We left our gear in the flat and wandered up Wenceslas Square towards the old town, waving away the flyers for ‘Great Irish Pub!’ and ‘Topless Girls!’ offered to us along the way. The Old Square — the heart of the old town — was just a few streets away to the north, but rather than join the crowds just yet we found a middle-of-the-road restaurant on a side street in which to watch Serbia play Germany. Lunch was Czech ‘gnocchi’ (potato dumplings, basically), pork and sauerkraut, washed down with a few jars of Pilsner Urquell.

“Děkuji,” I said to the waiter as he brought the bill. He looked nonplussed.

After lunch we headed back to the square for the USA-Slovenia game, where the normal tourist attractions — a centuries-old astronomical clock and the black Gothic spires of the Church of Our Lady before Týn — were temporarily playing second fiddle to a big screen suspended on a frame of scaffolding and flanked by a pair of cars on raised stands. This was the marketing gut-punch of the ‘Hyundai Fan Park’, where Hyundai’s sponsorship of the World Cup was emblazoned loud and proud across every flat surface.

We grabbed pints in plastic cups, found a reasonable place to watch, and settled in for the game. First though, we had to sit through the ads. In place of the usual pre-game punditry was a constant stream of car adverts: it was very much like that sequence in The Shining in which a crazed Jack Nicolson methodically smashes his way through the bathroom door with a fire axe, only this time the axe is a Hyundai commercial and the bathroom door is your sanity.

But I digress.

When the whistle blew for half time the temporary bars set up around the square became instantly clogged with people. We decided to head elsewhere for the second half.

The Golden Tiger was a smoky, wood-panelled bar a few streets away from the square. Our guidebook (a newly purchased replacement for one Jeff had left on the plane) told us that Václav Havel entertained Bill Clinton here sometime back in the ’90s, and that it was very much a traditional Czech drinking den. We were shown curtly to a table in the corner, whereupon Josh held up his hand showing two fingers and a thumb and the barman nodded his head in understanding.

“The book has a bit about Czech pub etiquette,” Josh explained. In short, the rules are:

  • Hold up a thumb for one drink, a thumb and a finger for two, and so on;
  • Your drink will be replaced once you there’s an inch or so left;
  • Place your beer mat on the top of your glass once you’re finished and ready to pay up.

This is a country in which beer-drinking has been optimised.

We settled in for the afternoon. It was nice to see a bit of the traditional Prague, for better or for worse: the beer was great, the atmosphere was genuine and the company was racist, although to be fair it wasn’t a native Praguer but a Serbian who served up that particular slice of authenticity. Jeff turned to our neighbours at the next table to make a comment on the game, and got chatting to this one chap who at first claimed his home country to be “part of the old Yugoslavia,” and who seemed to have some difficulty coming to terms with the fact that the YR was indeed F.

“Which part of the old Yugoslavia?” we asked.

“Serbia,” he told us. “Oh dear,” I thought.

Shortly after that he made a horrifically offensive remark about African footballers. We drank up and left after the game finished.

We rounded off the day with a pig-derived sausage from a stand in the Old Square and watched the last game of day (England-Algeria) under a threatening sky. A few drinks in an Irish bar finished us off and we called it a night, stopping only for another pig-based sausage at a stand in Wenceslas Square. Groaning like sausages about to split, we rolled home.