Glob-a-log

Okay, let’s talk about sex – and more specifically: how you go about ‘getting some’ in Prague.

In the West we’ve become used to the fact that almost all of life has become a political minefield - the dealings between the sexes being no exception to this, alas. In Prague things are more relaxed - and sex is easy. Most Prague women are not insulted if you propose sex. It’s not a big deal there.

That doesn’t mean they will actually sleep with you, of course, but it is safe - and quite normal - to ask. And women will ask the men as freely, if they feel like it.

The following three stories are deplorably autobiographical – but if you actually want to get laid in Prague, they do serve as a kind of instruction manual. A manual in reverse, that is.

1) When a Czech man or woman asks another person in the pub if she or he would like to go for a coffee, what is actually meant is, to put it bluntly, ‘Let’s fuck.’

As one of life’s natural ‘players’ I had picked up on this immediately, of course. (Insert hollow laughter right here…)

So, what actually happened was that, one night, some woman asked me if I wanted to go and have a coffee with her - and I said, ever so politely, ‘No, thanks, I don’t do coffee, but if you have tea…’

Some nanoseconds later she was gone and I was left scratching my head and wondering what the Hell I had said wrong this time round. The barman, when he had recovered from his laughing fit, then was more than willing to explain to me exactly what I had done wrong.

Ah well, one lives and learns…

2) One summer weekend a group of mostly young Czech kids and I were out camping, some two hours of rowing removed from Prague. We’d been drinking and smoking and laughing and singing and kissing a lot, when most of us decided it was time to hit the sleeping-bags. Most of the crowd paired off to have some claustrophobic sleeping-bag sex.

So, I told the girl who was practically sitting in my lap by now to push off to her own sleeping-bag or find someone her own age to play with. (She was all of seventeen or eighteen.)

“You don’t like me?”

“I do like you, but I’m way too old for you.”

“Why?”.

“You’re almost twenty (I exaggerated) and I’m 34. That’s why”.

“I’m eighteen!”

“Right.”

“So what’s your problem?”

“Look, you weren’t even born when Lennon was shot.”

“So?”

“Go find a boyfriend your own age.”

“I already have a boyfriend!”

Of course…

“Look, I just don’t think…”

“Hey, I’m not in love with you. It’s just sex!”

Anyway, in the end I managed to convince her that I would not have sex with her – after I’d formally admitted and agreed with her that I was one crazy foreign bastard for not doing so. No doubt she found a more willing one-night accomplice within seconds. (Leaving me feeling one part virtuous, two parts silly & bemused, with a twist of cheap regret & lust, of course.)

3) A Czech friend once told me that if you saw someone sitting in a bar, whom you would not mind going to bed with, you could simply go over and propose sex – as a way of greeting. My eloquent reaction was something like, ‘Wow.’

After enduring all my variations on the theme, ‘You really mean to say…?!’, my friend finally invited me to try it out on one of the women present.

“No way. I like to communicate with my victims first.” I answered.

So, having declined my friend’s helpful invitation to try and be more Czech about my sex life, we had some more beers and some more Fernets - and then I said, ‘Ah, what the fuck.’ and walked up to a table where three women were being terribly rude to an innocent bottle of wine.

I asked the first woman to look up if she wanted to go home and have coffee with me - and she just said, ‘Sure’, got up, took her jacket from a pile of other winter garments and asked me where I lived.

I immediately stuttered my way through the best Czech I could come up with and told her this whole thing had been my friend’s fault (such a brave and noble heart, that old heart of mine) and that I had not meant to actually take her home with me - ‘…but mind you, I do find you terribly attractive, of course, and it would be an honour to sleep with you… but I did not want to…’

Yup, I made a terrible mess of that one, but she was very kind and understanding about it - and moments later my friend had joined me at the table and after a while the barman joined us with a bottle of Czech champagne (cheap stuff, but good party booze and it gets you where you don’t need to go as fast as the real stuff) and then friend & barman told the women about all the other social mishaps this crazy foreigner (yep, me) was notorious for.

Two hours later the barman closed that bar, so that the six of us could pull a cabbie out of another bar, to take us to yet another bar our barman knew up close. And I ended up going home and having ‘coffee’ with the woman I’d first approached so clumsily, some hours before.

So yes, even I managed to have sex in Prague – but then, everybody does. I once even wanted to make and flog a T-shirt that would read ‘If you can’t get laid in Prague, you’re fucked.’

Anyway, there you go – and as I started saying: when you do find yourself in Prague and want to have sex, just relax, don’t do as I do and you’ll be fine.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 at 20:05 and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.