The people of Praha like Št’astný Nový Rok (happy new year in Czech)

It is new year’s eve and we are wondering what to do. I had been asking Hanka what she thought we should do, as she is in many ways my guide at this point. After I am not sure, and I don’t know, and no answer a couple of times, we end up on 31 December with no real plan. She and her friends, when she lived here 5 years ago, would go to some night club and party all night there. The night clubs here stay open until somewhere between four and six in the morning. Wow, sounds like a long night. I am not sure that I want to stay in a smoky night club that long, but it is no matter as you must purchase your tickets for admission one month in advance.

So on the morning of 31 December, I am presented with a list of options for our evening. They are: 1) Go to Hanka’s sister Petra’s house; 2) Meet two of her friends and celebrate at their house or; 3) Hang out here at the flat. OK, let’s look at these options. 1) Go to Petra’s house: Petra and her husband Jarda are nice people and they live in a nice house with a television. TV is cool (friend, mother, secret lover). That would be OK but fairly uneventful. I am in a new place and I would like to see something different. Besides, I would rather not see the Czech equivalent of Dick Clark’s old ass doing the Czech “new years rockin’(suckin’) eve”. I have seen some of these Czech variety shows and they are like really bad memories of horrible 70’s TV. No joke, Donny and Marie Osmond, KC and The Sunshine Band, Hee-haw, and a little Solid Gold just for color, all in a nice Lawrence Welk format. What is worse is that pretty much no one is actually singing on these shows, it is all a voice-over. And lastly in this little sidebar, they like to remake all of the worst of our music so that they can numb the minds of their people too; 2) Meet two of Hanka’s friends and celebrate at their house: Hanka’s friends (a married couple) are very nice. The husband, Martín, speaks a little, and I mean little, English. His wife, Lucie, as far as I can tell, speaks none except maybe ‘hi’. Speaking of ‘hi’ Hanka’s sister always says ‘hi’ to me when I am leaving. It is weird. In this country, they use Čau (pronounced chow) and Ahoj (ahoy) for their basic informal greetings. They both mean hello and goodbye, so they are basically interchangeable. Sometimes they are throwing around ‘Ahoj’ and ‘Čau’ together and repeating them three and four times as if no one heard them. It is kind of humorous. Anyway, Martín works on an ambulance and pulls twelve hour shifts from 7 AM to 7 PM. According to Hanka, he will not want to stay up late as he must wake at 6:30 the next morning. That and the fact that it will probably be like being at Petra’s place sounds, once again, just ok; 3) Hang out here at the flat: Well, this would be nice and all except for 2 reasons: i) We have been here absolutely too much as the weather in Praha in the winter basically sucks and; ii) You know, the whole Dick Clark thing. The options here are not that great. My enthusiasm has pretty much hit bottom at this point. So finally, I start to ask what else is going on here for new years. I mean, come on, this is a big city, there must be more to do than the options presented to me.

After a round of several questions, I find out that people gather in the town squares (náměstí) that are all over the place. The two largest gatherings are held in two of the most well known náměstí and are named Václavské and Staroměstské. These náměstí are right in the center of the city. Hanka says that they are crazy, packed with people under the influence, and said people are throwing fire everywhere. Let’s see, madness and people everywhere throwing fire. She then says that it is always just a mess and everyone is drunk and you must be careful of the fire etc… I have have only three questions for Hanka at this point: 1) Why the hell was I not informed of this in the first place?; 2) What time do we need to be there to catch the action? And; 3) Where, in the flat, are the rags, empty bottles and gasoline kept? Hanka, surprised at my enthusiasm to attend such a debotched and depraved event decides to call her friends and see if they would like to go with us. Her friends agree to meet us at the Muzeum station on the zelený krtek (zelený = green; krtek = mole (slang for metro or subway)).

We exit the subway train to the smog and faint reports of what appears to be some kind of fireworks. We ascend the moving staircase to the common hall from the various entrances to the metro. What we are hearing at this point is not the sound of simple fireworks. It sounds like a war zone just up the steps from where we are. The resounding boom that echoes through this hallway is rendering me deaf (more so than I already am) and shaking my teeth loose.

We emerge from the ground to find ourselves in the middle of what appears to be total chaos. People are everywhere. There are people in the center of Václavské náměstí firing off any and every different kind firework you can imagine. One thing is for sure, they DO NOT have the same regulations on fireworks here as they do in the states. The bottle rockets are nearly professional grade. The various sparkling fireworks are enormous. And, what amazed me, the firecrackers do not crack, they boom. These things are loud, really, really, really loud (The first one that went off near me (20 meters away) caused a log cabin to form in my drawers). Add to that the fact that everything is made from stone and concrete here and you have a serious attention getting, yet deafening experience. I quickly realize that Hanka forgot to put the ‘works’ at the end of the word fire when she described the activities here. I am told to pay attention because everyone else is not. Well, that was already my plan as due to the sounds here, it is now time for survival mode. While looking for a bunker in which to hide, I found myself wondering if this is what people felt like in a true war zone. The only thing keeping away the true war zone look was that people are walking and standing around, not screaming and running for their lives. The US government would never allow this to happen. This is beautiful. There is an immense lack of safety everywhere. One of the nice things about this place is people are held accountable for their actions so much more than the states. The cops don’t care what is going on as long as no one is getting murdered or taking a leak in public. It is refreshing to see this. So, people are firing off these things as if they could never exhaust their supply. It is only 10:30. What do these people do, save up an entire years wages for this? That would be enthusiasm similar to that of the redneck for the Kentucky Derby. This is cool.

We move on to Staroměstské náměstí to check out the scene there. It is a little more in control here. There is a band playing some Czech songs getting the crowd pumped, a load of people, food vendors, a big, old ass church and Orloj. Orloj is an astronomical clock made beneath a clock tower that attracts hundreds of people each hour to watch it chime. It is old. Every hour, a mechanical skeleton turns over an hour glass in its’ hand and dances while little doors open above the clock and figurines parade in front of them. Nothing too exciting or impressive about this except the mechanics of this thing are only about 510 years old! Columbus had not yet sailed when this thing was started.

Our next stop is the Karlův Most (Charles Bridge). This is cool. There are people all over the bridge walking, singing, lighting fireworks (not so much here) and just hanging out. There is this really calm and mellow feeling here. I take a moment and think about how people have been doing this here on this bridge (sans the fireworks) for roughly 600 years. We hang out here for a little while and decide to ring(explode) in the new year from a park on the other side of the river. The park is a cool place to watch over the activities on the other side of the river. All of the firework activity on the other side of the river is set behind a row of really old buildings. This makes for a really cool view.

We had no official countdown to the new year so we just used our watches. What was neat to see was that when the rest of the city hit midnight, the fireworks were going off out of control. What we experienced when we first arrived paled in comparison to what was happening now. Cool to watch. All of the fireworks going off and not one of them was fired by a professional. The professional show happened on Jan 1st. Now this is not to say that I can even compare this to a spectacle like the one seen at thunder over Louisville for the Derby festival. That one is riddiculously large. After about 10 or 15 minutes of what was going on here I could barely see the row of buildings on the other side of the river. This did, however, remind me of all of the smoke from Thunder.

So, with the new year here, we head to the krtek for a ride home. On our way home, the line stops at the two busiest stations: Můstek and Muzeum. The train fills up at můstek. It is packed. On to museum to find the same amount of people waiting as are already on the train. Damn, sardines and shit. I have no idea how all of those waiting got on but they made it happen. I wanted to release a silent and really stinky bit of flatulence and watch all of the people contort their faces in misery and look around to see if they could figure out who it was but alas, I had no fireworks of my own. If only I had cabbage and beans for dinner…