Motorcycles, Drugs and Beer an Unexpected Journey
The fourth-largest city in the Czech Republic is a place called Plzen and it's not really set up for tourists. This can be seen negatively or positively, depending on how you feel about tourists.The biggest reason to visit, if you are a tourist, is the Pisner Urquell brewery. I won't go too far into the history of the beer here, if you want you can click this link and let Wikipedia tell you all about it. Suffice it to say that Pilsner Urquell is part of a giant brewing conglomerate, like so many beers, and Gambrinus, which I prefer, is brewed in a different brewery on the same property.
The brewery was really the main reason for the trip and it's really close to the train station, so if that is all you want to see it's easy. I wanted to see some of the city and talking about my big reason for going right out of the gate isn't my style.
So, here is the train station. It's the main station, but I'm pretty sure there isn't another one. It is an interesting looking structure to be sure. Incidentally, round-trip train tickets from Prague cost 180kc; more on train tickets later.
The first place I wanted to check out was the city center. The city isn't that big and the center is a short walk from the train station. While heading there we, once again I have my Australian flatmate in tow, took a slight detour and found a monument to the U.S. Army soldiers who liberated Plzen from Nazi occupation on 6 May 1945.
It's a very nice monument, it's not gaudy and it gets straight to the point, "Thank you America!" It's not something you hear very often anymore. Evidently, when the government in the Czech Republic was communist, this liberation is something that wasn't talked about very much. As soon as the regime changed this monument was built.
There is even a convient map in the monument so geographically challanged Americans who make it here can see the route Patton took. The fact that the city was liberated by elements of Patton's Third Army also explains the Patton Museum that is in the town. Sadly, on this trip I didn't make it to that museum, but it's a good reason to go back.
From the army monument it is a short walk to Namesti Republiky or Republic Square. I think every Czech town has a Namesti Republiky. It's a nice town square with a big church in the middle, this one happens to be St. Bartholomew's Cathedral.
It's really your standard cathedral-in-a-town-center fare. We didn't go inside, but perhaps on the next trip. Besides it's wan't anywhere close to noon and what fun would climbing the bell tower be if I couldn't deafen the Aussie with another cacophonous trip to the top. Also, we were distracted by the more impressive magistrate courthouse facing the church. Aside from the fact that it was beautiful, it was also open -- on a Saturday. It wasn't too long before we figured out why.
Evidently, this is the place to go get married. Sure in the US people get married at the courthouse all the time, but I've never seen a whole wedding party pull up to a courthouse in decorated cars. There were guests, as you can see in the photo, and the whole bit. This was pretty funny considering the church, where you might think a wedding usually takes place, is literally 100 meters away from the courthouse.
The date on the courthouse says 1558 and I have no reason to doubt it. Look at the paintings on it. This photo just can't do them justice, they are striking.
Just a few doors down from the courthouse are some wedding shops and a hairdresser. Talk about your one-stop-shopping. You can roll into Namesti Republiky, get your hair did, pick up a dress and either get hitched in the courthouse or the church then file your wedding license all in the same place. WalMart has nothing on this.
From Namesti Republiky we went to find some food. Fortunately, there are plenty of restaurants nearby. I have a friend who grew up in Plzen and he suggested a few places, fortunately we stumbled past one while looking around. It was good and inexpensive, less than Prague prices anyway. This was where we discovered that Pilsner Urquell tastes much better closer to home.
There are many brands of beers in the Czech Republic, but really just two types. As far as brands go, I am not a huge fan of Pilsner Urquell. Oh and those two types are light and black (světly and černý in local parlance). Light is not what you think though, it isn't low calorie it's just not dark. Either way, Pilsner doesn't travel well. It's skunky as all get out in the states. It is a lot better in the Czech Republic, but it's a little too hopy for my tastes. Not off-puttingly so but if I have a choice I'll drink something else, Kozel černý mainly.
After lunch we wandered on over to the brewery just in time to miss the 12:45 English tour. Check the website for tour times. I was all good though because a group of motorcycle enthusiasts had ridden to the brewery and parked out front. There were quite a few cafe racers, which I like and also happen to be quite the in thing these days.
What you see above is the front gate to the brewery complex. The built it to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the brew. It's kind of like the Brandenburg Gate of beer I suppose. Below are some of those cafe racers.
As you can see there were some Suzukis, Ducatis and BMWs. I even saw something called a JAWA, but I didn't take a photo of it because I didn't like the angle and wasn't sure what it was. It's a Czech-made bike and while weird looking, it's not really very inspiring.
The bikes were cool and the gift shop was fairly unimpressive. There is a Pilsner Urquell gift shop in Prague with similar prices, so it wasn't worth buying anything. Besides, I don't really have a need for a beer branded golf bag. There were however some steins that were very cool and I might have to pick one up for my Uncle. The great thing about the gift shop is that there is a beer hall downstairs, shocking I know. As we had time for a few beers before the next tour, we imbibed.
About five minutes before we missed the 14:15 tour we realized it was time to go. Beer is distracting, especially when it is unpasteurized, super fresh and cheap. We chugged our suds and made for the visitor's center, a whopping 25 meters away. We arrived in plenty of time to plunk down the 200kc each for the tour, and extra 100kc for me because I bought a photo pass. I know, I know I could have just not bought the photo pass and taken pictures anyway, but my camera is rather large and difficult to hide and it sounds like a car with ignition-timing problems that keeps running after you shut it off. I didn't want to get in trouble, so I forked it over. The fee only gets you a tour of one brewery, the Gambrinus tour is another 200kc. Next time, even though I'm pretty sure it's similar.
We met our guide, boarded a bus with about 15 other people and went to the bottling facility.
It's a bunch of squeaky-clean beer bottles. I did notice some things right away. I will preface this by saying the only other time I have been in a brewery that produces beer on such a massive scale was in Colorado at the Coors brewery. The Coors facility does things quite a bit differntly and even though it was a while ago I remember the differences. As soon as we walked into the observation area of the bottling facility it was very humid. They wash the bottles and fill them in the same place. Coors is brewed cold, filtered cold and shipped cold -- it's kinda their thing. I'm even fairly certain the refigerated railroad car was invented by Coors so they could ship it farther and still keep it cold.
I don't think this guy is named either Laverne or Shirley but he is working the quality-control section of the line before the bottles go into the filling machine. Down at the bottom is a soldier who didn't pass muster presumably heading off for another shower.
As far as I could gather from our guide the beer is "filterized" in this facility too, but we didn't get to see any filters.
The brewing takes place in another building and we took the bus over there. We saw the old brewhouse and the new one. They looked a lot alike. There were also some interesting interactive displays where we were told we could do whatever we wanted. It was basically smelling hops, eating barley and splashing water on your friends. There was some yeast in a test tube though, we didn't get to touch that.
These are some copper kettles in the old part of the brewhouse. Not much to say here.
The new brewhouse uses stainless kettles now and they are a bit bigger than the copper ones. I think they still use some copper kettles for part of the process. The wort is cooked three times, so they need a lot of crockery.
We got to watch a movie about the history of the beer. It was a bit of a dog-and-pony show and I felt bad for Brewmaster Vaclav who was featured about every 30 seconds. He didn't look super thrilled to not be brewing beer.
You can look in these microscope things and see yeast doing its thing, which is eating sugar and pissing alcohol. Really, it's not so appetizing when you consider beer is tarted-up yeast urine. Nope, I'm wrong, it's still appetizing And check out the hand-model barley action from my Australian partner in crime. I think he is on the wrong career path.
Another interesting fact about the brewery that I forgot to mention is that it houses the largest elevator in the Czech Republic. I took a photo from it, but not of it. It only took us one floor, which was kind of disappointing.
The best part of the tour was the tour of the cellars. They were a bit cold and kind of dark and the floor, and walls, were pretty wet but it was very cool.
They ferment the beer in these giant open barrels. You can see the date the beer was placed in the barrel and the temperature also how many times the barrel has been used. They will use a barrel six times before they either clean it or destroy it, I'm not sure on that. Either the guide didn't say or I forgot.
After it's fermented and it has that nice white foam on top it is transferred to a closed barrel where it is aged. That pump thing on the floor to the left is what they use to move the beer.
There is even a nice man who pours you a fresh, unpasteurized and "unfiltrated" beer from these barrels.
After the tour was over, it takes about an hour and a half but seems much quicker, it was time to head back to the gift shop/beer hall and have a few more beers. Duh.
We only had a few beers and were getting hungry again. Unfortunately the restaurant portion of the beer hall had been completely reserved and getting food there wasn't going to happen.
This is just a random photo of the old brewery I liked. It serves as a good transition point for the search for food and the trip starting to get a touch surreal.
We left the brewery after those beers and went in to town to find food. We didn't really see anywhere we liked until we came to a McDonalds. Fortunately, there was a Mexican place across the street we went there. I don't remember where it was, but it is across the street from the McDonalds. It is the best Mexican food I've had in this country.
It was not seasoned perfectly, but it was actually spicy and the tomatillo salsa that came with it was actually pretty good. We of course had beers with our burritos. I'm fairly certain that there is an international law prohibiting the consumption of Mexican food without beer.
We walked back across the river to the train station dodging Gypsies and syringes, it's not the best neighborhood near the train station, and made it with plenty of time to catch our train leaving at 19:00. We even figured we had so much time that we would buy a couple more beers for the ride home. I'm not sure you're allowed to drink beer on the train, but I've never been told no and I'm not blatant about it or belligerent so I figure it's okay. We got to the platform, witch was suspiciously devoid of anything looking like a train, and took a seat. I assumed that it was coming from Cheb and would just roll up and move on. It turns out I missed the A4-sized paper changing platform 1 to the back of the terminal, so we missed the train.
I didn't think this was too much of a problem, because as far as I could tell our tickets were valid for 24 hours. I bought them online and printed them out. At the top of the ticket it clearly showed the ticket as being valid for the whole day. I took this to mean any train. I figured it was no big deal, there would be another train in an hour.
We left the platform and went to sit outside the station and wait, and maybe drink a beer. On our way out of the station I noticed there was a butcher truck. You might be thinking to yourself, "it was a roach coach with a deli theme." You would be wrong. This was a full-on butcher truck with slabs of meat and cheese on display. Even after the burrito I was up for a snack so I saw something that looked interesting and ordered 100 grams of it for us to share. It was ham with cheese and some other meat in the middle. The lady working the truck sliced off 100g of the stuff, wrapped it in butcher paper and everything was good to go. We walked over to the bus stop to sit down and eat and drink.
We ate this thing and it was really good, drank one of our two beers each and watched the man across the parking lot sleeping in a doorway shift his position a few times. It was a while before he moved the first time and we were a bit curious to know if he was actually alive. When it was about 25 minutes before eight we decided to find the right platform and not miss the next train.
As we made our way to the concourse and were trying to see which platform we were supposed to get to I was accosted by some drunk guy with a few of his friends and a 1.5 liter bottle of Gambrinus in tow. He asked me something in Czech and I replied that I didn't understand Czech. Turn out he didn't understand Czech either because he was Slovak. Although he introduced himself as being Kenyan. I spoke with this guy, roughly I'd hardly call it a conversation, for nearly 15 minutes about pretty much nothing. Whatever we were talking about there was cause for him to show me his Slovak national identification card. If I were to guess I think we were talking about how much better Slovaks are than Czechs. He did say that Slovaks were nicer and more generous. This conversation took too long and we were once again in danger of missing a train. At one point the guy's friends became so upset with him that they took his beer from him and threw it away.
As I was trying to extricate myself from the conversation the random Slovak guy finally noticed my taciturn Australian friend. "Where are you from?" The requisite reply of "Australia" was met with a very interesting response.
"Oh, here I have for you," he exclaimed and started digging in his bag. He withdrew a small bag of very potent smelling marijuana. As everyone knows, Aussies are internationally renown notoriously fierce stoners. We tried to decline this offer while he fumbled with his stash, but it was to no avail.
"Is gift. No money. Take it." It's rude to decline a gift so we accepted the weed and headed off in the direction of the wrong platform, again.
Fortunately there was a conductor there who pointed us in the right direction and we made the correct train with two minutes to spare. We even found a compartment with just one person in it straight away. No problem; all we had to do now was dispose the the ganja, because it was so pungent that I could smell it despite the fact that it was in my friend's pocket six feet away, get our tickets checked and relax with our final beers on the easy ride home.
Well, the conductor didn't like the printout of the ticket I bought online. He was having problems scanning it and God forbid he enter the number into his machine by hand. The conductor on the first train didn't have any issues with my similarly poorly printed outward ticket. I was scolded for having a bad print out and told that he would not be so nice to me next time and kick me off the train, or something. Because I'm going to be taking that train again within the time period of the conductors memory. After closer inspection of the ticket, there were seat reservations on it, so it might have been a good thing the ticket wasn't scannable.
After the ticket fiasco our compartment mate introduced himself. This guy is the Czech equivalent of the American you never want to sit next to on an airplane. He wanted to have a chat, but he didn't speak English. He did however speak some German and some Spanish. My German is rudimentary so I did the best I could, but my Aussie friend got the worst of it. He did apologize for the conductor though and explained that he was a Schwanzkopf.
This guy wanted to know what we thought of the beer, probably because we were drinking. Then he wanted to know what we thought of Czech girls, we didn't have any of those with us. Then, once he found out I was American he wanted to know what I thought about Obama. He really didn't believe that I was American and I had to prove it with my passport.
Then my Aussie friend left for the bathroom and it was my turn to chat in Spanish. The train ride is about and hour and a half. Thankfully our chopsy cabin mate got off at Smichov leaving us with 15 minutes of peace.
