By IAN CLEARY
Staff Writer

My travelling companion, Bill Boothman, was visibly nervous, and becoming visibly drunk. He was worried that we were going to miss the afternoon bus, which was understandable. We had missed the afternoon bus every day that we had been in Prague.

Bill is from "just outside New York City," a child of the superwealthy suburbs in which the powerbrokers of Manhattan raise their families, have barbecues, and play golf.

It was thanks to Bill's parents that we were quite comfortably set up in the Club Hotel, rather than in a filth-ridden hostel. I had no idea how much our stay was costing, but I could tell by the number of employees standing around waiting for something to do that it was well out of my price range.

"Waiter, another round," I yelled. " ... Yeah, yeah, put it on the room."

Before our beer arrived, however, the bus did. Twenty minutes later, we stumbled into St. Wenceslas Square. The square is in fact rectangular, and rather hideous. It is lined on both sides with neon-clad hotels, stores, restaurants and bars, many of which are American institutions such as T.G.I. Fridays and Holiday Inn. It is hard to believe that this was the staging ground of the Velvet Revolution, which ended communist rule in 1989.

The southern end is dominated by the massive National Museum, a quite monstrous and foreboding building. The northern end is the gateway into the back streets of central Prague, a confusing labyrinth of narrow, cobblestone alleys. The city was in fact designed to baffle invading medieval armies.

We had been in town for a few days and knew the basics of getting around - our destination at the time was the Ufleku brewpub. The Ufleku has been operating for 500 years, and is the world's longest running brewpub.

Their beer, in my opinion, is unparalleled. We were understandably in a hurry. We walked down streets from the National Museum and the square and took a left on Vodickova, past a frighteningly large church, a right on Lazarska, a left on Spalena and down Myslikova onto Kremencova and through the huge wooden doors of the Ufleku.

We had first been through those doors on a search for the American expatriate community that is rumored to live in Prague. According to the American media there are more than 30,000 Americans soul-searching in the Czech capital. The Czech government puts the number closer to 6,000. Whatever the number, it is generally agreed that the post-communist- cheap-beer-I'm-the-next-Hemingway days are over.

Which was too bad; I had gotten my hopes up about finding a community of fellow Americans who had gotten sick of fast food, mindnumbing television, sell-out politicians and poor job prospects; people who actually wanted to live life rather than stack their resumes.

Tragically, in a two-night search, all that we found was a couple of tables of guys in a sports bar, wearing white hats and cheering for the Lions.

The Ufleku was quite busy for 1 p.m., but our waiter managed to find us a couple of seats on a long wooden table next to a troupe of young Frenchmen, who appeared to have spent the previous evening and all the time in between, at said table. I pulled up a seat next to one of the stockier Frenchmen, who immediately introduced himself and began talking about American sports.

The waiter brought a tray of shots around. At the Ufleku the way to order a beer is to drink a shot - an entirely fantastic system. We drank shots, drank beer, and listened to our new, large French friend babble about the Dallas Cowboys.

After several hours of this we decided to move onto phase two. It was, after all, New Year's Eve. The bill came to roughly five bucks. We paid it, bought our friend another drink, and staggered out into the cold as the sun began to set behind the city.

The New Year's festivities were getting into swing as we trudged back the way that we had come. In Prague, New Year's Eve is synonymous with random, loud explosions. Most of the locals spend the daylight hours drinking and amassing large amounts of fireworks. The M80 type ones, that simply go BANG! are the most popular, but bottle rockets and Roman candles are not rare either. My guide book described the lighting off of these fireworks as being done with "frankly dangerous abandon."

This could not have been closer to the truth.

The main objective of the average fireworks-tosser seemed to be scaring the hell out of as many people as possible. They would sneak up behind unwary victims, light the explosive, drop it, and casually walk away. If the victim was unable to detect the mini-bomb ticking away at his feet, he would sustain a momentary, but utter, state of shock when it went off.

By the time we had reached the opposite end of St. Wenceslas Square we were well accustomed to the spontaneous explosions going on all around us. As the night went on the explosions only got more frequent, and the pyrotechnic arsenals of Prague's citizenry seemed never to dwindle.

It was through these explosions that we made our way to the Taz Pub, in that central yet confusing part of the city. We had chosen the Taz to do our serious New Year's Eve drinking for two reasons.

The first was that all bars were charging a nighttime cover and the Taz was the cheapest. The second reason was that it was the only place in town which advertised an indoor fireworks display.

As we approached the Taz there were a large number of young locals hanging about the entrance selling drugs. We were offered a dizzying array of narcotics, including the local speed, which is called piko. It is commonly known as the single worst amphetamine in all of Europe, and we avoided it.

We did, however, buy two grams of excellent marijuana for $7. It is important to point out here that the Bates Study Abroad Handbook advocates a very "When in Rome ..." approach to investigating foreign culture. At the Taz, the Romans were hopelessly stoned.

Drug possession is legal in Prague. Dealing, however, is not. That was fine by us, as we had no intention of selling anything.

The Taz consists of a large bar and two side rooms. The decor is a mix of pseudo-Spanish interior design, and the dorm room of a snowboarding enthusiast. Having bought our drugs and paid the cover, we moved purposefully into one of the side rooms. A large, Viking-like bartender soon brought us two beers, for which we were charged a dollar.

We ordered two absinthes before he left, and they soon arrived at our table. Absinthe is an alcohol made from wormwood; it is 150 proof, and banned in most countries because it has been shown to cause insanity.

We drank beer and absinthe for a long while. We tried to talk to the locals, which was impossible, due to both drunkenness and a language barrier.

We were starting to smoke a joint as the indoor fireworks display began. All around us people pulled fireworks from their coats, lit them, and threw them about the room. I saw a man in one corner: a fat, bald man. He was holding what appeared to be a half-stick of dynamite,wrapped in tin foil, with lots of wires spreading out from its core.

We ran.

Our timing was perfect, however, as we were able to buy two bottles of champagne and head down to Old Town Square as the stroke of midnight approached. Old Town Square is a majestic sight during the day. It is actually square (unlike St. Wenceslas Square), ringed by ancient buildings, and loomed over by even more ancient churches.

The cobblestone streets and serfish-looking buskers give it a quite old, quite European feel.

The spires of the churches frame the sky in an entirely alien sort of way. Altogether, Old Town Square can be quite invigorating during the day.

On New Year's Eve, however, Old Town Square was sheer bedlam. It was the number of people that scared me the most as we rounded the corner into the square champagne in hand.

Thousands of obscenely intoxicated tourists and locals had formed a circle around the center of the square, and were busily trying to scare each other. So many fireworks had been lit that a thick blanket of smoke hung just off the ground.

At this point the booze, the joints, the smoke, the explosions, the cobblestone and the churches all conspired to make me feel that I was an extra in a bad World War II docu-drama. A bottle rocket, whizzing inches over my head jerked me back to reality.

My hallucinations would have been anti-climactic anyway. There was no countdown to 1998 in Old Town Square. At some point there was a wave of loud cheering and the entire square seemed to catch fire for several minutes. Then people began to disperse slowly and return to the parties from which they had come.

The main event was over.

I woke the next morning on the floor, fully clothed and feeling absolutely terrible. I noticed that Bill had managed to get into his bed, but had apparently been unable to remove his shoes.

Then panic struck. I shot up off of the floor, clambered to the bedside table and checked Bill's alarm clock. It was past eight. We had missed our train to Munich.

We had planned to take the early train to Munich in order to catch our plane back to school. We had set the alarm before leaving the room the day before, figuring that if we did make it back to the hotel on New Year's Eve, we would need something to get us up at 6 a.m.

In retrospect, this was an extremely foolish plan. My head throbbed, my body ached, my hands smelled strange.

I kicked Bill - quite hard. He wheezed and sputtered to life.

"Did the alarm go off?" I asked.

"I don't know. I don't think so. It might have. I might have shut it off," he groaned. "What time is it?"

"Eight," I said. "We missed our train."

I spent the next two hours on the phone, finding us an alternative method of transportation to Munich. I was severely exhausted, still drunk and nearly broke. I had no desire to spend another night away

from my own bed simply because Bill had messed up our entire travel plan with one push of the snooze button.

There were no other trains that would get us to Munich on time, so I booked us a shuttle flight.

Bill had gone back to sleep shortly after I had kicked him awake. He explained that his privileged upbringing left him utterly useless during times in which he was expected to do things other than spend money. I kicked him out of bed again when it was time to leave.

Our taxi driver, like all Prague taxi drivers, paid absolutely no regard to the traffic regulations of the Czech highways and so we found ourselves at the airport with plenty of time to spare.

After smoking our last joint, I relaxed in a waiting area of the airport and tried to burn a few lasting images of Prague into my mind. I thought of the cobblestone alleys, the church spires, the long wooden tables of the Ufleku - postcard Prague. Then I thought of the neon lights, the American restaurants, and the guys in white hats. I couldn't decide which parts, in what quantities, constituted the real Prague.

Bill said, "I'm hungry. Let's eat something."

I had the number two meal, large.