As a non-smoker, I actually don't care about smoke in pubs. I don't go out that often but when I do I don't mind a properly ventilated but slightly smokey pub.
I remember when I first came here everything was shockingly different from how it was in the USA. Fashion, the food people ate, the fact that in a crowd of humans there was real body odor; mullets were still prevalent and proudly worn, due to the popularity of ice hockey player/superstar Jaromir Jagr, while the grunge era in the early nineties had ruthlessly put that hairstyle to death as far back as the early nineties in the USA. My first boss, Lenka came to work wearing THICK wollen socks with sandals...Wow! My jaw dropped.
There were still some holdover pubs from the old days that were completely devoid of mood lighting or decoration: just a white floor with basic tables and chairs, no pictures, no music no frills; just a bar and a pool table or a fussball table. Dudes listened to old-school heavy metal like Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath and the beautiful women listened to Abba and disco.
You'd go to the swimming pools and all the men wore speedos...regardless of fitness or aesthetic considerations.
You'd go to the disco and see these delightfully cheesy guys dancing with each other with joyous abandon; in the USA they'd either be being gay or deliberately provocative. Here it was just FUN.
Cars drove way too fast down the road and if a kid climbed a tree and happened to fall out of it, his parents didn't threaten to sue. Corporate visitors to local companies were cheerfully chaperoned to pubs and even brothels and it was all appropriate: the Germans came here for that kind of thing and looked forward to it.
People watched ancient shows from the seventies and eighties; Columbo and M*A*S*H were all the rage in 2003.
And all this was a decade after the Revolution, when things were really nuts. I just caught the tail end of it all(which was, in fact, why I came when I came: when I heard that the Czech Republic had voted to join the EU in 2003 I instinctively knew that something was going to be lost.
It wasn't all roses, of course.Hookers lined the roads of the German/Czech borders; sexual harassment was legal and labor rights were often abused.
But the thing is it's different. It's all respectable now. Or at least a little more so. There was something charmingly unironic and uncool about Central Europe that is fast disappearing. Czech people chortle about the socks-n-sandals thing like everybody else in the Western world; people are more perfumed and groomed; there is hardly a mullet to be seen. Nowadays everybody all over the world watches Game of Thrones on Sunday or MOnday evening and talks about it all over the place.
The culture, which was once a perfect balance between the free chaos of the East and the ordered glossy over-regulated West has gone all but completely German. It's been ordered all to fuck and back. The one hold out, besides the politics and dodgy roads in some parts of the country, is the gloriously unkempt look of the public spaces. I expect that to change too. Of course if the EU/NATO fails, which is looking more and more possible and the Czech Republic decides to re-enter the Russian orbit rather than the German orbit, things will go back again, I guess. But there was something perfectly balanced about things then. It's all frightfully Western now.
So when I hear about the ban on smoking that the Czech Parliament voted in today, one of the last countries in Europe to do so I can't help but feel a little nostalgic. I don't really care one way or the other to be honest.
Jana, who has never smoked doesn't like it either; she prefers that pubs be non-smoking out of choice; and in the light of the new EET regulation, which the common person has been totally fooled into thinking will be good for the country when really it will only be good for Agrofert and Ondrej Babis, that there are just too many regulations and blanket bans on things nowadays.
But you know, as for me, the issue is more personal and deeper: it's simply that I kind of like my foreign countries to be...y'know, foreign.
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