July 31, 2007
By Dan

I love Prague. Such a beautiful city that seems to drip with history and culture. It pretty much escaped the ravages of WW2 as it was handed to Hitler on a plate, and was unscathed when ‘liberated’ by the Russians.
The Medieval old town square is a web of narrow cobbled streets and leaning buildings, Charles Bridge still stands in all its opulent, if weather-beaten glory, and the epic castle dominates the skyline. The cathedral within the castle is one of the best I’ve seen – a gothic wonder of masonry, majesty and stained glass.
Quality beer, cheap absinthe, stunning architecture – what a city. The only slight was the blatant crack heads and junkies in the city centre parks. You had to step over the needles.

That night (Thurs, July 26, 07) we met up with an English lad called Rich – Justin had a friend who knew him or something- and he took us out drinking. A top bloke, he’s been living in Prague for three years and took us to a well-priced beer garden with a bunch of his mates.
As seasoned travellers, determined to experience all manner of diverse cultures, we had little choice but to experiment with absinthe.

There are many different ways to drink it, but in that particular beer garden they recommended dowsing half a tea-spoon of sugar in a shot glass of absinthe, then removing it and setting light to the sugar. The absinthe acts as an accelerant and once the sugar is bubbling in the spoon you stir it into the shot and drop an ice cube in to cool the mixture down.

Making the potion was half the fun and the results were good. It tasted far better than the absinthe I’ve tried in France, England and Germany, and was only £4 a pop.
It had various effects on the group. OJ accidentally knocked back the ice cube that was in his shot glass, almost choking himself and seeming distinctly uncomfortable afterwards. Megan loved it, demanded more, became very excitable and then threw up. Istvan suddenly became very lively and began speaking confidently in Magyar interspersed with his favourite English phrases – ‘no problem’, ‘big problem’, ‘please’ and ‘fuck’.
Justin ended up asleep in the bar, sitting bolt upright with his underwear exposed through a tear in the crotch of his jeans. We decided the best option was to take photos of him.

From Prague OJ, Justin, German Mike and I headed to a chapel in the east of the country that has some impressive bone sculptures. A wealthy family bought the ossuary, graveyard and chapel in Sedlec a couple of hundred years ago and began to get creative with the skeletal remains of the 40,000 people buried there in the preceding 1,000 years.
What possessed them I don’t know, but the results were interesting and on some levels deeply disturbing. They had the family crest made out of bones, with a skeletal bird picking at the eye of a human skull. Human chandeliers hung from the ceiling and four, ten-foot high pyramids of…yes, human bones.
What strange perversion. Perhaps the family were Satanists or some kind of twisted worshippers of the dead. The area, formerly known as Bohemia, certainly had its fair share of alchemists and weirdos.


We raced back to Budapest to film a traditional Hungarian meal at Zsofi’s parent’s place. But Istvan blew a tyre on the way, setting us back a couple of hours and forcing us to miss out on lunch in Bratislava. I suspect that will be a theme of the next four months.

We had a departure party on Saturday at a popular Budapest haunt called West Balkan.
They kindly gave us a 5,000 florin (€20) bar tab each, let us put up sponsor’s signs all over the place and give a press conference to a bunch of local TV and radio stations.

The ‘press conference’ was pretty excruciating – we foolishly didn’t start the thing till gone ten, and everyone had made a decent stab at the bar tab by then.
We paraded onto the stage in front of the cameras and a moderator then interviewed Zsofi in Hungarian while we stood looking sheepish in sponsored polo shirts.

Once that was out of the way everyone kicked back and partied, culminating in a great performance by Brains, a local reggae / drum n bass act that Zsofi managed to get to play for free. They were awesome (www.myspace.com/brains Or www.brains.hu).

We had all the Trabbis parked in the club so most of us ended up collapsing in them and waking up at the Balkan feeling terrible in the morning.

Then OJ and I, feeling a little the worse for wear, returned to Bratislava to get the footage we needed with Istvan. It’s a nice old place, with a similar feel to Budapest – sitting on the Danube and filled with Hapsburg architecture. If you drive along the public footpaths you can gain easy access to a beach that has been set up by the river. Security weren’t that impressed with my manoeuvre, but they let us film on the beech for ten minutes.

We've done Zwickau, Dresden, Prague, Bratislava, and Budapest. Now we’re trying to meet up with a kids charity in Romania before heading to Dracula’s castle and then Bucharest.

mrdanmurdoch@gmail.com
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