Hockey Sausages
After our hike in Slovakia we hopped on a train to Prague. Although slightly out of our way (our next big destination was Croatia) I had devised a very complicated plan to stop over in Prague for a few days in order to see Jaromír Jágr play hockey.
For those who are not familiar with the name, Jaromír Jágr is one of the best hockey players ever and is from Kladno, Czechia, a town just outside of Prague. He started playing for the Pittsburgh Penguins in 1990 as the first Czech player to be drafted without having to defect to the West first. He continued playing in the NHL until 2018, and finally returned to his home country at the age of 46. If you’ve ever seen an NHL game live, you have some understanding how ludicrous it is that a 46 year old man was still able to play without having every bone in his body broken. Jágr is a particular inspiration for me because at age 37 this means I still have 9 years left to make it to the big leagues. Gordie Howe played until age 52 in the NHL, but that was for the Whalers so it doesn’t really count.
Some Jágr facts:
He always wears the number 68 to commemorate the Prague Spring which occurred in 1968. Both his grandfathers were imprisoned in the 60s and one of them died in 1968 shortly after being released.
Probably connected to his experience growing up in Communist Czechoslovakia, Jágr used to keep a hidden picture of Ronald Reagan in his schoolbooks. Just like any well-adjusted kid.
As a young player in Pittsburgh he had a speeding problem, trading in his Skoda for a Trans-am. Apparently teammates would refuse to carpool with him to practice.
Jágr returned home but did not stop playing hockey. He is owner of his hometown team, the Kladno Knights, and depending on how the season is going and how his old man body is feeling, he will suit up and play. He is now 51 and playing professional hockey with 20 year olds. It boggles the mind, but read this quote from Jágr about how he was able to be such a dominant player even from an early age: “When I was seven years old, I started doing squats. I did 1,000 a day, every day. And when you do that daily—now people work out, but back then nobody really did it—I just skyrocketed.” Again, I’ve got a few years and I can do at least 10 squats, so I’m quite hopeful about my chances of becoming a New York Ranger.
I had to see Jágr play if at all possible, so off to Prague and Kladno we went. After arriving late at night from Slovakia we woke up the next day ready to see some hockey. If you want an authentic local experience in Czechia, go to a hockey game in Kladno. Getting there was interesting. You take a train with no foreigners at all on it, get off at a train station (shack) that barely exists at all, then walk through a forest path to the arena about 20 minutes away. I got a sense this was not a great place to be at night, and I understood why Czechia is the meth capital of Europe. Kladno had a lot going for it back during communism: it was decided it should be an industrial center, so mass housing was erected and factories were running around the clock. After Czechia transitioned to a market economy in the early 90s, competition caused the workers to leave and factories to shut down, and now Kladno feels a lot like a small American city in the rust belt. It has problems, time has passed it by, but it still has Jaromír Jágr, the local hero. You can almost hear “Glory Days” playing in the background as you walk to the small hockey arena, but the drunk guy collapsed on a log in the forest at 3pm ruins the mood a bit.
Once we arrived we were quickly impressed with the sheer amount of sausages and beer for sale outside the arena. We got in, sat down 5 rows aways from the glass (10 dollar tickets), and I kept my eyes peeled for Jágr. To my great disappointment he did not take to the ice but was coaching from behind the bench along with Jakub Voracek, another Kladno hometown hero who played in the NHL. So I still got to see Jágr and also experience an epic beatdown of Kladno by the Prague visiting team. It got a little depressing, but we were able to reinvigorate ourselves in between periods by exiting the arena along with all the Czechs to buy gigantic sausages and beer and breathe in an actual weather system of cigarette smoke. Kladno, it’s authentic.
The forbidden sausage
About 12 hours later, both Laura and I were bedridden with food poisoning. I’m not sure it was because of hockey sausages, but it seems like a good bet. This was an unfortunate development, since Jürgen, our friend from Munich, had arrived that morning to say hi and show us around Prague, a city he often visited. For that day the best we could do was shuffle around the neighborhood for 30 minutes. The next day we were slightly recovered and Jürgen showed us some of his favorite haunts, all of them obviously involving beer. He told us a story of driving into Prague from West Germany right after the country opened up to the West, and somehow getting lost enough to end up in Wenceslas Square in their car. It is now, and was then, a pedestrian only zone. After a few friendly “Entschuldigungs” the young confused Germans were able to extricate themselves from the awkward situation and find some beer. It was great to see Jürgen once more, and we left Prague with a pleasant feeling of food poisoning nausea mixed with a mild Pilsner buzz.
Photo descriptions
Scouting out a hotel with Jürgen
Supposedly the first ever tap of Pilsner Urquell
A church where Czech partisans were eventually killed by Nazis after assasinating Reinhard Heydrich in Operation Anthropoid
Big tower with babies crawling over it
Beer
Dvorak's tombstone
Wenceslas Square
View from the beer garden
More beer (note the Coke as I gave up at this point)
Church converted into, you guessed it, a beer garden
Vienna Sausage
After Prague we took the train to Vienna, another city I wanted to visit again after having my first trip in 2014 ruined by food poisoning. Funny coincidence, that. The most important thing we did in Vienna, and possibly our lives, is that we attended a live interpretive performance of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” at a burlesque venue. We simply wanted to see a burlesque show in Vienna, which seemed like a proper and fun thing to do, and instead we ended up experiencing a fever dream of an old Austrian man talk-singing lyrics while standing stock still for most of the show, his lover/coconspirator popping up from random points on the stage to play saxophone, and a team of black leotard clad dancers writhing around on the floor while a projector showed scenes from the USA civil rights movement as “Money” played in the background. I can’t overemphasize how strange the whole show was.
Was this real?
We had two bottles of champagne to get through it, got lost walking home, and collapsed. My dreams that night were at about the same level of weirdness of the show we had just seen, which is to say, very weird.
Cevapi (Croatian Sausage)
We recovered from having our minds blown in Vienna and boarded a 16 hour night train from Vienna to Split, Croatia. If you’ve ever wondered if the constant rocking of a train would help you go to sleep, I can tell you it does not. But going to sleep in Central Europe and awakening with the Mediterranean coast outside your window is quite a treat.
Breakfast at sunrise on the train
Upon arrival in Split we promptly took a ferry to the nearby island of Brač and settled into a week of Adriatic relaxation. I won’t lie, we put aside our typical routine of learning the history of a place and just enjoyed the beach, the meat, and the wine. There was some foreshadowing of things to come on our next leg in Bosnia, but at the time it meant very little to us. Large Croatian flags billowing in the wind, a reference to the Siege of Dubrovnik from a local, and a T-shirt on a man riding the ferry that clearly referenced the Balkan conflict, as uncanny as an older American wearing a T-shirt referring to a battle in Vietnam that I did a double-take. Croatia is a country that is proud of its heritage, its natural beauty, and its history, and although I knew it played a huge role in the war that devastated Bosnia, it wasn’t until we were actually in that neighboring country that we started to really understand the complexity of the relationship between Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia.
As Laura will most certainly explain in a future post, it’s a mess. But when you’re on a beach in Croatia with crystal clear water, sipping on wine and trying to figure out if you should grill some sausage that evening or go out to a seafood restaurant (I learned nothing and continued my sausage consumption unabated), you’re not really thinking about war and death and betrayal. There was plenty of time for that after the beach.
All countries are blessed with some mixture of natural beauty, tasty food, or cultural sites. But some countries, like people, are more blessed than others. It’s just a theory of mine, but I think tourists have a very selective memory when visiting a place with a dark history. Throw an idyllic beach at us and give us a delicious meal and we’ll not even consider whether our money is going into the coffers of a corrupt government or if we’re enjoying the fruits of a brutal war won decades ago by a dictator (probably supported by the CIA). But visit a country like Bosnia, which has plenty of nice mountains to be sure, but is several steps below Croatia on the “wow” factor, and the cracks start to show. We’ll ask questions about the corrupt government, the legacy of the war, and wonder why things aren’t perfect. Even domestically this bears out. I have heard plenty of talk about how terrible Florida’s state government is, but that doesn’t stop hordes of New Yorkers from flocking there in the winter. Conversely, I know NYC is seen by some Americans as a far-left hellhole, but the crowds of tourists from the middle of the country don’t seem to have decreased when I pass through Times Square. Offer a human being something shiny and they are often unconcerned about the provenence of that shiny object.
Scenes from Bol
I’ll close on a positive note: Croatia may have a dark past, Florida may be an alligator-infested right-wing circus, and NYC may be an overcrowded cesspit where you’ll be assaulted on the subway, but these places are also iconic destinations for a reason. They tend to overshadow their neighbors (Bosnia, New Jersey, Alabama) but there is a reason for that. They have a lot to offer a visitor. It doesn’t mean you can’t find something amazing in New Jersey, like a delicious pork roll or Bon Jovi, and in fact you should visit New Jersey AND NYC together to compare and contrast them. They go together, even if they have a complicated history and might sometimes wish they weren’t so damn close to one another.
Scenes from Split
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