Prague Journal

Thursday, March 17, 2005.

Thursday, March 17, 2005.
Today is St. Patrick’s Day. As I write this, Matt and Rick are at O’Che’s Cuban Bar drinking beer. They passed up Cafferty’s green beer on Old Town Square, since O’Che’s had a big-screen TV tuned into a soccer game. The bartender spoke Czech, but he looked Irish and spoke English with an Irish accent. Rick wouldn’t tell me how much he paid for the beer, but they said they had a good time.
Bohemia is considered to be the place from which the Celts migrated across Europe nearly two millennia ago, so Czechs celebrate their Celtic roots every March with a Prague Irish Music Festival, which has become quite a big event in the city. The festival brings some top Irish musicians over to play at various Irish hostelries around Prague, and it gives both Irish and Czech residents of the city an excuse to mingle and enjoy a beer or two. Both the Czechs and the Irish share a love of drink and music, and use pubs as meeting places for social gatherings.
Earlier, Matt and I had gone downtown and stopped in a few boutiques and galleries, among them the Gallery of the Austrian Cultural Forum’s “Passionate Perpetrators of Conviction,” an exhibit of Prague photos, mostly of demonstrations, from the 1980s. We also went in the Church of Our Lady of the Snows next door, which Matt had not remembered.
Brad met us for coffee at Kava Kava Kava, an internet café near Andĕl, after which Matt and I met Rick at the Staropramen brewery where we had scheduled a tour. Keeping with the beer theme, we went to the microbrewery at Pivovarsky Dům (house of beer) for dinner. Staropramen only makes lager beer, but the brewery at Pivovarsky had six, not counting their regular lagers. We tasted banana, nettle, cherry, coffee, wheat, and "blackthorn" beer! None compared with Staropramen or Pilsner Urquel or Gambrinas, but the atmosphere was great. We plan on taking Pultrs and Hollands there next week.
We took the metro to Vyšehrad, not to see the old castle wall, the rotunda of St. Martin’s church, the spires of the Church of St. Peter and Paul, or the cemetery where Dvořak, Smetana, and Alpons Mucha are buried, but because Matt wanted to ride the new cars on the “C” line and to see the view from the Nusle bridge. The Nusle bridge, which spans the Nusle valley and intersects the city of Prague, first opened in 1973, is about 130 feet (40 meters) high. The bridge itself is rather drab, made of grey reinforced concrete, but the height and expanse of the bridge are impressive. A few years ago some of the support girders began to crack under the strain of the metro running through the bridge’s inside. The original design had planned for far lighter trains, but Communist politicians pushed through a tender for far heavier Soviet-built trains instead. The track was reinforced and some of the girders entirely replaced, but there is skepticism as to how long the bridge will last. Between 200 - 300 suicide jumpers have leapt from the bridge to their deaths since it was first built, hence the local moniker “suicide bridge.” There was an aborted plan to secure netting underneath the bridge; there is now a higher rail and fencing intended to keep jumpers back.

posted by JWinn @ 11:40 PM