That’s it. Time’s up. During the next couple of days I will pack. I will run last-minute errands. I will sell things. I will pick out real Czech souvenirs for folks back home. We’ve already said goodbye to everyone but the closest of our friends. Lucie and I had a lovely bike ride to the lake just north of Brno this afternoon. I didn’t have a crown on me when we left, so she bought me a beer and a fried cheese sandwich at the lakeside beer garden. It was a beautiful and warm sunny day. The wind was calm. The fish were biting at bugs on the surface of the water. People were not wearing shoes.

I will miss fried cheese sandwiches. When C. first visited Prague in 2001, she later told stories of the “heart-attack special.” When I first visited Prague a month or so later, I discovered the deliciousness of which she spoke. It’s a specialty, and at some pubs it’s the only vegetarian option on the menu. It consists of a loaf of cheese which is deep-fried in oil (because cheese is not fatty enough by itself) and served on a roll with tartar sauce, which as far as I can tell is basically a big pile of mayonnaise with pickle relish mixed in. My fried cheese sandwich today also came with french fries, which I ate with a fork, because that’s what you do here, and I don’t like to be stared at while I eat.

When I say that fried cheese is sometimes the only vegetarian option, I actually mean that it’s the only real vegetarian option. (Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.) Often there are several items listed in the vegetarian section of the menu, but many of them include ham. From a certain point of view, you are correct when you object that ham is not vegetarian. But try not to think inside the box all the time. Ham can also be a condiment. If you were to beckon to the waitress and inform her that your vegetarian dish had ham in it, she would look at you with a slightly pitying expression. “Oh honey, it’s just a little ham.”

Non-vegetarian dishes, on the other hand, can consist of meat, stuffed with meat, with a side of meat. Maybe a little meat on top for a garnish. One of my favorites is chicken stuffed with ham and leeks with cheese and a slice of ham on top, but I also like dumplings stuffed with ham and creamy sauerkraut. Our friend Petr, the one who saved us from the landlady, likes to make giant trays of hors d’oeuvres when the four of us (Anne, Petr, C., and I) are hanging out. We’re talking about square feet of little sausages and cheeseballs neatly arrayed, accompanied by slices of bread smothered with cream cheese and blue cheese with slices of raw onion on top, and Olomoucký Sýr (which is a kind of stinkier-than-thou cheese whose legal status is in limbo given certain food safety concerns on the part of the EU). I don’t know if feet are involved in its manufacture, but it smells like they might be. Nonetheless, fry up a slab and slap it on some bread with some chunks of raw onion, and you’re on a rocketship straight to heaven. (I should be fair: Only pub food is so notoriously fatty and heavy, but most Czechs don’t eat out very often. At home, they also eat very good bread and a lot of vegetables with their meat and cheese.)

When you are walking down the street and you notice other guys—the kind who don’t already have beautiful girlfriends—watching the 6'2" blonde women with impeccably-toned everything from head to toe walk by, you expect that those guys are probably trying to figure out exactly what those women are doing to keep from showing the effects of the exclusively meat-and-cheese-based diet. It must be hard for those guys, because, well, it’s not just an occasional 6'2" blonde woman who walks by. It’s like every third woman is over six feet tall, and even if she’s not blonde, she has jet black hair and sky-blue eyes, or perhaps the ubiquitous Eurgundy dye and has applied eyeliner inspired by lioness eyes; but the woman’s particular coloring at some point becomes irrelevant for those guys, who in general look far less like a nation of supermodels than their better halves do. It must be somewhat of a curse, I think, to be a woman from this Slavic gene pool, because there are very few alternatives on the menu of prominent noses and foreheads and eyes ever-too-slightly close together. Need I mention the healthy, healthy selection of beer guts in every size and shape?

This is not a nation of anorexic women. It’s a nation of people who don’t own cars. In fact, many of the ones who do own cars now are starting to look a little, well, American. Like me. And I don’t even own a car. I sold my last car for $25, and I figure I got a pretty good deal for it, considering the shape it was in. You should have seen it. It was in worse shape than my van, which I let get towed away because it was cheaper than paying someone to tow it away. I miss my van, and the whole van lifestyle. It used to be that I knew it was time to throw some stuff out when I had more stuff than would fit in the van. One is not as portable as one would like when one owns more than fits in the vehicle that takes one to the next place. Throw all your stuff in your van, fill up your 44 oz. trucker mug with Amoco coffee, and the world is yours for the taking.

i just finished czech class, in which i explained the dishes most likely to be available to me at the upcoming west virginia family reunion. they mostly match the czech menu you describe (meat, wrapped in meat, with a side order of meat, and potato salad with bits of meat in it if you're still hungry). mmmmmmmmeat.

beer guts are bouncy and fun, like bean bags, or only portable, like beach balls, but less likely to slip away from you in a sudden tide. not to be underestimated. or misunderestimated, either.