Spring 2005 Story Contest - First Place
Praha
Haley Lovett
CIEE Prague Spring 2005
I arrived in Prague disoriented and tired from a long day of international travel, carrying so much in my backpack that had I tipped over, I would have been as helpless as a turtle on its back. It was mid-day, but the daylight seemed like a clever trick to a brain that knew it was nighttime back in the states. As I left the airport and made my way to the metro, my mind began to spin realizing that I would actually be studying in this city for the next month, and that soon those very metros that seemed so foreign would become familiar.
I was excited to meet the roommates who would share in my experiences. And I was thrilled to finally be getting the chance to study the politics of middle Europe. But I had no way of knowing that my eagerness was just scratching the surface of what I would learn over the next thirty days.
To begin with, the city of Prague. I not only figured out how to make my way around the city with ease, but found myself hopping from one metro line to the next like I’d been doing it my whole life. Figuring out the schedules of the public transit and knowing when I had enough time to run to catch the last metro at night, or whether I should take a tram ground back to my apartment. I found that in the early morning, the Charles Bridge is beautiful and calm, and that when I climbed one of the cathedral towers at the Prague Castle, I could almost see my apartment. Through the details that adorned almost every building, I found why it is referred to as “Golden Prague”. I read Kafka and visited “his” café, I realized that Alfonse Mucha and I share the same birthday. By the end of my stay, I could maneuver my way through the crowds of tourists and into a favorite coffee shop with ease.
I met and became good friends with my roommates. In my imaginings of my study abroad, my roommates were not properly figured into the equation. My Czech roommate a Belarusian, who also spoke Russian and Czech, and who had mastered English to a point that it became nearly poetic, and who was always willing to talk politics, music, or anything else that happened to come up, and was patient to explain so many things about the world that I hadn’t been exposed to. My American roommates taught me more about the diversity within the United States than I had ever even stopped to think about. Between the three of us, coming from Oregon, Minnesota, and Louisiana, we were able to bridge the land gaps between our states and find common interests as well as explore the different food, climate, and culture of each other’s homes. Some of my best memories of Prague happened inside of the walls of my apartment, late at night cramming for a test in our living room while Lance Armstrong works his way toward his seventh Tour de France victory on Euro News and the bar below us bustles with midweek patrons, or in the kitchen trading and combining our own mixes of Czech and regional US cuisine.
I learned Czech over my morning coffee three days a week from our program director with three other students and managed to make my way around stores and bus stations with a fair amount of ease (and plenty of humorous confusion), but just my effort at a language that looked completely incomprehensible to me my first few days always helped me interact with the people of the Czech Republic and my experiences talking with them very enjoyable (even if my language skills were at a minimum, my attempts were always returned with a smile). And each day I studied politics from a woman who was heavily involved in the underground movements in the Velvet Revolution and spoke of her involvement as though it was the most natural thing in the world and left the students in her class nearly speechless because only through her accounts could we begin to imagine the actualities of life under a communist regime.
The impact that this experience has had on my future career as a journalist is not yet measurable, but will no doubt be great. I have learned to learn from everything around me, that when you go to Prague you may come back with a wealth of knowledge about Louisiana, Belarus, or Minnesota. That there is so much about culture that is intertwined with its language, and the value of learning that is immeasurable. That the better stories come from your mishaps, and that you are never really lost in a new city, you are simply exploring.