The last time I saw Prague was in January 1992, only a little over 2 years past the Velvet Revolution. I was 19 years old, able to get by with barely-passable German far more easily than English, and in my memory the 700 year old beer hall was serving a giant liter mug of midnight-black beer with a head you could set a quarter on and too strong to contemplate.
When the lady behind the counter at the hotel asked us if we’d visited Prague before and I said “32 years ago,” she got a look I couldn’t place and then said “well…welcome to the new Prague.” Which, I get it – today Prague is the Nashville of Central Europe, the home of wild drunken stag nights, a place where the car service from the airport includes “lap dancers” on a list of offered amenities, a reasonably-priced party town for the young and wild-spirited, very much in the spirit of its Belle Epoque past as the spiritual capital of Bohemia.
Prague feels European. By which I mean to say, you know you are not in an English-speaking or American-influenced country. The fact that they don’t use the Euro adds to this; converting koruna to dollars and back took me most of the week to figure out (although I’m not going to lie, beers for $4 or less is magical). Forty-some years of Communism didn’t bother taking down the art nouveau architecture, with the result that it feels like a less expensive and more accessible Paris. After a couple of days in the nice hotel, which I ruined with the worst bout of food poisoning in my life (never eat “shrimp quesadilla” in a landlocked country), we wound up in the Flora neighborhood, and thus began one of the stranger weeks of my life.
It’s a weird dynamic to wake up, eat breakfast (something I only seem to do on vacation), kiss my wife goodbye as she heads for the office, and then be left to my own devices to kill time from around 9 to around 4. I was working remotely, on the sly, and 4 to midnight approximated 7 to 3 in California, which was enough to fake out the company and play it off as though i were still in the front room of my own house. So I had six or seven hours to kill with random perambulations, after which I had to come back to the room and go to work – after which I had to lie down and try to fall asleep, which proved impossible. I don’t think I fell asleep before 2 AM any day i was working, because you really do need time to let your mind wind down.
The other quirky thing is that when you wake up on Central European time, you have a bunch of stuff to get through on your phone from the day before – and then you basically have five or six hours of radio silence before the East Coast wakes up. For someone who refreshes his phone more or less constantly all day, this was unsettling. Everyone I knew was asleep or at work themselves and I was left to my own devices – a sense that hit me in Budapest in 1992 when I woke up at 2 AM all alone in the Hotel Ifjusag. But three decades on, I had resources I didn’t have back then – an iPhone, Internet access, and a much better sense of urban exploration.
So I set off, on foot, secure in the knowledge that Apple Maps could get me back where I needed to go and my transit pass on the phone could be my magic carpet for trams and buses and metro alike. I sought out that 700 year old beer hall, which turned out to be a little over 500 years old, and the giant intimidating pitch black beer turned out to be a half liter of brown lager with a typically Czech head and only 4.7% ABV, and it was delicious. I drank Pilsner at the first bar that ever served it, and while I will never be a Pilsner drinker, I get how it managed to conquer the world. I took a tram up past Prague Castle and found myself in the tiny neighborhood of Novy Svet, with its winding medieval cobbled streets and a coffee shop a step down into a centuries-old building. And I walked through Flora, a pleasantly quiet mostly residential stretch that nonetheless had bars and trams and plaques commemorating resistance fighters in 1945.
It was quiet. It was pleasant. It was far from the worst place to be an expat working remotely for a company back in the US. And in a lot of ways, it felt more normal – the Atrium Flora mall across from the hotel was like a mall from days gone by, with a cleaners and a McDonalds and clothing stores and a newsstand and a tobacconist and a toy shop. Not like the “everything is geared toward the Chinese luxury tourist” malls in the Bay. It felt like a place I could spend a lot of time and be all right, language barrier notwithstanding.
And this is crucial: I wore a BSC hat out in public, willingly, for the first time in at least 18 years. Because I was closing the loop. I was there for the kid who didn’t know that in three decades, his biweekly take-home would be more than what it cost to send him on that trip back then. For the kid who didn’t know anyone, who felt as completely lost in Birmingham as in Bratislava, who was too callow and too Baptist and too scared to know his way around a cheeky half. I always reply to anyone who says “it gets better” with “when and how”, but if it actually does, sometimes you have to take a moment and acknowledge it.
Of which.