Posts Tagged ‘meat’

The Bear Clan™ recently returned from a lengthy stint in Brno, working with the good folks at 2K Czech on Mafia 2. Brno is a beautiful place – there’s nothing like walking around a downtown area with buildings older than Canada. The weight of history is palpable, weighing on your shoulders and filling your vision no matter where you look. More churches than Abbotsford. My personal favourite was The Shrine of Our Lady of Mount Carmel – as I write this, I’m playing a CD of choral music purchased from their gift shop. Our guide was a wonderful lady who kept apologizing for her English, despite being quite good at it. Better than my Czech and German, anyways.  She was kind enough to allow us past the black velvet rope and into some of the more cloistered areas of the church. The Order of the Carmelites dates from the 13^th century – the priests from Kostelní Vydří were able to maintain a presence despite the events of World War 2 and religious oppression from the Communists.

Let’s talk beer, people. Excellent quality, wildly inexpensive – when a can of Coke costs more than an equivalent tasty road pop, you know that you’ve arrived in a country of taste and sophistication. Unfortunately, if one does not pay attention while ordering off the Czech menu and happens to point at the wrong item, it is entirely possible that your beer will be served to you, tainted with banana flavouring.  Yes. The object of much ribbing throughout my tenure there, but to my defense, the iPhone app that was supposed to help translate Czech-to-English was worth pretty much squat. Banana beer has now been crossed off the bucket list. Yay.

There’s a medieval restaurant in downtown Brno named Středověká Krčma, where apparently David Copperfield and some famous-in-Europe shirtless guy like to eat. Servers in authentic old-school medieval dress run around serving grog (yes, grog!), real sheepskin on old wooden benches and meat dishes specifically designed to knock you for. Of course, you wouldn’t know that since the only menu on our table wasn’t translated – so picture a bunch of Canadians crouched around a piece of paper, muttering things like:

“I think that means ‘meat stick’ or something”

“That’s not what the translator says”

“What does it say?”

“…this menu is in old Czech so the app can’t read it”

“COME ON, MAN.”

After providing much unintended hilarity to surrounding patrons, our waitress finally came by after a few minutes, took one look at us and queried:

“English menu?”

Cue uproarious laughter.

Now, I ordered the duck. Apparently ducks in Brno are some sort of super waterfowl, specifically developed to double as attack avians of a sort, because this particular dish was the size of a hefty toddler and surrounded by roughly two thousand dumplings and orange slices. It tasted delicious but there was no chance of me finishing it in this lifetime or the next. Oh, did I mention the two drunk guys chopping apples on a stool next to our table using a real sword? That, my friends, is the sort of in-house entertainment that Chuck-E-Cheese simply cannot match.

Brno rocks and I demand you go there right now.

More pics on the Massive Bear Facebook page.

-TIM