As I approach the sixth month of living in Prague, the inevitable souring of my opinion towards the city is beginning. In Spain, it happened not too long after moving to Madrid, where 90 minute commutes and buses that came whenever they felt like it, left a bitter taste in my mouth. In Turkey, while it did have some minor annoyances like 6 day work weeks and large crowds with no sense of personal space, I didn’t really experience that end of the honeymoon feeling. Probably the imam bayildi and iskender kebab and our lovely neighborhood of Kadikoy managed to keep me in a good mood.
There isn’t really one thing I can point to in Prague that drives me nuts or frustrates me. Rather, it is the lack of any of these things that has been getting under my skin. The fact that, on a weekend, we can walk through the centre of the city and hear nothing but loud obnoxious English speakers makes me feel like I could be anywhere in America. We shop at an overpriced supermarket rather than buying fresh produce from a little fruit stand down the street. The weather is worse than what I am used to in Connecticut, where at least it is warm in the summer. Sunny days with temperatures in the 80s are peppered in between long periods of rain where the cold and wet gets into your bones.
There is a lot to do and see in Prague, but somehow it doesn’t seem that way. While in Istanbul we could spend a day doing “nothing” but taking a stroll along the Bosporus and watch the cargo ships and ferries floating by, with the occasional dolphin sighting – both bustling and peaceful at the same time. A few weekends back, we took a walk by the Vltava River, which has a stunning view of the castle, but yet lacks the same dynamism that I felt in Istanbul. Maybe it isn’t fair to compare Prague, which has a rich history of its own, with the ancient Istanbul. But as far as culture, there seems to be very little that sets Prague apart. Spain had its siestas and tapas. Turkey had a multitude of the strange and exotic – mosques and the call of the muezzin, labyrinthine bazaars and the smell of oriental spices in the air. Even Germany, where I just visited a few weeks ago, seemed to be bubbling with culture as we smelled the beer, wurst and mustard in the streets. In fact, really good and plentiful street food is sorely lacking here in Prague and maybe that is one of the things I use to gauge a foreign culture.
I will probably be lamenting about how I miss Prague next year, particularly if we wind up in the Land of Culture Shock aka Japan. But at the moment, I feel like I am living in an American colony in Eastern Europe, just with more consonants (e.g., ice cream is zmrzlina) and prettier buildings.
