Czech This Out

I've got a soft spot for Prague, it's the very first city I backpacked in, the first city I hostelled in. Back before travellercliche. Back at the start of the internet travel age. So long ago that Prague isn't even in the Czech Republic anymore. Well Czechia.

So I went back. But this time it was a stag do so the wide-eyed wonder of my more innocent years was substantially more red-eyed.

And no-one wants to hear about a stag do. The things that seemed hilarious at the time (the taxodermy tiger, Edgerley Edge, goulash in bread, the Nationwide text, the koala bar, the sinister accordianist, the 80s cafe, and a coffee, etc) will at best seem like cliquey in-jokes. So I shall gloss over that as much as possible and leave you with two recommendations. One for the best bar, one for the best cafe. And by best I mean weirdest, obviously.

Alchemy was a bar that seemed to base itself on Knightmare. Or a nightmare. There was a point in the evening when a cloaked figure in a plague mask carried a box of smoke to the table next door and presented them with a tarot card. You don't get that in Wetherspoons. Often. 

If you find yourself in that bit of Prague between the Old and New Towns follow the chalk signs to breakfast and you too might find yourself in Anicaffe. It's a chintz-lined cafe-cum-spa run by a lady who oozes personality but never seems to be entirely sure where she is or what she's doing. The food was good. Everything else was bonkers. Try and find it.

After All This Time?

I went to that there Harry Potter Studio Tour (first time to Watford - box tick). I took my mum for mothers' day, it seemed to be a popular mother-son destination, although I suspect we were above the expected demographic. 

I really liked it. Is it because Harry Potter is a guilty pleasure? Not really, a. I'm pretty blatant (I came third in a Harry Potter pub quiz a couple of weeks back) and b. I think it was more the scale of it than the HarryPotteriness. I really hadn't appreciated the amount of detail in the films. Five hundred handwritten-and-aged labels on bottles just in the back drop of the potions room. That's ridiculous right? A real chocolate phoenix as a table display in the background? And then there was all the things they made that they couldn't really use because CGI was better - a massive animatronic hippogriff for example. So much detail. It gave me a whole new respect for people who have to recreate worlds. 

Not blogged for a while. Do you wanna hear about the other culture I've done? Not really? Tough, telling you anyway. 

A lot of the gigs that I've been to over the last few years have been legacy gigs; bands I liked back in the day celebrating twenty years since their hayday. I assumed that the David Devant and His Spirit Wife gig would be the same. It wasn't they mainly played new stuff. What? 

Post Modern Jukebox on the other hand were a very different, crowd-pleasing beast. (You've not heard of them? They're worth a YouTube.) I did get slightly disconcerted as it seemed like the name had been franchised out, presumably so that you can have a bunch of PMJs touring at the same time. Is that really cynical? M'eh. Who cares. They were a lot of fun. 

Talking of postmodern jukeboxes, also saw Girl from the North Country. The Dylan not-quite-jukebox-musical that people seem to be raving about. I'll let you listen to their raves instead of mine...

Beer, Whine and Spirits

Well that last couple of weeks has been full of alcohol.

Beer:
I'm still not certain what I make of beer festivals, I think I'm becoming less cynical of them - is that an age thing? Am I approaching the age where I start appreciating the beers enough to stand in a church full of BO and wet dog smell on a rainy afternoon? Perish the thought.

Wine:
In house wine tasting? That sounds sophisticated, right? Turns out it's just someone trying to get you drunk enough that you think £100 for six bottles of wine is good value. Still, we got to pretend we were grown ups and use words like bouquet and depth and earthy.

Spirits:
And ginfestival. This was better than I feared it might be. I've never been one for drinking a neat gin, so had visions of spending the night making this face. Sorry that doesn't come across well typed - you're gonna have to use your imagination. But even in the sample bit they gave tiny splashes of tonic, which was nice.

Turns out I actually learned a stuff too. I now know my Navy Strength from my Old Tom. I now know that if you're going to drink wasabi flavoured gin then use ginger ale as a mixer. And most of all I know that if you are gping to drink gin neat then drink Brockman's. Turns out it doesn't make you make the face...

Verdant Mountain

So Monteverde is a cloud forest. Like a rainforest only inside a cloud, which means you get perpetual horizontal drizzle. Rubbish for al fresco reading but great for orchids. There are some ridiculous orchids here; I saw one that was so small a hummingbird's tongue would have smothered it.

So yeah, saw some more of that nature: Kill Bill toucan (sic), howler monkeys, agoutis and enough makes of hummingbird to fill a baguette. Got a bit more of a sloth fix, saw a two-fingered sloth (sic)

curled up in a slothball, almost touching distance from the side of the road, then got to see it slothing a few hours later. They are peculiar animals.

Stopped for lunch at one of those cafes set up for tourists - nothing Costa Rican on the menu, but a suitably fruity bird table outside. There was a patio of people waiting for the motmots and toucanets to come down from the trees, only to see two capuchin monkeys pillage the tables and make off with a fruity bounty. For the record toucanets are brilliant, they look like a disdainful, furry melon with a beak.

It feels a bit ungrateful to whine when I saw so much of that nature, but I'm going to anyway. I didn't see any frogs. Not one. I checked lilypads and bromeliads and the closest I came was a cane toad. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate a cane toad as much as the next man - they are a no nonsense kind of animal - but they aren't the colourful frogs that the postcards promised.

Bromeliad

Bromeliad is a word that I didn't know four days ago, but am now using with gay abandon. Ever since noticing out-of-place pineapple heads on a massive guanacaste tree a couple of days back, I've been looking at trees a bit more closely. I was aware that in the tropics trees were their own ecosystem: like a simpleton I'd assumed that this meant the big trees - those trees which reached all the way up to the canopy. Now that I've used my eyes, it turns out that it's all trees; that a privet hedge will be spotted with epiphyte bromeliads; that an orchid will be growing out of a croton's armpit.

Anyway, I'm on the slopes of the Arenal Volcano and it feels like Costa Rica proper. No offence to the cities from the last post or the towns from the journey (Sarchi for oxcarts; Zarcero for bushes - I know you don't care either, it just feels bad to expunge whole towns from the holiday), but this is more what I came for.

Some nature that I've seen so far:
1. A mummy and baby sloth having a scratch at the side of the road.
2. A coral snake wriggling across a pond and into a field.
3. A toucan, singing for us as we soaked in hot springs.
4. A caiman, getting snappy because we were too close to her babies.
5. Two iguanas having a cuddle.
6. An absolute deli-worth of colourful songbirds hanging out on a table round the back of a restaurant.
7. A cane toad.

All in all, well Costa Rica.

The Way to San Jose

I'm in Costa Rica. I've eaten rice and black beans and tortillas and I've seen a yellow bird and a bird with an orange head and a sparrow with a quiff, so it's sort of what I expected.

So far I've just been in the Central Valley - the bit where everyone lives - which is squidged between a mountain range where they have lots of volcanoes and a mountain range where they have lots of earthquakes. Consequently it's been all about the cities. I've whistlestopped both Cartago, the old capital, and San Jose, the current capital. Neither city would've great for Spiderman. Best building in Costa Rica (I've been in at least three buildings, so I'm an expert) is the Basilica of our Lady of the Angels, a grand, wood-panelled hang out for a small, stone icon (with a good story) which is chock full of knee-crawling pilgrims. 

Oh and turns out the way to San Jose is a direct flight from Gatwick. Can someone let Dionne Warwick know?

Do This

So the battle of the big plays with the all-star casts. Pinter v Shakespeare. The Birthday Party v Julius Caesar. Do this.

Given that The Birthday Party is Pinter's most famous play, and probably the most famous play I hadn't not seen, I was a bit surprised at how little I knew about it. In my head it was an Ayckbourn-esque comedy of manners. Out of my head it's very different. I didn't enjoy it. Don't get me wrong, it was well acted and amusibg enough in places; I just felt a bit cheated at the end.

Julius Caesar (with Cat Stark, The Guv'nor and, erm, Paddington Bear) was a bit less of a wild card - although when I first stepped into the Pit at The Bridge it was channelling the spirit of Brixton Academy and that wasn't how the RSC version started. Anyway, the Pit was ace; got right into the civil war. Made it the most immersive Shakespeare I've seen since That Macbeth. Boom. Quite literally.