Three Months In Prague

You know that feeling when you wake up in the morning and say, "Enough is enough.'? It doesn't matter what it is, you just know that you're done. My husband Paul and I reached that conclusion together and the result was the most dramatic change of our thirty-three years together. Within four months we sold our home in Oakland, closed the door to our business of many years without even telling most of our clients we were leaving and put everything we owned in a storage unit in Alameda, California. We were going to live on our savings in Prague, Czech Republic and discover if living in Eastern Europe would suit us on a more permanent basis. We found a beautiful flat to rent on expats.com and pre arranged a six month lease with the Slovakian owner currently living in Manhattan.

We caught a seven a.m. flight on October 25, 2006 from SFO to JFK and spent three days in the Hamptons saying goodbye to our son Dorian and his girlfriend Rebecca. From there we flew to Vienna for a day of museum saturation and pampering in a small luxury hotel then caught a train for Brno, Czech Republic. After visiting relatives in Moravia we took a bus to Prague and parked ourselves in a tourist hotel until we could see our modern, split level flat in the elegant Bubenec district above the Castle and St. Vitus Cathedral.

As a portent of things to come, on our way to a meeting with the flat manager we were pulled off the tram we were riding by two officious plain clothes officers for having absent mindedly forgotten to stamp our tickets when we boarded. To this day I'm still not sure if they were legit or just petty thieves. One of them was trying to pull my ticket from my hand claiming it was no good. I held it in a death grip, he shook his big block-head mumbling, "Big trouble for you lady," to which I replied, "What are you going to do? Throw me in tram jail?" They fined us a thousand korunas, about forty dollars in 2006, and sent us packing on foot to find the flat where the manager awaited us. Upset and unnerved, I vaguely remember hearing Paul call them operavatceks, an insult from the Communist era, as the tram rolled away.

 

The flat was everything the owner had promised with one or two big exceptions. There was no heat and no hot water and the young Czech woman acting as property manager couldn't give us a time certain when they would be turned back on. After another three expensive days in a not so friendly Prague hotel we still had no indication when the flat would be ready and winter was just around the proverbial corner. We went on-line again and found an apartment in the Vinohrady neighborhood where two of Paul's cousins lived and we signed the rental agreement on November 9, 2006. What will follow is a journal of what should have been six but turned out to be three months in Prague.