I had never been outside of the USA before I moved to Prague in 1996. I wasn’t at all nervous, but I should’ve been. Not because it was dangerous - it most certainly was not. I just had no idea what I was getting myself into.
Remember the days before the Internet? When the only thing you knew about a place was what you read in the Lonely Planet guide? Friends in LA told me: “As long as you aren’t expecting Western Europe you’ll be fine.”
And I thought Well, that won’t be a problem because I’ve never been anywhere but Indiana and California. I’m not expecting anything.
Turns out I was definitely expecting Western Europe. I was expecting the scenes from Audrey Hepburn movies. Parisian cafes, Italian vespas, London taxis. I was not expecting ancient Bohemian castles, defenestration memorials and torture museums. I wasn’t expecting to live in a communist panelák with a speaker system built into the wall that would randomly turn on in the middle of the night to scream things at me in Czech. Neither was I expecting the sauce on my spaghetti to be ketchup or the secret ingredient of the vegetarian special to be ham.
In fact, nothing in my childhood in Indiana or life in LA had prepared me for this place. These were scowling, angry people and the sounds that came out of their mouths were utterly incomprehensible. I couldn’t read their facial expressions or decipher where one sound ended and the next began. Church bells rang at all hours, which I loved, but trams threatened to run me over and announcements blared at me in the tube stations.
And to make matters worse, I hated the job that brought me there. I had been hired by a school to teach English and I was dreadful at it.
In my very first class, I introduced myself as an American, which I thought was simple and straightforward enough, but my students immediately demanded more information.
“No, but where are you from?”
“No, but your family is from where?
“Where are you really from?” They kept asking.
Hand- to-heart, I had no idea what they were talking about. It took me several minutes to realise what they were saying: “America is a new country, where are your ancestors from?”
I replied something to the effect of What? How the hell do I know? And then I tried, as quickly as possible to move on to the lessons of the day. We started with the basics:
Q: Hello. How are you?
A: I’m fine, how are you?
But this too provoked debate. My students wanted to know: “What do you say if you are not fine?”
Me: “Well just say that you are fine.”
Student: “So we must lie?”
Me: “No, it’s not lying, it’s just making small talk.”
And then a flood of comments and questions:
“Americans are always fine.”
“That’s because they are rich and happy.”
“We are not Americans, we are not always fine.”
“What do you say if you are not fine?”
These were long days.
The teacher’s dormitory was aptly named The Hotel Dum (pronounced DOOM) and was a 25-minute bus ride from the nearest tube station, Budêjovická. If my perception of the outside world was angry and loud, then my room should’ve felt like a refuge. But when the speaker on the wall wasn’t yelling at me, my room was invasively quiet. Not a relaxing quiet. Not an Aaah, now I can finally hear myself think kind of quiet. No, this was a disturbing quiet. This was a Fuck why am I the only person in this building kind of quiet. The walls were paper-thin - literally bendable and foldable like school classrooms. In theory, I should’ve been able to hear a person pee down the hall, but I never heard anyone speaking in Czech, English or otherwise. There was no phone, no radio (apart from the uncontrollable squawk box screwed into the wall) and no TV. In fact, the only sound I could hear was the fluorescent bulb buzzing from the gas station across the street. It was like being in solitary confinement in a 1-star Hotel.
I was allowed to leave, I just didn’t have anywhere else to go.
So after work and after dinner, I sat down at my desk to write letters in the hope that someday I’d figure out how to buy stamps.
I was self-conscious in my letters home. I felt like I’d made a huge mistake quitting my cushy job in LA and moving to a former communist country whose name no one could remember. But I didn’t want my mom and Grandma to worry, so I told them what they wanted to hear.
I said living in Prague was like living on a film set. I said that when I first saw the castle looming over the river, I thought it was a backdrop to a Disney film. I said I’d met some interesting people (which was true), but in fact, I was crushingly lonely.
One night, after I’d finished writing my letters, I grabbed a notebook and got into bed. And for the first time in a decade, I started to write, just for me. The truth. What a stupid fucking idiot, I wrote. What are you going to do now?
Grandma read my letters to anyone who stopped by or answered the phone. In one of my early letters, I must’ve mentioned that I couldn’t find scotch tape in Prague, because a month later I started receiving regular care packages of scotch tape from people all over the Midwest.
God bless them, each and every one. I really only needed a few pieces of tape. But within six months I could’ve opened up a transparent tape store next to the American Express office on Václavské Námêstí and made a killing.
By the time the fourth box of scotch tape arrived, I’d made a pack of friends, moved into a new apartment, got a new job and met my future husband. It was a rocky start, but the best was yet to come.
p.s. This is part of a longer piece that I may/may not include in the book. Was this fun? Do you want to hear more about Prague?
p.p.s. Czech friends, I’m sorry but my computer doesn’t have a háček so I had to use ê instead.
Laurie, I love your humor with which you describe some uneasy situations you ran into :-)). Those crazy Czechs! And yes, I'd be curious about more material from planet Prague;).
Yes I’d love to read more about this