Hangouts

Joe's Bar:

Original expat dive. Served decent Mexican food, played Violent Femmes in heavy rotation, and sponsored a weekly Celtic Ray concert which drew a small and fervent crowd of fans.

The Globe Bookstore and Coffeehouse:

Opened summer of 1993. A terrific used bookstore with a quality restaurant/coffeehouse attached, only three blocks from my apartment. This became one of my main hangouts.

Govindas:

"Vegetarian Club" run by the Hare Krishna's, this relaxing spot offered all-you-could-eat Indian for the equivalent of a dollar. I ate there every day, hung out with a neat group of expats, and never once shaved my head.

Asylum:

Short-lived squat club, opened in an unused building owned by the Charles University Drama Department. The large "auditorium" was a mass of shattered concrete from a fallen second story balcony. It was an extraordinary space, and the American operators tried to turn it into a living theater experiment (with a super smokey bar on the side). My friend Matt had an exhibit of his collage Tarot cards there on the very strange Witch's Night (April 30), 1993. And I once saw "Booger" from Family Ties hanging out there. Unfortunately, the University reclaimed the building to use as a storage warehouse.

Radost F/X:

Artsy disco with attached vegetarian café. Attracted the black-wearing photographers and painters, as well as diplomats and Mafia types. Sunday afternoon brought the popular and insufferably pretentious "Beefstew" open mike poetry readings. I seldom heard any good writing coming out of the mike, but is was another great (though not at all magical) place to meet up with your friends. The Thirsty Dog, and later, The Taz Bar:

Hip but sleazy hangouts (especially the latter), and good places to score dope. People smoked pot openly in these bars, and you could walk in, spend ten minutes talking to a friend and breathing the air, and walk out totally baked. The Taz Bar was named for the Tasmanian Devil of cartoon fame, incidentally, although the owners must have known the secondary meaning of "TAZ".

An assortment of short-lived techno clubs, including Fetish, Ubiquity, Bunkr, and Repre (which was located in the fabulous Obecni Dum.