I'd avoided bar crawls like the plague. Huge groups of sweaty, drunken youths, staggering around Prague's beautiful streets, totally oblivious. So how did I come to join them?
A hen party, that's how.
One of my good friends here in Prague, who is getting married in September, declared that for her symbolic "last night of freedom", we were going on a pub crawl. And not just any pub crawl. One of the main ones—the Clock Tower Pub Crawl—which meets under the Astronomical Clock in Old Town Square every night at 21:15 PM.
"We're doing something we would never normally do," she said, cheerfully, handing out flower leis and vodka shots.
I choked back my response (there's a reason we never do this, for the love of god, we live here!) and plastered a similarly wide grin on my face. To new experiences!
And you know what? It wasn't so bad. In fact, it was actually pretty fun. We, seven girls, began the evening exploring the free bar with gusto at a communist- themed bar called Propaganda. From then on, we traipsed around town led by incredibly professional and patient guides to three different bars, necking welcome drinks in each bar (and then buying water to recover. It was an outrageously hot evening).
We met some fun people, some mad people—one man who kept telling me he hadn't slept for 40 hours, prompting me to tell him to stop being so ridiculous and to have a kip on the nearby sofa—and some awful people, inevitably.
But it was a cool way to see Prague at night. There was a certain sense of camaraderie, like going to a big, boozy football match, and I did visit bars I hadn't been to before.
The crawl ended in a club housed in a church, but unfortunately by that point, some of the aforementioned awful people (young, undersexed boys mainly) were a bit unbearable, so we moved on to a bar of our own choosing.
By then it was already 2:30 AM, so any other crawlers, I'm sure, felt they had already got their money's worth.
For lone travellers, the crawl was much less of a meat market than I had expected, offering the chance to meet sweet people and interesting travellers (although I appreciate some people are on the hunt for meat markets, in which case I'm sure that kind of scene can be found as well, particularly later in the evening). In fact, for any tourists, you could do worse than the crawl if you wanted to get a snapshot of Prague's city center nightlife while meeting new people.
For expats like me, though? Well, I've done it once now, and I think that's probably enough. If you need me, I'll be in the quiet pub around the corner, on my own, maybe even reading the paper, with a beer...