I’d never even heard of this town before seeing it in a book about weekend trips around Speaking of throbbing whats, my very scientific and even more heterosexual inspection of the Speedos in
It is a four km walk to the train station. All uphill. And why not? God’s a dick. So, I decide to hitchhike. An old Slovenian or some other weather-beaten Balkan picks me up and drops me off halfway, where I start trucking it up the hill. I make it, with about a minute to spare. My cock is fucking huge.
After three solid days of not talking in Cesky Krumlov, I headed to
“Where you from?”
Understand, this is THE most cliché of all questions amongst travelers. It’s been only two months of this round-the-world (or RTW*) traveling for me, and I already can’t stand the utter gasp of that sentence any longer. I have no idea how I’ll feel six months from now, but I’m guessing I’ll find my inspiration somewhere in
It turns out, she is a school teacher from….
“Ok. It’s 10:30. Tomorrow, if I eat dinner around 6:30, I can be done by around 8, and be back here and out again by about 9.”
I would rather dissolve my genitals in sulfuric acid before I deal with this chick for another ten minutes.
She fires more words at me over the course of about nine minutes fifty-five seconds. Having exhibited far more than any saint’s patience, I turn around and walk towards my door – mid-sentence – offering nothing more than a grunt and a half-hearted hand wave. And she wonders why she’s still single…
Those who know me well, and even many of those who don’t, (I hope, at least by now) realize that I have an overwhelming appreciation for time to myself. Never has that been truer than after having being browbeaten by this random New Yorker in
Beyond that, I had the best rack of ribs I’d ever had outside the state of
I also went to a number of museums, one of which (the Leopold) had an entire floor devoted to a guy who I can only assume was the creative consultant for Hostel, if it weren’t for his subtle (invisible?) artistry. For example, there was a delightful video of him sitting in the front of an art lecturer’s classroom; defecating himself and rubbing it all over his body. I gave it a 3 out of 5 wipes. Could have been a 4 wiper, but the director didn’t really have a lot of control over the gagging extras seated in the first few rows. (Actually, I guess a 1-wiper would be a primo flick. But you get the point.)
Next, there was a lovely video of him cutting himself with a knife while tossing his body around on a white sheet. Methinks he could have cut out the middleman (ZING!! Puns!!!!) and instead just stolen the Red Tent linens. I solve problems.
There was another enchanting “exhibit” consisting of a wall full of deformed baby pictures, juxtaposed with pictures of real people making retarded faces. This was one of those moments I have when I think to myself: I could have done that… SOOOO much better.
Like, why stop there? What about putting a picture of a lady during childbirth, right next to a picture of the same lady three hours after she eats a plate of hot wings and a double espresso? Or, what about a picture of Al Reynolds biting into a raw lemon, next to a picture of Al Reynolds five seconds after he goes down on Star Jones? See? I can totally kick ass at modern art.
On the upside, if you want to know some really cool modern artists that I saw there, I’d recommend googling Egon Schiele or Koloman Moser. I know everyone goes cuckoo for Klimt, and his stuff was great and all, but Shiele stole the show for me. Moser’s most impressive work was his furniture designs, though frankly, by that point I was probably a bit predisposed to loving anything that avoided all things self-mutilating.
I understand that I talk about self-mutilation quite a bit. But I assure you… when the day finally comes when I do bludgeon myself to death with the blunt end of a torpedo shell, I’ll have the common decency not to film it.
I'll get pictures for Vienna up soon. But it may take a couple weeks. Hang in there, desk dwellers...
I’m writing this from the bus on the way to Cesky Krumlov. Let me just say that I was excited about going to Cesky Krumlov, but now, facing 3 more hours of what is, after 20 minutes, already an immensely painful bus ride, I can’t say I’m nearly as enthused. First of all, I have a smelly old Czech man already passed out next to me. That, I could probably live with. What I can’t live with, however, is his shameless encroachment into my seat space. I’m admittedly anal about abiding by the “stay on your own f***ing side” rule of public transport. In this case, Sr. Funk has a full 4-5 inches between himself and the window. Mind you, these are 4-5 inches I would sorely need, even if all my own space weren’t occupied by his wild spread-eagle sitting/slumping posture. You may be wondering why he’d be sitting like this. Or, you may just be assuming that his cock is thicker than a one-pound can of Folgers crystals. Assuming the former, between his legs sits a doo-doo stained, white cloth sack full of no doubt: smelly things, and stained things.
Half the reason I’m writing this right now, in fact, is I am hoping that a lapful of laptopo will provide some visible evidence (other than what I thought was an obvious 8 inch height advantage) that I could REALLY USE THIS SPACE.
His leg is a full 5 inches past the double-seat median, and the more he slouches, the more his legs spread open and his elbows flay. At this point, 70% of my port side is being touched by something dirty.
I know what you’re thinking: shift into the aisle a bit. No dice, cowboy. There is another smelly Czech man, this one in his 40s, standing in the aisle (because apparently, that’s how Czech busses roll). Worst part? His ass-side = my side. And here I thought I was lucky to have bought my ticket in advance, thinking that a seat assignment was actually an advantage. Sandwich me between two funkmasters, and the advantage is effectively nullified.
Oh, hey. Old man slouch-all-the-way-down-to-my-cock just woke up. Sweet. I’m A) hoping he can (and will) read the English off my computer screen, and B) hoping he’ll SIT UP AND GET OUT OF MY KITCHEN. Nope. He’s asleep again. I’m not kidding. That’s how long it took. I almost envy him. Well, clearly I envy him, in only the simplest of ways (he IS the Jones’ right now). I definitely don’t envy his leather-colored cuticles, or his stained everything-he’s-wearing/carrying.
Lets talk about his speckled spectacles. Yes, the lenses are in fact dotted with some unknown tar-colored substance. If he were a bit younger, I’d ask if they were the goggles he used to win the Belmont.
Oh shit. This was great. He just woke up, looked at my monitor for a minute, tried to continue reading the book he’s trying to read (he’s been on page 143 for nearly half an hour), and passed back out. And here I thought I was the hungover weary traveler on 3 hours of sleep and no food. I can only assume this guy got started at about 4pm yesterday with some Becherovka on ice at his crib till his friends got back from the gastro-entomologist, then powered through a barley and hops dinner at the beer garden, when his friends wisely flaked off. He continued on, wailing on B’52 shots at Chateau till around 3am, when he made the strong call to hit up Studio 54 till about 2 hours ago. Now he’s crashing hard after the coke binge he went on with those models from Prague VII.
I’ll add more later. My wrist is seriously killing me from contorting it to type in these cramped conditions. And frankly, this guy isn’t worth a crippling case of carpel-tunnel.
Wrote all that on the bus. The update is that he eventually backed the fuck off, but only after spending about three minutes reading what was on my screen (I had the view set to 200%). Looks like our boy knows some English. Good for me.
Ok, so Cesky Krumlov is the old capital of the Czech Republic. There’s a wicked castle, which just so happened to be right outside of my hotel room window. Other than that, here’s a quick recap of my weekend in CK:
-I spoke no more than 200 words for the entirety of three whole days. This town has nothing but couples and families with kids running amok. Not my scene.
-There is absolutely NO nightlife at all. I was in bed every night by 11pm like a good boy.
-There is, however, a beautiful stretch of the Vltava that snakes around the castle and several others further upstream.
-In case any of you were wondering how it felt to row a canoe (alone!!) for 20 kilometers, I can assure you that it’s about 12 kilometers past fun. It’s kind of like when you go home to visit your parents for a week, and the first three days are a good time. Then day 4 rolls around, and you begin giving thought to diving on a rusty spike in the backyard. By day 6, you’re drinking bleach and tonics with breakfast and taking note of where all the prescription meds are located. Moral of the story: I almost drowned myself in the river Vltava. On purpose.
-I imagine if you had a partner to row with, much like bringing a friend to visit your parents, it probably tempers the experience a bit. But you’d still rather shopping for objects to self-inflict blunt force trauma.
You’ll all want to check out the picture captions from The People of Cesky Krumlov. I’ll try to make it a blog entry, but it may be difficult. I’ll see.
Warning: This is a rather long entry.I met these great English musicians from Leeds while in Krakow. They have a jazzy, soulful hip-hop sound, and despite they’re very convincing arguments about how painfully bad they are, I found them not to be half bad. Check out their Myspace page here.
They were barreling through Krakow in a day and a half on their way to the Open'er Festival in Gdynia, Poland. I took one look at the lineup, and I had to go. Gdynia is an 11 hour train ride due north of Krakow on the Baltic Sea. In order to make this trip happen, I’d first have to convince Colette and Matt to go. Going to a festival solo, in most cases, is not advised lest you wish to find yourself naked in your own one-man drum circle.
Convincing them proved easy after another three hour lunch; our third in as many days. For those of you keeping score, that’s 9 hours of lunching in 72 hours, or 12.5% of my time spent swilling beer, borscht, cigarettes, and various polish food products under the baking sun of Krakow. Good-ass times.
Once the decision was made to go, three important variables had to be worked out: lodging, tickets (festival and train), and warm clothing, in that order. Lodging proved difficult, as campsites were sold-out, and literally every hotel, hostel, and short-term apartment was booked within a 2 city radius.
We decide to rent a car. Not to drive up there, but to sleep in once we get there. The attractiveness of that idea is right up there with drowning myself in lake of ipecac. But a guy working at The Flamingo, Rafal, was already going to Open’er. He heard of our idea to sleep in a car, and openly laughed at us.
Let me just be clear; Rafal is gay and weird. Not that he’s weird for being gay, but he’s pretty weird, and if you add gay, he’s pretty much the weirdest guy I’ve ever spent any significant time with. He has tattoos on his actual head, a pretty progressive (or regressive, depending on your point of view) haircut of dyed long, red hair with the lower skull shaved (to show off the tattoos), and a generally understated yet unambiguous flamboyance. --I’m not doing him justice. I wish I had a picture.
On top of all that, I was sensing that Rafal was digging me. I know this because I have among the most sensitive Gaydar’s in Eastern Europe (I’m quite sure no one in Poland has spent 6 months performing a weekly show at The Duplex). Knowing this, I sat with him for nearly an hour while he played me clips of his favorite (shitty) bands on YouTube. Mind you, I took this to be more of an act of spreading the gospel of whatever horribly offensive emo-grunge music he listened to. Think 30 Seconds to Mars, only subtract an accomplished actor who’s banged half of Hollywood as your lead singer, and add a troubled Marilyn Manson impersonator. I was hoping my patience in willfully viewing this detritus of even the emo-grunge genre, would earn us a place to stay that A) that didn’t have a tattoo parlor with a hair salon for a waiting room, and B) was about two securely locked doors away from Rafal.
As it turns out, he came through and found us spots in the middle school down the street, where we’d be sleeping on the floor.
Colette and I took one train up there, and Matt took another about 4 hours behind us. On the way, Colette tells me that the night before, she made a play to hook up with Matt, and he rejected her. Rough. Then she asks if I would have cared, since that may change our friendly/family dynamic, to which I say “Absolutely not, though knowing what you know now, it was probably a bad call to leave your vibrator in North Carolina.” She emphatically agreed.
We get to Gdynia at 5:30am, and rather than hang out in the dingy train station waiting for Matt for four hours, we head across the street to an even dingier mom-and-pop coffee shop, where they are BLASTING house music. At 5:30 in then morning. On a Friday. With no one inside except a weathered looking seaman from an old Hemingway novel. Random.
It turns out, everywhere in Poland is like this; house music in coffee shops, hip-hop in family restaurants, house music in supermarkets, etc etc. This really brings the “Follow the baseline” mantra into question. Playing by those rules in Poland, you could wind up stuck behind a rigged video poker machine at a Herna Non-Stop, next to Captain Ahab, dropping zloty hand over fist and reminiscing about the time the girl fell for you, and YOU ran away. Man, those were some good times we had, back then.
Once in Gdynia, I view our sleeping quarters, which consist of approximately 24 square feet of linoleum floor. That’s it. For all three of us. I promptly hit the convenience store and bought two car mats to sleep on those instead. After 3 straight days of car-mat-stubble on my back, I had effectively reasoned out suicide as a more painless personal tragedy.
On to the festival. Sorry, the lead-in really is half the story. The first thing I notice is: Heineken green is absolutely ev-ry-where. They’re really not afraid to be omni-present. The running joke of the festival, among literally everyone I spoke to, was “hey, do you know who’s sponsoring this event?” By the second day, I felt like Sysiphus. I was in a never-ending beer ad, with no hot girls in bikinis, and beer that tastes like Hitler’s urine after a plateful of asparagus spears.
In a shocking twist, Heineken is all they’re selling. Needless to say, after three days of binging (and once purging) on Heineken, I never want to see or smell or taste those horrible demon’s ejaculate ever again.
The next thing I notice: no drugs. ANYWHERE. Not the familiar wafting of weed waltzing past my eager nose, not the overt sale of home-blown hippie glass, not the ubiquitous salesman with the less ubiquitous backpack, not the dread-locked team of brownie vendors, nothing. It was almost spooky.
Whether you partake or not, after about 10 of these festivals now under my belt, I’d come to expect (and appreciate) the libertarian self-governance of music festivals. Police presences, when present, were usually only concerned with crowd control and acting as EMT consultants. In Poland however, news hadn’t arrived that not only is music great, but that music festivals aren’t only about music. They are about a throwback to a time when we could govern ourselves, and if you weren’t harming anyone but yourself, you were free(er) to do so.
Speaking of which, Matt was fiending for ecstasy, which was more than a few synthetic strides past where I was willing to go. But he obviously wasn’t about to find what he was looking for in this emerald lockdown.
Once we got over our disappointment, I decided the quickest path between A (sober) and B (fun) was to hammer shitty Heinekens at a clip I hadn’t neared since fraternity rush. Each day, once we’d achieved a sustainable fun plateau, or SFP if you will, we’d start catching some bands:
Let me say that seeing the Roots without the exhaling geysers of weed everywhere is JUST PLAIN WEIRD. They absolutely killed it out there, but it was unfamiliar territory, comparing it to the previous 4-5 times I’d seen them. They still brought an immense amount of energy, and easily came off as being the most gracious of all the bands that performed. They hung out on stage for an extra 20 minutes to thank the audience, hang out, and throw random stage elements into the crowd, who in turn acted like hookers at a rally for free healthcare.
Groove Armada was insane. They are incredible, live. The crowd, as a whole, literally lost their minds during their set. And considering the lack of synthetics around, that is more than a little noteworthy.
Bih-stih-Boss (or, the Beastie Boys, as we know them) were solid. The Poles absolutely love these guys. Which brings me to another point about Poland: there is a very real Polish hip-hop movement. Which makes perfect sense, when you consider all the black people that live there. In fact, I think I saw one whole black person (two halves) the whole time I was in Gdynia. That’s a ghetto, man!!!
I don’t understand the hop-hop influence there at all, but it’s present, and it’s pretty well patronized. I’d make a comment on how good or bad it is, but considering idiots like Young Jeezy can sell a million records, I got to give the Polskis the benefit of the doubt here.
Lastly, let me add that during the festival's second day, I experienced my first ever flash-flood. Why this was actually awesome was because before I left Krakow, I had taken the extra 15 minutes (and $15USD) to buy waterproof boots. BEST. PURCHASE. EVER. 5% of the festival had waterproof boots on. We were like the captains of the football team, minus the overwhelming urge to date rape.
This is a really long entry. My apologies. I got rambling about a very cool yet strange weekend, and it became a meandering path of my stream of consciousness. I’ll try and be more brief (and more entertaining) in the coming entries.
