I first visited Prague for a three-day weekend during the seven months I lived in Moscow before starting law school in 1998. Immediately entranced, I was delighted to revisit the city on business trips from Budapest in 2008 and 2009, and really fell in love with the Czech capital during an eight-month stay here in 2010. Given the opportunity, once I co-founded CEE Legal Matters with Radu, I immediately chose to return to the city, and reveled in Prague from March of 2014 to the summer of 2017.
Throughout those various visits and stays here, I saw the city as magical — for some reason even the name Prague captured my imagination, and I experienced the medieval city of spires, cobblestone streets, historic breweries, and hidden cemeteries, and romantic figures like Mozart, Vaclav Havel, and Franz Kafka with a profound sense of gratitude that my life had led me here, and an amazement that I was fortunate enough to experience it. Even on bad days, or following encounters with unpleasant people, I never once — not for a second — lost the sense that I was in a special place.
There is, after all, a reason INXS filmed their "Never Tear Us Apart" video here (in 1988, even before the Wall fell).
My Czech friends, it must be said, always reacted to my comments on the subject with some surprise. They were pleased to hear me speak of their home in such glowing terms, of course, but they also always seemed a bit confused that someone so apparently smart could be so utterly mistaken.
I'm getting it now. That magical aura that drew me here in 2010 and 2014 has finally started to disappear. Those rose-colored glasses are starting to readjust to the winter gloom. This is, I see now, a city that is in many ways like so many others, full of working people and students and retirees, all trudging through the snow and shaking off the cold, dealing with crying children, or heavy bags, or stiff joints, and in all familiar ways just trying to navigate through life. They could be in Duluth, or Boise, or Cleveland. Their lives still involve rent, bureaucracy, disappointment, and loss. It's justacity.
...
Here's the thing, though. Somehow, even with imagination transforming into reality, I still really really like this place! A lot!
The Not-So-Grim Truth
In the 1981 movie Stripes, incompetent American army cadets John Winger (Bill Murray) and Russell Ziskey (Harold Ramis) contemplate crossing the Cold-War-era border to rescue their commanding officer and their platoon, which had inadvertently marched into Czechoslovakia, where they were now being held:
Winger: C'mon, it's Czechoslovakia. We zip in, we pick 'em up, we zip right out again. We're not going to Moscow. It's Czechoslovakia. It's like going into Wisconsin.
Ziskey: Well I got the shit kicked out of me in Wisconsin once. Forget it!
I've mentioned that exchange a number of times over the years to friends, primarily in the context of topography and environment, as, indeed, with its size, rolling hills, and familiar midwestern weather, the Czech Republic resembles nothing so much as the upper Midwest.
But I've started to realize that the authors of that cinematic exchange were righter than perhaps even they knew. This is, to a child of the Midwest (two years in Kansas, then 17 in Michigan), an extremely familiar world. The cuisine, for instance, is so profoundly mid-American that the historic connection between the two is almost unmistakable. Meat and potatoes. Fried chicken. Gravy. Pork chops. Ribs. Funnel cakes. And, of course, lots of beer (lagers, famously, were invented in Plzen (hence the word Pilsner)).
The leaders and the best
The similarities go beyond that. As I walk around in the winter slush, seeing kids bundled up and adults bracing against the cold, I'm taken back (unhappily) to my Michigan school days. (I've managed to honor my oath never again to scrape the ice off a frozen car window, but only by not having a car).
And hockey — the Czechs are more into hockey, famously, than any other non-Nordic country in Europe (other, perhaps, than Russia).
Perhaps not everything is the same. Czechs tend to be a bit less immediately friendly than American midwesterners are famous for, and the relationship between merchants and customers is, shall we say, inconsistent — often tending to brusque. But that's all essentially irrelevant. As everywhere else in the world, once initial walls are broken down, people here are every bit as friendly, interested, and extremely helpful as you'd want.
(You do need to ignore the different affect of clerks and strangers, though, which can seem, to us over-the-top-friendly Americans, to be a bit cool. Turns out, the failure to smile all the time does not in fact reflect disinterest or hostility, but there is no doubt that it can be a bit off-putting for Americans visiting the supermarket or bakery, for instance. Yesterday the owner of a fancy foods shop in the Flora Mall who was coming down from a step ladder glared at me while rejecting my polite offer of a hand).
So what we've got is, to me, a familiar culture, with familiar topography, familiar weather, and familiar cuisine.
But that's not all, of course. Prague also has a gloriously beautiful historic center — a UNESCO World Heritage Site — which draws way-too-many millions of tourists a year (and only those few Czechs who can not avoid going there).
I mean, it's a pretty clock and all, but ...
The Czechs also have a crazy tennis culture, which, more about another time. But more tennis courts than any other country in Europe, as far as I know, and more players, certainly, per capita. And beyond tennis, there are numerous parks, and beer gardens, and the most wonderfully relaxed spring-and-summertime atmosphere I know.
Significantly, of course, there's also my personal connection. I've got some good friends here, and I really enjoy the opportunities to spend time with those here in Prague (Ales, Christian, Filip, Jiri), as well as those only a short train ride or flight away (Liesel, Radu, Andi, Agi, Marek, Susan, Marta, David, Johann, Chryssa) — another thing that makes Prague stand out to me.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it's also Europe. This is a world of advanced and fully-sufficient mass transit options, of train travel, of cafes and bakeries, of pubs and restaurants, of bookstores and toy stores. It's easy to walk around, with actual neighborhoods and trees taking the place of parking lots and traffic corridors. On one block there's a Ukrainian restaurant serving great borsch next to a relaxed coffee shop next to a Czech hospoda next to a bookstore next to a bakery next to ...
I may, someday, move back to the American West. I love the atmosphere there, the laughter and relaxedness. All my relatives are there, and so many good friends. I love the sports, the bagels, and the superior Mexican food. The language. The weather. And, hell, it's home, so I'm confident and comfortable with all my social and commercial interactions. I have by no means said goodbye forever to the land of my birth. But for now, being in this beautiful, social, dynamic, neighborhood-focused land of parks and beer and tennis, with cobblestone streets and history instead of parking lots and pavement ... I couldn't be happier.
So this feels like home to me ... but with all the advantages of a major, and historically beautiful, European city. Turns out, rose-colored glasses aren't necessary at all.
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