dispatch from bohemia

(Alternate title: Czech Me Out. Disastrous puns galore, my friends.)

I have, apparently, not a single word in my brain. I’ve been here for almost two weeks. It’s beautiful. I mean, all of it. I walk from the tram stop to school and see twenty old, intricate, beautiful buildings filled now with tourist-trap restaurants and marionette shops and the Sex Machine Museum (I’ve not yet been in). If I walk to school, I pass through two squares and walk by a huge bronze museum and turn at the stand that sells hamburgers on the street. It’s been snowing, but not in an entirely miserable way, and now it’s stopped so things are pleasantly white and it’s sunny and I’m sitting in the computer lab, desperate for human contact from the other side of the ocean but the thing is that everyone over there is always asleep.

I really like ninety percent of the people here. It’s strange to be back in a program of only one hundred people when I haven’t been in high school for maybe three years now, but it’s not so bad. My roommate is cool, I already knew the girl who lives next door, and I’m quickly becoming friends with someone from across the hall. It’s my pattern: I get excited to go somewhere new, I freak out immediately beforehand because I’m sure I’ve eternally screwed things up and will never have any friends again, and then it works out fine.

Which doesn’t mean I’m not fantastically excited that my New York roommates and I might all meet in London in February. I miss them like crazy. I miss the effortlessness.

A note on the language barrier:

MARA stands at bar, waiting to order a drink. DRUNKEN CZECH MAN squeezes in next to her.
D.C.M.: [something in Czech]
Mara: I’m sorry, I don’t understand.
D.C.M.: Uh, what will you have to drink… bay-bee?
MARA offers awkward excuse and runs the fuck away.

Czech is hard because parts of it are a lot like Russian and parts of it are very much not. I know I should try to learn it, but part of me is strongly resisting because I’m afraid I’ll get completely confused and return to the states knowing no language that is in any way useful to me. I’m studying Russian one-on-one with the professor here, which is scary, but at least I’ll get something out of it. I had to drop Czech for it, but I’d still like to audit a Czech class. I just don’t want to be an asshole.

But look. Here’s a Czech tongue twister: “Strc prst skrz krk.” They consider R a vowel. I am not joking. Also, the word for yes is “Ano,” but sometimes they shorten it and just say “No.” Mostly, I’m lost.

I feel like I understand my family more just by being here and soaking up the history. I saw an old Jewish cemetery (graves dating back to the 1600s) in which people had put rocks on top of all the headstones, and all of a sudden it makes sense that my mother brings pebbles from Seattle when she visits her mother’s grave. A tour guide talked about the Austro-Hungarian empire and the greater freedom Jews were given if they spoke German and took on German names, and then I understand why my last name is German. We walked through a temple where the names of Czech Holocaust victims are painted on the walls, and I saw my last name printed several times over, and I understand that my grandmother lived not quite here but close, and those names weren’t her family but could be. Her mother and her father and her sister and these were things I always knew, but never really thought about very hard. My grandparents were born in what’s now Croatia, and if I can confirm that I’m not likely to be shredded by a land mine, I’d like to go.

Here’s something I like: passing close enough by a stranger that a word or two of his conversation is spoken right into my ear, as if it were meant privately for me. It’s like two-second intimacy without the effort of actually forging a relationship. (Grammatical dilemma. Do I write “his” and feel conspicuously love-starved, “his or her” and feel stylistically awkward, or “their” and feel the disdain of my eleventh grade English teacher lasering into my soul? I guess the first is the least deniable.)

I’m in a class with a man who was in prison under the communists and who’s since worked in South America and Bosnia and places where people do bad things to other people. He had us read the Communist Manifesto and this weekend we’re reading Mein Kampf (which should be a blast) and I think his class is going to be depressing but enlightening. He’s already asked us questions about the conditions that would be necessary for us to torture another human being–the kind of question that cannot possibly be answered simply, especially not in class–and other frighteningly thought-provoking things.

My photography professor, on the other hand, reminds me of all of my grandparents rolled into one. Funny thing about that: I’ve taken one picture since I’ve been here. Something has scared me off so far. It’s hard when everything’s so pretty to find things to photograph without feeling like a blindingly obvious tourist or a postcard company representative or something along those lines. I’ll get to it. I’m here a while.