Notes from five nights in Prague.
When I'm on holiday, I have time to do things I don't often get to do in everyday life: walk around a city for hours, breathe fresh air, feel sunlight on my face, and spend time away from my phone or other screens. It's almost like existing temporarily in another dimension. Sometimes I think if I'm not connected to my phone for at least 10 hours a day, I'll miss something crucial. But then I disconnect from the news for a week and find that, even after seven days away, I still have a pretty good grasp of what's going on. I didn't miss that much. It provides some perspective.
I arrived in Prague on Easter Sunday. The city was teeming with tourists. Germans, English, Spaniards, Italians. Prague felt like London before Brexit. I settled into a packed, dingy bar in the city center with a good friend who traveled from France to meet me, and I reveled in feeling connected to the world again. That international atmosphere felt like home. I like listening to accents and guessing people's origins, like a modern-day Henry Higgins, or asking strangers who they voted for after they've had too many drinks to lie.
But once most of the tourists left on Monday, the city felt markedly different. I noticed that many of the people I spoke to seemed frustrated and sad. People complained about inflation. The prices in Prague were comparable to the U.S. I regularly paid $3 or more for a cup of coffee. The average salary in Prague is around $1,200 a month. Rent for a 1-bedroom flat is about half of that. People are struggling. According to the Czech Statistical Office's data for April, beer is the only product in the supermarket that's not getting more expensive.
On the outskirts of the city where I stayed, about a 50-minute walk from all tourist destinations, I saw a lot of older men drunk on the streets. During a walk along the Vltava river, I passed semi-permanent homeless encampments where people built large bonfires under bridges to stay warm.
This was the first time I had been back to Prague in quite a few years, but the gap between the rich and poor seemed noticeably larger. I don't remember seeing so many luxury clothing shops before or so many people on the streets. Maybe they were there, and I didn't notice. But everyone I spoke to said things had gotten harder.
A friend from Prague runs a DIY social center with experimental music and theater performances. People filter in and out all day, volunteering to tend bar or set up sound systems. They're fermenting kimchi in a dark bathroom, and the smell of garlic is so overpowering I almost passed out when they opened the door. Behind the building, developers erected dozens of luxury condos, each with an identical garden plot. So far, the condos are lying empty.
Covid, what Covid?
You would be forgiven for forgetting that there's a pandemic in Prague. The bars and restaurants are packed. So are the trams. Almost no one wears a mask. I'm honestly not sure how I didn't contract Covid-19 while I was there. Either the three doses of the Pfizer vaccine I received are doing their job, or I am one of the few super-immune people, or maybe Covid is a hoax (kidding!). Who knows?
If you need a PCR test to travel to the U.S., you can easily make an appointment here. They will email you a pdf with your test results, and you can pay more to get your results faster. It's a good thing they require a test before your flight because mask mandates are not a thing on planes in any country I transited through (Germany, Switzerland). I wasn't asked to put on a mask until I got on the New Jersey Transit heading home.
Ukrainians and Russians share the streets:
I heard a lot of Russian spoken around Prague. Groups of young Russians crowded into tram cars. Russian tourists posed for photographs in front of churches. Russians are the fourth largest foreign community in the Czech Republic. Thousands of Russians in Prague have openly protested the war in Ukraine, something they cannot do back home.
Meanwhile, like in the U.S., Ukrainian flags are everywhere. Several Czech people told me that Ukrainians were previously treated like second-class migrant workers. Now people treat them with deference. I caught up with a Ukrainian friend while I was there, a man who let me camp out on his bedroom floor in Kyiv when I first reported from Ukraine in 2014.
At the urging of his mother-in-law, who is from Crimea and has lived through a lot of this before, he and his wife and young daughter left the country days before the war began. They want to go home, but they're unsure if it will be possible to build a life there again. Even if the war ends soon, the country will be littered with landmines, and the economy will be decimated.
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