HALIFAX — “Prague is sooooooo beeeeautiful - I can't believe we eeeever let the Communists have it for themselves,” exclaimed the woman standing in the American Express line, so that everyone could hear her and dutifully nod their heads in assent.
Like so many passing fashions, with time the situation compounded itself.
The worse things got, the more desperate the masses became to see things before they got worse still, and the more people who came the worse it got, until one day those in the know woke up to the fact that this particular destination lacked the panache that brought them here in the first place and moved on to find a new “undiscovered” paradise, and only the clueless continued to arrive.
* * *
In the early days in Prague I might go to some bar where the people, slightly menacing and worn to the bone, looked like they'd crawled out from under some rock after 40 years of who knew exactly what.
In a manner of speaking, it was fair to say that they had. I imagined they knew some deep, dark secret that I was curious about but ultimately glad I'd never really know.
I took a train to Poland, and sitting across from me was a Polish man who was the spitting image of a childhood Polish-American friend - spitting image, that is, but for the fact that he was 30 pounds overweight, his teeth were black with decay, his complexion pale and unhealthy, and he appeared 20 years older than his 40-year-old twin in America.
When my wife Jana and I rented a car and drove to western Bohemia, we got lost, and Jana got out of the car to ask directions. I looked over at the down-and-out-looking toughs she was talking to with trepidation, but she evidently didn't think a thing about it as she matter-of-factly reported the directions she'd received without comment.
I was reminded for an instant just how harsh in certain respects her life must have been, though she never even hinted that that might have been the case.
* * *
That first winter it seemed to snow every day, but when I looked at the ground I'd be surprised to see not more than a half inch or so of accumulation at any given time.
A lot of coal was still being burned as heating fuel in Prague, and even more in towns and villages where I was naïve enough to find the incense-laden scent enchanting. I coughed away all winter without making any connection to the likely cause.
I wasn't alone in my suffering. Everyone called it the “Prague hack.” I went to the hospital to ask for antibiotics, but the doctor with a two-day stubble on his chin insisted that I had a virus and antibiotics wouldn't do me any good.
Like the unassumingly assertive American I was, overly confident in my own ignorance, I told him I knew my own body and insisted the antibiotics would help. He shrugged, and gave me the antibiotics and, as he'd predicted, they didn't do any good at all. I continued to hack away, and came to take it for granted, until one day, a month or two later, it suddenly dawned on me that I wasn't coughing anymore, that I'd gotten well, just as the Czech doctor said I would.
* * *
Up to this point in my time overseas, I hadn't viewed myself as a Prague expatriate, partly because I was old enough to be a father to the Gen-Xers who accounted for the majority of Americans in Prague at the time; not to mention the fact that the very term “expat,” utilized so near the turn of the 21st century, sounded to me pretentious and out of date.
Ernest Hemingway may have been an expat, but he could just as well have been the last one as far as I was concerned. This is not to say that I wasn't in some respect a part of the Prague expat scene - whether I consciously chose to think of myself as such or not.
After all, if not an expat, what was I?
Take the actress Margot Kidder (Lois Lane in the Superman movies), who hung around Prague and was rumored to have had her nervous breakdown here (or perhaps the breakdown had occurred upon returning to Hollywood or New York or wherever she returned to, though maybe it simply never happened at all; but regardless of its veracity, it hardly mattered, it was a legendary part of Prague expat culture at the time). Surely she was considered a Prague expat, though, like me, well beyond university age.
Certainly, I had stereotypical experiences common to plenty of other expats, often taking Jana with me and blowing her mind by showing her what her city looked like from the expat's point of view.
I enjoyed my extra spicy bloody marys and huevos rancheros weekend brunches at Radost, a combination music store, restaurant, café, bar, meeting place, art gallery, nightclub, and all-purpose hangout.
I occasionally attended Czech/American (with an occasional Ukrainian or Brit thrown in for good measure) literary readings on Sunday evenings; I drank an occasional surprisingly quaffable margarita at Joe's Bar, just across the Charles Bridge on the Malá Strana (“lesser town”) side.
I frequently rendezvoused with my friends and other expats at the U Maleho Glena, or I just enjoyed my solitude there, enjoying my passive long-time crush on a certain waitress, whose name I never bothered to learn. I drank cappuccinos, and what in hindsight was barely tolerable acidic Czech wine, though at the time I drank it quite willingly and liberally, at the reconstructed, infamous Café Slavia's, along with hordes of tourists eager to sit and take in the ambiance where Vaclav Havel and other dissidents were said to have formerly gathered to drink, commiserate, and conspire.
My British friends, John and Margaret, turned me on to U Stary báby ( meaning “at the old lady,” which, ironically, John enjoyed mispronouncing “oh sexy baby”), and soon I was frequenting it regularly and turning on other expat friends to it, until it became so popular that it ceased to be whatever attracted us in the first place.
On particularly nice days or, come to think of it, even on the more common gray and dismal not-so-nice days, I might find time to hang out at a random café or pub; I went to the Globe bookstore and adjoining café to look at books and to see and be seen; once I even went to a basement nightclub to take in the six-foot-tall stoned-on-ecstasy Czech cover girl types do their thing on the disco floor.
And I'd been in Prague long enough to have my special personal spots for meditation and reflection scattered throughout the city, whose precise whereabouts I selfishly kept and still keep to myself.
Finally, on at least one occasion, around 2 or 3 a.m. on a cold February morning, I found myself crossing the Charles Bridge on my way home when suddenly I noticed I had the entire bridge to myself, for a fleeting moment anyway, a serene and surreal occurrence unlikely to be repeated in this new millennium or the next, given the steadily increasing popularity of Prague on any day, at any hour, in any season.
So go ahead, call me an expat if you want to. I've been called worse.
* * *
This is not to say I was overly thrilled with the label. The Charles Bridge had become packed with expats of every size, shape, and look, the callow variety of outward appearance that passes for substance in the West: youth with Mohawks, pink hair, shaved heads, and body piercing, walking next to grandmothers from Peoria and preppies from Scarsdale.
But look a little closer, and there wasn't all that much intermingling in the crowd. Mohawk man and Mohawk woman, pink-haired body-pierced guy and pink-haired body-pierced girl, dreadlocked boy and dreadlocked girl, preppie boy and preppie girl.
Worse than the appearances of the young were the sounds emanating from their vocal chords, the cloying, incessant inhuman screeching and whining of American youth that echoed everywhere - cafés, trams, and buses. Czechs would recoil in horror, but the Americans were oblivious; convinced they were getting looks of envy, they would preen and carry on all the louder.
It's not as if the locals were always that much better.
Newly minted Czech capitalists were very nearly as offensive as their American counterparts. Vulgar Czechs on their cell phones emulating American hoodlums with their phony nonchalance and pseudo-sophistication were increasingly filling up the downtown cafés and bars, making the list of places to actively avoid more numerous than the places to seek out.
American fast-food joints like McDonald's, KFC, and Dunkin' Donuts were ubiquitous. Luxurious foreign restaurants and shopping centers affordable only to westerners and local criminals popped up overnight, cruelly mocking the shallow pocketbooks of the working classes. Seventeenth-century Baroque walls became the canvasses for disaffected youth to display their sociopathic graffiti.
* * *
Besides junk products and waste, America dumped redundant employees on the Czech people: con artists and apparatchiks of every stripe, economists, businessmen, lawyers, teachers, and self-proclaimed human-rights experts and artists, all brazenly hawking their wares, language, and ideology.
Businessmen came and taught Czechs how to exploit the public for the benefit of the corporate classes. Lawyers came and rewrote their laws for the benefit of “multinationals.” Writers chatted in cafés and otherwise emulated the lifestyle of the left bank of the 1920s and 1930s, but the end result rarely lived up to overhyped expectations.
After the slogan “Paris of the East” became obviously and painfully inaccurate - not to mention excessively trite even by expat Prague standards - newly minted western human-rights advocates reinvented Prague in an image of their own making.
No longer was Prague a modern-day pre-war fun-filled Paris, but seemingly overnight it had morphed into a sort of doomed pre-war Berlin, a sick and troubled society awaiting redemption by bored Gen-Xers intent on saving the Czechs from themselves, much as they may have imagined their moms and dads had battled a twisted American “establishment” and staved off American self-immolation in the distant sixties.
Crime rates skyrocketed; schools and hospitals fell into disrepair. There was little interest in the arts among the new elite, and so they quite naturally fell into a tailspin, as evidenced by the fact that Czech films, once avant-garde and challenging, became bland and sentimental enough to grab the attention of the American Academy Awards.
U.S. government officials and consultants expounded that all this was a natural part of the transition and that old-fashioned notions of economic jealousy and working-class empathy had to give way to a harsher reality, all in the name of democracy and globalization.
Rudeness and callousness were celebrated as pragmatism and ambition; selfishness and greed as individualism and entrepreneurial spirit. An ingratiating and forthright people gave way to opportunistic and glib hustlers. Black became white, and white became black.
Worst of all, no one but the old and disenfranchised seemed to notice or care.
* * *
But, in truth, all of the foregoing was at least in part window dressing, viewed from a foreigner's perspective, the hypercritical stage that for many expats, myself to some degree included, followed initial infatuation.
The transition was bringing changes both good and bad, but perhaps most interesting of all, and often overlooked, was the fact that the transition was more often than not producing no changes at all.
The stunning Baroque architecture remained second to none, and if, even in the 1990s, central Prague was already on its way to being “Disneyfied” for the benefit of foreign tourists, the fact remained that architectural wonders and historical gems were scattered and housed in nearly every neighborhood in the city, as commonplace as Starbucks and McDonald's in the United States.
Perhaps more critically, the quiet unpretentious manners and customs of the majority of the Czech people were surviving the recent American-led capitalist onslaught just as it had outlasted the Soviet-led Communist invasion before it.
Stranger still greeted stranger with a hearty “dobry den” upon entering a store or shop; a person couldn't take so much as a bite of a hot dog, even walking alone on the street, without someone shouting out a sprightly “dobrou chut,” and the young continued to reflexively surrender their seats on buses and trams to their elders as a matter of course.
It was probably no accident that Czechs settled in the Midwest, Texas, and Canada. Aside from the familiar landscape, that's where they felt most at home culturally as well (Milos Forman and Ivana Trump notwithstanding).
For the truth is, Czechs are deeply conservative, though conservative in a sense that Americans hardly recognize as conservative anymore.
Others before my arrival dubbed Prague the New Paris and Second Chance City, and those descriptions reflected a certain component of life in the city for a number of expats and a privileged few Czechs. But, though the setting was more exotic, the vast majority of the populace reminded me more of the Midwesterners I grew up with in Nebraska, with their pragmatic, measured, live-and-let-live approach to life than they did Parisians.
With any luck, Prague will never be a San Francisco, New York, or Paris, as much as I like those cities for what they are. Quite to the contrary, Prague's klutzy unpretentiousness is what made it hip in the first place.
Hardly the New Paris, “Omaha on the Vltava” more accurately captures what the city was and really is all about.