Prague is still there, though a little smaller and a bit meeker. Or maybe it’s just me; I got bigger and stronger.
A little back-story:
Last week I returned to Prague after 5 years of living in very polished environments. I left the place looking like a stick insect and weighing about 167 pounds, I rolled in mid-January with 40 more pounds, a knapsack, and two additional chins. My severely emaciated condition can be accounted to shoddy eating habits, no exercise, and hangovers so tremendous I didn’t bother getting out of bed to eat for days at a time. The weight gain is a result of doing the opposite of that.
The places that I lived after Prague were Ottawa; the town that fun rolls down the window to laugh at as it drives from Toronto to Montreal, Powell River; a place where they lynch you if you don’t think it’s fun, Vancouver; which everybody tells you is fun, and probably is if you weren’t on the verge of committing suicide; Delft, Holland, which is fun because your health lies in the hands of 15-year-old with the fists the size of ping-pong paddles, and Aarhus, Denmark; where fun may exist underneath the layer of fog produced by their foul-smelling cheese.
Despite the vast geographic distances between these places they have certain things in common, the most evident being loads of white people and fairly sterile atmospheres. Sterility is a word which brings to mind doctor’s offices and spermicidal jelly. You stretch the definition to cover cities or towns and you’re still not far off from the original definition. The places I’ve lived since Prague are not only clean and wholesome, like Delft —or like Ottawa, which works as a fairly effective anti-conception system — but their governments and authority figures have a much closer relationship to their citizens ranging from “meddling” to “rape”.
An Israeli friend of mine in Prague, for example, has been making and selling lovely tasting snacks to drunk bar patrons. Here’s is how it works: He makes them at home, puts them on the counter of the bar, people buy them, he profits. There’s no contract, no city, merchant, or union approval, and no taxation. People in Western Europe may dimly recognize this system as a half-remembered memory, like nation-state borders or Otto Von Bismarck. People in North America are aghast and reach for their phones to call lawyers and see if they can crush him for not being FDA approved — which still wouldn’t stop them from stuffing their faces with his delicious snacklings.
Another couple friends own bars which they keep open as long as they want, so long as they don’t piss off the neighbours. Those same places are hosts to the kinds of shady activity that would have entire police forces dedicated to their surveillance if the bar were in any other country.
Another friend arrived in Prague as a back-packer, climbed up the corporate ladder to a powerful position with a massive international conglomerate before getting too cocky, going independent, and landing on the wrong side of the real-estate crash. Massive doses of pervitin probably did not help. It made him loopy and stripped his teeth of enamel, which made his teeth slightly transparent and rendered his open mouth a good place to keep goldfish.
This last story I’ve heard a lot. In fact. this tends to happen more than the people that find success and fulfilment.
Another heavily frequented bar in my old neighbourhood still has the exact same people telling each other the exact same sad stories about ice-skating up a hill, but having a plan to change all that.
This sort of thing can go on because the country, like much of Eastern-Europe operates in a distinctly grey area. It’s not necessarily a good thing; one bar-owner friend was significantly screwed by his management and forced to shut down with no legal recourse. With no fixed identifiable system in place, bureaucracy —building off former Soviet ineptitude and malfeasance— behaves like a spoiled rich fat child that repeatedly changes the rules of the playground games in order to give themselves the advantage.
It’s hard to tell if the grey area is a good thing or a bad thing; whether it’s okay for 12-year-olds to be served alcohol by topless bar staff, or that the place is rife with people stitching each other up for a quick buck due to loose laws, it just is. And to be honest the place, within its own dodgy framework, functions just fine. Very little violent crime, no particular profusion of destitution, and a fairly healthy, though moderately weird-looking, populace.
That grey area, also, allows for some pretty peculiar behaviour. When eating with a friend in a local eatery (Czech eateries on their menus, by the way, tell you how much food you’ll get by weight; 150g, 200g, 250g, etc. However, the scales are fairly arbitrary from restaurant to restaurant. 200g in the particular place we were in was a mound of fried cheese and french-fries, in another restaurant, for the same price, 200g is a bean on a leaf of lettuce. Grey.) a man walked in dressed like how a drunk Czech man imagines what a guru looks like. He was wearing an orange sarong/toga/robe, elf boots, and an orange turban like the 50s cinema portrayal of the Maharaja by people that have never been to India. He was also a drunk Czech man.
What was particularly interesting about him though was the people he was with — not a circus troupe, group of cheap palm-readers, or hari-krishas— but normal people. Even when he suddenly got up and started gesturing in a pseudo mystical manner; flighty hand gestures indicating his knees and the turd-like object attached to the front of his turban, they nodded appreciatively and continued their amiable banter.
For someone like me that thrives on weirdness, it’s things like this that make Prague so attractive to me.
And how was it for me returning?
Originally I wanted to re-visit the city, but in the end it was about seeing friends. There is a special comfort in being with people that are on the same wave-length. I spent many formative years with these people; not sitting around television screens, not texting each other, not using social-media as a guise for a real relationship, but actually talking, and more importantly laughing, and often sober. Having the conversation pick up where it left off, shed of the bullshit second-guessing which beleaguers most new relationships, makes you realize how tiring it is the rest of the time.
Prague itself has actually changed very little, at least on the surface. Maybe they’ve cleaned up their bureaucracy somewhat, but from what I’ve heard you still need 13 stamps from eight different locations in opposite ends of the city to renew your driver’s license. The metro is still packed with dour people and smells like an NBA locker-room after game-time. A man will still wears socks in sandals without any sense of irony. You can also still blag your way into the pricey seats of a Strauss Concerto, be unselfconsciously approached by beautiful women, and dance till 5 in the morning. I did notice a fine effort to institute recycling, complete with bins for paper, glass, and metal, but it was once, and in the national airport.
This is horribly clichéd, but I find it hard to avoid the analogy. Visiting Prague was like seeing a past girlfriend with whom I shared an emotionally charged and passionate relationship for a long time. The amount of terrible explosions of blind anger in the place was only equalled to the amount of times I laughed so hard my diaphragm seized up. The sex —still with the analogy here— was unimaginably good, as only two people who have a lot of time to practice together can make it. It was a slightly sad though cleansing re-union where we both appreciated who and where we are in our lives. And without a doubt, after my sudden break-up with Prague, I fantasized often and heavily about her. Facebook didn’t help, it put the city in my face (appropriately) constantly. Returning to Prague has made me realize that we can be friends. This is a nice feeling. It’s soothing because I may understand her better now than I did when I was there... at least my relationship with her anyway. I also know that as long as the right people stay there, she will always be there for me when I need her. Which I will.
Because I still find her sexy as hell.
