Miminka-Babies

Sam and I awoke at noon confused as to why we had both slept in our shoes.  

After showers and coffees, we made our way to Prague's famous TV Tower.  Despite being isolated away from the Old Town, the TV Tower is by far the tallest building in the city.  We approached the gray structure and became confused like we had woken up with our shoes on or something.

"Are those babies?"  Sam asked me, indicating toward the giant, naked, black, sculpted infants that seemed to be crawling up and down the tower.  They had no faces.  Rainwater dripped from their bald heads and asses and assaulted our cameras.

We paid for admission tickets with free money from Yellow Tooth, and flew up the elevator shaft at four meters per second to reach the observation deck, one hundred meters off the ground.  The view spanned every inch of the city of a thousand spires, tiled rooftops of many colors penetrated the gray fog.

I hoped an information pamphlet would shed some light on the babies, but alas,

"The architecture of this unique project was accentuated with a bizarre yet thought provoking series of huge black crawling infants which now adorn the facia of the magnificent tower adding to its mystery when shrouded in blue and red lights during the hours of darkness."

We descended and made our way to the national museum at the apex of Wenceslas Square.  The building itself is grand, covered in detailed sculpture and columns, it's lit in a way to make a person feel small.  We wandered through different exhibits, which were impressive, but often missing key information,

One caption would begin, "Before the war..." while the next would start with, "Years after the war," causing me to wonder what could have possibly taken place in between.  The entire visit became worth it when I saw the original documents from the 1938 Munich Agreement, or as the Czech's call it, the Munich Dictate, or the Munich Betrayal.  No Czechoslovakian delegation was invited to a conference during which 3.5 million of the country's citizens and 70% of its iron, steel, and electrical facilities were handed over to Hitler and his cohorts.

Britain's Neville Chamberlain decided to appease the Nazi's in hopes of avoiding a second world war, but by giving away the Sudetenland, he only delayed the inevitable.  This embarassing moment in Western history has become a bad precedent, a lesson in f what not to do for American foreign policy makers ever since, "No More Munichs."

Sam and I returned to the hostel with vodka and Red Bull, and got dressed up for Central Europe's largest club, impossible to tell, if not for giant blue neon letters announcing this very fact on the side of Karlovy Lozne.

We entered after paying the equivalent of a six-dollar cover and walking through metal detectors, only to be hand frisked by Neanderthal-like security guards on the other side.  I checked my coat in the lobby with a woman who asked me my name.  She wrote nothing down, nor did she had me any sort of ticket.  I assumed she had a photographic memory.

Sam and I wandered around the club's five paters (levels) and explored the various dance floors, each uniquely decorated and featuring a different type of American pop music.

Things escalated quickly, and after a number of cheap cocktails, we soon found ourselves dancing on either side of an old Asian woman, while her handlebar-mustached husband glared at us from a nearby bench.

Later we met a Turkish guy who might still be Sam's favorite person on Earth, as well as a depressed Russian who complained about the herpes on his face and apologized repeatedly for his "small" English.  We also met a sweet Czech bartender who loved Sam and I and repeatedly encouraged us to continue dancing with Yoko Ono.  I even think I caught her husband smiling once out of the corner of my eye.

When we crawled out of the club around five a.m. after receiving cheek kisses from Yoko, I had my jacket in hand and no longer questioned the coat-check girl's memory.