# Prague

26/1 (Australia Day)–Prague

I’ve been in Prague almost a week now and for most of that time I’ve
been ill. Something’s attacking my eyes, nose and throat. The worst of
it passed a few days ago, but there hasn’t been much improvement since.
(Last night, after playing two games of chess with an Andrea, I was
forced to retire to bed. (This was about 8 o’clock.) I was planning to
just nap but ended up sleeping for 12 hours.) So this is why I haven’t
seen much of the city.

I have been reading. I read Henry James’s novella “The Aspern Papers” (a
weak, ridiculous mystery with a one-sentence plot and lame conclusion,
populated with pathetic characters who say and do almost nothing for
weeks on end) and then I read Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary” (much more
worthwhile, I must have liked it because I read the last 80 pages or so
in bed, by torchlight) and then, most recently, all but two stories of
Milan Kundera’s “Laughable Loves” (also excellent).

But, I have seen some of Prague. Prague is very pretty and is filled
with many beautiful things. I have scrappy, uninteresting, notes on
several things that I won’t type: the Charles Bridge deserves its fame;
Prague can be relatively cheap; there are a large number of
not-very-good Italian restaurants in Prague, and a surprising number of
Chinese ones (run by actual Chinese people).

One of the most noteworthy things about Prague is the size of the
English-speaking population. I don’t know why there are so many expats
here. Perhaps one of the reasons is that it’s very easy to feel wanted
here. As an English-speaker in Paris, say, you don’t have shit Parisians
want. But here in Prague, they want your money, they want your
English-speaking skills (one guy I spoke to got a job teaching English
by saying No, he didn’t have any teaching experience but Yes, he thought
it was something he’d enjoy), they want your Western sophistication.
It’s nice to feel so wanted. And you also get to feel smug: as someone
coming from a rich Western country, you can look down upon Prague’s
fleet of unscrupulous taxi drivers and corruptible police force. You can
think “nice try” when you hear their experiments with rock music. The
Czech Republic got capitalism, but she wants to learn English, to drink
Coke and eat at McDonald’s, to join the EU, to become more Western–in
other words, to become more like you. All this is both attractive and
reassuring to young, unattached, undecided, twenty-somethings. I’m
over-stating my case in the name of provocativeness and hell, I’ve been
here less than a week (and talked to less than 10 expats), but this is
the thought that occurred to me this morning as I ate breakfast and I
figured I should record it.