Living In Czechia: Introduction

 

“One's destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.”

- Henry Miller

“You don’t find yourself when you travel, you lose yourself and suffer greatly for it.”

- Me

Travel, they said. It will be fun, they said. When adults say it’s good for young people to travel, do they mean it’s important to get lost in a foreign train station and eat some funny looking food? Or do they mean it’s important to spend time in another country so your home no longer makes sense to you, and you’re still no closer to making sense of any other place either? The first seems shallow and insignificant, the second is so earth shattering it cannot simply be called ‘good’. It seems both essential and tragic.

I apologize to my readers (all 10 of you) for failing to write since I arrived here in my new home. Like many blogs, what started with great ambition came to an abrupt end once real life got in the way. In 2018, I was traveling through Europe as a Linklater protagonist, drinking in each day like ambrosia, and then I arrived in Prague. The task of attending to my Maslow hierarchy came rushing in. I had to face a new city and a new job, surrounded by a new language with new people and new problems. That's one reason for the delay. However, as the months (now years) flew by and I considered sharing a story or two, I realized that my hesitation was caused by another problem: to be faithful to this experience I had to first understand it, and my understanding of what exactly was happening seemed to change every day. Let's be clear -- I'm not under any delusions that I owe or am even capable of typing up some poetic opus about the truth of travel and culture. However, as far as my ambitions for this writing project go, I at least want to document something that feels true to me, and so far that has been much more difficult than I expected.

In any case, here I am, over four years later, with what will be an undoubtedly strained attempt to cover what has happened.

First of all, I have learned a lot since leaving the States. For instance, there are different standards for politeness in Czechia -- I’ve learned to flag down waiters with my eyes instead of my hand, to pay in exact change whenever possible, and to say hello and goodbye in every shop, restaurant, and elevator. I learned to remove my shoes when I enter an apartment after my landlord scolded me for soiling the, apparently, freshly cleaned tiles of her walk-in-closet-sized flat (which I was essentially forced to move into, more on that later). I know to say Dobrou Chut' (like Bon Appétit) to anyone around me who is eating. In fact, the persistence with which Czechs fulfill this Dobrou Chut' duty is impressive. As a tour guide, we had a restaurant we partnered with where we would herd groups of 20-40 tourists in like cattle to feed and quaff before leading them back outside for the last 45 minutes of our tour. I would be wolfing down some spinach and dumplings between my 10am and 2pm tours as a stream of tourists would flow past me with that glassy-eyed, bovine look of someone who has spent the last week or two taking in new visual information and has stopped trying to draw any conclusions about it. The guide or waiter or restaurant manager would always poke their head through the stream of people and say "Dobrou Chut'!" with an encouraging smile and nod. I swear if a Czech was hanging by their finger-tips on a 14th story window ledge, clinging for dear life, and spotted a diner through the glass, they would still say Dobrou Chut’ before their grip gave out and they plummeted. I still don't quite know how to respond to this either. In America, we just eat, no ceremony. When someone is telling me to enjoy my meal, it's not going to make the salty wet spinach taste any better.

Aside from these Czech niceties, I’ve also learned to expect Czech aloofness. Strangers staring, service members being impatient or derisive, and bureaucrats, on whom you depend for your legal residence in their country, that seem to relish creating tortuous, kafkaesque requirements of you which even they themselves cannot remember or understand. I've learned that Czechs love their dogs, but you shouldn't ask to pet them; that Czechs in general expect to be left alone, and that it's nice to get on public transportation and expect to be left alone. After a couple years here, I start to see the friendliness of Americans to be quite invasive, or their attention unwanted, but I simultaneously miss the feeling of connection, even if it is somewhat artificial.

I've learned that mushroom picking is a national pastime, and that the mushrooms with brown slimy tops and spongy bottoms are safe but the ones with gilled bottoms are not. That nettle stings are supposedly good for rheumatism, that garlic soup is definitely good for hangovers, and that wearing shoes indoors is considered barbaric to Europeans in general. I've learned that Czechs are some of the least religious people on earth, and that they drink Czech beer religiously. I mean religiously -- some of them will talk to you about the importance of beer foam alone for an hour, in fact, you can order a glass full of it. Seriously, it's called mlíko (like milk). I've seen a Czech man slick his hair back with beer foam, and I've heard multiple students tell me that beer is a good source of vitamin B, which I thought was a joke (the B being Beer), but it turns out to be true. It's normal for Czech men to go to the pub and drink 6-8 beers per evening, which explains why the Czech Republic has long held the title of most beer consumed per capita in the world (although the tourists help those numbers; I should know, I’ve been herding british bachelor parties through the narrow gothic streets on tours long enough). Incidentally, I've learned that peeing in public is also widely accepted here. As one older expat told me on my first week of living here, that's why there are so many bushes in the parks -- and here I thought the park shrubbery was for scenic value, not just private urination. It's also very common to see a Czech parent pull their child's pants down to their feet and have them urinate in plain sight on the nearest patch of grass (when I told my Czech girlfriend, now wife, Annie that this was strange, she asked "why, do Americans assume that everyone is a pedophile?" Initially I got defensive in these squabbles, but I've come to acknowledge that Americans are just prudish weirdos.) 

me (right) surrounded by piss covered foliage

I've learned that good Czech bread is also very important, and puts our American sandwich bread to shame. It is rich, bitter, hearty, and excellent with a sausage and some mustard once you’ve acquired the taste. I've learned that Czechs have colorful swear words, much better than English swear words I'm told (another argument I'm resigned to losing). For example, přizdisráč, which means someone who shits by a wall – in other words, a coward. The most popular czech swear word is probably kurva, which means whore. They use it like we use the word fuck, and there's even a polite alternative, kurňa, which I hear Annie saying when she's struggling to find her ringing telephone. I've learned book-loads about Czech history – in fact, I became a tour guide 6 months after moving here (you could say I posed as a tour guide, gradually earning my keep by fleeing to Google after every tour in which I suffered a humiliating stumper of a question). I've learned how to make bramboráčky, eat chlebíčky, and wield an easter whip. I have learned that it is normal for Czechs to pour you a shot of homemade plum brandy as a gesture of hospitality, and have been offered such brandy by a priest at 10:00 in the morning. I've also learned to be careful of this brandy because a slap-dash distillation can result in an ABV that is borderline lethal. I've only begun to learn what it means to foreigners when you say you are American.

Your nationality means a lot to people, it turns out. This is especially true if that nationality happens to be American. Maybe I'm naive to be surprised by this, but I'm going to risk sounding foolish. Maybe the very reason I didn't realize its importance is because I grew up in a country with so much power. I never had to consider the impact another country had on my livelihood. Let's take the Czech example: its central location, small size, and mineral-rich land has made it a target for world powers to control for centuries. A factoid that I heard from my tour-guiding colleague goes something like this: "If you were born in Prague the early 20th century, you would have lived in 8 different countries by your late 70s without ever moving your feet.":

• Austria-Hungary

• the first Czechoslovak Republic in 1918 (end of WWI)

• the Second Czechoslovak Republic in 1938 (the Nazis take the Sudetenland)

• the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in 1939 (Nazis take the rest of today's Czechia)

• the Third Czechoslovak Republic in 1945 (end of WWII)

• the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic all the way from 1948 to 1989 (as a Soviet satellite state)

• the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic (after the velvet revolution)

• the Czech Republic in December 1992, right around the time I entered this sweet old world.

Going from monarchy to democracy to fascism to communism in one generation has left the people jaded – particularly the recent 40 years under communism (a topic which is, itself, worth a 400-page treatise). There are many ways in which this period shaped Czech thinking; it is perhaps the largest single phenomenon that divides Annie and I's points of view. This brings us back to what it means to be American. Communism means you have basically one kind of each thing at the store, as long as it isn't out of stock, which happened a lot in an economy strictly planned out by a group of old men in Moscow every 5 years (unsurprisingly, female hygiene products and hair-ties were in short supply). It also means that the west gets seen as a land of plenty, the place where you can buy blue jeans and listen to Elton John without being arrested or followed. Even today, brands like Levis have a cachet that is hard for me to appreciate because they symbolize a kind of forbidden affluence. In the 70's, people went out under the cover of darkness to markets in the woods where they could purchase smuggled copies of Exile on Main Street.

There's a common conversation you have as an American expatriate in the Czech Republic. Maybe you try to speak some broken Czech or you ask someone if they can speak English with you, pretty soon they ask "where are you from?" There's a few options here - I can say, "America" which is what a lot of Americans might say, but as that's also the name of two whole continents, I can instead say "The US" or "The States". Of course the actual name of my country is "The United States of America", but if I said that I would sound like a lunatic. The thing is, I could choose any of the four options and anyone would know what country I mean. The Czech Republic has recently started going by Czechia to fit in with the other European nations' abbreviated names (France for The French Republic, Germany for The Federal Republic of Germany) but many Czechs worry that will just further confuse them with Chechnya (a common mistake after the Boston Marathon bombing).

The next question they ask is almost always, "why did you come to the Czech Republic?" or often, "why you came to Czech Republic?", as many citizens who are older than 30 still don't speak English very well, since they were all taught Russian at school until 1990. I focused so much on my answer to this that I never stopped to wonder why they were asking it. After learning more about Czech history, I discovered that there is a deeply embedded feeling of inferiority to America. If you had a relative in America during communism, you were the envy of everyone. Kids with moms or dads who fled to the states would get high quality clothing, barbie dolls, other western goods sent to them in the mail. The Czechoslovak government hired musicians to make knock-off versions of popular American songs. You can compare the music videos Boty proti lásce with These Boots Were Made For Walking and get a pretty clear feeling for what different worlds these two countries were living in. Black and white, no dancing, stiff camera movements. Generally, the lyrics are not translated properly. It's not clear why -- maybe because they just want the same sounds, but the meaning is unimportant. So for example you take Petula Clark's exuberant Downtown and you get Helena von Dráčková's Pátá which means "5:00", and is a song about the time when the school bell rings and you get to go outside. The song bemoans how boring school is, and you can see in the video that the singer seems quite bored herself, playing with the stage dressing absent-mindedly as she sings.

Since then, things have changed quite a bit. You still can't get the cornucopia of flavors and dietary options you find in the average American store, but the European Union's standards require that the food is all well labeled and high quality (sometimes more so than in the states, e.g. somatic cell count in milk products). I generally feel much safer in the Czech Republic than I do in the States – they are much more stringent about drunk driving, there's almost no violent crime, and gun laws are strict. Plus, the emphasis on public space in Europe makes city life a lot more pleasant. All of that aside, the mythology of America looms large, and many Czechs still can't understand why you would come here when all anyone wanted to do was go there.

The mythology also causes Annie to react in strange ways to some of my stories. She was genuinely upset when she learned about the all night I-Hop diners where drunk college students would get a 3-AM meal before stumbling off to bed. Apparently, what I think of as a fun anecdote is, to her, disillusionment. The citizens in that spectacular nation of wealth and plenty squander their time and money on such trashy pastimes? The fact that anyone would consider getting behind the wheel of a car after having a beer is already savage enough. 

The other challenging thing about nationality is that just when you think you understand some differences, you get new information that moves the needle. This is one part of why it took me so long to write something here – I find that each month I spend here, the truth of the experience changes altogether. So whatever snapshot I attempt to post now, I dread looking back on it in a year and feeling it's completely off the mark. 

My impulse is to type out a lot of the thoughts that have been in my head recently in a kind of think-piece about American culture, politics, and how pessimistic I’ve been feeling about where the nation is headed. Instead, however, it may be better to tell a few stories here from the past few years, because besides being more entertaining, I think the world needs more stories and less hot takes from amateur thinkers, especially pessimistic ones.