Britain's natural aristocracy --Ooops... make that boozocracy:
On the road, Britons 'drink and drink and drink'
Sarah Lyall/NYT
Thursday, September 4, 2003
PRAGUE The party started on Friday morning, when EasyJet's 6:15 flight to Prague took off from Stansted Airport.
"We looked on the Internet and these were the flights that were available," explained a 30ish passenger whose breakfast - three cans of Kronenborg beer - was lined up in front of him.
"I thought we were going to Barcelona, but apparently Prague is quite a historical and cultural city." He snickered.
Meanwhile, his friend had already finished his own first round.
"Bring the trolley to me with a big straw!" he shouted, then explained his vacation goals: "Get drunk, I suppose; have some drinks and have a good time."
In the last few years, a new kind of British tourist, lured by flights costing as little as a bus fare, has descended on Prague in unprecedented numbers, apparently with one main goal in mind: to drink as much as possible.
Drunk and aggressive, in drag or wearing only underpants, they spend weekends staggering in packs from bar to bar near Wenceslas Square. So troublesome have they become that some places refuse to serve Britons who arrive in large groups.
"It's disgusting," said Martina Tajdusova, who works in a hotel in the city center. "They spend a lot of money here, but the British don't know when to stop, when is enough. They drink and drink and drink."
Tour groups help fuel the business by portraying places like Prague as centers for inexpensive liquor and sexually compliant women, and by organizing weekend-long pub crawls whose participants set out to drink, for instance, in as many places as possible before stumbling - if they can still stumble - on to the return flight home.
"As a friend of mine said the other day, the British treat every day as if it were New Year's Eve," said Ivo Lorenc, who rents out apartments to tourists and who once cleaned up after a party of four weekending Britons who left 100 empty bottles behind.
"They tell us that it's cheaper to fly to Prague - including accommodation - and drink all weekend than it would be to stay in London and drink there."
In other places, too, Britons are earning a reputation for bad behavior. In Greece, several tourists died this summer after bar fights or drunken pranks gone amiss. In one incident that was videotaped by a local businessman and which sparked widespread disgust around Greece, three British women leading a tour group on Corfu performed flamboyant oral sex on fellow employees in front of a cheering crowd.
In Spain, where more than 600 Britons are in jail, many for offenses committed while on vacation, Lloret de Mar on the Costa Brava has banned drinking on the streets and beaches.
And even hard-drinking Dublin, long a popular destination for British stag parties, in 1998 began to ban such groups from places in the Temple Bar neighborhood.
In Prague, the city is in something of a quandary: after a downturn in tourism after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and last year's disastrous floods, it is loathe to offend the free-spending British visitors who make up more than 10 percent of its tourist trade.
"There's nothing shameful about spending a lot of time in a restaurant or a pub - we are grateful for every tourist," Hana Cermakova, a spokesman for the tourist authority, said. "It's true that we have had some complaints about groups of young people, but it's not just the British. It's not possible to divide troublemakers according to nation."
Perhaps not, but the British, particularly those on stag weekends, certainly stand out because of their tendency to travel in packs and to wear unifying items of clothing, like soccer shirts, T-shirts printed with salient facts about an impending wedding, or wigs and skirts (for the grooms among them). Residents are still talking about the time a group of 53 women arrived from Wales, each dressed like Tom Jones.
Once they left the plane, considerably merrier than when they boarded, the EasyJet passengers were unleashed into the open air.
Another group of men, in Prague to celebrate the forthcoming nuptials of 31-year-old Andy Briault, wearing a long fake ponytail under his cap, headed to Paddy O'Reilly's, an Irish bar.
Playing drinking games and compelling Briault to change into an obscene shirt, the group was still on the pleasantly coherent side of drunk, although that would change later. The pub's owner, Robbie Norton, said that though there was some truth to the complaints, many groups were by and large harmless.
Also, they are big business. For instance, he said, a group of 23 men once came to the bar on a Friday and ordered 180 vodkas and 60 cans of Red Bull, an energy drink.
"I know that sounds totally insane, but they came back and did the same thing on Saturday and the same thing on Sunday," he said.
But a happy group can turn easily into a scary group, and many bars have hired bouncers to eject the worst offenders. Residents say that the police often look the other way as long as they are paid off when they meet Britons misbehaving in the street. Back at Rocky O'Reilly's, another stag party settled in. Having taken a bus tour of Prague that morning ("We're not just philistines," declared the groom, a police constable named Marty Neley, as his friends began to shout, "It was boring!"), they had decided that enough was enough, and that it was time to get down to the real business of the weekend.
They had decided to remain in the pub, they said, because they did not want to offend people on the street.
If all they wanted to do was drink, why not just stay home?
"It's cheaper to come here than to go to Blackpool," said one of Neley's friends, "and nobody knows us here."
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