There's an Egg in My Soup by Tom Galvin

Author:Tom Galvin [Tom Galvin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781847174345
Publisher: The O'Brien Press
Published: 2012-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

Beer Barrel Polka

If places like Grabarka represent the Poland of old, travel to the west is the polar opposite. The German influence is immediate, those who live there tending to speak to you in German rather than English upon hearing you’re a foreigner. BMWs are everywhere. Stylish restaurants, chain stores, designer names and top brands on billboards; it is obvious why we were sent as volunteers to the east rather than to the west.

In the second year of our stay, myself and a few of the lads in the group got an urge to buy a bar. It was a bit mad, one of those ideas actually conceived in a bar. But it was a bar in Minsk, opened by a student, which gave us the idea. If he could do it, so could we. Only better. That was the motivation.

The other bars in the town at that time were rarely visited. There was a café that was too full of students and closed at ten o’clock. There was a bar at the bottom of a block of flats that had two pool tables and plastic patio furniture. That was the spot I frequented with the ‘pomaturalne’ students who I had grown close to in the first year. It was an awful place, but it was a bar. The bar lady was very friendly, and gave you bread and ‘smalec’ with every round. ‘Smalec’ was basically a thick fat spread that a lot of the alcoholics ate. It helped line your stomach. You would see them early in the morning buying a bottle of spirits, some bread and a little, margarine-sized pack of smalec. The sad fact was that they were saving money on food to buy drink, and lining their gut with this stuff instead.

There was also the café place that I had avoided on my second day, which catered for older people and had a dance of sorts on a Sunday. You could get breaded pork chops there after a few beers and the bar ladies, dressed in flowery aprons, would warn you against drinking cold beer in the winter. Actually, they would almost refuse to serve it. They would point at your throat and offer a tepid bottle or, better still, hot beer with cloves.

The bar that inspired us, though, was a dirty, festering dive. There were no doors on the toilets, and the cubicles for men and women were right next to each other. That’s the first image that comes flooding back, as images of that nature would. If a girl wished to pee, a friend or boyfriend stood where the door should have been and blocked the view. Men didn’t bother trying to block the view, sometimes using the sink. I’ve seen bars in the States that employ similar tactics when it comes to their toilets, but that’s mostly to prevent drug users from injecting themselves. In this bar, it was simply because the owner wasn’t arsed hanging doors.

Some of the insane antics that went on in that bar have long since been obliterated from memory.

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