Lager and life: Trip to raise your glass to
They know all about masks in Prague, with every Communist schoolchild back in the day put through a daily drill of fixing on a gas one. And woe betide anyone who didn’t do it quickly enough.
Today’s masks in these Covid days are cloth and less restrictive. And the revellers at the long table on the King Charles Bridge at its grand reopening in July are lowering them onto their chins to help them gulp down their Urquell Pilsner beer.
No country on Earth, not even Scotland, drinks as much proportionately as the Czech Republic. And they even bathe in the stuff… close by in the Original Beer Spa.
Beer is everywhere in Czechland. Plain-clothed monks produce it and clink glasses on a night out up the hill in Prague’s Castle area. The superannuated refresh with Pilsner after taking the waters and the treatments in the spa town of Teplice.
And the burghers of Hoptown Zatec notch up how many they’ve drunk on their beer mats in the Hop Museum next to the Beer Astronomical Clock which is better than the more visited one in Wenceslas Square.
Here a skeletal figure next to the dials, and Satan himself, mock the teetotal. They hold a Hop Festival here in Zatec every year, where among the competitions is a biggest belly contest. I’m here to work on mine…
Just as soon as I get out of this nuclear bunker. Radoslav had warned us to stick together as we made our way through the myriad dank, dark passageways five stories down in the bowels of Parukarka Hill in Prague.
The only ones for company are mannequins in protective suits and gas masks and the ghosts of Communism past.
Here is where 5,000 Czechs would have come to see out the end of days. Let’s hope that they had a plentiful supply of Urquell then to wash down all that tinned meat.
The Czechs are a durable lot, toughened by a lifetime of being fought over by world powers – but they’ve always had a Pilsner to pull them through.
Beer is at the heart of the Czech story. It is believed the oldest in the world, dating back to 993 BC, was brewed here at Brevnov Monastery.
For 250 years in fact only monks were allowed to brew beer. You can only imagine they gave up reluctantly.
They certainly haven’t lost the habit, judging by the fun they’re having at the Strahov Monastery Brewery close to my opening night billet.
You’d be hard pushed though to recognise them as monks, as there is barely a tonsure between them.
In the corner, two British girls on a hen night ply a local with shots and for advice on which bar to go to next… there are no shortage of options. I’m happy where I am though, with my waiter guiding me through the beer menu as I sup down my beer onion soup and beer goulash with dumplings. Thankfully it’s all downhill home to the Golden Key Hotel where I will sleep in a triple bed under a wooden ceiling, with a sauna in the morning.
My hosts probably feel that they can’t trust me in Prague’s Beer Spa and that I’d drink all the suds. So they take me next instead to the spa town of Lazne Teplice which is the last word in massage, saunas, bathing pools and medical practices. This is where the luminaries of yore came to take the waters. Among them Beethoven who also sought a cure for his failing hearing… and you can see his horns on display in the glass cabinets in the Hotel Beethoven corridor.
Beethoven, the 200th anniversary of whose birth it is this year, was clearly well looked after in Teplice. And he would certainly have feasted on the town’s speciality chocolate cake in the titular cafe. I did and I have been told I must work it off, as the Czechs themselves do, in Bohemian Switzerland, the park named for the two Swiss artists who came here in the 19th Century and were reminded of their own homeland.
It truly is an enchanted land and got the official stamp of approval when the makers of The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe film used an arch in the park as a location in the screen adaption.
The Czech Republic is full of surprises and I spend my last night back in Prague, which too has many still to reveal. Two iron figures outside the Franz Kafka Museum, whose waists revolve and who shoot out water onto a map of the Czech Republic.
It is the work of experimental sculptor of David Cerny and is believed to represent what the European Union has done to their land. The Czechs are wonderfully irreverent to their leaders.
Walk around Prague and you’ll see Cerny’s mark everywhere… A man holding an umbrella hanging from a building, a Communist Brabant car on legs and babies climbing a TV tower.
You can get up close and personal to the babies in the tower cafe but be careful looking out the window, because these weans have no nappies on. Cerny’s statues blend seamlessly with the Medieval icons like the nation’s patriarch King Charles IV.
Tourists though are urged towards the statue of St John of Nepomuk who fell out with King Wenceslas – and, no, not the Good One. This Wenceslas ordered Archbishop John to be thrown off the bridge when he refused to divulge Wenceslas’s wife’s confession.
It’s good luck to touch his statue and make a wish and that wish will be lifted up to the heavens. To be honest, with the Czech love of beer, I wouldn’t be surprised if St John of Nepomuk just had too many Urquells and fell off the bridge.
Factfile
Where to stay: Hotel Golden Key, The Castle area of Prague from €70. https://goldenkey. astenhotels.com/en. Beethoven hotel: Price per person per night in off peak season is €87 – including room, treatment, daily entrance to thermalium pool and enjoy the water features, sprays, cold baths and spas.
Bohemian Switzerland: Visit the park and see The Lion
The Witch And The Wardrobe film locations – €120. www. bohemiadventures.com.
At present, if holidaying to Czech Republic, quarantine for 14 days on return.