Hockey Night in Prague

Like so many Canadians of my generation, my first brush with European hockey was in hockey card sets in my younger years.

O-Pee-Chee had its special Red Army set, filled with long polysyllabic names and those cool CCCP jerseys. When the Berlin Wall came down, we were treated to more strange unpronounceable names in the card sets and on the hockey broadcasts – the French announcers on Radio Canada had real trouble with the Slavic names.

As the years went by, Swedes, Slovaks, Finns, and Czechs all became a part of the game in Canada. Everyone became accustomed to the names, even those tongue-tied French announcers. No matter what any facemask-hating hockey commentator might say, and no matter how long it took Noreth America to notice, there has been good hockey in Europe for decades.

That sentiment took Teak and I to seek hockey in Prague.

Lev Praha is one of the Russian Kontinental Hockey League’s recent expansion teams in Central Europe (Zagrab is another new one, Bratislava’s first season was last year). Watching Lev Praha play some good old hockey was going to be our original plan, but they were on a road trip into the vast wastes of Russia, and road trips in the KHL can last as long as a month because of the distances between franchises. We settled on watching Sparta Praha, a 113-year-old team in the Czech Extraliga, the Czech Republic’s national hockey league. Sparta is first in the league, and we bought tickets for a home game against the Pirates of Chomutov, the league’s last place team.

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It was a blow-out, 9-0, but it was damn good hockey. Not as physical as we’re accustomed to in the North American game and its smaller rink. They move the puck fast and set up great plays, despite the big ice, plus there was almost a fight – on two occasions. Good hockey.

Back in Toronto – my apologies for comparing, but I can’t help it – if I wanted to catch a professional hockey game, like the Maple Leafs of Toronto, I would be shelling out $100 per ticket. If I wanted to drink a beer (and sometimes you need several watching the Leafs), that would be $12 a pop. I couldn't tell what a hot dog would cost and I'm afraid to find out.

A better Toronto option would be watching the Leafs’ minor league team, the Marlies, who consistently play good hockey. Cheap seats are about $15 a ticket. Beers, unless you’re sneaking in travelers, aren’t cheap though.

In Prague, we spent about $10 for good seats. We had little time between the game and our arrival in Prague to do anything more than check into the hotel and rush to the arena. This meant we ate eat at the arena, something I usually avoid. We managed to get a decent sausage with a slice of rye for $3. Then there were the beers: $2 a pop.

Sorry, Toronto.

What made the game special were the fans. This is a 113-year-old hockey club, so there is probably a lot of heritage. Sparta Praha’s following is incredibly enthusiastic. The standing booster section was at the end, with banners, flags and, thankfully, no vuvuzelas.

Everyone in the arena chanted, well, chants that everyone in the arena seemed to know and wore the team’s swag. Everyone save for the two foreigners – although Teak bought and wore a Sparta jersey. There was a real energy in the place. For every goal scored – and remember there were nine unanswered goals – the crowded erupted as if every one mattered as much as a sudden death overtime goal.

There were families with young children, young couples smooching between plays, drunken high schoolers double-fisting beers, and old guys who looked like they were around for the club’s first game – oh, and the two aforementioned foreigners.

After the final buzzer and the handshakes, the entire Sparta Praha team stayed on the ice for a while and saluted the fans, who were all on their feet and singing what I am guessing was the team song (my Czech isn’t so good).

I went from a casual hockey fan to a Sparta fan right there.

"Dobrý den venku! Jsme na vzduchu,
 Je to Hockey Night večer..."
--Stompin' Tom in Czech

A near fight,
which is as close to a fight you will get in European Hockey.

The team came out and sang a song, it could have been the Hockey Song

Teak looking like a real Czech hockey fan in his new jersey.

In Praise of Discovery Walks

Bloody Fields. There's no blood, but they got new foot paths.

At one of my old Toronto advertising agencies, an art director and I would go to the pub down the street with our notebooks when we got stuck with a problem in the afternoon.

After a pint or two, we would usually have a few good ideas in our notebooks (along with a few loopy ideas) and return to the office with a bit of a glow, from the beer and the productivity. This art director enjoyed his drink, so on slower days, he'd insist on "one more drink" and we’d miss a chunk of the afternoon.

The perils of the afternoon beers.

Later, at the same office but with a new, more consistent art director, a creative conundrum would take us out of the office as well. Instead of dark pubs or tempting patios we'd go for a walk through one of Toronto’s ravine paths near the office, which the city conveniently called Discovery Walks on its trail signs. The name stuck.

The ideas from those might not have been as loopy as the beer-y ideas, but they were good. The fresh air, chirping birds, and even the occasional deer sighting, was calming.

I still get in my workday Discovery Walks, in a different city on a different continent. Tobacco advertising can seem like a long, stressful grind that never seems to end, so I am thankful this office is blessed with a park on either end of its quiet street.

Even with an art director-to-copywriter ratio of 13:2, few art directors venture away from the comforting glow of their screens – the sole two exceptions being a bespectacled Spaniard and Kata.

The closest park is Városmajor. It is your basic city park with playgrounds, trees, kids, old ladies walking arm-in-arm, and old men playing chess. It's a good place for a ten-minute escape from creative conundrums. It’s also pretty, but not as exciting as the one on the other end of the street, Vérmező, or Bloody Fields.

Bloody Fields gets its bad ass name for being the place where leaders of a Jacobins movement executed in the late 1700s. At this time, politicians of that particular stripe were behind the French Revolution. Hungary being an absolutist monarchy with a comfortably entrenched nobility, the Jacobins were executed pretty quickly, in front of a crowd, so no one got any bright ideas.

Oh, just down the street is another park where György Dózsa was executed. He led a peasant uprising against the king and the nobility, which, like so many Hungarian uprisings, looked like it could have succeeded before failing. He was captured, tied to a blazing hot iron throne and given a hot crown. As he cooked, his followers were brought out and made to eat his burning flesh before he died.

The City of Budapest could have followed the tradition of Bloody Fields and given this park an equally cool name, like the Broiling Hot Death Seat Park, but instead they settled with György Dózsa Square. Missed opportunity, if you ask me.

Anyway, this is the sort of cool stuff you learn when you’re a history nerd on a Discovery Walk.

My favourite Discovery Walk is a longer one up the hill behind our office, Little Swabian Hill (Swabians were what German settlers were called before Germany existed). It’s a longer walk, but it's more rewarding. It's also a little arduous, since it's a steep hill, but once you're at the top of the hill you realize it's worth the effort.

It’s also part Nature Walk up there – since there are birds, bees, and lizards, but no deer, sadly. You get a great panorama of the Buda side of the city, there are trails in forest around the top, and  even a few interesting leftovers from the German occupation.

Budapest has its fair share of dark bars that, I'm sure, contribute to loopy ideas during creative blocks. But it's comforting to know that I can still maintain the healthy creative habits that keep me sane – no matter how far from home I am.

You never know what you will find on a Discovery Walk.

Up, up, up, you're almost at the top!

It's pretty when you get to the top.

Little Swabian Hill has a Big Swabian View.

Hungary Heritage Moment III - Pannonhalma

You get up to the top of the wall and this is what you see...

Then you turn around and this is the view you get...

The basilica. If you go downstairs, they have a collection of Habsburgs' hearts.
That's how they were interred.

The courtyard, as seen from the cloisters.

The fancy door to the basilica

"Every fancy, gigantic library must have a gigantic globe."
That's written somewhere in the Bible, look it up. 

Catholicism has had a bumpy ride in Hungary.

Efforts to spread the religion among the Magyar tribes were intensive, but difficult at times, just ask St. Gellert, who was stuffed into a barrel and thrown from a hill that today bears his name for preaching to the heathens.

Hungary became officially Catholic after Istvan’s coronation, by order of the pope at the time. The kingdom was on the frontier of Catholicism, just before the Great Schism. The kings put non-believers under the sword and missionaries spread the word. All that work was almost completely destroyed by the Mongol hordes. Then Hungary was occupied by the surging Muslim Ottomans on their way to Vienna from Turkey.

After the Turks were pushed out things began to look a bit more peaceful. Nope! Kidding! The Reformation had begun by that time. In the coming years, uprisings against the ruling Habsburgs were more religious in tone than nationalist. The Catholics from Austria often fought Lutherans and Calvinists from other corners of the empire – who in turn sided with the dreaded Turkish heretics against those Austrian papists.

Much, much later, of course, atheist communism also had its day in Hungary, closing churches and imprisoning or executing clergy.

Through it all, the Archabbey of Pannnonhalma has stood the test of time, and withstood the challenges of, well, being located in Hungary. The Benedictines built their abbey in 996. Since then, it has added a basilica, a beautiful library, a boarding school, even a winery – building a tidy little business in the process, while also being far more socially palatable than tithes or indulgences,

The Archabbey largely was spared the Mongol destruction, but was occupied (not thoroughly pillaged, however) by the Turks. This is in stark contrast to what happened at Székesfehérvár, the kingdom's old royal capital and basilica. Hungarian kings and queens were crowned and buried there for centuries, until the Turks decided it was a good idea to use it for gunpowder storage and, unsurprisingly, accidently blew it up.

The Archabbey of Pannonhalma has even survived a state repression. The Benedictines were outlawed by an emperor looking to lessen Rome's influence in the Holy Roman Empire (he could have changed that name too) and make a little money from confiscated land. They were invited back by another emperor to be a teaching order. The Archabbey even kept its doors open for religious business during the Communist years, churning out graduates from its boarding school.

Over the Christmas holidays, I dropped by the Archabbey for a visit in my spare time over the holidays. The Archabbey sits on a hill in the small town of Pannonhalma. I took a train to Győr, then found the bus station, which took me to the top of the hill in Pannonhalma. The winery was closed for the Christmas holidays, but I could get up into the monastery and walk along the wall into the basilica, the old cloisters and the library.

The monastery closed early, at 4:30pm, but the bus was not scheduled to return until almost 6pm. This gave me plenty of time to wander the grounds, exposed to the cold wind on the high hill in the frigid early darkness. When the bus arrived I was almost frozen stiff. I could have hugged the driver. The monastery has survived foreign invasion and state persecution, but how it survives the cold was, at the time, beyond me.

Archabbey of Pannonhalma