At the time of this writing, I had just left the Czech Republic:
We are on a train in Slovakia, having just left Brno, a university town of some 300,000 people, and the seat of many cool historical sites and swanky European shops. I very much liked Brno- it was not a touristy city like Prague. It was quite because the students were off on holiday, but it definitely felt like less of a tourist façade over a city of have and have-nots, which, to some extent, was the feeling emanating from Prague. You could tell people live in Brno, or picture living there yourself. I’m sure it appeals to me in part because it is what you’d think of as a very western city. It’s clean, the trams work, the empty student dorms we stayed in were exactly the kind of thing you might expect to see in the US. In that sense it was quite comfortable for us.
Insofar as that familiarity goes, the Czech Republic, as I’ve seen two cities and five days, does not seem like the image I had of “Eastern” Europe. The Stalin statues have been pulled down, and the soviet-era housing complexes, if they ever existed, have been replaced, and in large part, you could drop the “Eastern” part and call this just “Europe.”
Until you open your mouth, that is. While the people in Prague speak English, in Brno, our collective English, French, and Spanish were… less useful. We did our best, with “please” and “thank you’ in Czech, and a lot of pointing and smiling, The wait staff were the only people with whom we really had to interact, and they would take one of two approaches. Understanding that I do think tourists have an obligation to try to lea the local language, it was still helpful when waiters would utilize their stash of English tourist phrase to collect our orders. However, interestingly enough, the most pleasant and functional waiter-foreigner interaction we had was in a pretty little patio coffee shop in an airy courtyard in Brno where the waiter addressed us with a smile and the usual welcome greeting in Czech and seemed somewhat perplexed that we only smiled and inquired “English?” He smiled in turn and shook his head with a shrug. Still smiling, we shrugged as if to agree that it was no matter, really, that we couldn’t talk. So we asked very politely in English for two lattes, pointing to the appropriate item on the menu and holding up two fingers. He politely replied in Czech that it’d be right out. That is how the interaction continued to proceed. A few gestures carry the meaning, and everyone knows the progression of taking an order. Really, you don’t need the words to understand when someone is being polite and friendly. Everyone there knew exactly what was being said, and I think we all got a chuckle out of being able to understand the meaning behind our completely mutually unintelligible words. It was quite fun, really.
But now we’re off to Slovakia, to Zilina, where we will stay with a couple we found on CouchSurfing, that same travel networking site we used to meet the student for coffee in Prague. Hopefully they’ll teach us “I don’t speak Slovak” in Slovak. In the mean time, I shall continue to enjoy these long, slow train rides. There is merit to being able to let your mind wander whilst the Slovakian countryside slips by. One might say we’re Czecking out Slovakia. On that fine note, Laura out.
Let me make an addendum to that last entry. One thing that you come to appreciate on the (long- very long) train ride between Brno and Zilina is that this seems to be a fairly contrasting place. The landscape is beautiful. Rolling hills, solitary lakes, picturesque hamlets nestled into verdant valleys. And then you'll see an ugly-as-f*** train station with lush forests running up the hillside behind it, or a shack with peeling plaster walls and a corrugated steel roof overlooking an idyllic rose garden and the happiest looking vegetables this side of creation, villas over gleaming rivers with a stunning view of Soviet high-rises, a cement mill thwacked down in the middle of a pristine field. It's odd.