Let them eat chleb...

Imagine you are hungry.

Not a little hungry, but superdyduper hungry.  The kind of hunger you might get if you just climbed a billion stairs to see some famous castle in the middle of Bohemia.  And that you are with your friends and their kids and dogs and that you are with your family (minus the dog cause she isn't even in the country yet).  And that everyone is hungry and tired and just a little cold cause apparently summer ends in July and this is clearly August. 

Anyway, what would you do?  

Well, like us I think that you would head to the only restaurace that you can find - at the bottom of the hill near the castle. And naturally so would everyone else who has made the trek to the same famous castle that you are sure has a name but you don't know what it is.

And, like us, since you would be the only non-Czechs in the very busy restaurace you would be ignored until everyone else served by the one waiter dude who happens to be more than a little crusty on this particular winter Saturday in August.

And so we sit.  And wait.   And listen to the kids whine about how hungry they are and that they are going DIE at any moment cause they haven't eaten for 3 hours and that there is a McDonalds on the outskirts of Prague that we could get to in just over an hour if we left now.   (The McDonalds thing actually makes sense given how long we've been waiting, but we are on our first Czech adventure for the weekend and damn it, we will eat Czech food.)  

So while we wait, we study the menu which is all in czech.  Between us, we recognize 4 words:  chleb, kureci, Coca and Cola.  It is settled then; we will all have bread and chicken and Coca Cola for our meal.  Except for Caroline who has spotted the Czech word for Fanta.  There are worse meals than bread and chicken and I'm sure it won't kill us.   And so we order 8 chicken somthings and a hundred litres of Coke.    

In the meantime, because my Czech bathtowel dance has been so successful in the past, I take it upon myself to order enough chleb for the table.  I change up the dance to replace the rubbing of my arms in a drying motion with a pointing at the menu and hugging the whole table to ensure we get enough chleb for everyone.  Crusty waiter dude can't believe what he is witnessing and the look on his face says it all.  He has obviously never learned the dialect of Czech that I speak/dance/mime.   

Turns out that crusty waiter dude wasn't staring at me cause my Czech is a little suspect.  He can't believe I ordered what I just ordered.  The chleb part was right but apparently I should have paid more attention to the 6 words after that. I now know that they stood for (in no particular order):  vile, disgusting, horrid, bad and finally 'don't do it'.

What we ended up with was 8 pieces of rye bread covered in a thick layer of pork lard topped with breaded nuggets of cold pork fat, topped with red onion. I don't ever remember wanting to spit something out in a restarace before, but this, this, was totally overwhelmingly vile.  You know the saying 'going to the dogs?'. That is exactly where this stuff went to.  Frodo and Lucky loved their impromptu meal and we didn't have to eat it. Win-win.