Prague

Sitting in a booth by my lonesome across from the bar. A bar called Beer Geek right in the center of Prague. I was here last Thursday, my first full day in the city. I’d arrived on a bus from Berlin.

Getting here was easy. There were some fields and farms. Pretty much the same as anywhere else. Although it seems like there is a lot more open space in Eastern Europe, once you make your way east or southeast of Berlin. People everywhere … walking into the bar, filling up the place. Prague is beautiful.

That’s what I was told before I got here. And I’d seen a lot of expat English teachers who had made their home here. In fact, I met a girl last week in this same bar. A California girl, from San Francisco. I was sitting at the bar, scrawling in my notebook. Somehow, we started talking. She’d thought that my handwriting was atrocious.

She wrote down a bunch of places for me to visit in my notebook. I kept drinking, she kept drinking. We talked for about two hours, trading stories. She’d been in Prague for about five years, had come here to take a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) course. Said that she’d ended up meeting a guy here and staying for two years. She had only been allowed to stay for three months. But I guess it all works out, endlessly—when you’re an American white girl with a friendly accent.

I told her about my Chinese girlfriend and how her visa to Germany had been denied. We laughed about that and ordered two more beers.

“Imagine that,” said I. “Not being able to enter a country just because of where you were born.”

“Yeah,” she replied, “yikes.”

The first 24 hours in a new country is always the best part about traveling. Even though I was hungry, disheveled and complacently irritable, the new architecture was vivid, distinct, unique and vibrant. It still is, after these past five or six days. The oranges, the reds, whites, blues, greens.

Streets stretching across the city with cobblestones. Buses and trains. Coming and going. The language, Czech, crackled … I’m drinking and writing so I’m allowed to switch tenses. (The bar is filling up and it feels strange to be sitting in a corner, writing.)

I didn’t really know what I should be seeing in Prague. I told the girl at the bar that, her name was Kristina. She laughed at that.

On Friday, I was up bright and early, as ever. Still catching my breath after spending six months in Southeast Asia. My girlfriend back in northern China. I went out across the cobblestones, scratching my chin. Sunglasses covering my endlessly working mind and heart. Feeling the spirit of Prague all throughout the city and its people. It weird to get somewhere new and to be in a different country and to see and realize how different everything can be. Yet it’s almost the same, everywhere.

The language here is like lightning. It sizzles in the throat of a Czech. Just like their thirst for beer.

Somehow, I ended up waltzing toward the bridges which line the river which makes an S, going north and south across the city. (Reader: Take note. I just got out of my seat in the corner so three beautiful women could sit down in the bar that has got overly-crowded in just the past ten minutes. Listening to punk music, no less!)

F. Scott Fitzgerald said that adding exclamation points to your writing was self-congratulatory. So let’s continue.

I saw the river and the old bridges and there were little boats going across the water piloted by people. The wind was calm, unlike the first day I’d arrived. Tourists were all over and they were inundating the bars, shops and restaurants. I was probably drinking beer. White clouds, all puffy. Blue sky. Smiles. Eight or nine different languages going around me. A Turkish woman instructed her family to stand in front of the bridge while a group of Chinese people gawked at a blackish brick that stood steadfastly in the June sunlight. I snuck a picture of them then I wandered around some more, finding a place with weed chocolate, getting my Friday and Saturday reversed.

***

Just looking over what I wrote. I know that switching tenses can be a hazy sunlight to people who are used to reading other shit. But my eyes are getting heavy and the bar is filling up. The bartender came over with my second beer, another one from CZECH REPUBLIC. THE.

I like mistakes. I like making them. Coming to Eastern Europe in the oncoming summer months feels like a mistake. Just like coming to this bar and sitting down to write. A mistake.

The Czech people seem to be resilient and individualistic. In Germany, I got a sense of a more open culture—with people from all over the world living and settling there, starting businesses, etc. That seems to be similar to here, although there are more Asians. With vegan places. Why?

The Italians are here too. French. Greek. I saw a Sri Lankan curry restaurant on the walk over here. OH. And there are plenty of beer gardens. Where Czech people gather each day after work to spend hours in the sunlight. Germany and the Czech Republic get long hours of daylight as the summer sticks its hand under its armpit and squeezes.

Their language is noisy, in other words. And I like that about them. I got the sense, after three or four days, that the better their English the friendlier they were with tourists. When I went into a dive, I got some pretty strange looks. But I didn’t care. The older gentleman spoke in their native tongue, moving around and staring at the sky and themselves, inwardly. I was polite, sincere, respectful. Ate a traditional Czech dish of breadcrumbs, beef tenderloins and cranberry sauce, washing it down with 500 mL of local beer. Left a tip. Twenty-one percent.

The city of Prague is a romantic place. And they appreciate their literature. I went out to a local bookstore, one of the places Kristina had told me to visit, and I explored. Since I wasn’t teaching online classes anymore—English—I had more time for that. It had been a long time … bookstores were places I went to find solace. Now, they terrify me. And they also bore the shit outta me.

Even Kafka. I’ve read that his short stories were worthwhile and I’ve been told by others … “You should read Kafka.” I can even remember telling a (crazy) girlfriend one time that I wanted to move to Prague. Maybe because of KAFKA?

“They hate Americans,” she told me. What the hell did she really know?

I left Kafka in the bookstore, along with the other heavyweights. Allegedly.

My allergies were making me sneeze, all these damn beautiful parks and flowers and roses and children chasing dandelions, barefooted.

I don’t know what’s going to happen to our species once most of us die off in the aftermath of all that’s coming for us like a comet from the Seventh Circle of Hell. But I can picture some alien species coming to Prague, buying a beret, some canvases, setting up in a third-floor studio apartment, an easel. The cool wind of the afternoon blowing on through as he/she/it dabbles a bit of blue, green, red, and orange paint … mixing all the colors with the last echoes of a classical radio station that some fool forgot to shut off before the bombs started blasting apart everything and everyone.

What a beautiful place. The Czech people have their own sense of art and life and living it.

So nothing bad will ever happen here, again.

I’m sure of it.