What we loved most about Prague was the spirit of the city. A relatively short time after the country's change to democracy, the people in the old city were busy opening bars, selling Jim Morrison T-shirts and Indonesian clothes, and running head shops and CD stalls, making money, and enjoying life. The young Czechs wore grungy clothing, sported long and wild hair, browsed in bookstores full of intellectual titles, and some of them told us the last several years had been like a dream come true. They waved their arms at the bustling hotels, shops, and restaurants and told us that most of this had not even existed not so very long ago.
The
languages spoken by the city were changing with the times, too. Most older
people in Prague had learned German in their youth. Many twenty-somethings
spoke Russian, and with Russian people not so very popular in Prague, a
lot of them had now learned English. You could walk down the street and
buy Die Welt or Le Monde or the International Herald-Examiner, turn on
the radio and hear American pop songs all day, and read signs and notices
in English and German. This was fortunate for us, because Czech was quite
baffling. The spoken language was beautiful, smooth and melodic, but the
written words . . . the spelling were puzzling, the sounds obscure, the
diacriticals formidable. During our whole stay in Prague we only ever learned
the words for "beer" and "please" and often got those mixed up.
A small community of American expatriates lived here, drawn by the excitement and maybe the inexpensive cost of living. I liked to walk the half-block from our pension to one of the bars where expatriates gathered, listen to the jazz tapes, drink the strong dark beer, and read the local expatriate magazine. I've forgotten what it was called but there were interviews with dark-eyed underground musicians, tips on getting Internet connections and phone service in Prague, and an entertaining collection of articles on topics like how to get laid in Prague and the joys of auto-erotica for those who couldn't. The last seemed appropriate because there was a strong smell of romance -- well, maybe just sex -- in the air. The young women wore skimpy dresses and bare midriffs, and our pension had thoughtfully provided a brochure of do's and don'ts in Prague, including a warning against picking up prostitutes on the street due to "the danger of being narcoticized and robbed in your room". An American writer I met in the expatriates' bar talked about how wild Prague women were, and his friend, a female writer, complained that she felt like a prude in the city. Her former job, incidentally, was at Playboy Magazine.
Towering
over the crooked streets and CD shops of the old city, the amazing buildings
of Prague dismissed all of this as ephemeral fashion. Nazi domination,
Communist rule, flowering democracy -- ho hum, we've seen it all, they
seemed to say. Left over from Prague's centuries as one of the most powerful
cities in Europe, the churches were dark and brooding, wearing tall spires
crowned with forests of spiked turrets and laced with fantastic Gothic
decoration. We loved wandering around Wensceslaus Square, circling Our
Lady of Tyn, weaving a random path to the statue-lined Charles Bridge,
and meandering through the Lesser Quarter before heading back to Wensceslaus
Square or the hotel for dinner.
Unfortunately, Mary was fighting a bad cold through our stay in Prague, and only got out and about during a few of our days there, so I was often left to my own devices, which explains why I never sampled any of the many art museums and serious culture in the city. Instead, I hung around the bars in Vinohrady and combed through the used camera stores, looking for bargains on East German cameras. Word is that at one time a used camera buff could pick up worthy cameras for the price of a loaf of bread in Prague, but alas prices have gone up and for a medium format camera with Zeiss glass I had to shell out the exorbitant sum of . . . $80. The next time we visit Prague, we'll bring a spare suitcase.
It cost me slightly more, $100, for the privilege of spending two hours at the Prague police station dictating a report and combing through books of mug shots, after falling victim to a scam that is, according to the police, becoming popular in Prague. One of the ubiqitous black market moneychangers comes up to the tourist and offers a good deal on currency. Plainclothes policemen then appear, arrest the money changer and search him for forged currency, question the tourist, search him for forged bills, and leave with a stern warning against using the black market. Whereupon the tourist realizes that through sleight of hand some of his bills have disappeared along with them. The "policemen" are not policemen at all, and their "police ID cards" probably just Czech drivers licenses or video rental cards or the like, but how many tourists in Prague can read Czech anyway? Petty crime, scams, and pickpocketing were increasingly common in Prague. The helpful notices in our hotel urged guests to beware of pickpockets and to rent one of the "boots" to immobilize cars parked on the street.
The police resignedly told me that although I had identified the perpetrators from the mug books, they would not be arrested since Prague lacked the jail space to house its burgeoning criminal class. The station was dingy and the only technology in sight was a pair of old manual typewriters. The mug shots were kept in tattered three-ring binders stuffed with overexposed Polaroid photos of criminals standing by their beds, red-eyed in their underwear. Many of them had smiled prettily for the camera, in a display of contempt or vanity. All in all, not an uninteresting way to spend a hot summer afternoon in Prague.
(Six months later, in California, I received a formal-looking letter from the Prague police, replete with official stamps and signatures. Unfortunately, I could not find anyone to translate it. So I've never known what did become of my $100.)
Traveling On a Budget
Modern hotels in the center of the old city ran over $US100 a night, but Pension City on Belgicka (69 109 13) had remarkably large double rooms, plain but clean with large sunny windows overlooking a quiet leafy street, for $US48 a night. Meals in the neighborhood were cheap, e.g. $US 3-4 for dinner in an unfancy restaurant.
Staying Connected
Compuserve had a local node in Prague and the hotel phones used standard RJ11 jacks.
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© John Liu/Mary Sauve 1997. You may link to this page but you may not otherwise use, take, or republish this material.