The Drunken Monkey and the Morning After 2.9.10

When I left you last I looking for something to do for the night. Fortunately for me Red talked with some of his friends from Colgate who are also in the Prague for the semester and organized a night of fun. Around 8, Red left the apartment to go over to his friends place to start drinking before going on a pub crawl. I asked him if he would wait just a few minutes for me as I had just gotten out of the shower and only needed a few minutes to get dressed, but Red was already really late and said that he couldn’t. Oh well, it probably was for the best because he skipped dinner and I wasn’t prepared to do the same.

Mira had cooked a chicken the night before and had some left over. He had offered me some the night before, but I had already told the two apartments down the block that I would eat with them so I wasn’t able to take him up on his offer. This time was a different story however, so I indulged. I wouldn’t eat his food without him eating with me though, so we sat down together and had a nice conversation over dinner.

Red had told me he would text me where they were going later, but I know that when people say that, even if they really do intend to do so, when they have a few drinks in them they can become forgetful. Wanting to go out for a night with other people at least one night before classes start, I get proactive and with Mira look up where the bar that Red had told me he would go to: The Drunken Monkey.

The Drunken Monkey is an expat bar owned by five Americans and which leads a bar crawl with regularity around Prague (I believe it’s at least once a week). The bar is located up in Praha 1 and isn’t exactly walking distance from our flat, nor have I really explored that area at this point in the day time, so knowing my way around was always going to be tricky with my sense of direction. As a responsible young man, I write out directions with Mira’s help. As an irresponsible young man, I notice as I reach the metro station near the flat and look for what my first stop is that I have l left the directions sitting on my desk. Thinking that I’m late at this point to meet up with Red (it’s a bar crawl and I didn’t want them going to the second bar before I’d even arrived at the first one), I decide that I remember it well enough and trudge on blind, armed only with my memory to do battle with the dark and windy streets of Prague.

The battle started poorly when Prague dealt an early blow – I went one stop too far on the metro and wound up on the wrong side of the river. Undeterred however, I continued though I thought it would be prudent to text Mira my dilemma. I made my way back to the proper stop and then had to figure out which exit to take and which direction I needed to go. As I exited the underground, I did a full circle trying to get my bearings and match what I saw on google maps with what was before my eyes. I start heading to my left but quickly realize that is the direction of the river and I had needed to walk away from the river to reach Old Town Square and promptly turned around. After this I actually do a pretty good job of remembering where I need to go and make the right turns. I get within two blocks of the bar before Red texts me and says they’ll be at Old Town Square in a few minutes to meet their guide and head over to the Drunken Monkey – clearly, I wasn’t as late as I’d feared.

I decided I wouldn’t push my luck trying to find the bar on my own and returned to Old Town Square. While I waited for Red and the people he was with to arrive, I walked around the square a bit. There are several (three that I saw and remember clearly) churches in Old Town as well as the Astronomical Clock, which gathers quite a crowd every hour to watch it strike the hour. I happened to be there for the 10 O’clock chiming but missed the show as I was a few hundred meters away and didn’t have the angle. I tried to make my way over there but it wasn’t in time. I suppose that will just be something on my to do list for another day.

When Red showed up, it only took us a minute to find our guide, an expat named Freddie. Freddie is from Boston (I think) and before moving to Prague had attended UNLV. He also lives directly above the bar.

Freddie delivered us safely to the Drunken Monkey at which point an hour and a half power hour (go figure) had just begun during which everything was prepaid for with the purchase of a wristband – which also served as a our ticket in for the rest of the night. Inside of the Drunken Monkey was an assortment of different people, though I believe my favorite were the Scots who I unknowingly forced into coming on the pub-crawl. On our way in, the Scots were standing on the corner of the street of the Drunken Monkey and they were trying to figure out what to do. One of the larger gentlemen (probably 6’4, 250) looked at me and asked if we were going on the pub-crawl; when I answered in the affirmative I received a bellowing sigh from him as acquiesced to the girls in his group’s desire to participate. I would make amends with him later in the night however when we bonded over Robin Williams and his thoughts on Golf and the Scots.

The bar had pre-mixed their shots (so as to cut the alcohol content they contained as they were free shots) combining rum or vodka with Mango juice. Whatever the case, these shots went down so easily and without lingering effects that I quickly consumed three of them in my first few minutes there with another guy on the program by the name of Andy only to return moments later with Red and Matt and a few of Red’s Colgate friends to take a few more.

After the shots, we went back to the back room (not as sketchy as it sounds) where beer pong and flip cup tables were set up and had a beer. I was sitting at a table with a few people and Freddie when suddenly I see Freddie produce a small baggie stuffed full with weed and proceed to roll a spliff as if it’s the most normal thing in the world. I have limited experience with weed at best having never indulged myself so I cannot say with any accuracy how much weed he had stuffed in this plastic bag. That being said, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was under the legal limit of Prague, which has recently decriminalized just about every drug in small enough quantities (see here for more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_cannabis#Czech_Republic). Freddie, the generous guy he is, passes his spliff around the table when he is done. Side bar: I don’t know the proper etiquette for sharing weed, so I could be way off base here, but it seemed to me that the guys only took one hit before passing it while the two girls who participated took four or five each. I just thought it was a humorous juxtaposition and laughed to myself when I noticed.

Even hour and half power hours have to come to an end at some point and when that time came, everyone with a wrist band (probably 60 of us) were herded out the door and down the block to another bar where we were greeted with a free shot (one of the perks of purchasing the wrist-band was that at every stop you received a free shot – this feature led to my eventual introduction to Sambuca at the next stop and who I very much enjoyed meeting). This wasn’t the best stop on the crawl for sure; the dance floor was undersized and underused and the bar was a warzone. I stood at the corner of the bar with three girls (Becca, Hannah and Molly) for twenty minutes trying to order drinks to no avail. I won’t blame the bartender though because he was running around trying to meet the orders in front of him and never had a dull moment during which he could have served us, it just so happened that we didn’t penetrate his peripheral vision and so were not served. My solution to the dilemma: weave my way to the center of the bar where I would be seen and order for all of us. This actually worked incredibly well and only a minute or two after reaching the bar the bartender asked what I would like to order. The girls wanted to take a So-Co and lime shot so that’s what I ordered. Unfortunately the bartender thought he was out of shot glasses so he moved on while we amended our order. When he moved though he revealed three shot glasses behind him and when he came back I pointed them out and he happily poured us our drinks.

Drinking to life and good times we had our drink and retreated to a quieter spot of the bar. We weren’t done though and a few minutes later we took a shot of whiskey (my first) with Andy. I have a sneaking suspicion that I was quite inebriated at this point and fortunately we moved on to another bar shortly thereafter. This next bar was where I had the welcome shot of Sambuca and the conversation about Robin Williams.

We ended the night in Mecca. Yes, the Drunken Monkey pub-crawl is also known as the pub-crawl to Mecca, a night club with several floors, a huge dance floor, and the professional dancers who dance on podiums in scantily clad outfits for the men to oogle over.

At around three in the morning, I decided I’d had enough and left. Unfortunately, Mecca is on the other side of the river from my flat so I had no idea how to get home and I hadn’t yet put the number of the safe cabs in my phone so I was a bit nervous about getting home as Red was clearly not prepared to call it an evening. I received a bit of luck however when I met a student on the NYU program outside by the name of Mike who informed me he lived at 60 Sleska and would happily share a cab with me.

The only real problem with this set-up is that 60 Sleska is not directly across the street from 61 Sleska. That fact was immediately clear when I looked opposite Mike’s apartment hoping to find mine and instead found a park. Who would have thought that a three or four block distance separated Sleska 60 from 61? I certainly didn’t, and let me tell you, walking around an unfamiliar neighborhood at three in the morning while pleasantly toasted is a sobering experience. I made a circuit of the block to try and gather my bearings. Unable to reach any firm conclusions on my own, and worrying for a moment that Mike lived on a “different” Sleska street, I consulted some of the NYU kids still standing outside of their apartment socializing about which direction they thought my flat would be. One of them conveniently had a map and after debating for a moment about which way North lay, I started walking. It turns out that like in America, the addresses have a logical pattern, with evens on one side of the street and odds on the other. Czechs just don’t have a strict policy on keeping them in line. So, while one side of the street may be low sixties, the other may be high eighties (as it turns out is the case with my block). The disparity can be attributed to the park, which lies on the odd side; so, while even addresses continue to increase, the odd addresses take a multi-block hiatus before resuming at the conclusion of the park.

When I finally arrived home, it was nearly an hour after I’d left the club. Shortly thereafter I fell sound asleep. I slept surprisingly well and woke up on my own accord four hours later for orientation at the Study Center. And with no hangover, I was in significantly better shape than many others – I give my thanks to Jeffrey for teaching me the water bottle and vitamin trick.