Thai me down

On Monday night Mrs Velkyal told me that we were going out on Wednesday to either drown our sorrows or celebrate, thankfully we were celebrating the election of Barack Obama to the White House. As this was Mrs Velkyal's idea, the choice of restaurant was entirely up to her, so we went to a Thai restaurant in an area of Prague called Vršovice - I can't remember the name of the restaurant however, I really should learn to pay more attention to these kinds of things.

Having almost bashed my head on the door lintel as we entered the restaurant, we sat down to peruse the menu - also with us were Joanna, a colleague of Mrs Velkyal, and her husband Oscar, who got married the day after we did and recently swapped the Caribbean for Central Europe. On the very first page of the menu was a special offer - "Chang Thai Beer Only 35kč!" That's about £1.15, $1.84 or €1.40. Well given that the other choice was Gambrinus, what would you have done? Exactly.

My first instinct was to look at the label, and only 3 ingredients are listed, water, malt and hops - "good start" I thought to myself. The beer itself was a very pale golden colour, with a reasonable white head, although this disappeared worryingly quickly. There was very little on the nose, slight grassiness, floral notes, but nothing to get the juices flowing. And bland it was to drink as well, really very little flavour, more of a vaguely hop flavoured fizzy drink - perhaps I should have had the Gambrinus.

The food however was lovely, I had crispy Thai duck with red curry, coconut milk and lemongrass with a side serving of egg fried noodles - happily distended (my homage to Bill Bryson, wanted to use that phrase for ages!), we walked back from Vršovice to the centre of the city, shoring up our plans for relocating to the US next summer.