An Interesting Situation

We had an interesting experience/situation come up the other night after practice. To set the back ground of the story I’ll have to give you some information of our rink. Hockey rinks in the Czech Republic are not like those back in Canada. Pretty much all of them have a restaurant inside. Granted some hockey rinks in Canada do as well, but they are usually more like canteens. These are actually restaurants. Along with this there is in most cases a hotel attached as well. By our standards it would be about a 1 to 2 star hotel, so not very nice, but practical to hold teams for camps and tournaments. So the rink itself is quite a big structure.

So after practice on Wednesday night we were running around the rink on the outside doing our cool down when we turned the corner to the back side of the rink and saw an elderly man face down on the ground, half of his body still on the one step and half inside the door to his room. Oh boy! So we run towards him and Chelsa’s asking him in Czech if he needs help, what’s wrong and so on. He mumbles a bunch of stuff in Czech which we can’t understand. Finally Chelsa is like “can we help you up?”. That gets a “ano” out of him and so Chelsa and Arielle start lifting him up. They get him to his knees back inside his one room closet which smells just rancid by the way. They thought they had him balanced enough so he could hold himself up, but then he starts to tip over again...yep he’s drunk, if you didn’t figure that out already. They are trying to get him onto his bed somehow so he can pass out there. At this time I’m like, I think we should go get the rink guy. So I run into the rink and find the rink guy finishing up shovelling the snow off the ice, and in my best Czech say something like “there is an old man who needs help outside, we need you to help us”. So he finally comes with me back outside, but by this time Chelsa and Arielle have gotten in back in to his bed and shut the door.

So come to find out from the rink man that he’s pretty much just the local drunk, and that he starts drinking when he wakes up. Okay what a weird situation, for one who knew that there was this little closet room at the back of the rink where this guy lives, this is my second year here and I had no idea! Two who is this guy, how did he come to live in that room, and by the looks of it he can’t afford to buy alcohol, so how does he get it. All these questions, not sure if we’ll find them out, but there is never a dull moment over here that is for sure!