PATE!  BANNED!

I am in Prague for the summer.  The first in a series of reports about life in the Czech Republic, from the historically underrepresented perspective of a person who knows nothing about life in the Czech Republic.

In general, Czechs love the sea and are excellent swimmers.  They are a surprisingly buoyant people, considering their country has been landlocked since herds of woolly mammoths drank up the great inland sea of Europe millions of years ago with their massive trunks, during what historians call the medieval period.  Maybe the gallons of Pilsner Urquell beer Czechs drink has carbonated their very blood, or maybe they are constantly gassy from the reams of sausage they consume (more than three meters per Czech per day according to UN reports), or maybe I’m making all this up–but Czechs can fucking float.  So Czechs have a natural affinity with the Adriatic coast of nearby Croatia, and over 800,000 vacation there each summer.

Czechs are loyal tourists in Croatia, save one thing:  They’re really cheap.  Czechs rent the least expensive houses and whores.  They never eat out (in restaurants, ahem).  Czechs in Croatia barely even shop at local grocery stores, as one of their key money-saving strategies is loading up the family Škoda with entire weeks’ worth of provisions, including–most notoriously–mammoth tubs of Czech pate.  (Frugal Czechs are known as “pate eaters” to disdainful Croats.)  I have not tried the pate, but this is only because I refuse to eat foods in paste-form.

But earlier this month, Croatia struck back by banning imports of all meat and dairy from EU countries, including Czech Pate.  The country’s expressed reason for the ban was that it was trying to conform to EU standards in anticipation of joining the EU in the near future–but Czechs knew what was up.  They were being hosed.  So great was their outcry at the prospect of having to buy inferior, Croatian pate that Croatia promptly reversed the ruling.  Now Czechs can continue to haul in their cans of smushed meat and float silently, sated and pale, in the warm Adriatic.