May 27, 2013 - 12:01pm
Blogette: Not at home? That's no excuse
BY KATIE STEEN
We were at a 24-hour convenience store. He thumbed expertly through a selection of Czech beer, eventually selecting a cheap can with a goat on it. He paid, shoved the change in his pocket and we were off to a club whose name I can't remember, somewhere in a part of Prague not typically included on tourist maps.
I was with some people from my hostel — the ringleader being a Canadian man who was telling us about his time in Amsterdam. Wandering through the red-light district one boozy night, he had decided to get himself a hooker — a task no more difficult than knocking on a glass window. The story he told was pretty entertaining, if not educational. I was told about "dick bibs," about how "anything extra costs money" and about how the prostitutes were, apparently, "total bitches." After the end of his time with them, he was shoved out of that strange little glass-walled room, with his pants still halfway down his legs. A scummy story overall to be sure, but still funny enough.
But as I followed this guy through the unsettlingly homogenous streets of Prague at 1 a.m., waited for him to take a piss in a parking lot, then strolled blindly toward the club, he continued to talk about his European women — about how he doesn't usually go to clubs in Canada, but the women in clubs here are just so much “better” than back home. He told me about one woman at a club in Prague, a gorgeous blonde with huge tits (of course) — the kind of woman who would never talk to him in Canada, apparently. Ah, but this isn't Canada, he emphasized. No — we were in the Czech Republic, so of course she was dancing topless for him by the end of the night. “But I'd never do this kind if thing back at home,” he assured me. And I continued to follow him to this club, almost wanting to congratulate him on this tit-filled triumph of a bachelor abroad. Perhaps I should have felt honored that I seemed bro-y enough to have this talk bestowed upon me. But no, honored isn't quite the word.
The night before, he had apparently blown $700 on booze with a couple of Czech strippers, rendering him hungover in bed until 5 p.m. the next day. “I never quite understood the point of strippers,” a Danish dude staying at our hostel said. “They're like a cake you just look at and can't eat.” Except our young traveler didn't come all the way to Prague to buy a cake on display for the night. After all, these aren’t Canadian strippers — they're Eastern European strippers, so it was practically a self-evident right that our drunken friend from the north can do whatever he wants to them.
He told me the hilarious anecdote of his night with the strippers — of how he kept grabbing their boobs, and they would slap him in retaliation without realizing that that just got him off. Eventually one started crying after being incessantly groped, despite physically attempting to fight him off. This story was told to me in between spurts of laughter. I want to believe he just didn't see the harm in his actions — even after he made a woman cry from sexual harassment — and anyway, he would “never do this kind of thing back at home.”
We eventually approached the club, and it was exactly the kind of club I had grown to expect during the walk over. The next day, the guy would ask me why I left the club so early, oblivious.
Traveling is about trying new things and doing stuff you wouldn’t normally do in your home country. But I found it disturbing that respect for women didn’t seem to make it past the international border.
