"The bartender was Czech, and he watched all this quietly. As soon as we stopped at the last town on the border, the police decided to tell me to have a nice trip, and he took me into the store room on the train, opened the window and poured shots and lit a cigarette for me as we crossed the border and said "fucking Germans. Welcome to Czechia... anything is possible!""

I can almost hear him. That is basically the essence of Czechdom :)

It is interesting how some aspects of culture are essentially the same and others diverge wildly once you cross the border. When it comes to Bier and Schnitzel and snowy Christmas, Czechs are almost indistinguishable from Bavarians. But in other aspects it is just as you saw it, two worlds apart.