While old Oliva tells a group of children about his life as a sailor and how he met Diana and her cat with sunglasses, a strange circus arrives in town.

The International Festival of Magicians in Karlovy Vary: one of the performances is stylized as a memory of the eskamotero Vili Brod, who also performed in Karlovy Vary in the 1930s. Brod's story is ingeniously supplemented with excerpts from documentary and feature films with Karlovy Vary themes...

Two hilarious short stories set in the milieu of apprentice youth, depicting the amorous travails of teenage boys. In the first story, "The Sorrows of the Devil's Apprentice", we see a talkative storekeeper who is constantly advising his charges on how they should behave, unaware that one of the young men has fallen in love with his daughter. Overcoming shyness is also depicted in the second of the stories, entitled "May I Beg, Helen?"

Jirka is a composer, his wife, Jana, a pianist. Jana would like to have an own concert, but so far she has only been selected to accompany Valenta during his concerts in Budapest. After some resentments, she accepts the proposal.

Getting into the popular music spotlight is not easy, as even an enthusiastic amateur, an overconfident young man whose singing career soon fails, will find out... A tantalising insight into the backstage of the entertainment industry, neither the musical passages nor the unexpectedly massive participation of the singing stars of the time succeeded.

The female employees of the poultry-processing factory find relief from their monotonous work in chatting about weddings and marriages. The very young Zdena (Marta Vancurová), too, dreams about a white veil and an entourage of bridesmaids. On her return home from work, she runs into a peculiar man on an abandoned road who pertinaciously offers to read her palm for a few crowns to buy soup. His augury is rather usual - wealth and poverty, suffering and happiness. Then however, he declares that Zdena must marry exactly on 3 November of that year otherwise she will be unhappy.