haonowshaokao

Thursday
Dennis arrives late at night and goes to bed early.

Friday
Dennis comes to town with me & Gwen, we drink all day. On returning to the hostel certain people take against him without having even spoken to him, though he has behaved himself completely.

Saturday
We drink all day again, but this time with spirits. Then at the Clown & Bard we accidentally offend someone who does not appear to possess a sense of humour. I leave early with Jess, in the midst of it. Dennis is left to keep drinking till 6.

Sunday
Entire day drinking again, and the night. Some people are now actively hostile towards him & he seems to have met a bizarre selection of people. After I have gone to bed he nearly gets into a fight or something and phones Ted to report that he has pissed off Prague.

Monday
I arrive at 4pm to find Dennis wildly drunk in the bar, singing and playing guitar. We eat at the restaurant but he falls asleep on the table. I return after work at 9pm to find him in the packed hostel bar, asleep on a chair with his shirt off.

Tuesday
Dennis is awake but unable to eat or drink for fear of being sick. He is very quiet. After a sip of beer he goes to bed at 10.30.

Wednesday
Partially recovered, he goes home. After a beer.

The Morals Of The Story
1. When in Prague pace yourself on the drinking.
2. Some people really just don’t get the joke.
3. Denzil is a legend.

Every move I make is horrendously difficult. My head is swimming. People on the street scare me. I feel vaguely like vomiting and generally have no appetite.
Tonight I will pass up on drinking. Probably.
With Dennis and Gwen in town and with the hot weather and compulsion to go to beer gardens it was inevitable that I would get into this state. Drinking through it is an option, but not an option for someone who has to work.
Don’t let me say it hasn’t been fun though. Mayhem has ensued. Gwen left this afternoon, very very reluctantly and Dennis has pissed off just about everyone, which has been comedy. I have been staying out past the point where I can get home easily. Last night two trams and one bus took me a mere 35 minutes walk away from my house. Might as well have waited for the metro to start. Tonight is the Roxy, free Mondays.
I feel that it would be nice to have a full write up of the whole weekend here but lots is missing. How did me and Jess get to Namesti Republiky? Did I really have a ten minute conversation with that girl I don’t even recognize? What was it that I said to Jess that was so funny the next day? Many many questions.
What I do remember is that me and Jess slept through our lessons on Friday, and while I may have got away with it her case is a little trickier. As she would say, *yikes*.
I hasten to add to all of this that my life is not normally like this, and next weekend will be subdued, lazy, comprising a lot of games of chess, that sort of thing.

Dennis and Gwen have been here for a day and a half now, so I have been getting down to some serious drinking.
Thursday was the compass launch party, was very very cool and Elijah Wood turned up, which was a bit unexpected. Then much Blind Eye and various bars round town. Am taking a little time out now but back to the drinking in half an hour, methinks.

A restless sleep and a failed lie-in this morning, then I lay around for a bit, listening to the radio.
At 2.45 I was one minute late for the bus, with half an hour until the next one, so I counted down from ten in the vague belief that when I said ‘zero’ it would appear.
It did.
Continuing the luck, I also have some money at last. Fucking cool.

Tired. Still no serious money, but a couple of paid lessons means I have real actual proper food that isn’t rice or pasta. Two more lessons left, then bed.

Broke still, and at home for the duration, though awaiting money which should come through very soon.
Ventured out of the house two times – first in the late-morning drizzle to try the cashpoint (unsuccessfully) then a second time in the mid-afternoon sun down the road to another cashpoint, also unsuccessfully. This time, though, I found three crowns and got a couple of rolls from the supermarket, which I then ate with some rice and the potatoes I bought yesterday. Read for the rest of the day.
Tomorrow is a day for work and payment, then the weekend starts Thursday.

Broke, and with my only lesson canceled, I carried out a few chores and then headed back home to watch a Hungarian film called Hukkle, which was short but fantastic. Martin came back towards the end and told me that we may well be getting another lodger. Which is a pretty good idea, as there is one more spare room.

We woke up to a clear blue day, and wrote off the day to sunbathing. The first day of summer and it’s still May. On the hill in the park a number of other people had had the same idea. I covered up a lot but still managed to burn my feet.
Afterwards I cooked some vegetable curry. Sprinkling dried chillies in with my fingers. Then I touched my face and had to spend 20 mins with it under the bathroom tap. Then I had a piss. Oops.
Crisis over, half an hour later, the food was good and the German-dubbed version of Moulin Rouge wasn’t. We set off to the Clown & Bard for movie night but since they were showing ‘Love, Actually’ we sat on the steps. Michelle got a chair and some scissors & cut Jess’s hair (by request) into a pretty severe fashionable mullet. After twenty minutes of street hairdressing we’d drawn a crowd.
Thankfully the results were more than successful.

Friday night in the Clown & Bard was cool – an old American guy with 21 mouth organs turned up and held an impromptu gig there and then. There seems to be a real scene going on there now – semi-permanent residents have returned. We were tired from being up so late (the weekender’s sleep pattern problem) and had to go home early.
Today has been great, we’ve had quite an adventure all-in-all. After a small lie-in we tried to escape Jess’s flat but found we had lost the key and were locked in. After twenty minutes or so it was found by me in my pocket and we set out.
The tram lines around Biskupcova are being dug up so we walked across the Olsanka cemetery to the Indian shop/cafe near my old house. Jess was impressed, we will be returning there often. Then, on a whim, onto my old house to collect some videos and see Ivana. Irish David accompanied us to the Parukarka Park for a Sunbathe, then we bumped into Johnny, basked in the sun for a few hours and played dice with teenage Czech girls, with white tree-fluff blowing over us.

As the sun was on its way down we went over to Johnny’s house to watch ‘Head’ and lots of Simpsons.
We arrived at the Blind Eye late, and found a birthday party in progress. With food. And cake. And a little too much of something else too.

An actual office lesson draws my laughable ‘working’ week to a close. Now a loose end… I think I’ll start going to some beer gardens for the next few days. Hmm.
The guy two computers away is looking up naked men and arranging to meet them. The guy next to me keeps peering over to look at my screen. Fuck off! Nothing to see here!

PS – one more guest expected soon, this one: