cc Photo by kruhme The ancient beauty of the Vltava. Deeper than you think. Dirtier too…

My best friend Delaney just got back from two months abroad in Prague, coincidentally the very same city I chose to explore this past semester.

Her last night there, she and a friend decided to jump off of Charles Bridge and into the murky depths of the Vltava river. They didn’t think about the relative fragility of their spinal chords, about the uneven floor beneath the rushing brown water, or their respective blood alcohol levels. They jumped… and then they were arrested. Two hours later they were back in Chapeau Rouge, soaking wet after some aggressive reprimanding, a forced trip to the hospital, and a light $50 fine.

I lived in Prague for exactly one-hundred and eighteen days, and I never got up the courage to jump into the Vltava; but then again, after four months there I began to feel as if I breathed the Vltava; pumped it red through every inch of the person I was becoming—maybe I didn’t need to jump, we’d already become one.

cc photo by Gennie Catastrophe Prague’s infamous TV tower. Ahhh, the beauty of communism!

Prague for me, was a test; a collection of frustrations and adventures that forced me out of my head and into the open.

There were encounters with xenophobes, there were tests of heart, nights of nostalgic homesick, and adventures across borders. I went to Auschwitz in the dead of winter and traced the footsteps of tragedy through two feet of falling Polish snow. I rode a rusting bicycle through the streets of a Berlin spring; accidentally flashing tourists too much thigh as the wind played tricks on my ill-chosen shift dress. I died my hair bright red in Copenhagen, I got lost in Vienna, I threw up in Budapest; I lived on wheels.

Here are a few of my footprints.

The art of “get the hell away from me.” The best bars in all of Prague are not five stories tall or full of beautiful Czech models; they are dirty and drug-riddled, they smell of sweat and stale beer, and they all have at least one Foosball table.

At the top of the list is the infamous Chapeau Rouge, with its red walls, peeling paint and international clientele. Its patrons range from nineteen to forty, and are made up of longhaired snaggle-toothed locals and half-dressed blonde-American bimbos.

The hallways to the bathrooms are lined with sharply dressed African men, waiting to be asked for a gram, or for some mystical purple pill, but they don’t approach or intimidate. The bar tender in the far-back nook of Chapeau’s basement is a crotchety middle-aged Czech who refuses to pour a single drop of pivo (beer) for anyone with a penis. I approach the bar for my friend Peter and flash a smile. “Co chtes?” (What do you want) he asks, “dva Pilsner” (two Pilsners) I respond coyly. “On the house,” he says, “you look like a pin-up girl.” I walk three steps away and hand Peter his beers and proceed to the dance floor. They’re turning the fog machines on, which is usually my cue to leave, but I’ve just gotten a second wind and decide to dance it out, that is until a twenty-something year old Czech with dreadlocks dangles a pair of handcuffs in my face. “Jak se mas zeny? (How’s it going girl?) Wanna have some fun?” he asks seductively.

Okay, time to go.

Photo courtesy Chapeau RougeA rare shot of the basement of Chapeau Rouge…empty… it’s never empty.

The Anti-America Cliché: Word on the street was that xenophobia was a part of being Czech. Okay, I could understand that, 40 years of travel-restricting communism would make anyone a little cautious of outsiders. Luckily enough I hadn’t had much trouble fitting in the first few weeks of my stay abroad.

Then came March.

One night I was heading home on the tram with a friend of mine from Switzerland. It was about 2 am, and we were discussing our plans for the following morning in broken Italian-English, when from behind us came a booming voice, “Fucking Americans! No one here cares what time you have to wake up, shut up or go home!” My jaw dropped, I turned around to see a well-dressed man in his mid to late thirties glaring straight at me. “He’s Swiss,” I corrected my attacker, “but thank you for being a closed-minded prick.” We exited the tram and I threw him the finger with a smile. Then I cried… but only a little.

Surprising anecdotes aside, Prague became a stream of colorful excursions and unexpected disasters. There were countless spring walks up romantic Petrin Hill that ended in suntans in semi-secret purple gardens, there was an eerie visit to the historic town of Kutna Hora to explore its infamous bone church— where jaws dropped in awe at the fifteen person chandelier.

Twelve bottles of wine later…

There was a weekend of wine tasting in southern Moravia that ended at a punk rock show, nights of getting stuck in sideways rainstorms while waiting for the tram home—only for the rain to turn into snow, and for the snow to turn into pea-sized hail.

There were my amazing host parents, who never left the house, ate potatoes and pork almost every night, and whose sixteen year-old daughter sometimes thought she was a witch. There were Lord and Britt, the family’s snarling German Shepherd/Wolf mixes, who ran away at least once a week, but turned to love-putty as soon as they smelt me coming around the corner. There was the night I got locked out of the house and had to scale the wrought-iron, barbed-wired topped gate and ripped open my favorite leather jacket (which I still haven’t fixed.)

I saw all eighteen canvasses of Alphonse Mucha’s Slav Epic.

So what did I learn? I learned Czech. The language, the facial expressions, the recipes, the history; the state of mind and being. And unlike Delaney, I didn’t have to chip my tailbone to do it.

Instead I rolled with the tide and learned when to give in to the universe. This is what Prague gave me; it dulled my obsessive need to control and replaced it with a chaos-embracing sense of peace I’d never felt before. I was on the other side of the world, alone, and it hurt. It was the kind of beautifully frustrating pain that leads to strength, I needed to stretch my edges past their elasticity and into the unknown.

And guess what? I can almost touch my toes.

I felt kind of weird smiling next to a stack of heads. But oh well.