Soccer and tunnels

So, I am now sitting in an American bar scarfing down a greasy Saturday breakfast. When I read the menu, I came across the phrase "our very own Iowa biscuits." Can a bar in Prague really have their own Iowa bisuits?

In a Czech bar the other night, I was taken aback by the plastering of the walls with American movie and music posters. Star Wars, Charlie Parker, Pearl Jam... Every poster in the place was of either American or British figures. Yet on the bar itself resided a sign, in English, saying "Parking for Czechs Only." Hmm.

Last week I was invited to play in a small-sided soccer tournament by one of my students. His team was keeper-less, and having done a lesson on all the English terms related to soccer, he knew I am a tender of the goal.
On our way to the field, it was explained to me that the ground was "unreal grass, where the ball bounces real high" - so i translated that to astroturf. Well, the reality of it was that the field was clay. Like tennis courts. Not your optimal diving grounds.
During our quick warm-up (we needed much more than we were able to get - it was in the 30s and rainy) before the first match, I see someone drinking a beer. Now, mind you, it's 8:45 in the morning. I thought, "Holy crap, a beer... NOW?! What a mentality heere." I chuckled to myself.
After our first match (which we lost 2-0), we had an hour off, and so we went inside the building next to the field to warm up. The inside of this building contained toilets, locker rooms and showers, and a small cafeteria. Well, "cafeteria" may be stretching it a bit. It was more of a bar with a few tables and a TV. My teammates decided the best way to shake off their cobwebs and rusty first-game subpar performance would be to have a beer. So, 30 minutes after chuckling at the man with the beer, I was putting one back. But I have to say, it was a great idea. Calmed the nerves, and actually woke me up a bit. I told my teammates that I play much better after I have a beer in my system. So they bought me a second one. And it worked. Buzzed from that point on, I played a helluva lot better the next match. So naturally, I was bought a beer in between each of our six matches.
But that was relatively tame by comparison - my teammates moved from beer to rum with their subsequent rounds. Granted, they were drinking tea, but they added a shot of rum into each cup. Then half of them smoked cigarettes, but still ran around the field 10 minutes later. What a mentality indeed.
We ended up winning the rest of our matches (and tied our last one), so we wound up in 3rd place. Not a bad day.

So a rumor reached my ears about an underground tunnel which runs below the famous Prague castle. This tunnel is not advertised in any guide book... to get to it, you have to pull open a manhole cover behind a parking lot.

We found the storm drain, and explored the tunnel. It was, when we first got in it, about 4 feet tall, so we were challenged to maintain enough light (we only had one flashlight) for everyone to see as we hunched our way down the tunnel. The tunnel slowly got taller as we walked down it, and we were soon able to stand straight up. The tunnel was clearly a drain of sorts from the castle, and there was a small stream running down the center of the passageway.
Walking down the tunnel, we eventually came to this room we had been told about - a room where people used to stage sneak attacks into the castle from within. Apparently, years ago, if the people in the castle suspected that they were about to be attacked from that room, they flushed all the water from the castle down that drain, which would drown anyone in there, and then carry their bodies down the tunnel out to the river. Really cool stuff.
Since then, it's apparently been used for some strange pagan rituals, an idea supported by the drawings on the walls.

Down a different passageway in the tunnel, there was a way to climb up (we think to street-level, but maybe it was into the castle itself).

Here's Ben coming out of the tunnel - he's standing on the tunnel floor here (so you can get a sense of how deep it was initially)

All in all, a very neat thing to do, especially at 3AM.

As the trams run once every half hour at that time of night, we decided it was faster to walk home. If anyone reading this ever makes it here, I highly recommend walking around this city at 3:30 in the morning. Amazingly picturesque. Arriving home after 4 was a bit of a drag, though... well, not so much the time I arrived, but more so the time I had to wake up the next morning - 6 - to go teach.
But I was done at 8:30 that morning, so I promply found myself faceplanted in bed.