Living in Czechia: Don't Let the Bed Bugs Bite

"What I love most about my home is who I share it with"

When I first arrived in this country, I stayed at a hostel, waiting to get a flat I could move into. Rocking up to the New Town of Prague’s historic center with a bulging backpack and puffy eyes, I mapped my way through the architectural collage to find my worn down temporary lodging: a five story structure with a large wooden door, and some taped up paper beside a buzzer with shaky calligraphy that read “Art Hole” — the name of my new temporary home. The place had been recommended to me by another traveler in Vienna, and since I enjoy the small surprises of spontaneity, I decided to book a bed there. I did not stay long, but long enough to leave a mark.

When I was tucked into bed as a child, my mom would sweetly rhyme good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite. In my imagination, these bugs were the stuff of fairy tales, just like other bedside stories told to lull you to sleep. After moving to Prague, I discovered that this rhyme is more of a sick joke, because if there are bed bugs in your midst, this incantation will do little to keep them at bay. In fact, after one or more of these things hitched a ride with me from the Art Hole to my new flat, I learned that eliminating them involves several rounds of spraying insecticide, laundering all your bedding and clothing in boiling hot water, dismantling your bed frame and steaming every nook and cranny of your flat with a rented machine from a place on the edge of town, encasing your mattress and pillow in special airtight material, depositing (delicately) a carcinogenic powder called diatomaceous earth in the electrical sockets and other odd holes around your room where they may be hiding, wrapping double stick tape along your bed’s feet, and spending every night half asleep and vigilant, ready to snap on your phone’s flashlight and investigate the moment you feel a slight crawling sensation which, believe me, is every hour or so, regardless of whether or not these bugs exist. 

The bugs have evolved to be nearly impossible to catch in the act — they hide in dark nooks near your bed, and they can tell when you are in your deepest sleep because they are attracted to the carbon dioxide of your breathing and can tell when you’ve stopped stirring. Then, they strike, crawling out from wherever they lay their eggs to find some skin — your arm, your back, your neck or forehead, and when they bite they release a numbing agent so they don’t disturb you during their meal. Then they crawl a bit and bite again, and again. The bites do not appear for several days, and when they do, they flare up as a line of angry red bumps that itch and burn. The worst part is, they do not need to eat all the time. They generally go a couple weeks between meals, and in extreme cases can even survive for up to a year without food. So even when you’ve done everything you thought possible to eradicate these invisible beasts, you cannot be sure they are gone. There’s always the chance you’ll be at work, talking to a client, and feel a slight itching on your lower back. Then, you sink down into yourself with the realization that these things might still live with you, and you take the next opportunity to run to a bathroom stall where you undress and check for new bites to confirm that it’s time for another round of treatments. This went on for four and a half months. For most of it, I never actually saw a single one of these bugs until one night I felt a crawling on my neck. I smacked my neck hard and felt something fall off of me. In the dark I squinted to find some dark, moving dot and squeezed the still writhing thing, swearing out loud under my breath, and flicked the light on to find at last some physical evidence of the enemy I had been battling. It came with a strange relief, to know at least I was not crazy, spending hundreds of dollars a month on a problem that was actually all in my head.

A bed bug, the only one I ever saw.

This was how my life in Prague began. It is a crisis which truly traumatizes people. If you want nightmares, just look at the online forums of people who have battled these bugs — many of them want to burn their houses down and start their afresh. Now imagine this, but in a country where all of your resources are in a language you don’t understand, surrounded by strangers or new companions who grow fearful and distant the moment you mention your problem. 

My savior came in the form of a tall, long-haired, deep-voiced Czech man. He was an actor trained in Shakespearean English who moonlit as an exterminator to pay the rent. He arranged for spraying sessions of my flat as soon as I contacted him, and he always had a calm and collected demeanor. He offered reassuring words to me, muffled by his face mask, as he strapped on the rest of his protective gear: "we will manage it, and if you get more bites or see bugs again in the next couple months, then we will try again until they are gone." I nodded, barefoot in the corner.

Me and the teaching materials

Meanwhile, I was starting a new job as an English teacher which I had only limited training for. I taught at a language school which offers in-company English lessons. That meant planning lessons for 25 classes a week, with students of every skill level from elementary to proficient, and zigzagging through town to the offices where these students worked. The cast of characters was diverse – factory workers, high-powered lawyers, US embassy employees, supply-chain managers, accountants and rappers. Some were kind, engaged, motivated, others were bitter, rude, or totally uninterested. 

The language school has an office where teachers of all ages and backgrounds gather to photocopy, print, and gripe with one another about their students and their problems. I was not the only one met with crises upon arriving. It seemed like almost every one of my colleagues had a challenging first few months — some fell ill with mysterious viruses they couldn’t diagnose which left them sick and weak, others had nightmarish roommates, threatening them with violence or simply having copious amounts of disturbingly loud and acrobatic sex at all hours of the day and night.

I met a friendly older Polish man at my language school. He was a close talker with a perennial sweat sheen across his puffy face, who looked more and more weary each time we met. At one point, I ran into him on a tram. I was heading back to my apartment with an extra large black trash bag which was filled with bedding that I had boiled and dried at the nearest Laundromat, nine stops away from my home. I was feeling a little nervous because generally I didn’t want people to see me like this—sunken eyes, carting around my literal baggage. But he seemed even worse, and he was carrying a suitcase himself. We said a surprised hello to one another, a funny seeing you here kind of thing.

“Are you going on a trip?” I asked him.

“No, no, I am moving to a new flat.” he explained.

“Oh really, I hope it’s an improvement?”

“Well my wife and I are having some trouble so I’m going to a new place for a while.”

I thought my fellow English teaching expats would have a certain joie de vivre. There is that, sure, but there's also a kind of desperation to some people, and in the office near closing time, this hangs thickly in the air. One particularly dark color in the patchwork of teachers are mid-life crisis adults. I met a timid man in his late 30s with a spinal defect which caused his posture to bend to the side, giving him a constant deferential demeanor. I first met him during a training with our language school where we were all expected to present demo grammar lessons at the end. His lesson started well enough, but when we all got confused about the activity, the other teachers started to step in and try to fix his exercise. Some combination of stage fright and confusion caused him to fold completely, crying "can I stop, please can I just stop?" He spoke like a teapot whistle. 

Frankly, there were a lot of people giving demo lessons that seemed unprepared for both the confidence and the know-how to teach English. And our language school just churned through these ill-prepared travelers like a wood chipper through twigs. They hired them, saddled them with impossible schedules for minimal pay, siphoned off the profits while the teachers floundered, and then the teacher either wised up and found a healthy balance to survive or shuffled back home from their expensive and stressful “adventure.”

This scoliotic teacher approached me at a certain point asking if I'd like a room in his flat. It wasn't convenient timing for me, but I was definitely interested in moving eventually, if only to get a kind of 'clean slate' feeling after my rough start. He invited me over for tea in his large and luxurious flat near the center of town. There was a big kitchen, two large private rooms and bathrooms, and even a living room. I told him I couldn't really afford to pay more than 10,000 Czech crowns per month on a teacher's salary. He seemed to be doing some mental math, bending some facts and rounding some numbers to make it work. It turns out he'd actually bought the flat and that he'd kind of gotten himself into a bit of a financial hole getting out to Prague in the first place, as he wasn't expecting all the fees that came with the visa process nor the low-wages that English teachers actually make. Eventually I stopped seeing him around the office, and found out via an optimistic Facebook post that he was heading back to the states for his next adventure. 

Then there was a 40-something British gentleman that we’ll call Ben. I heard him speaking at one of the five preparation tables we had in the language school office, and noted his turgidity. Ben presented himself as a man of letters, a former professor, and spoke with a slow intensity which held your attention, even if his meaning was ultimately diffuse. Part of my intrigue may have simply been that charming accent. In America, we meet so few British people, but in our media they are almost always portrayed as clever and prissy (it gives me some idea of how Europeans must see us Americans after watching all those films we export like American Pie; we aren’t doing our reputation any favors). Unfortunately, it turns out Brits can be just as dim as Americans, although the pleasant accent always allows a grace period before the reality sets in. 

Ben had unfortunate halitosis and an interest in speaking with me about breathy topics like politics. We both taught a class at a company early in the morning on Wednesdays. They were advanced-level classes, which many English teachers learn can be less of a teaching job and more of a place to espouse your wild theories. You spark controversy and, thus, conversation practice. One day, as we were preparing our classes, Ben explained to me what his plan was for this Wednesday. He had these verbal habits that parrot Gervais’ character David Brent (or perhaps it's a common British affectation). One is building questions into his speech to keep you with him, agreeing and listening, but also making your position feel a bit like the student under a teacher’s careful condescension. The other is using words instead of phrases or sentences to make points, as if the word is self-explanatory. He says this to me, with great seriousness in his voice, and slowly:

“Dylan, we teach a class of Czechs, right? Advanced speakers. They want to enjoy the class. Yes? Here’s my tip: Comedy. Right? Watch videos. Comedy videos. Stand up. Sketch. Funny political commentaries. What do you get? Conversation. Culture. Entertainment, right? Brings people together. They love it. Three weeks we’ve just been doing comedy. You use themes, genres. Black comedy. Yeah? The Czechs like it. Lots of black humor in Czechia. And so we do that. I recommend it. Have an interesting class. In the morning. Get up and laugh. Everyone likes a good laugh, don’t they? And are they men? or women?” 

“What?”

“In your class, your students. Are they Men?”

“Yeah”

“They’re men, we like to have a laugh. Men do. Brings us together. They like each other, enjoy the class, and enjoy your teaching.”

I ran into Ben outside of work sometimes when I went to the “Sunday Soup” sessions at a dingy DIY Co-Op type club called Žižkovšiška. These were laid-back jam sessions with expat and Czech musicians at a hostel with a stage and a bar. The place was dark and dirty but the laissez-faire approach made it feel lawless in a refreshing kind of way. Tens of coats bulge out from the small coat rack at the entrance, and if you come too early, you have to dig under the layers of smelly wool, fake-fur, and stiff leather jackets to find your garment when you leave. Although smoking in pubs was banned almost three year ago now, the place doesn’t really enforce this either, and so there’s always the eye-sting of marijuana and tobacco haze in the air. The bar is run by gah-damn teenagers with elaborate eye makeup who are so stoned you have to supervise them to make sure your drink gets made, and god forbid you want to order anything other than beer off the menu (which usually I do because the keg-lines are so dirty that one pint of beer scrapes up your bowels for the next 24 hours, but maybe it’s worth it for the price, 30czk (~$1.50)). To the right of the entrance there’s a ping pong table, which means there’s always errant plastic balls flying past your head or whizzing past your ankle while you order at the bar, and some lanky European hipster asking for you to toss it back. On Sunday they make a lentil soup, a bowl of which comes with the entrance price, along with some bread, that’s served up next to the bar and you can enjoy it if you aren’t finicky about hygiene. It’s not bad. Around the corner, there’s saggy chairs and couches surrounding chipped tables with candle sticks, the candle sticks completely obscured by layers of hardened waxen rivers, 30cm high. People stand, sit, and shout over the music that blares from the stage. Anyone can bring an instrument and play. The only rules, I’m told, are no covers and no jazz (what they consider ‘jazz’ is still unclear to me). The musical talent spread is delightfully broad. Some are getting up there to squeak their way through a song for a few verses or play a punctuating note or two, others are virtuosic and enviable in how they pluck out a golden and dynamic tapestry of sound from an understated guitar that hands below their slumping shoulders. One of my favorite acquaintances here in Prague and a regular here is a Dutch musician who organizes jam sessions around the city and offers music lessons. He’s a multi-instrumentalist who fills in on the drums, piano, guitar, bass, what have you, depending on what is needed to fill out the rhythm section. Otherwise he hangs back and chats, with his perpetual smile and floaty head nod that makes his long brown hair sway. He is generous, optimistic, and in the way that many endlessly friendly people are, his actual opinions and inner feelings are mirage-like. That is, they vanish when you try to investigate them. He and some others came to a small birthday party I had in a pub 6 months after I moved here. He was one of the first to arrive and last to leave. For his birthday, he threw a jam session where the entrance fee proceeds went to charity. I mean, every time I see this guy, I admire him more and more. Bad-breath Ben often sits at one of the long tables near the stage, chatting up a girl about 20 years his junior, and then gets up to deliver a passionate but pitchy saxophone blues, hips jerking to and fro, eyes all crows-feet, shut tight.

For Ben, his tribulation was a peculiar one. Running into him in the office for the ump-teenth time, I gave a polite hello and how are you? 

“Not good, something strange with my head.” 

“What do you mean?” I’m still standing, ready to remove myself from the conversation and start working as soon as I find the opportunity.

He explains, deliberate, slow as ever.

“I’m losing time. Confusion. Get a call from a student, where are you? she says. I say it’s Saturday. It’s Monday, she says. I look at the calendar. Monday. Next day I go to work. Receptionist at the building, what are you doing here, I say I have a lesson, Tuesday morning, 8:00am. She says it’s Wednesday. Look at the calendar. Wednesday. I don’t understand it. Time just gone. Strange.” My impulse is to offer condolences and maybe advice, but I honestly have no clue what to suggest. He’s obviously got a calendar already. 

“That’s terrible,” I say, sincerely.

“That’s not all, I mean my health is bad. I’m feeling unwell, generally.”

“Have you seen a doctor?” I ask.

“I’ll have to see a doctor, yeah. Maybe need to go back to England.”

Prague's famous Astronomical Clock, just outside the company where Ben and I taught English lessons.

Ben, like many others, slipped away, stopped coming into the office. It’s a gradual thing. You see people so rarely, but then you realize, you haven’t seen that intense guy with the shaved-head and tattoos in quite a while. the one who bragged about how famous his punk band used to be… or that plump Irish girl who was always so stressed out about her lesson planning, there in the corner all the time, textbooks piled on top of each other, photo copied stacks sliding off the shared table where no one has enough room. It’s not always clear that things went south for people. Sometimes they get better jobs, or more private students, and start to depend less on the arduous schedules and tram-hopping that our school demanded of us. But many also get disillusioned, or the money runs out, and they go home. 

Others wise up and realize that students have tragically low expectations of them, and so decide to stop lesson planning altogether and just wing it every class. One acquaintance of mine was a young woman from Niagara Falls, NY (who always made it very clear she was not from New York City), and her tactic after traveling the world and teaching English for a few years, was just this. She was a member of my initial friend group formed out of our training cohort, the commonality between us being that we enjoyed drinking, and that was enough. But truly never have I been a member of a more motley crew. If you’ll allow me to be brazenly categorical for the sake of picture painting – there was a radical-leftist feminist from NYC, a trump-voting ex-personal-trainer linguist from Wisconsin, a quick-witted and heavy-set couple from Dublin, a ravishing and catholic-guilt-laden gal from Ireland/Lithuania, a rather insensate skinny white-rapper from NYC, a hefty middle-aged gay ex-republican lawyer from Colorado/Georgia, an older half British half Chinese woman with stunning stories from her past, a Czech chain-smoking cardigan-wearing intellectual and student of politics and philosophy, and the aforementioned New Yorker (NOT NYC). This short albeit reductive description of the individuals I was initially socializing with should give you a clear feeling of the powerful stench of dung from elephants-in-the-room. And with enough social lubrication (as was our primary if not sole pastime), those elephants would often get alluded to.

The thing is, when you socialize with such a cast, you can sometimes be surprised by the ones you gravitate towards, learn about yourself, yada yada. I found that mine and miss Niagra Falls’ personalities worked together like oil and water. However, I should say that I admired her work-ethic. She filled her schedule through the week with blocks of lessons all day, from 8:00 to 20:00, teaching Chinese children online when she didn’t have a class in person. She managed to do this because, as she would often brag, she shunned lesson planning. She preferred to walk into class and start talking, get a conversation going, and when she heard a mistake, whip out an exercise from her trusty binder for that mistake and drill it. It’s not a terrible strategy, if the students are really learning something, and most of my irritation likely stemmed from the fact that I, meanwhile, was spending hours every evening meticulously planning out the beats for my lesson and feeling, all the while, incompetent. She also tried to convince as many of her students as possible to hold lessons in the pub instead of at the office. Essentially, her goal was to get paid with as little effort and as much beer as possible. 

She also balked at learning any Czech at all, or anything about their customs, and it was this kind of thing that made me, perhaps unfairly, group her into this category of the American fulfilling their ‘travel the world’ cliché. These are the types you meet in hostels throughout Europe. It is less, learn as much as you can about the world, and more, drink in as many pubs as you can around the world, and for every foreigner you sleep with, that’s 100 points. She had been teaching in countries far and wide, and especially enjoyed her time in South America where she got to snort high quality coke on the reg. She was the type of person who spoke only at one volume level – shout – and strained her voice so much that it was always threatening to take the day off. This meant that being in public with her marked yours as the Loud Americans table. There is this way so many of us travel that should make us cringe, like Europe is an extension of Disney’s Small World After All ride, and we want to sit, maybe snooze, while our boat takes us on the track past all the pretty colors and funny looking buildings and strange sounding people. Except that when the ride is over, other people are all impressed with you for being ‘well-traveled’.

Unfortunately, there were many other teachers I met like this as the months flew by, and my mental block for these types really prevents me from seeing the other, perhaps redeeming, qualities in them. I met one guy who told me he had to stop teaching in China because life there was corrupting him. He was treated like a king, the laws didn’t apply, and women were throwing themselves at him, all because he was a tall white guy, and a goofy-looking one at that, with a ridiculous hat. People get sucked into this expat teaching lifestyle in some countries especially because they are so bacchanalian. You can bet that teaching a good English class is the last thing on your mind. Plus, there’s a reason why the Chinese government gives teachers luxurious lifestyles while looking the other way – these teachers are helping their children grow up to compete with America itself in a very real and in some ways existentially threatening way, at least with regard to global power dynamics and, by extension, normative human rights. 

Maybe the joke’s on me. As I said, the teachers are all woefully unprepared, the students expect little from us beyond an hour away from work, and the language school is not exactly monitoring our performance (we have plenty of time to prepare for our two observations a year, wherein many teachers tell their students: on Tuesday we are going to have a very different kind of class, please pretend like it is normal). Even if you do put in the effort, it’s rare to find a student that is ambitious enough to actually improve. Many students are so busy with their work they hardly ever show up. Teaching adults takes on a hamster-wheel type quality. Here’s the beginning of a typical 8am class to demonstrate:

7:55 - arrive at the reception, explain ‘Jsem učitel, mám tady hodinu’ to the dead-eyed barbie-doll they pay to check Facebook for 8 hours a day.  She hands you a card for the elevator.

7:57 - get in the elevator with other employees of the massive office building, to whom you must say ‘dobrý den’ upon entering and ‘na shledanou’ when you or anyone else exits.

7:58 - wait awkwardly in the hall with your materials for your student  to come and let you into the secure area where your meeting room is, meanwhile enduring the darting glances of curious employees as they walk by. 

7:59-8:10 (depending on the student) - meet your student and go to some fish-bowl meeting room where bored office workers can watch you pantomime any number of topics through the sound-proof glass. 

8:11 - ask ‘How are you’ as you’ve been trained to do since you were a child, instinctively, and watch the Czech student squirm and respond, ‘fine’, as they have no such ritual in their culture.

side note: Czechs ask each other ‘how are you’ only in personal settings, where your answer would always be honest*. They think Americans are very strange for always asking ‘How are you’ and expecting the answer to be ‘good’ or ‘fine’. I explain that this is not necessarily true, see British Ben above and his time problem.

*additional side note: Czechs are only honest insofar as they are pessimistic. I’ve been told that if you tell someone you are ‘good’ or ‘great’ or ‘fantastic’ or any number of positive responses to this question, it is considered bragging and is very indecent indeed. So you see, this becomes a strange ritual. We compulsively ask Czechs ‘how are you’ and they squirm and respond ‘fine’ which is meeting us halfway, regarding polite-optimism.

8:12 - ask ‘did you do your homework?’ to which they shamefully respond ‘no’ and you are grateful because it means at least 5 minutes of class time taken care of as you do it together.

8:20 - introduce some grammar point or topic you planned to work on today. For example, one part of English which many native speakers never appreciate the difficulty of is what we call ‘phrasal verbs’. You can teach phrasal verbs to almost any level of learner because they are so difficult to learn. These are verb and preposition pairings, and they often have illogical and multiple meanings. For example: ‘look up’ can mean literally to look at the sky or to find the definition of, ‘back up’ can mean literally to move backward or to support someone/something, ‘break down’ can mean ‘to divide into smaller parts’ or ‘to get upset’ and ‘eat out’ can mean ‘to go out to dinner’ or, of course, cunnilingus.

8:30 - guided practice, some fill in the blank or multiple choice exercise.

8:45 - free practice, e.g. role playing.

8:50 - review mistakes. The great linguistic differences between Czech and English cause some pretty surprising mistakes. The most common one and cause for much blushing is gender confusing. He instead of She, vice versa. Czechs also have a pronoun, svůj, which means “one’s own”. In the sentence He is eating his goulash, ‘his’ would be replaced by this pronoun. It goes for ‘your’ and ‘my’ and any other reflexive possessive pronoun. That means Czechs will often default to ‘your’ when they mean ‘my’ or ‘his’, creating mistakes like “This morning I was reading your emails” or “I ate dinner with your husband”. Word order is also radically different. In Czech, words can move around much more because the words themselves give the information instead of their order. So we understand that we are describing the dinner Milan’s spouse Lenka had and not some freak accident when he says the sentence “A chicken ate my wife”. The word ‘prosím’ is very tricky as well. Czechs use it to mean ‘please’, ‘you’re welcome’, ‘pardon?’, and the infinitive form of the verb means ‘to beg.’ There’s a story I heard about a Czech waitress with an English boss who was asked to work overtime on a shift. She responded, ‘If you get on your knees and please me.”

After six months of sprinting from class to class, and meeting mostly disinterested or frustrated faces, I felt my motivation falter. My lessons became sloppy and improvisational, and it didn’t seem to make a difference. I was becoming the teacher I loathed from the start. In February, my mom came to visit me in Prague and we took a tour of Prague Castle together with a gregarious and intelligent guide. At our break I asked him about the job, and his enthusiasm felt genuine. He encouraged me to apply, explaining that the process at first was a bit grueling but it paid hearty dividends once you were working. This was where the second phase of my life in Prague began, as I dove into getting out of teaching and into tour guiding as soon as Easter, 2019.