Praha

Gulpity gulp gulp gulp, and down goes another beer. They say it’s not only the cheapest, but the best beer in the world. So but of course if the beer is cheaper than the water, you bet your Benjamin’s I will be on a strict low water high carb beer diet. Reaching the bottom of the stairs with the other expats and surprise surprise, once again the entire bar including the bar tender, DJ waitress, and blind toothless old man in the corner have stopped whatever they are doing and have now physically turned their chairs around to ogle at me with solemn curious looks on their faces. It’s like a scene out of the movies when the most popular blond twit from school trips and the entire lunch cafeteria stops whatever they are doing and just stare. Where the music at the bumping night club comes to a screeching halt and everyone freezes. I used to want to run back up these long stairs to the fresh air, freedom from these dungeon underground bars and stares. But now, I just chuckle to myself. What else can I do? In their eyes, its like me chilling in a Hollywood bar and all of a sudden a group of white faced bounded feet Geisha’s hobble into the club and do a little dance around me with delicate fans. Of course I would fucking stare in shock, so how can I be mad at them? Steve on the other hand manages to have fits of childish tantrums against the men gawking at me, but it’s not like they have any clue what he is saying with his garble, so it doesn’t really seem to negatively affect me. Walking down another zillion flight of stairs to enter the underground nightlife of Prague, I say to my drunken self, “You should have been too young to remember those beastly Arnold Schwarzenegger bodies and flamboyantly extra tight neon orange shirts that show off protruding muscles but nevertheless, you have an older brother that subjected you to watch these cheesy movies in the 80’s.” The ruthless DJ is pumping out of this world music suddenly switching it from trendy gay poppity hippity hoppity that you know you have heard at the lame San Diego "On Broadway" club a million times, flowing into the land of the weird Karneval music that only wild German drunks can understand while dancing folk songs on the top of the tables, then transitioning into 2Pac preaching that’s the way it is. Well I guess “that’s the way it is” in the outskirts of Praha (Prague).The city that’s a four hour ride away from the infamous Bratislava, an even shorter ride to the most horrific concentration camp in the entire genocidal world of the holocaust known as Auschwitz, to a hop skip and a jump to Moscow where the people worship beastly world champion weight lifters and the old commies still linger at the pubs discussing their once very powerful Soviet empire that shed red blood to their neighbors in the west.
Communism, infiltrating all the way down to the heart of South America, Cuba and into the Far East of Mao Tse Tung’s China. Marx preaches of the common man, the laborer to be equal to the aristocracy, the supporter of the labor strikes, but unable to predict that a future like this throughout any part of the world can never be achievable because deep within the human soul there is a side of greed that is drenched in superiority. Consequently, eventually one corrupt individual will corrupt the rest, and leave their country economically destroyed with poor pregnant mothers waiting in line for three hours to get a loaf of bread to feed her three children and unborn baby. Where corrupt Stalin will disregard Marx’s Communist Manifesto by twisting its core values and rampage the streets of his neighbors and slaughter any non believer in his way because he distorts the principal communist beliefs of rebellion and strikes for equality into extreme measures of genocidal violence that permits his sick mind to ingest the literature of Mein Kampf .
Wow, so this is my life. I actually live in Prague. Wait, did I just really imagine that or have I actually moved half way across the world to a foreign pre communist world formerly known as Checklosovakia? The land where the people have formed a new country, government, and way of life just under twenty years ago. Where the Russians forced them to live under the red hands in which they were not permitted to fight for their rights or speak badly about their government or their neighbors would report them, resulting in them being thrown into prison. A land in which the people were not able to excel in their career or they would be deemed as abandoning the socialist ideas of the common laborer although their government was corrupting their world and hiding all the capital. Post the Velvet Revolution, in which hundreds of peaceful protesting students were surrounded by police along the narrow cobble stone alleys and brutally beaten like savages, now lies one art noveau café after another, beer gardens hiding behind the alleys, and live bands playing along the Charles Bridge. From the fall of communism is 1989 into 2007, I walk along the Cinderella land of castles and cathedrals that are all intricately criss-crossing throughout the Old Town never to be touched by the wraths of Hitler’s bombs because even this demented tyrants eyes could not bare the thought of destroying something so amazingly beautiful. The city in which you can now speak freely, rest in a park reading Milan Kundera's The Lightness of Being and listen to the beautiful music filling the air from various opera houses and synagogues in which orchestras are playing in. Where you can walk down any alley and come across a Chinese, Thai, or Indian restaurant nestled in between old book stores and little Muha art galleries.
Sitting with the other expats after another tiring day of teaching Czech adults in our Vyscokenska neighborhood bar, like an eager child eager to pick their wise brains, I am amazed by their world knowledge and open hearts. While Tyler, a published poet and teacher from Malaysia and Japan, and Jessica, a savvy New Yorker PR consultant and writer, discuss the world surrounding us, I glance around me and let my environment slowly soak in. The walls are lined up with antique black and white photos of the family members. Peering into the photograph I notice how they all look so cold and stoic, not a hint of a smile or cheerful twinkle peering out of their eyes. From so many years of tyrants like Hitler and Stalin imprisoning their souls, how could I expect them to understand a simple smile of joy. The wooden bulky long tables are all filled with street workers enjoying their large cheap Pilsner Urqell’s over an extended break from the humidity. The language that fills the air sounds like drawn out zzzzzzsssscccccchhhhh. Can I get a motha fuckin vowel please! They stare at me like a foreign brown object that does not belong. No tourist dares to visit these outskirts of Prague because its outer shell is diluted grey, not gleefully colorful like the heart of the city. Old run down factories line the uneven roads and train tracks of our neighborhood that I run along in the morning with graffiti scaling along the exterior. To think less than twenty years ago while Russia was occupying the country posting all the street names in Russian and forcing the school children to learn their mother tongue, these factories were up and running with the common laborers slaving their way through the day. Now after such hardship I ask myself why aren’t they jumping up and down for joy like a kid let out of the house to play in the snow? Their faces are so cold and stern with sheer traces of misery. Yet, they are not mean people nor are they snobby New Yorkers that enjoy boasting toughness and arrogance. The Czechs and their huge mafia that run the nightclubs, brothels, and most stores don’t need to try and pretend to be hard core because, they already are hardhearted. It lives inside their tough skin, within them, from a country that went through generations of torment and finally just recently broke the chains from Russia, the scars are just too fresh to adapt the ideology of individuality and thinking freely for oneself, yet.