Month: April 2024

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.

It was in a random neighborhood in Denver last October where the thought first occurred to me: brick is what I key on. There’s precious little brick left in the Bay Area, thanks to 1906 and 1989 and the unsuitability of unreinforced masonry as building material in earthquake country. But the neighborhood of early-20th century low brick buildings of two or three stories reminded me of Asheville, or of the bits of the Southside of Birmingham that first tipped my notice back in 1985. And then a walk through the France section of EPCOT in November confirmed it.

The neighborhood as urban village: that’s the thing I always seem to imagine. The confluence of old brick buildings, some centuries old, the presence of canals from an era before rail, the presence of streetcars or trams for anything that’s too far to do on foot.

The apotheosis of this, of course, is Shepherd Market. A tiny square with a couple of side streets in and out and a couple more pedestrian passageways. Inside: restaurants, barber shops, a couple of corner shops with soda and magazines and knockoff phone chargers, no fewer than four pubs, a tobacconist, a pharmacy, a hardware store. Apartments over almost all of them, many associated with centuries of practitioners of the oldest profession until only a couple of decades ago.

We’ve stayed at the Park Lane four times now – five if you count the one-night stopover at the end of the trip – but I only realized Shepherd Market was there at the end of a previous trip. These last two times, it has been where I get my haircut and straight razor shave, where I grab my first pint of the trip at Ye Grapes, where I can be assured of grabbing a couple bottles of Coke Zero to take back to a hotel that seems to have a deal with Pepsi in every country. It is a place of imagination: that perfect other realm where there is no job, no American politics, nothing to think about other than where shall we go today and what do we feel like doing.

In William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, Cayce Pollard thinks of London as “mirror world” – different plugs for different electricity, different light switches, different weight to the coins and different denominations. I feel that, big-time. A world where a pint of beer is a hefty and generous measure, but where as likely as not it’s barely 4% alcohol by volume. A place where fountain soda is basically unobtainable other than at American fast food chains, and God help you if you want a portion larger than a half liter even there. A place where coffee means espresso and is served in a thimble, a place where ice in a beverage is one piece at best the size of a Monopoly die. A place where I eat more vegetarian food in a week than I do the rest of the year in America, because it’s plentiful and better. A place where the wheat doesn’t put my wife’s immune system on monkey tilt. A place where instead of dealing with rideshare apps and their casual exploitation of distributed servantry, you put your hand up to hail the best cabs in the world – or climb to the top of a double-decker bus and enjoy the view from the front.

And yet, even as London is our own personal Disneyland, our friends there are contemplating getting out. Because just as Austin and Nashville and Birmingham can’t escape Texas or Tennessee or Alabama, London is trapped in England, in Brexitland, in a tabloid press culture and a non-urban population incapable of relinquishing imperial pretensions, A city that was the financial capital of the planet and the greatest cultural melting pot of our time until voters outside the M25 decided that they could vote themselves a British moon on a British stick. I know about all of this, thanks to BBC Sounds and Londonist and the sardonic remarks on BritBox panel shows, but when I’m in London it feels like something that never touches me, like what it must be like for people who don’t know or care or think about politics. I can just be. (Especially since for all its own bigotries, English conservatism doesn’t seem particularly hell-bent on ending abortion access or burning books. Their attitudes toward trans people are desperate, but that’s another post.)

London is what I think of when I think of getting away now. The Palm Court of the Park Lane, indie-chill music overhead and a glass of Auchentoshen on one big rock to hand, memories of our honeymoon or the time we just decided to live in London for three weeks and pretend we were wealthy and retired. Winding cobbled streets, a cheeky half of cask ale literally around almost every corner, the entire Mr Fogg’s chain of delightfully immersive cocktail parlors. A mirror world. Work doesn’t matter, politics doesn’t matter, we have no obligation but to enjoy ourselves and take lots of pictures. Sit in the club room with a fizzy clear lemonade (and maybe just the least splash of cognac on top) and use a big piece of hotel stationery and my favorite blue-black pen to write out what we want to see tomorrow.

But there was more to this trip than London. Of which.