The Beercentration Camp of the Prague Beer Festival

“I’m not sure I like this element,” my friend Tom said, chomping into his gigantic, onion-covered sausage, grease dripping down his chin and onto his napkin. “They’re fellow British people. I know these people. Something bad is going to happen.” He took another sip of his beer to wash the onion-sausage mix down.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean, look at these people,” he nodded towards those people. “They’re a bad element. I’m not really comfortable here.”

“Maybe after a few more beers,” I said.

“No, it will be even worse.”

We were at the Prague Beer Festival, sitting outside at a picnic table, soaking up the sun while sipping on the suds. “I think I know what you mean, actually,” I said. I looked at the crowd again. Mostly they were fat, shirtless Englishmen, their own fingers as big as the sausages Tom was eating. They were talking loudly, shouting across the tent, they looked like they belonged more at a football game than anywhere else.

probably the best place to eat there

I remember the Prague Beer Festival being better than this last year. It felt more organized. This time, we came to the gate and they gave us a card. On the card the different vendors would write down the price of the beer or food that you had ordered, and then you had to pay the sum upon leaving the festival. “What if you lose this card?”

“Then you’ve got to pay 5001 crowns,” the clerk said. That’s something like 200 dollars.

“I just don’t like it,” Tom went on in between bites of his sausage. “And not only this element, but also this card, this sword of Damocles hanging over my head.”

“Just don’t lose the card,” I said. “Then you’ll owe nothing more than what you ordered. The thing is, it’s the same policy at Czech restaurants, isn’t it? They write down your order on a piece of paper, and then you have to pay for it.”

“I didn’t know there was a penalty for losing it though,” he said.

“Well, now you do. And I guess you won’t manage that sword of Damocles either,” I said.

The beers were good, if not expensive. There were some 120 beers offered on tap throughout the tents. There was one stand that served only IPAs, all sorts of IPAs including a fruit IPA. I don’t think I’ve ever had a fruit IPA. My favorite was the Chotmouc Lezak, a very thick and heady beer.

The festival is in general a great opportunity to buy all the Czech beers you wouldn’t otherwise be able to try in regular restaurants. But my friend was right, it did seem to attract many British hooligan types.

“For being one of the most xenophobic countries in the EU,” I said, “I mean, for essentially pulling out of the EU because of your fear of foreigners, the UK pumps out the most degenerate lot of tourists I’ve ever set my eyes on. I’ve never had a problem with a Muslim tourist, but man, these British tourists rove around the city, vomit, shout, and get into fights all the time. Do they act this way back home?”

Tom shrugged.

I guess they did. What a sad lot. Is this what technology and civilization does to a people? Is it boredom? Comfort? There should be a study on it. Maybe I’ll write a doctoral proposal to Oxford and see if they’ll accept my candidacy.

the beercentration camp

Back to the festival. It was a strange setup too, a real beercentration camp. You enter into the tent complex, which is like a big O of tents, with only the center of the circle open to the air. That meant the air tended to be stale, it sits around and heats up. It was clearly so they could easily control entry and exit from the festival, but it didn’t make for the most comfortable or attractive setup. Just white tarp everywhere, and wooden tables. And the tents weren’t big enough to give you the open Oktoberfest feel, they were only each enough room for maybe 8 picnic tables each.

It’s only a few dollars to get in though, and you can try a wide variety of beers, and the food vendors are fantastic. Your ticket is good for the entire festival, which is almost the duration of the month. That means I’ll most definitely go back anyway, regardless of the element.

But well, after a few beers, we went off to the nearby Letna Park beergarden for some of the typical, still tasty cheap stuff.

enjoying the view

beer, fresh air, and a view, much better

For more on Prague, check out my new book, A Facetious Guide to Prague.

#Prague #festivals #rantsandraves

The Curious Japanese Garden South of Prague

The huge gold fish swam in the pond before us. It was teeming with them, the fish climbing over each other to get a breath of air, or to get out of the water, or who knows what they were after.

“If the fish jump up the little waterfall,” my friend said, “And through the gate, then they’ll become huge dragons." She was translating for us. Explaining the myth of the pond was an old Czech lady, the owner of the house slash Japanese garden.

"Do the fish know that?" I asked.

My friend didn’t really understand my question, but she translated it anyway.

“No,” the lady replied, also feeling my question was a bit strange.

“Then how would they know to jump up the waterfall? Why would they ever try it? I think if I were one of those fish, I’d appreciate that knowledge, even if it’s quite impossible to jump up the waterfall. At least there’s something to live for,” I said to myself.

the goldfish pond and the magic gate the left

It was a beautiful place, a weird place. My friend lived out in the village of Olesko, just south of Prague. Olesko is a beautiful village that follows a ridge overlooking the Vltava river. The village is mostly just big summer houses for Praguers, scattered through a thick forest. The summer house is an important thing throughout European culture, a way to get out and get a breath of fresh air, away from the crowded city.

the view from a beer drinking ridge

Just down the dirt road from her forest home was a Japanese Garden. Some time ago, two quite rich Czechs moved there, built a mansion, and developed a healthy obsession with bonsai. The obsession would turn into a full blown Japanese garden, which became something of their retirement job, where they’d take care of the garden and then charge entry for tourists, and give them a tour of what a traditional garden in Japan might look like (I say might as I have no idea if it’s accurate, our Japanese friend who was with us said it was at least).

When we got there, there was some confusion. We were waiting outside the fence in the road. Our friend pressed on the buzzer and had a short talk. Nothing really came from it. She had called them earlier and told them we were coming, and now we were told to wait in the road. Some people came out so we walked in and waited inside, out of the dust, and feeling with a little bit more meaning and purpose. There was a very long driveway, lined with little bonsai trees on either side. There were two large houses, and to the left a Japanese style gate through which I supposed was the garden. There were a lot of people milling around, and clearly this was some sort of strangely popular thing for Czechs to do on the weekend.

the entrance of the gate

Then an angry old man approached us. This was starting to play out like a Japanese manga. “What are you doing here? Why are you here?” he was growling.

Our Czech friend replied, “We made a reservation, so we’re waiting for the tour.”

After the brief interview, I asked, “Do you know that guy?”

“Yeah, he’s our neighbor,” she said. “I told him we were coming, that we were here to take the tour. I don’t know what his problem is.”

It certainly didn’t seem like he knew her. I guess that's what bonsai does to someone.

Then a friendly old lady came up to us, all smiles and cheer. She started us on our tour, starting first at the Japanese gate. They close it every night because evil spirits would come in otherwise. Then upon entry through the gate, we had to follow the stone path going clockwise. Something again about evil spirits. The big dog that accompanied her didn’t seem to care much about evil spirits though, as he trotted around and plopped down wherever he had pleased.

no evil spirits be gettin into there!

one of many statues that adorned the garden

We came to an upper pond, which had a small stream run off from it that went to a waterfall and then down to the lower pond full of goldfish. Down there were a few shelves along the house wall, with some random but expensive looking souvenirs from Japan.

the upper pond

souvenirs and more souvenirs

When the tour was over, I was left a bit weirded out. I mean, the gardening was probably not that much more spectacular than many of the private yards that I’ve seen back in the States at richer homes, but I couldn’t imagine those people giving tours of their landscaping to people for a couple of dollars.

leading a tour

Was it worth a few dollars? I guess so. That’s all it cost. And it seems they’re at least paying for the upkeep of the garden with all the tours they were giving. Just very strange. One day I’m going to turn a room of my house into a magnet museum, so I can charge people entry to see all my magnets from all over the world. The Japanese garden is on Vltavksa 371 in Brezova-Olesko. Call Vaclav Wiesner at 602 315 658 or email him at tanukiwiesner@gmail.com. They're also on Facebook. Reservations required and they don't speak English.

If you enjoyed reading and want more of Prague, then make sure to check out my latest relase, A Facetious Guide to Prague, available now on Amazon (in a couple of days on paperback, and on kindle in maybe a week!)

#Prague #parks #nature #museums

Burn the Witches!

All across Prague, bonfires would be lit up, and effigies of dark cloaked women would be set on fire and roasting, the wicked cackling of the winter would be driven away, welcoming in the spring time and warm weather. The evil spirits of winter would be burned and destroyed, the witch’s strength would be ebbed by the coming warm air.

It was Čarodějnice, or Witches’ Day, a Czech holiday celebrated every year on the day before May Day.

Also, I'll put in here quickly that I don't in any way advocate any burning of actual witches.

A Bit of History

Of course, it wasn’t always a day to burn effigies of witches. That innovation is somewhat more recent in regards to May Day celebrations. The transfer from paganism to Christianity doesn’t really follow a clear, sharp line. As people converted to Christianity in the middle ages, they weren’t so willing to part with their traditional ways (we see the same in modern Czech Republic, they’re atheist now but love to celebrate their long held Catholic traditions).

St. Vitus Cathedral at night

Many people were forcibly converted, yes, but a large part simply because it was an easier religion to follow and also that it was often not really that different (take Slavic and Germanic paganism, who already had an all-father, from which all lesser gods and spirits, read angels, were created). It was clear, and there were benefits. Humans wouldn’t be sacrificed, neither livestock, to principalities that only had remote and bizarre characters. Nobility were nothing that special, rather than god-men.

In the Roman lands, the peasantry was the first to convert, and it went bottom up, not top down. The Roman Emperors repeatedly tried to quell the growing faith, but were so unsuccessful that eventually, it was impossible to be a Roman Emperor without being Christian, which also meant sacrificing, or at least changing, the cult of the Emperor.

And why was it popular with the poor? Because Christianity taught that the first were made last and the last would be made first (granted, it's certainly strayed from that since then). It wouldn’t be until much later that the emperors and kings decided to try to wiggle their divine rights into a religion that really didn’t honor the divine rights of kings. So pagans, especially the lower castes, weren’t always reticent to join Christianity.

St. Nicholas Church in Mala Strana

There are stories, of course, of mass forced conversions. Namely Charlemagne’s exploits in Northern Germany, but for the most part, the Christian conversion of Europe was a long, centuries' long process brought by weird, long bearded hippie dudes in brown robes and sandals arguing with Druids and the other established hierarchs (the first Christian king of Bohemia wasn’t until Saint Wenceslas as late as the 10th century). And of course, in non-Latin lands when these hippie monks came in talking crazy stuff that should get you killed, often they were brought to the king and the king sometimes took interest, sometimes burned the guy at a stake or sacrificed him one way or another to Wotan or Chernobog or whoever.

Anyway, enough of that, I’m talking about Witches Day. The traditions were very slow to go. The Catholic Inquisition struggled with figuring out ways that the traditions would be quelled. It didn't work so well, and some schools of thought believed that it would be better to blend the local traditions with Christianity (Jesuits especially took up this strain of thought when they went on a global level, hence the differences between Latin American Catholicism and Roman Catholicism). And so, the winter yule tree became a symbol of Christmas, the Easter bunny a symbol of Easter and the animals that God created, and so forth. The symbols of pagan religions were subverted into symbols of Christianity. And why not? Paganism probably did the same with the animalistic traditions that came before Wotan and Zeus.

On May Day, the old pagans held bonfires and sacrifices, hoping that the evil spirits of winter would be driven away and the warmth of summer would be brought in. People loved the bonfires. So the bonfires were eventually allowed, but the meaning slightly changed (witches instead of evil spirits, the irony here being that it was a tradition of witches to begin with), and the guys over at the Inquisition office had an idea. “Who do we normally burn on bonfires?”

“Witches!”

“And who celebrates May Day the most anyway?”

“Witches!”

“So why don’t we take May Day and turn it into a day of burning witches?” (of course, human sacrifice is so popular a thing that that also didn't end easily, at some point everyone was burning each other)

“How do we know who’s a witch?”

“Burn her!”

Basically, the old Monty Python scene:

And later, when they ran out of witches... “We could use an effigy!”

“Ah, what a fine idea!”

And so a new tradition was born, or rather an old tradition transformed into a new one.

The Actual Event

There are a few bonfires held around Prague for Caroldejnice. The most famous one is in Mala Strana at Kampa park, and the more local ones are in Zizkov and the villages around. The more local you get, the more kids and cheesy pop music concerts you get, so we went to the Kampa one, hoping that it would have more of the traditional trappings to show off to the tourists.

Supposedly, there’s a procession that starts from St. Nicholas Church and goes to Kampa Park and they light the fire at 8. We were a bit late, so we went straight to Kampa.

a fireman makes sure it stays under control

We made it for the fire. First we just saw a mass of people, mostly random foreigners, but also a lot of Czech families dressed up as witches and wizards. Then there were the firemen. Firemen everywhere. Fire trucks, fire men standing on fire trucks, and so on.

Then there was a speech in Czech, and finally the drumming started. We fetched a beer in this process, and then sort of watched these dudes with brooms dancing around in a circle, all around the bonfire. I finally caught a glimpse of the bonfire, on which was a burning witch! Not a real witch, mind you, an effigy, but it seemed pretty real. It even looked like it had a skeleton. Weird.

a man with a rat does a dance... as they do

a child looks expectantly for a burning witch

Now I’m not sure what it means that a bunch of people dressed as witches were dancing around a burning witch. Especially after I had read a rant by some English pagans about how it’s bad to burn people and they wouldn’t be burning any witches but celebrating them in England. I wonder if they have a problem with burning Catholics on Guy Fawkes Day…

the fireman wonders why he's there

The bonfire was honestly a bit of a disappointment. Earlier that day, Prague City Hall had met and decided that everything was too dry, hot, and windy, and that they wouldn’t allow bonfires within the city limits. Rather than disallowing the fires altogether, they allowed little small ones that at least got the job of burning the witch done, but areas with bigger witches had their witches remaining unsinged.

Supposedly in the villages it gets crazier, especially where there are rivers separating one village from another. They have a contest about which village can light the bigger fire. But no big fires in Prague tonight, my friends.

We then waddled over to the stage, beers in hand. There were some guys dressed up in medieval costume with medieval instruments, jamming out to some medieval tunes. They didn't seem too disappointed by the lack of fire. They were pretty awesome, I’ll have to grant them. Definitely beat the tiny doll burning in the fire.

the best part of the show, to be honest

For more about Prague, stay tuned for my upcoming book, A Facetious Guide to Prague, soon available on Amazon.com. Sign up on the mailing list to find out when it will be released. Sign up is on the top right of this page.

#holidays #Prague #festivals #islands #kampa #history