Sudetenland Tales by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

Sudetenland Tales

Page 153

drug paraphernalia, other strewn about garbage, awnings and people selling stuff; drugs, Blue Ray snuff, cases of soda, boxes of snacks, fish, slabs of meat, vegetables, bags, everything. Various food stalls were buried in the shops, and after the morning, it was always packed with traffic, mopeds, carts, motorcycles, and people shopping.

I thought I’d walk to a McDonald’s for lunch to sort of ease into things, and their facility was some weird standing, room only alley with the kiosks and I guess you take your Big Mac and go sit in the street and eat it. They looked like the worst possible golden arches I’ve ever seen in my life, and that includes the ones in the lower Bronx. I went to a giant hotel and ate at the ‘French Patisserie’ which was just paninis and pre-packaged salads, like the sandwich shop you’d go to in an office park in Schaumberg or Auschwitz.

I thought it would be dumb fun to find a Catholic Irish Pub. There was one place a mile away. It’s the same setup as what I saw in Poland last year or what would be in Bloomington or Brooklyn or anywhere else now that everything’s been copied and franchised; the green shamrock, the sepia tone pictures of Irish laborers on the walls, etc., etc. The first floor was the bar, which was full of bald headed, Irish by way of Eritrea, Sudan, Somalia, the Congo, or Burundi; expatriate ‘blokes’ wearing