yet. What I remember is the casting: Obi-Wan for James and Anakin for Mary (snerk). I think Anakin-James and Padme-Mary actually makes more sense within the context of creepy obsessive love, but I do admit to being vaguely hopeful that it will reveal that Obi-Wan whacked off all of Anakin’s limbs out of love and then forgot it.
--Battling poor health and harsh conditions, Mother Theodore Guerin led a group of French nuns across the American frontier to the woods of Indiana in 1840 to set up a Roman Catholic school for women. On Sunday, she and three others were named saints.
"The church rejoices in the four new saints," Pope Benedict XVI told a crowd of several thousand in St. Peter's Square. "May their example inspire us and their prayers obtain for us guidance and courage."
Hundreds of Indianans traveled to Vatican City for the ceremony, including Marilyn Wheeler, 65, of Terre Haute, who said Guerin helped her survive breast cancer. When Wheeler went into surgery in 1999, her surgical cap included a patch of fabric that had been touched to Guerin's remains. Wheeler now wears the fabric over her breast.
"I feel so close to her," she said.
Man, Catholics. We’re so creepy.
--Rock singer Sting has made a big impact in the charts with an album of 16th century lute music.
There’s a joke here. Somewhere. I’m just not sure where.
More Czech stuff.
In the morning, I was supposed to meet my mother, the bride, and the bride’s mother for a manicure, which I think is another ancient bonding tradition. The only problem was the directions left for me: “Go to the Square, and we’ll be in the third floor of the yellow building on the corner.”
Now, the Square has yellow buildings on all the corners. Fortunately, when we were making our drunken way home last night, the bride had waved vaguely in the direction of the place, so I could narrow it down to two corners. But there were three yellow buildings, all of varying hue, on one of the corners, and another yellow building on the other corner. And it all gave me terrible fits, really-“Is that yellow or cream? Light gold? Maybe it’s tan? Oh God, I need to sit down.”
Fortunately, I was walking down my third unsuccessful try when my mother came down the nearby stairs to figure out where the hell I was. I got hauled up the stairs just in time to wave goodbye to the bride’s mother and see the bride sitting on a chair, getting her feet massaged before her pedicure. She glared at me a bit woozily.
“Tell your brother I hate him,” she said.
“The one you’re marrying, the best man, or the one who has purple hair?” I asked
“The one who told me to keep ordering that drink.” She closed her eyes.
Katerina learned a lot of her English by being an au pair in Ireland, so she speaks English with a half-Czech, half-Irish accent. It gives her a very interesting lilt. She loves learning dirty or inappropriate slang, using it in front of my brother, and then pretending not to know what it means so he has to explain it in public.
I’m terrible at taking care of my nails, so I only get them done if I’m about to go somewhere important, which pretty much limits it to weddings, business conferences in other cities, and the occasional odd formal. Like a massage, it’s usually a fairly pleasant although mildly painful event; the two sensations are joined in my mind so that if it doesn’t hurt at some point, I feel vaguely as though something’s gone wrong and I haven’t gotten my money’s worth. But still:
Manicurist: *something emphatic in Czech while waving scissors*
Bride: She wants to know if it’s okay to cut off your cuticles.
Thorne: That is like a whole bunch of not okay.
Manicurist: *more Czech, waves scissors about in menacing fashion*
Bride: I think she’s going to do it.
Thorne: That’s very kind of her and it’s not like I don’t appreciate it especially if this is some Czech wedding tradition that I’m unaware of but I’m pretty sure you’re just supposed to push them back and not actually cut them off which seems like it would be sort of painful and OW SHIT.
Manicurist: *something stern in Czech*
Bride: She says that if you move your hands when she’s cutting you might bleed.
Thorne: Man, you think?
After all cuticle mutilation was accomplished, I said goodbye to the bride, who had to go work out the wedding dinner seating arrangement with the groom. It was apparently time for more castles. The problem with keeping track of the castles was that I can pronounce them vaguely phonetically, but trying to spell them correctly is impossible. I’m nearly certain I was at Hluboka Castle this time, though.
I didn’t go to a single castle that I didn’t have to make a lengthy walk uphill to get there. I’m beginning to see the point of building castles on hills though. If I were an invading army, I sure as hell wouldn’t want to have to do that climb just to get to a point where I was within range. And apparently, the folks within the castle would make their calculations so that whoever was approaching would have to come at the castle from a clockwise spiral direction, figuring that the typical soldier carries the sword in the right hand and the shield in the left, therefore leaving their right side exposed to the castle and vulnerable to archers or whatever. Nice bit of trivia there. At any rate, attacking a castle is work.
I’m pretty certain that this is why European women are so thin. They spend all their time trying to siege castles.
The tour of the castle was entirely in Czech, so there’s probably a lot of very important history about it that I didn’t get. I was distracted by-okay, I totally grok being comfortable with your body and maybe wanting to go natural about it. If you don’t want to shave certain bits, that’s entirely fine by me; if you want to wear nothing but all-natural fibers dyed with berry juices, that’s great; if you want to eat meals consisting of granola and deep-fried candy bars, hey, knock yourself out! However, I am of the firm stance that one should use deodorant, especially if you’re going to be in small windowless rooms with large groups of people on warm days. This isn’t a personal expression of self thing here-it’s a hygiene thing. You have a right to your body odor, but I have the right to my goddamn ability to breathe while surrounded by .
This is not a Europe-only thing, either. People at home, especially you people on the DC Metro and all the wannabe hippies on my college campus: You have to use deodorant. This is one of the things Louise has violent opinions on, although I don’t know if she has any opinions that aren’t violent.
After the castle, the for-now docile GPS unit led us to the Budweiser Budvar factory. This is the beer that has fought endless battles with the American Budweiser brand; in America it is marketed under the name of Czechvar. You can arrange for tours of the factory, and in fact, my eldest brother had attended actual parties held inside the brew rooms themselves. The last time he was at one of those things, there was an unfortunate vomit incident that we still needle him about today.
The tour is actually a lot like something at Disney world. You walk from room to room and they have little videos and almost-rides. Like, there’s this one part where you stand in an elevator-like apparatus and it takes you to “the deep underground springs” where they use the purest water for their beer. Or something. There’s, like, glass display cases with beer history memorabilia, and the whole thing concludes with a movie that is supposed to be 3D but really isn’t. Regardless, we all wore the 3D glasses anyway because it seemed a shame not to. Some of the beer trivia is great though-for example, the Pilsner-Urquel museum (which we were not at that day) has a crystal keg that was used to deliver beer to the Vatican. Being the pope means you got beer delivered to you in a solid crystal keg.
I mean, dude. It’s good to be the pope.
The movie is, by the way, a parody of a Mission Impossible film, and involves all this espionage between the Czech Budweiser brand and the American Anheuser-Busch Budweiser brand, as well as some hearty endorsement of the town itself. You can kind of figure out who comes out the winner in the film. It’s actually pretty funny for sheer camp value.
Then, a Budvar worker takes you through the whole plant itself, step by step. You go to where they cook the hops, where they ferment it, where it’s mixed, chilled, bottled, shipped out, etc. The guide told us that people tend to either love or hate the smell of the hops cooking; I think I fall on the hate side, but people around me had rapturous looks on their face while they breathed in big whiffs, so I’m probably in the minority there.
Through the bottling plant, millions of bottles zooming over the conveyer lines. We were actually there on a washing day, so instead of seeing the beer go into the bottles, we saw the recycled bottles get washed out and made ready for rebottling. Crates and crates of bottle caps everywhere, noise like you wouldn’t believe, and salivating tour groups passing by every few minutes.
As we crossed from one section of the plant to another, my brother leaned over and pointed out the exact spot that he’d had his unfortunate vomit incident in to me. We took a picture.
They are extremely generous with their free samples, and that was probably the best part of the whole thing. They don’t quite end the tour with the free samples of cold beer, so by the time you’re tired of walking up and down ramps and stairways, you at least have beer to drink along the way in order to distract you. Good planning on their part. Then, they dump you right outside the gift shop and leave you to blow your money on two-foot high beer steins, and of course you’re a bit liquored up by then and willing to buy anything which is great planning on their part.
The beer itself was very good. Ice cold, which was just what everyone wanted, and you could taste the freshness of it. This was also unpasteurized beer, I think. Not too bitter, which I liked. I am not too fond of the bitterness that seems to be more pronounced in a lot of the light beer served in the Czech Republic.
We actually had a tourist in our group who was from the American Budweiser company. He hadn’t been on the first part of the tour yet. We told him to be sure not to miss the 3D movie.
Of course, the only thing to do after touring a beer factory is to go out to dinner and drink more beer. David, Nick, and my brother came to collect us again; the bride was back with her family since it was the night before the wedding. We ended up at a restaurant where the menus were entirely in Czech and German, so we all just sort of pointed randomly at things. I ended up with a fish of some kind; it was either trout or carp. One of my brothers ended up with the Czech version of chop suey-and don’t ask me what an Americanized imitation of Chinese food is doing in a German restaurant in the Czech Republic-and one of my other brothers got what I can only describe as “various types of fried cheese.”
Dalibor arrived at the restaurant to present us with a box full of elaborate Czech cookies that the bride and her family have made. This is another wedding tradition: many tiny and delicious cookies are made beforehand. There are heart cookies tied together with ribbons, shell-shaped cookies held together with cream, round ball cookies dusted with sugar, flat wafer cookies decorated with little silver balls, big cookies and little cookies, simple cookies and decorated cookies, icing swirls and little sprinkles, and the purpose of them is to be eaten. For tradition. Good stuff.
My youngest brother-this is the one with purple hair-was feeling a bit under the weather and went back with my parents to the hotel after the meal was done. I stayed with my two other brothers, along with their friends, and we sat around shooting the breeze and drinking for a while. Like I said, the waiters pretty much fill your glass until you forcibly stop them, and they just make a tally mark on a piece of paper at the table. At the end of the night, they add up all the tally marks, and you pay accordingly.
Since we hadn’t been able to give the groom a bachelor party, we were doing our best to get him drunk. He was wary of us though, and kept in control. I ended up meeting one of his students who came to join us at the pub, who I think was named Pavo or something like that. He had been sitting at another table and walked over when the meal was finished. I had no idea who he was, but that was not exactly a new thing, so him sitting down next to me out of the blue didn’t come as much of a shock. What did throw me a little was what he said, which turned out to be “I see you in picture many years ago and I say, ‘Pavo, you must meet this girl.’ And now I meet you!”
As it turned out, when my brother was teaching English in the Czech Republic four years ago, my mother had sent him a bunch of family pictures. And the only person who will really understand this is Louise, because the pictures my mother decided to send were of the Halloween when Louise and I both decided to dress up in vaguely slutty fashion, which mostly meant black leather with too much eye makeup. And my brother had shared these with his students and so-yeah. A bit awkward in terms of first impressions.
Here is where I have to stop and apologize to all the Czech guidebooks. My mother bought, like, six of them for this trip and made me read every damn one. And most of them said perky things like, “You will probably encounter such-and-such questions from Czech residents once they find out you are a tourist! Here are the sort of PC and diplomatic answers you should give!” And it gives you a brief rundown on politics and which cities have the most corrupt taxi drivers and if people will kill you for mispronouncing the name of a town and how to play down the neon blinking signs of TOURIST that we were probably all sporting.
And right up until that night, the guidebooks hadn’t done me any good. But Pavo asked me every damn question the guidebook predicted and was basically the template Czech citizen that it had outlined. So, I need to apologize to the guidebook, because it actually was useful for reasons other than maps for once. Pavo and I had a fairly nice talk, except he kept trying to get me to pronounce Czech tongue twisters. I have hardly a hope of doing those sober.
Eventually, we left the restaurant and methodically went to the 61 Highway bar, then to the Blue Door bar, then to the Sahara bar, all of which were filled to capacity. Friday nights in small towns fill the bars up fast, I guess. Eventually, we were successful with getting into Club Zeppelin which is a bar/dance club on top of a building. We were still trying to get the groom shitfaced, and he still wasn’t succumbing, even to shots being bought and pressed upon him.
After a while, we all ended up standing around doing shots of Becherovka, which is a Czech herbal liquor. It is flavored with anise, cinnamon, and a bunch of other herbs, and it tastes like fermented Christmas holiday trimmings. It’s like someone just took Christmas, shoved it in a blender, let it ferment, and then poured it in a bottle. There’s no other way to really describe it. It’s not exactly a bad taste, but it’s a weird taste; doing shots of it is sort of “I’m not sure why I keep drinking this but I guess it could be worse.” It’s supposed to be served cold, but it takes so long to get back from the bar that it was fairly warmed up by then. But drinking it room temperature doesn’t really do too much to change the taste, so.
I wish I could say that we got the groom to do something highly embarrassing, but it just never worked out that way. He’s all responsible now; it’s very strange. Pavo showed up at the bar again, and went on a twenty minute diatribe about how Czech beer was the best beer in the entire world, even better than Germany, and finally asked me what I thought. I promptly agreed with him that Czech beer was indeed the best beer in the world; you don’t argue with a six foot guy holding a beer stein and standing at a fifty degree angle to the floor.
“You are beautiful girl. I teach you to speak beautiful Czech,” he told me drunkenly, and then dozed off standing up for a while. With all this attention, my ego may soon grow uncontrollable.
Around one in the morning, we headed back to the hotel, since we were all supposed to be awake again in about five hours. It's another one of those weirdly clear memories: someone smoking, someone trying to sing "Life on Mars", David trying to ride his bike slowly so he could keep the same pace with us, my second brother arguing with my oldest brother about hiring a taxi for him to ride the rest of the way to his apartment, my oldest brother insisting that he didn't need a taxi, Nick brooding about seeing his ex-girlfriend back at the last pub, and so on.
And then, my brother, waving goodbye when we got to the hotel and walking away with David towards the apartment he was spending the night in. My second brother and I unlocked the hotel gate and then turned to wave back as they retreated. There were lots of awnings casting shadows down the street that he walked away in, dark enough to swallow him completely. It was suddenly uncomfortably metaphorical, and so we went to bed.
I had a conversation with Louise the other day that ended with, "Hang on, the car’s on fire, I’m going to have to call you back."
…Meh.