Smoking, Beer and Dogs

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship going on with Czech pubs.

Love, because first and for most beers generally cost between $1.30 to $1.80 - and good beer at that. This is a country known for their beer, and with good reason, their first brewery opened in 1118, so they have had time to perfect the art.

There's even a microbrewery in Prague that doubles as a monastery. Documentation of the monks of Strahovský Klášter brewing their own beer have cropped up since as early as the turn of the 13th and 14th centuries when there were actually two breweries in the monastery. Although the tradition stopped in 1907, it was restored and reopened in 2000. As far as I understand it is no longer the monks doing the brewing, none the less it's still pretty uniquely European to enjoy a pint at a Monastic Brewery.

So you can understand why the Czech Republic has the highest beer consumption per capita in the world. The annual average per person is 158.6 liters, to put that in to perspective that's 27.5 liters higher than Ireland. Who knew that ANYONE could drink more than the Irish?

The next best thing about Czech pubs? Fried Cheese.

Fried Cheese can be purchased and eaten as a meal without facing judgement from calorie counting waitresses. Wer'e not even talking mozza sticks, but more along the lines of an entire block of cheese, breaded and fried and then served with some variation of potatoes. Which I am not gonna lie is pretty magnificent.

Czech food isn't exactly unrivaled, with not a lot of variation from meat (most often pork) and dumplings with a pile of cabbage forever looming on the side of each plate. Traditional Czech food is centered around meat and starch, with vegetables being a very secondary concern. In fact, I think Fried Cheese may be the only vegetarian option on most Czech menus. I once ordered a tomato salad and literally received a bowl full of tomatoes, nothing else, just tomatoes. A well balanced meal is of little concern over here. But they do have a few scrumptious meals, which I may even miss once I leave including Bramborák (potato pancakes) and Svíčková (marinated beef sirloin served with a vegetable sauce, dumplings, cream and a small dollop of cranberry sauce).

To top it all off, most pubs and restaurants are dog friendly. How great is that? And there doesn't even appear to be a size restriction. My friend's Weimaraner, a dog that rivals me in size, has tagged along with us to various posh establishments.

So how can one hate these pubs? They offer great beer for a ridiculously cheap fare, while your dog lounges at your feet and you munch away on an entire block of cheese. Well the answer lies in the cigarettes.

Now I suppose if you are a smoker this may seem great, as the world quickly decreases the amount of countries which allow smoking in public places. But for non smokers, the dark murkiness dominating Czech bars is offensive at best.

Without fail I leave smelling like a chain smoker and wake up with a sore throat to match. And in a country that seems to have politely ignored the invention of the dryer, the only option is to either hang your clothes somewhere where fresh air will pass through them for at least a day or to spray them with artificial chemical scents.

The only regulation on smoking in restaurants, pubs and bars is a sticker on the front door, indicating that they are one of three options: A non smoking bar (about as rare as a sensible Herman Cain quote). A smoking bar (read smoking den where identifying people at other tables is an issue because of the haze) or they have separate areas for smoking or non smoking, which is rather pointless without physical barriers so it's more of an imaginary separation.

The Czech Republic is a far way off from having a proper smoking ban. In fact as far as I can tell though many European countries claim publicly to have smoking bans it's about as ridiculous as the countries that claim to be democratic by adding the word Democratic to their name...(Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Democratic Republic of Congo...the list goes on.)

So to get that delicious beer at a Czech pub you've just got to suck it up, quite literally. Because the prospect of change is a gloomy one when it comes to smoking laws.