Brew Praha: Three Good Things About The Czech Republic

Prague is frustrating if you're under the age of 50 or you're not in town at a Chinese wedding. Much like the theory that models are boring in bed, central Prague, without doubt one of the prettiest places in the whole world, is just a pile of extra long limbs leading to a slow brain with an appetite for nothing more than lo-cal water and carrots.

A corrupt little Disneyland on the banks of the Vltava, Prague can be so uneventful that you get to hoping that one of the thousand and one pickpockets you're constantly being warned about will have a go just to spice things up.
There's a graff artist operating in the city who has a tag that reads 'Stop making this city clean'. And you've got to agree with him. The city centre has been given a complete Hollywood makeover. They pay out-of-work actresses to dress up like mermaids and hang under the Charles Bridge in the middle of the night. They catch colds and get replaced the next night as Prague is full of out-of-work actresses, just a couple of bad auditions away from a career in webcams. From the castle to the museum, the whole riverbank is lit up like a shop window birthday cake and most of the locals you meet wear period costume and can change your currency in three languages. In fact most locals, those that don't work in the gargantuan tourism industry, avoid the central district, Praha 1, and we'd suggest that as long as you're under 50 or not in town at a Chinese wedding that you avoid them too. If you are in town at a Chinese wedding, cut loose, go wild and don't waste any time on the naysayers who try and tell you that a pink suit in a chapel might be verging on crass.
Prague 1 is a little bit hard to believe. It's more department store than city, gated enough that the only drunks asleep on the streets probably have hotel keys in their jackets. But if you can get beyond it, and that means travelling so far that you no longer hear the Russian WAGs or English stags anymore, you find a Prague that's still got a whiff of the dynamism and radicalism that sent Ivan and Boris packing twenty years ago.
Cross Club

The Cross Club in the station district is what happens when an automotive parts factory has a midlife crisis and decides to transform itself into a bar. You find it in a little visited part of town called Holesovice in Praha 7. It's beside the train station and apart from a McDonald's, the Cross Club is the only thing not shrouded in darkness come nighttime. When we arrived, there were a group of Prague kids stood in the hallway building joints in their snowboard jackets. The Cross Club is not draughty. Urban outdoor chic is what you might call it. If the dancefloor turns into a snowdrift, they'll know what to do. That's the look in Prague and if you want to get it, dig out your old Carhartts with the hammer hook, throw something waterproof on top; pierce your eyebrow or your nose, thin down to about 60kg and smoke spliffs like they come in packs of twenty. Simple. Then go do it at the Cross Club. The place is very well known in Eastern Europe because it's quite the smoker's delight. It gets so bad that every hour the security do a sweep and scoop out the casualties. That's all right though. It means you don't have to wait long for a table. On level two and a half, a chef cooks up burgers and toasties that cost no more than loose change, and that's also all right.
Up until about a year ago, Cross Club was just a private bar. The staff lived upstairs and mates, and mates of mates, were the only people allowed through the door. It took an age to get permits but they did. Even now, tripping through the mess of cable, axles and suspended truck parts, it's hard to see how that was possible. But Prague's corrupt. And a little corruption is never a bad thing. We met a Canadian who bought a black market driving license for about €100 and avoided re-sitting his test in Czech. On the streets, the smell of weed pushes out the smell of boiling pork and places like the Cross Club are allowed to open with no fear of litigation.

It's almost too much. The lamps are old motorcycle engines with bulb fittings bourn through the metal casing, the chairs have been ripped out of old buses and the overall impression is that you're having a beer behind the face of a Swiss watch or in a Giger nightmare with less boob on show.
The bar is on four levels, each one with different regular nights. Anus Music was playing on level three. Anus Music sounds like the Czech Drop Kick Murphys remixed by Doc Scott if you're up close. If you happen to be on the level above or below it just sounds like airplanes taking off.

Kolbenova Flea Market

There's a flea market about six stops east of the centre of Prague where you can buy hunting rifles and Red Army hand grenades alongside porn flicks and mystery meats. The tracks that seperate the stalls are muddy trenches that splatter your shoes and make you instantly unwelcome anywhere with carpets. The haggle is a bit hit and miss. Mostly because if you haven't mastered Czech or already sorted out the look from the Cross Club, they'll assume you're a German and charge you triple. The Germans are doing well in the Czech Republic. They own the banks, much of the supermarkets and have spirited away enough Czech footballers to make the national league little more than making-up-the-numbers. The Germans are liked in the Czech Republic because of their buying power. Proving you're not German is the first step in a game called 'Don't get ripped off in Prague'.
The Kolbenova flea market sits alongside a dusty road that looks a lot like the Long Mile with tyre factories instead of car dealerships. The Czechs are lookers. Every fourth model at this year's Milan fashion week came from here, but stepping out of the metro and approaching the acres of scrub where the market makes its weekend home, you're met with a lot of faces only a mother could love. But again, like the Cross Club, the black-tooth ugliness of the Kolbenova market comes as a welcome antidote to what you see in the centre of Prague. Or maybe I'm wrong, and you go to Eastern Europe to shop at Gap and get served by giraffes with chopstick arms

Czech is right up there with some of the hardest languages in the world. The tenses are fine. There's only three to begin with, but each word has seven cases. If that makes no sense, imagine a language where you have to add vowels to the end of a person's name to distinguish whether you're talking to them or just about them and you start to understand why an ex-pat in Prague can be content with functional rather than fluent Czech after twenty years.

If you can master ‘thank you' by day three you're already doing better than most. Don't be so hard on yourself if you're not quite getting numbers at the market. Use your hands or buy a 50cent calculator off the guy with the gold teeth who does a steady line in stuffed boars, broken dolls and nappies.

Corruption, like nature, loves symmetry. We got chased out of the market for taking photos. No one sells a nearly new flatscreen TV for €50 because they want to improve the quality of their home life. Anway, we legged it from the TV thieves and hopped a tram back to the city, only to be controlled by an inspector en route. The fine is a standard €30. We only had a tenner, which meant he'd have to travel all the way to a bank machine with us for the rest. In the outskirts of Prague, bank machines are about as rare as tourists. We came to an agreement with the inspector and he allowed us stay on while he pocketed the ten. If we'd bought a 50cent calculator from the boar head salesman, we might have got off for half of that.

The Baby Tower

David Cerny is that artist who embarrassed the EU recently. Entropa, his work that tried to capture Europe as a map of stereotypes, wasn't that well received by those who felt places like Bulgaria weren't best represented by a squat toilet. But this was tame. In the past he had the same work, Shark - Saddam in formaldehyde - banned twice.

The Baby Tower in the Zizkov area of Prague is a TV tower covered in crawling black babies. The tower is as ugly as a bag of dead bunnies but its contrast with the pristine skyline along the river make it somewhat endearing.
To get to it, you have to travel by metro then walk through the belly of a mountain. It's a really spooky tunnel that runs for about 200 metres and bends in the middle so you can't see daylight till halfway. We heard a rumour about kids racing cars through the tunnel at night. It was impressive and barely believable. You could do it with the wing mirrors folded and everyone inside holding their breath.

The Baby Tower was built on top of a Jewish cemetery during the communist era and parts of the cemetery still exist, dotted around the base of the tower like dead leaves circle deciduous trees in late Autumn.
Cerny's babies were installed during Prague's time as the European City of Culture in 2000. They weren't supposed to be permanent but locals found they improved the most hated building in the city so they stayed.

You can find Cerny's babies in other parts of Prague; reclining, crawling, staring off into nothing. It's proof that underneath the architectural Botox, Prague's still got a sense of fun. The city centre is staid and overrun with trinket shops. Every time you sense a photo op, half a dozen couples block your path and the constant German greetings will leave you feeling genocidal. But a country that has no issue attaching a dozen plump-arsed little children to its largest tower is a self-assured and wonderful place. And that makes it well worth a visit.

Words: Conor Creighton