Perks of Prague: I've never been so humiliated in my life

The Perks of Prague

 this is a follow-up aritcle to this here article

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by KEO

When I was a newbie in Prague, I had the experience of two lifetimes. Not in the best way, but maybe in the worst way. This is a follow-up article to the Two Word Challenge in which I manged to put in every combination then submitted and also a follow-up article to a story about death and red lips, or maybe her lips were blue. Sorry I can't remember that far back.

And oh Johnny, where are you?

What Nonsense will have to reappear in order for us to get this story right, but I am already over my 319 word count limit.

I had just come to Prague then and was living in an area notorious for its ugly  incompleted buildings, dubbed Kralikarnas or Rabbit-hutches  and I didn't associate with any of the people there, because nobody would live in them.

The nearest supermarket was on Vackavske Namesti.

To get there, you had to walk through 5kilometers of newly made mudflats to get to the subway and then take the subway. Am I being redundant enough yet?

The subway ran from Nove Butovice to Mustek which is under Vaclavske Namesti.

When you got out of the subway, you were instantly sick.

You were instantly sick because the subway was the primary Piss-up Place for all the local bacchanalian inhabitants.

And there were pools of piss everywhere in those days. I mean Pools of Piss. Pools of Piss that were slimy and made the marble slippery to walk on and Pools of Piss that were so fresh that one whiff woud nearly burn your lungs out.

Czechs specialized in  WMD- Chemical Warfare under the Iron Curtain. In some places you are still reminded strongly of it. Mustek is one.

There's nothing like male bacchanalian piss to make your Saturday morning shopping trip a bliss.

I mean Pools of Piss. Right there in the main subway  station, laying stagnant in the Saturday morning sun.

Not one pool of piss, but two pools of piss and dribblets everywhere where men missed the walls and splattered the floor.

 
Czech Weapon of Choice

Now where was I now that you have the picture of sanitation and health in the good ol' days of Prague.

And the metro station of Vaclavske Namesti was held up by scaffolding. Not because of renovation. It was new. But because the buildings were crumbling on top of it. Probably the foundations were rotting away from all those pools of piss.  Yellow, slimy, nauseating piss.

Now in those days, I was slender and sexy and wore bright clothes. A peasant, I hate peasant skirts and prefer to be more chic with black baggy harem trousers and slinky silken shirts that showed off my sinuous body. Not all Kundry's need to be built like Brunnhilde;  and some sopranos are more cats than apes.

So because I was hungry, I went to the grocery store. It was the closest  available by metro from Nove Butovice  which was the end station in those days.  Maybe 14 kilometers away.

I had a raspberry teddy-bear coat from Vienna. They were all the rage there along with lycra leggings. I had legs. Still do, but a bit more on the chunkier side.

I wore my bright raspbery teddy-bear coat right into that store. It's a democracy here, you know. With Charter 77 and all that. But you wouldn't know about that because you were wearing peasant skirts in Chicago while you were going to college and wasting 20USD on beer you didn't drink.

 Bad beer, I should add, because the best beer in the world is Czech Beer

oops I can add a picture here.

an august affair with an archduke Franz Ferdie

I had different values. So I strolled in, in my raspberry teddy-bear coat  because it was January and Prague had two colors then: grey and brown. I forgot about the yellow pools of piss, but there you are, it had three.

And it had to be the worst humilation in my life. I don't think that I will ever get over it. No indeed.

In those days, there were almost no stores in which you could take things off the shelf. You waited in line.

SOMTIMES FOR HOURS!!!!!

That first year I WAITED IN LINE EVRY DAY FOR A WEEK SIX HOURS A DAY JUST TO BUY EGGS!

Can you believe that.

You in your peasant skirt couldn't understand anything so difficult, because  you couldn't endure such indignities. But I finally got the eggs at the Zizkov train station as they were unloaded off the train coming in from Poland at 5am in the morning.

Fancy thatt!  I paid 6kc an egg, too! Three was an Egg-Cartel then, so the  Grosshandlers would ship the eggs back and forth between Prague and Poland to drive the prices up. No sh-t. So for a month before Easter all of Prague went Eggless, while I managed to buy a flat of eggs for 6 or 7kc each.

I was rich and could have easily resold mine to my eggless  (and clueless) neighbors for double the price which is what they were selling on the street through the Black Market.

You bought your eggs in paper sacks then, too.

See what you miss by wearing a peasant skirt in Chicago while you were going to college? Lack of proper education I say. Sucks it does.

Oh I forgot. Only one sentence to paragraph for the witless audience.

This is journalistic style.

Back to the story. This was January and I was living in Stodulky which was still unfinished property with big, round kralikarnas where nobody in their right mind wanted to live. My buiding had the reputation of having the highest suicide rate in town.

Great.

maybe this is why I suffered a hunger attack and had to go to the supermarket at Mustek where there were  pools of piss to complete my Saturday morning bliss.

Am I repeating myself again? Oh dear,  Alzheimer's at last. Telltale signs are lack of motor control.

My spelling reveals all.

Pools of piss.

I was minding my own business in the supermarket and trying to figure out what the label said on the cans.

In those days everything came in cans.  Apples, pears, strawberries, fish, peas, carrots, you name it, but the labels had no pictures and they came in basic colors like Skodas:  orange, brown, gey and drab olive.

another picture please to illustrate the point

Skoda Orange--if you cant read the title

So I as trying to figure out from the Cyrillic what it might mean in English. I spoke no Czech then as now. I have very useful vocabulary: cerny pivo and dobry den. Somethng like that. And piss is universal; language. You grab your crotch and wriggle.  Got that? Or point and shoot if you're so lucky to be a man.

Any place  in town will do-- just turn your back and do it. When in Rome and all that.

So as I was trying to interpret that yellow might mean deadly and  drab olive poisonous, a  security guard sidled up to me in my nice, screaming raspberry pink teddy-bear coat and tried to arrest me.

It was the most humilating moment of my life!

I  didn't have anything in my pockets. My pockets had holes. I couldn't keep a pair of gloves in them. So he took me aside and demanded to know what I had stolen. Nothing.  He patted me down, went through my pockets. My pocklets were tricky I admit because his hands went all the way through and  poked back out at me.

He demanded my purse. He went through my purse and pulled out my passport.

I didn't look the same as the picture because I ws thin.I lost over 40pounds in Vienna. So I was really thin then.

And then he called his partner and they started threatening me

So  what can a poor little brainless soprano like me do?

Play stupid.

It worked.

"Cerny pivo?" I said.

And luckily, they got angry and told me to leave.

So I never went back to that store again in my  bright raspberry teddy-bear coat again.

Besides it became Julius Meinl later which ws good. Nice to have a good Jewish grocery store in town after all those years of communism.

And I knew the Meinl family in Vienna. I had a friend who au-paired for them.

Really I did.

And so I had nothing. And I had to go back out to the catch the metro where there were pools of piss everywhere to get back to my flat in  Nove Butovice.

But it was my first day in the flat.

And I forgot to take a map.

And they had changed all the names of the streets overnight...

And that's another story. It took 4hours for me to find the building, because they had no numbers and there were no street names and the names had been changed.  And all the buildings look alike. Someday I'll go take pictures for you, but now it's different. There's street signs and some are painted.

And when you go to college in a peasant skirt and buy beer for 20 USD, you really miss out on the educational side of life.

But my,  aren't we sheltered.

The names weren't changed  because I still have mine. This is a true story. There were pools of piss in the Mustek metro. Pools of slimy stinky piss.

And I didn't tell the editor of the Prague Post because it didn't exist then.

Besides it was a normal event.