Fear and Loathing at Oktoberfest 2006

Munich during Oktoberfest is a wasted city. Vomit covers the ground and beer practically rains from the sky. You're constantly sandwiched between a loud drunk American pissing himself and some 12-year-old lothario with a dirt-stache and a girl on each arm. Where do they come from and where do they go?

Oktoberfest puts on the facade of good clean fun--all buxom beer wenches and enormous pretzels and lederhosen and giant cookie necklaces and roller coasters--but to see it at night is to see the naked soul of humanity, writhing in pain, beating the ground, and, in dejected despair forsaking God for giving man alcohol.

One has to go a few miles out to Dachau just to remind himself there's still a world outside of this bizarre carnival fantasia of Bavarian sausage.

An illustrative anecdote. Two men are standing beside each other taking photos of a giant spinning beer mug or something. I point one out to my companion because he is wearing a Praha Drinking Team t-shirt. As I am doing so, a third party enters the scene wearing an "OOOOOOooooohhhhh yeeeeeeeaaaaahhhhhh" expression on his face, he grabs the respective crotches of the aforementioned photographers.

But it was fun though!

All the bitches stand in line

And now, for all you faithful blog-junkies (all four of you), I give you the two greatest videos ever made. These were discovered on Ocko TV (sort of the Czech MTV, or, more accurately, the Czech MTV of 1982, back when they still just played videos ). Anyway, both of these songs are pretty much inexplicable, so I'll let them speak for themselves.

Lordi - "Who's Your Daddy?"



Robbie Williams - "Rudebox" (#1 in Germany and labelled by The Sun the worst record ever)

Dining Out

Europe in general, and the Sketch Republic in particular, are not what you would call service-oriented cultures. Seat yourself. Wait ten minutes for the waitress. Wait another 10 for drinks. Wait 30 minutes for food. Track down someone to finally give you the check.

Under communism there was essentially no service industry (unless you count the guy who hands out rye in the bread line). But even more to the point, there was no quality drinking water. People simply aren't used to putting a cup under a faucet.

Thus, there is no free water. In fact, there is rarely plain water at all. You instead have to order a bottle of sparkling mineral water that usually costs more than a beer. However, the beer is very cheap, often less than a dollar. And it is very good, and there many varieties. There is a long tradition of beer in the Czech Lands, the drink having been more or less invented here.

It is also traditionally the drink for all people. In fact it was at one point mandated by law that beer be affordable to all citizens. Still, one can only drink beer so much, and it's hard not wish that you can go into a restaurant and get some damn free refills on Coke, for if there is one axiom of Czech dining, it is this:

THERE ARE NO FREE REFILLS.

It's Been A While

Sorry to disappoint my loyal readers by waiting so long between posts, but I just wasn't spending much time on the internet the past week. Anyway, in this blog I will touch on three--perhaps four--significant topics.

1. Schedule

Here's a list of the classes in which I'm enrolled (in order of length of course title):

Beginning Czech
Modern Czech Literature
Topics in Avant-Garde Cinema
Collective Identity in a Totalitarian Regime
Europe and the United States: Transatlantic Relations Past and Present

2. Opera

Last Friday all the CIEE students went to the opera at the National Theatre, which is a really amazing place, so amazing that it's where they filmed the premiere of "Don Giovanni" in the film "Amadeus"--despite the fact that "Don Giovanni" actually premiered at the Theatre of the Estates (also in Prague). We saw Antonin Dvorak's "Rusalka," which is basically the same as "The Little Mermaid" only the songs aren't as good.

3. Football (Soccer)

Last Saturday I went to a soccer game. It was Sparta Praha vs. someone else. And Sparta killed 'em 2-0. I was surprised thatthe seats were only about half-filled, considering it was such a nice day and tickets were so cheap (around 5 dollars for our seats). But some of the fans who were there made up for it, screaming at bad calls and constantly chanting Sparta :: PRAHA. I also had a cheap sausage, which are ubiquitous here.

4. 9/11

One of the four channels we get in the dorm is Deutsche Welle, a German 24 hr. news station that alternates between German and English broadcasts. Monday night they showed a brief documentary on America, 5 years after 9/11. Particularly interesting were the fact that they keep in the original audio of the video of the attacks, people screaming "Holy Shit!," Jesus Fucking Christ!," etc. Also, the assumptions made are somewhat different, although perhaps more accurate. For example, when talking about the War in Iraq, it simply stated as a fact that the Bush administration was planning the attacks prior to 9/11/2001. It was an intriguing example of culture clash, rivaled only by the new Rammstein video "Amerika"--which includes the chorus
"We're all living in America,
America is wunderbar.
We're all living in America,
Amerika, Amerika.
We're all living in America,
Coca-Cola, Wonderbra,
We're all living in America,
Amerika, Amerika.

This is not a love song,
this is not a love song.
I don't sing my mother tongue,
No, this is not a love song."

Truly a chilling exposition of America's global cultural domination.

Bone Church

Yesterday, the whole CIEE program visited Kutna Hora, a small historic silver mining town turned into a tourist trap. But actually it was a nice little place, the best part being the bone church.

It's a Catholic church built in the 1400s with interior crypts and decorations made out of human skulls and bones. There are a lot of skull-and-crossbones, inculding a bone-coat of arms and a bone-chandelier. It contains the bones of over 400,000 people. Whoa. The pungent stench of death practically filled the room.

Apparently, this is just one of a few churches that had this conceit. There are a lot of them in England, I'm told. Really, it was probably the coolest place ever.