If an inventory of the pockets and backpack turns up 63.50 Kč, 39 U.S. cents, 10 Sk, three bottle caps, and three used up AAA batteries, there’s only way to do Petřiny, end of the line for trams 1 and 18, and that’s on a budget. Some do the budget thing fanatically; others have it forced upon them. There’s the old man who dies a pauper’s death but has $100,000 in a shoebox under his mattress, and there’re the spendthrifts who cash in every coin, lest the Antichrist arrive tomorrow and declare most currencies useless.

To explore on a budget dictated by binges from the 10th of one month (payday) to the first of the next (rent day), which lead to a diet of Braník and rice from rent day to payday, when the bingeing begins anew, one needs a couple of things: a metro pass and a bottle. The metro pass, 30 days for 440 Kč, not only budgets money (one 20 Kč ride a day over 30 days is 600 Kč), but time, as there’s no need to wait by the ticket machine for folks to fumble their change and press the wrong buttons, making others miss their trains. The bottle, which easily fits in that holster thing backpacks have these days for water, means no 3 Kč deposit, which nearly doubles the price of, say, Klasik, and there’s always a bottle—or perhaps 40-some—sitting in a crate in the kitchen.
Finding somewhere to fill the bottle on a Petřiny Saturday isn’t easy. Perhaps it’s simpler during the week, when that neck of the woods surely bustles; it’s tough to know for those with jobs, though. Most of the people head up the hill, toward what a bike sign indicates is Oborá Hvězda, this foresty spot. Maybe it’s wise to follow. It’s a ritzy neck of town, though, the kind of place where people don’t advertise their beer prices in chalk on the front door, the kind of place where there ain’t no damn potraviny. Maybe it’s grand in Petřiny’s Oborá Hvězda, maybe it’s swell to take beer from closer to the center into the those woods. I wouldn’t know—the first store I found on the route I walked was at Dvorká Šarka, where the Braník bottles cost a whopping 10 Kč, deposit not included, but watching the ducks, like all broke-ass old men do, is free. But that’s the end of some other lines.
 

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