Four Underrated Things about Living Abroad

There are some nice bits abroad

What's properly worthwhile about living in a foreign country? Actually, not the things you'd assume.

It's not down to learning a foreign language, which is of course a perfectly justifiable thing to do but something that can really be done anywhere. It's certainly not down to meeting new people, which again can be done more or less anywhere. People are probably all the same and certainly someone's foreignness doesn't mark them out as intrinsically more valuable. Of course, here I'm the foreigner, a fact which marks me out either for curiosity - like a baffling pet that occasionally, parrot-like, says a proper word, much to everyone's amusement - or casual disinterest.

What makes living abroad really worthwhile is, at root, having a minimal level of estrangement from the everyday world around you. A few years ago I watched a TV show based around the idea of strapping a pillow to the front of one particularly bumbling man and seeing how he got on looking and feeling a bit like a pregnant woman. Foreignness is a bit like the pillow: a fixed, slightly embarrassing weight that accompanies you wherever you go and makes paying for shopping and using public transport slightly more annoying processes than they need to be.

Daily life

But that rather tenuous metaphor doesn't quite cover it, because the underlying sense of alienation needn't be unpleasant (obviously pregnancy needn't be either). In fact, living abroad gives one key advantage to those who do it: the time and repeated exposure needed to develop a sense of the small social contrasts that define and particularize places. My semi-permanent foreignness gets me closer to the reality of daily life than a tourist but still bars me from being absorbed entirely into it. I realize I sound a lot like a smug hippy, but living somewhere really does get you intimate access to things you just don't notice on a weekend trip. 

Here's four of those specific to Prague and the Czech Republic.

"Like frontier railways": Prague's heroic tramways

4. Public transport

I should preface this: I'm definitely not a trainspotter. Everyone hates public transport - that's a given. And in practice I hate it too. But strictly in theory I'm a believer in how a city's public transport can define it. The red and white trams of Prague are iconic, while its metro system is strikingly dingy and surreal. I'm not really interested in carriage numbers or what model of tram I'm riding - again, I swear I'm no anorak (well, I do secretly  have my favourites). More important than the models are the routes - the scouring of the city by twinned tram carriages, cutting between hills and over rivers like frontier railways (well, a bit). Not to mention the metro stations: bleakly austere dungeons of grey marble, often home to vast, semi-deserted underground shopping centres. In this permanently nocturnal habitat whole working lives play themselves out to the hum of escalators and the constant shuffle of feet. A few shoppers mill in the perma-gloom, bathed in bleary, flickering yellow lights. Bright fashions and fishing essentials are displayed inside shop-fronts, on pale mannequins never to see the light of day. All this marks a significant philosophical departure from London, where no one is ever encouraged to stop anywhere inside a tube station. After all, when have you ever found a toilet at a tube stop? In Prague they're everywhere, invariably guarded by a bouffanted, cigarette-puffing older lady and her rough-looking boyfriend, the walls jazzed up with a few stylish pictures of dogs or flowers, doilies covering the desk, obligatory 1970s radio crackling out forgotten hits. And always an ancient and dank looking armchair. Both above and under the ground, the transport system delineates a second city built into the margins of the first.

"A permanently nocturnal habitat": Under the ground

3. Neighbourhoods

Prague is not the most neighbourhoody of cities. It has them, like everywhere, and they have their unique characteristics, but broadly the demographic mix seems pretty consistent. True, there are more older people in Vrsovice than anywhere else and Prague Four, which is huge, seems to have a lot of young famlies. And of course no one's ever going to mistake the Old Town for Skalka. But the neighbourhoods I've always had a fondness for are the ones outside the historic centre, especially some of the big communist-era estates, and this is because some of them are really quite nice.

Picturesque housing estates

It's often difficult to picture nice housing blocks in western Europe: we're partly conditioned by the epic failures of the sixties and seventies to think of them as universally blighted. No doubt in Prague too there are blighted estates. But many of the ones I've been to are really quite peaceful. Last year we lived on one and I had a great time wandering around it in spring, cutting down sleepy, bushy pathways and sitting on benches overhung by enormous trees. At the time I described my estate as a sort of post-communist Butlin's, stuffed with greenery and young families. But now, again in spring, they feel more intimate, like small, self-enclosed towns lined with dozens of trees and little parks. OK, maybe growing up in one is dull or maybe it's not as nice as growing up in the actual countryside, but I wouldn't know and this is my blog so I get the right to conclude from my own impressions. And many communist-era housing estates seem like genuinely lovely places, where de-commodified public space is maintained in common and old and young mix "like in the old days." Although even the best are far from perfect, there's a rare few in Prague that have provided what looks like a convincing answer to the chronic problem of creating decent mass housing.

In the woods. Not sure what they're all looking for.

2. The countryside

It took moving to the Czech Republic to win me over to the countryside. Not that it's unique here but it is well loved. That said, the Czech countryside wins over a lot of places. Poland is as flat as a pancake run over by a big car or something (need to work on those similes). And southern Europe, with its bare rock and stubbly, straw strewn hills, always looks a bit barren to me. By contrast, nature in the Czech Republic was made for adjectives like "lush" and "verdant" (which in the name of decent writing I'll endeavour not to use). And to my surprise it turns out that being in it, as well as just looking at it, can be nice. Czechs also win on attitude to nature. Basically, they love it. Everyone flocks to it at the weekend. The names of trees and plants and sub-species of squirrel can be recited off-hand by the most settled of urbanites.  

Back to nature

There's proper countryside and then there's countryside-in-the-city. Prague is broken up by woody valleys and hills, which you can often walk into just by stepping off your estate and into some trees. Various hiking paths dissect the city. Yes, hiking paths. They're all over the place. Prague is, in essence, a sort of big, semi-rural town. So it surprises me a little when a student shakes their head and says, "I wasn't made for this big, dirty city life," while outside rows of trees wave in the breeze and there are signposts to a village cloaked in miles of lush, verdant woodland. 

Prokopske Udoli. About ten minutes by tram from the centre of Prague.

1. Drinking

I've never seen a fight in Prague. I've seen at least one in every British town I've ever been to, so why not here? Why are Czechs such an apparently peaceable bunch? The answer, predictably, boils down to the drinking culture. Pubs are cheap; people often drink locally; they stay in one place over the course of the night; and at the end of it all they stagger home. Not much opportunity for a fight if there's no detour via a kebab van or a club. 

Now, I don't presume to fully understand Czech drinking culture. Actually, I probably don't understand Czech drinking culture at all. Conversation topics, manners, silent codes of conduct - all are alien to me. However, pubs are the perfect places to speculate about social etiquette. For example, the obsession with beer mats (presumably to protect the tables, which is practical enough). The insistence on table service as a crucial sign of civility (otherwise, I suppose, you're just like McDonald's). The precise manner in which toasts are made and drinks are paid for and tips are given. All of these knit society together in a way that largely dodges the need for pissed up brawling. No wonder Brits on holiday are considered so peculiar.

As it turns out, then, people aren't all exactly the same - some like to lamp each other more than others. Perhaps it's not the most philosophical sounding discovery but I consider this last fact well worth learning.          



       

Teaching Business

"Business English" is a grizzly little epithet. It suggests something too much at ease in conference centres and on team-building excursions. What business English teaching attempts is a tidy reduction of the language to  battle-ready nuggets of usefulness: thus such aggressively targeted niches of study as "language for describing key players in e-commerce." In theory I've nothing against this. Who wants to study the future perfect continuous when you only really want to be able to go on holiday and, in the words of one student, "not look stupid"? So, of course, teach students what they need. 

The problem comes when things get too obscure. When the basic value of learning English for most people is that it's a holiday necessity (like beachwear or sun-tan lotion), it's probably best not to push things too far.  I've never met anyone who really cared about learning the precise etiquette of email writing in English because, unless you're a sociopath, you'll generally intuit it. The same thing goes for "lexis relating to conference calls" or "chatting at the water-cooler".

Like everything else that happens there, people who study English at work are utterly alienated from it. That pretty much rules out homework. Or often attendance. The lessons are a routine only slightly more preoccupying than ordering something from a vending machine or going to make coffee. Indeed, in such conditions, my function is not wholly dissimilar to that of a vending machine: they make a selection, I spit out the right thing. This is consumed with the force at least of habit, though not with any noticeable satisfaction. Its memory is discarded moments later.

Providing such services can be oddly degrading. At least when I'm teaching seven year-olds can and can't there's actual learning going on. I arrive at companies feeling like a cheap door to door salesman, or worse, some kind of motivational speaker. 'Let's all get up and stand in a circle,' I've been known to say. Understandable, then, that the only response is a heavy sinking feeling. The distant whirr of photocopiers grows louder in the conference room quiet. Post-lunch jaws slacken around me. Ties are loosened. Chairs creak under the weight of impatient bottoms.

This quiet weight of expectation is hard to shoulder. I feel, in psychoanalytic terms,like  the classic hysteric: frantically trying to impress some inscrutable master. 'How about this one on over-fishing in the Indian Ocean?' Someone picks at a finger-nail. 'How about this one on the Notting Hill carnival?' A muted sigh. A cleared throat. My most frequently asked question of myself while I'm teaching is: How much of a dick am I being? Not what are they learning? But how annoying am I? This is, I suppose, as it should be, when you're asking for the attention of lots of people who are much older and more experienced than you are. In a business English class, however, the answer is necessarily: Quite a lot of a dick. That's because most people, when they're at work, just want to work. Or not work and talk about what they want. Or better, not work and not talk and stare out the window or do crosswords.

The most terrifying thing about business English and its invasion of the workplace is this: it participates in that postmodern managerial desire to make all time simultaneously recreational and productive. It's not so much a desire to eliminate relaxation, more that those in charge hanker for a world where the division between work and leisure no longer exists: massages and clay pigeon shooting and walking holidays and studying in your spare time and even staring out the window all become legitimate parts of the working day. It's with horror that I imagine myself a part of that.

There is the occasional, heart warming exception. Take Jirka and David. Two computer programmers who work for the incessantly modern Avast (rumoured to have "barefoot" days at the office), they are typically awkward IT types. Neither do any homework, of course. But that's fine: Jirka has a two year-old daughter. David, I think, just comes along for the company. While Jirka is a sort of quiet stoner who enjoys listening to Pink Floyd, David is a short, bald, very shy man in his thirties. Both come along for an hour and a half, and together we do very little. They talk about software, how rubbish they both think Apple is, their families, and what good beers I should try. Then they leave. Their only motivation in coming is, I think, to escape the office for a bit. It's a relief I'm more than happy to provide.

Prague Spring

Prague in Spring

Somebody has moved the Indian Chief on Francouzska street so that he faces away from the road. Where his arm used to shield his eyes from the sun it now cradles a drunken head, his elbow propping him up against the wall of the non-stop pub which is his lookout. My tram shunts past and a few of us crane our heads at it.

It's spring-time in Prague.

Last week - the end of March - a Russian teenager got dressed up in army fatigues and took the tram to Krymská. His friends were waiting for him at the stop and they laughed in solidarity and recognition as he stepped off. Together they marched with their air rifles in mock formation down the road. A few passers by, mostly on the trams, craned their necks as they passed. Krym is Czech for the peninsula the west calls Crimea.

Today, like everyday, I go to Krymská, the street named after Crimea, and climb the hill to Slovenská. Ruská is not far away, if you follow the hill all the way down to the bottom. My street, Lužická runs not far from the top. I climb the blossoming paths that lead to Bezručovy Park, up the steepest side of the hill that separates two historical neighbourhoods - Královské Vinohrady and Vršovice. Though Neruda rarely left the villagey splendour of Mala Strana and Kafka had an abiding affection for the scuzzy working-class district of Žižkov, this anonymous hill packs in as much varied life and mystery as its more famous counterparts. Beyond Vršovice is Nusle, the smog-cloaked valley bisected by Nuselsky most (Nusle Bridge), Prague's great, rumbling road bridge, designed precisely in order to cut out the sultry, silty, stacked tenements below. Nuselský most connects the edge of the New Town (Nové Město), itself cut to shreds by hollering traffic, with the outcrop of Vyšehrad. This huge hill-top, jutting out over the Vltava was home to the first local settlement, belonging in some myths to Libuše, Queen of Vyšehrad, who would eventually prophesy the founding of Prague and the famous castle at neighbouring Hradčany. Thus, via Nuselsky most - a short modernist diversion - the hill between Vinohrady and Vršovice is joined to Hradčany, the seat of national power. The radio used by the Czechoslovak resistance in Prague - the resistance that assassinated Reinhard Heydrich, the Blonde Beast, Himmler's right hand - was also called Libuše. Her anti-fascist credentials are beyond question. 

In Prague it is sometimes necessary to take these scrambled paths through history.

Vysehrad

I sit in our local beer garden, tucked away in a bushy corner of the hill between Vršovice and Vinohrady, and watch everyone looking up at a dog which, startled by some distant ricochet of a siren, lets out a long, maudlin whimper. Her owner hushes her and gets her to lie back down on their shared bench. The drinkers return to their drinking as the last of the cool spring sun peels back the clouds.

Across the valley, the jumbled, fume-streaked stacks of Nusle roll up the side of the hill, while behind them the glass-and-steel of last decade's modernity - the modernity of the boom and the bubble - fan out across the horizon. Interspersed are the concrete juggernauts of the panelaky peeking out of a light city mist.  

A few of my students tell me their families used to live in Vinohrady, when rents were affordable and the concrete was still crumbling. But oh, the high ceilings!

Krymská is not far from either Ruská or Ukrainská. Curiously, though, it runs parallel with Francouszká (France street). Nearby are Italská, Anglická Americká, Belgická, and so on. In fact almost all the roads are named after the Allies of the First World War, the victors in a conquest that saw the birth of Czechoslovakia and in the wake of which Královske Vinohrady, Vršovice, and other villages were formally incorporated into Prague. This fairytale city at the heart of Europe would become the anchor for what Benedict Anderson famously called an "imagined community". Yet isn't Europe itself an imagined community - an aspiration and an idea for balancing inter-imperial conflict - of which Prague was repeatedly the star player and the key to power? After all, without Prague's rebellion there would have been no Thirty Year's War and no Treaty of Westphalia - the key moment in the construction of an imaginary world of sovereign nations which would legitimate, restrain and extend imperialisms. In other words, the birth of the idea of Europe. Czechoslovakia-as-nation-state (and later just the Czech Republic) simply represented the territorial intensification of Prague's enduring significance.

The roads of Vinohrady and Vršovice - the roads of the Allied countries of the FirstWorld War - converge - in what could be a marvellous display of Czech humour - on Náměstí Míru or Peace Square.

Not all the road names are national. Some, like Jana Masaryka, lament and memorialize the dead. Jan Masaryk was the son of T.G. Masaryak, Czechoslovakia's first President. He was also Foreign Minister after World War Two. Bucking the national trend - or rather inverting it - he threw himself out of a window and died in 1948. A plaque dedicated to him on the road not far from where I live says "Pravda vítězí, ale dá to fušku" - "Truth wins, but it's hard work." Though his death has the whiff of Communist cover-up, it's never been fully established. Still, there's a certain bleak irony in a Czech leader defenestrating himself. The nobility has a habit here of falling out of windows. At least he took his destiny into his own hands. After he died people joked, "Jan Masaryk was a very tidy man. He was such a tidy man that when he jumped he shut the window after himself."

In the beer garden a Dutch man with long grey hair is pointedly telling a young woman, "It's best to save money for travel. Better than having things for your flat." He stops to drink his beer, which is already half-raised and has been bobbing around in his hand for some time. She nods and he goes on with his sermon until, somehow, he has started talking about Putin. "He wants his old satellites back," he says sagely. In the city of pastiche, of entangled and enmeshed historical time, perched on a hill in a quiet residential neighbourhood, he says, lowering his voice to a sweetly saddened pitch, "Even here in Czechoslovakia! It's terrible."       

5 Things That Annoy Me About Living Abroad

The romance of living abroad...

"I went to a postindustrial city in northern Poland to really find myself spiritually." I don't know about you, but I can't imagine anyone ever having said those words. People go to South-East Asia or India for that sort of thing. So how, then, did I find myself living in Poland? The short answer is: work. Since Poland I've lived in Sicily (for about two months) and Prague (for about two years). Most Brits leave their country of origin to escape (whether for two weeks or a couple of years) the "daily grind". I went to find it, and in that regard my travels have certainly been a success. In my case at least the defining fact of living abroad has been the necessity of work. In that sense it's no more exciting than living anywhere else (unless, of course, you're unemployed).

I don't mean to play down the positives: I've met some nice people and done some nice things, but probably no more than you would if you lived in, say, Swindon (actually maybe a few more - sorry, Swindon). However, there are some big differences between living in the UK and living "on the continent". Some of them are great (I can go to Germany by train in about an hour!) but a lot of them, while not awful, are just a bit annoying. So here are some things that are annoying, shared in a spirit of collective misanthropy. Come, be miserable with me!

1. People

Other countries are, shock horror, full of foreigners. People are basically a bit annoying everywhere, but culture plays a big part in how annoying they seem. Thus there's an irresistible tendency for outsiders to bracket the inhabitants of the "host country" together as one amorphous blob of odd habits and poor social etiquette. This, of course, is a complete fantasy, a sort of knee-jerk reaction to being stranded in a place where custom operates at a slightly altered symbolic level. People don't hold doors for each other here. They don't say thank you as much. They don't smile politely when they make eye contact with strangers. But so what? Basically, every Czech person I know is perfectly nice. What needs resisting is the urge, as a foreigner, to curl up in a ball of outsiderdom. As Descartes (probably) said, it's only by encountering the eccentricity of other cultures that you realise the eccentricity of your own. A bit of estrangement can be a good thing. That said, I don't know if I can stand having another door slammed in my face.

2. Language

I love learning Czech. I love its rigidly systematic grammar (although, thankfully, I haven't had to do anything too mind-bogglingly advanced yet). It's a language in which every noun has fourteen possible forms (seven cases; singular and plural in each). Add to this the fact that different nouns fit in to different patterns of declension, sometimes but not always determined by their gender (if, say, they're regular nouns these can be fairly predictable but get pretty weird if they're irregular). To give an example (from the admittedly tiny amount we've covered so far in class): Praha (Prague; nominative) becomes Prahu in the accusative, as in Mám rád Prahu ("I like Prague") because it's regular and feminine. In the locative it becomes Praze as in Jsem v Praze ("I'm in Prague") because the last consonant in the nominative form is "h" (nothing to do with gender). Then in the genitive it becomes Prahy as in Přijde do Prahy ("She/He's coming to Prague"). Still following? Excellent! Admittedly, that's just the first few (there are four more cases and for most nouns you need to learn the plural forms as well). Then there's the preposition-noun conjugations; perfective and imperfective verbs; the irregular genders of nouns; when to actually use all these cases; the fact that relative and normal pronouns also decline ("Who" is rarely just "Who" but changes with infuriating regularity), along with the declination patterns of adjectives when they conjugate with specific nouns, and so on.

All of which is fine. I think with time and effort and patience I might just about get my head around 50% of all this, give or take a few years. That would be pretty good. Not being an ambitious language learner (nor, given past precedent, a particularly successful one) I'd be happy with that. But the fact is, most daily encounters - in shops, on trams, buses, trains and metros, in offices, at the doctor's - can spare neither time nor patience and take a dim view of effort. Met with so much pig-headed refusal to understand my pronunciation (I can't roll my rs in the prescribed Czech fashion), it all becomes a bit dispiriting. Plus, my ability to stop my brain panicking and actually listen to people speak is only just catching up with my reading skills. So now I can get my head around simple sentences if caringly enunciated by a sympathetic speaker. All too often though, the speaker just wants me to go away quickly. What's galling about this distaste for my Czech abilities is that it's my job to listen to people garble, mispronounce and frankly ruin my language. I put up with it as a job. I have to listen to it all day, every day. Is it too much to ask to be allowed, just occasionally, to garble someone else's language a bit?

The joys of travel...

3. Work

My job is probably no worse than anyone else's. On the one hand, I get to talk to lots of people and make five year-olds race each other whilst pretending to be crocodiles. On the other, it pays awfully. Wages are low here by European standards anyway, but apparently no one at school has had a pay rise in fifteen years. Wages haven't even risen in line with inflation, which, assuming the school's income has remained steady, amounts to a pretty big saving. Partly it's the market: there's a lot of competition, prices are very low, and there's no shortage of labour. I know very little about my school's accounts (maybe a little more staff involvement in this area would help us understand the situation?) but can't help but feel it's also an industry-wide attitude problem. I'm in no way singling out my school (others are far worse) but EFL teaching is built around total flexibility: expectations of teachers are low and expectations of schools are low because the work is short-term and staff are easily got rid of. I can't help but feel this filters down to students. If your underlying attitude to your workforce is that they are eminently disposable (to be taken maximum advantage of while they last and to be let go lightly the moment they express dissatisfaction) then naturally teachers will end up being demotivated. How can this not affect students' perceptions?

Old Town Square, Prague

4. Shopping

In Britain supermarkets are decadent banquets swollen with delights plundered from the far corners of the earth (in my mind at least). There, saffron is sold by the bucket; caviar costs the same as baked beans; an infinite variety of herbs and spices spills from every shelf. They're so multicultural, in fact, that even Papua New Guinea gets two aisles at the local Tesco Express (in my mind). The average Asda is a sort of apocalyptic Noah's Ark of world cuisine, the kind of post-nuclear utopia of fat first-worlders imagined by sci-fi writers since the fifties. Except they're here and now. Not so in the Czech Republic (or seemingly anywhere else in central or eastern Europe). By comparison, supermarkets here are deeply austere places, stocking strange jarred meats in jelly (not dissimilar to cat food) and tangled, tough-looking roots with scary-sounding names. Maybe it's because Czechs like to grow vegetables in their out-of-town gardens, but city supermarkets often just don't have much interesting veg. For those of us without a "connection to the earth" this means puzzling over wilted cabbage and already-mouldy tomatoes as a weekly ritual. I want my post-nuclear utopia back.

5. Getting things done

Admittedly a vague sounding category, it's really quite simple. When something breaks and you live near home (as in real home - where your family and friends live) someone will usually help you out on the cheap. Broken washing machine? No problem because someone always knows someone else who can fix it/scrap it/sell it for parts/give you their old one or relegate it to some dank corner of a garage. But when you don't know anyone (other than equally unhandy Humanities graduates) that gets a bit harder. Without the support networks you simply take for granted at home, you are left stranded in a hostile sea of unpronounceable bedroom fittings and inexplicably complicated shop return policies. This ties in with shopping. To my dismay I've realized that not only do I lack basic manual skills - like being able to drill a hole - but also, as a foreigner, I lack the social and language skills to successfully complete even simple tasks. When I was at the Czech equivalent of B&Q I found that I kept staring over the shoulders of the concerned women at the counter, looking for distant words, before eventually saying, 'Does she return?' in Czech. I waved my bag of light bulbs in front of them, 'Where is bulbs for return?' Then, despairing, I staggered off into the cavernous warehouse, all the more alone for having asked someone a question. The sad thing is that being a foreigner - even someone with a basic knowledge of Czech under my belt - inevitably makes you look a bit of an idiot. So after two years of living here my main achievement has been to reinforce the impression of myself as a bumbling, awkward, ill-at-ease Englishman of the old school variety. In that sense I suppose I have "found myself" after all. 

Top 5 Shit Pubs in Prague (Followed by 5 Good Ones)

24/7 Herna Bar

Everyone knows Prague is full of blatant tourist muggery intent on astronomically over-charging currency-baffled, bum-bag-toting Americans for soggy Schnitzels. But those places are obvious, and not only in their shameless cruelty - look out for the burly mafioso types guarding the exits - but also in their relentlessly depressing, would-be glamourous exteriors - all blinking neon, laminated menus, and under-dressed female staff.

This piece isn't about those unsubtle staples of the tourist mile but rather focuses on the seemingly innocuous: those pubs that, from the outside, look like harmless if unremarkable drinking-holes. Yet inside all manner of perils awaits you.

All highly subjective, these choices reflect damning verdicts arrived at after a) multiple duff visits b) one bad experience or c) blind prejudice. Enjoy.

5. U Vejvodu, Old Town

A controversial choice for many, I've just never had a good time there. This massive, soulless hall with its half-arsed stab at traditional decor has apparently been over-stuffing foreigners for 600 years (or something). In that time they've perfected a very Prague-ish brand of weary nonchalance. Sold as a slice of "authentic" Czech drinking culture in the heart of the Old Town, it's basically as awful as anywhere else, only slightly cheaper. Predictably the lower prices hardly encourage the staff to be any nicer. I'm sure working in a bar in the Czech Republic is poorly-paid, and certainly I wouldn't want to do it. That it's what the frustrated, mostly middle-aged service staff do as a career forever is not only upsetting but visibly galling for them. They have my sympathy. But that's not going to make them any less bored or unimpressed at the sight of yet another gleeful Brit requesting an absinth. The whole thing grinds on interminably to a deafening, claustrophobic soundtrack of hissing beer taps and hollering stag-parties.

4. Prague Beer Museum, Namesti Miru

The original branch of this not-really-a-museum museum is so dimly-lit that it's impossible to evaluate. Not so this exciting new addition to Prague's collection of anonymous beer halls. Selling itself solely on the fact it serves 200 beers (or something near that) they've forgotten to decorate the place, install functioning toilets and decent furniture or hire actual people instead of angry, malfunctioning robots. Barely concealed hatred vies for place with the timeless of habit of just ignoring customers. All of which is slightly more excusable when someone has been at it for decades, but this place has just opened and the staff are all young. Not that the depressed jobs market is swollen with exciting jobs for the youth of Prague, but at least they've got the hope of something better ahead of them. Also, there's no need to sell 136 beers (or whatever it is). Why not sell five and change them occasionally? That's not going to happen, however, because that would require some care and forethought, qualities found hopelessly wanting. Also, the mascot - a naked sillhouette which resembles a morbidly obese Mussolini guzzling a beer - is just a bit off-putting.

3. Puerto Rico Cocktail Bar, Vinohrady

This desperate, under-loved den of a 'cocktail bar' in Vinohrady occupies a very special niche: that of the unconvincing pan-South American novelty pub. A couple of pictures of Che, cigars, cars, and wizened old men are apparently enough to 'transform' a typical pub into a carnival of cheap exotica. Always semi-deserted with aggressively loud trance music on the sound system, actually ordering a cocktail is a daunting and disappointing experience. You shout at the server several times, wait fifteen minutes, and eventually a semi-solid slop of ice and glow-in-the-dark strawberry flavouring is delivered to your table. Meanwhile, stray wires dangle ominously from the ceiling, holes are patched up with black duct tape, and one middle-aged woman cackles demonically from her smoky corner. Still, she's the closest thing to joy you'll find here. Less a drinking-hole than a sinking-hole right in the middle of my bloody neighbourhood.

2. Any Herna Bar

It feels slightly unfair to moan about Hernas. Sure, the Czech Republic's unique, 24/7 non-stop pubs are horrific by normal, "human" standards, but who hasn't ended up in one at 5 in the morning, noisily engaged in verbal battle, or quietly throwing up in an ashtray, or shooing away the unwanted attentions of some grizzled local lothario, or even being that lothario? Hernas are banned in the Old Town so you'll have to venture further afield to experience them. After all, why wouldn't you? These are places of true community spirit. It's just that the community in question consists solely of bearded old men and the barely contained sexual frustrations of their younger, randier counterparts. Approach with caution, but don't worry too much: everyone's too hammered to fight.

1. Restaurace Antal, Budejovicka

By some stretch the worst pub I've ever been to. Conveniently, for our purposes, it also represents the apex of all that is shit about Prague pubs. Pleasingly nondescript from the outside, it inhabits a strange limbo between smoky neighbourhood pub and after-work bar. The two worlds clash to dispiriting effect. Men whose poodled haircuts were probably banned in Britain in the 1970s perch upon stools, eyeing all movement with feline curiosity-cum-aggression. The frankly terrifying bar staff make it their mission to impress these watchful, squatting ringleaders by seeing who can be rudest to the unsuspecting non-regulars. The aged, denim-saturated skeletons on stools chuckle mirthlessly to themselves at their minions' shenanigans. The suited after-work types largely get in and out as swiftly as possible. More foolhardy are those, unused to the relentless venom of the oldies, who stick around to get drunk. As the drinks accumulate so does the anger of the bar staff, who take to verbal abuse and deliberately adding extra drinks to the bill. Eventually a sort of pissed Stockholm Syndrome develops in which the victims come to see their treatment not only as appropriate but laudable. You give feeble thanks for their service, go home, and cry yourself to sleep.

Now five of the opposite: places that, for whatever reason, get it right.

5. Duende, Old Town

I hated this place on my first visit, probably because it was full of exuberantly drunk teenagers who insisted on flirting with each other and wearing their baseball hats backwards. Since then they've mercifully been absent, allowing me to appreciate the slightly shabby, messy quality that a few pubs in Prague manage but Duende has perfected. Also, it's right next to Hemingway's, a just-the-right-side-of-posh cocktail bar, and Standard Cafe, a friendly late night coffee shop and bar, so when one is full you can push onto either of the others.

4. The Pub, Old Town

Depending on your perspective this is either a chaotic window into hell itself or a deliriously fun battering ram of the senses. The owners have done everything they can to encourage mass beer consumption - allowing punters to pour their own pints and keeping an international league of beers-per-table on screens around the room (curiously Bucharest always seems to be first). The emphasis is clearly on drunk people's innate tendency to compete like gluttonous feudal barons over who can consume most rabidly: Germans and Americans alike remove their shirts and mount tables in bizarre, highly ritualised displays of drinking prowess. All of which is really quite exciting if you can set aside your, um, dignity, self-respect and intelligence, and just brainlessly enjoy it. It's sort of the drinking equivalent of smashing up old furniture just because you can. If you can't pour a pint of beer at the start of the evening you'll soon be an expert. Drunken idiocy, then, but done right.

3. Cafe Mlynska, Mala Strana

With more hipsters than you can shake a fixie at, this converted water-mill on Kampa island has just the right amount of artiness. It's the sort of place that guide books describe as "relaxed", but is also big enough and gets busy enough to feel lively in the evenings. No one ever shouts at you for mispronouncing "peanuts" in Czech and no one tries to con you out of 30 kc every time you go there, which is at least a relief. The thing that really swings it is the building itself - accessible by a candle-lit bridge over a tributary of the Vltava, it has an unmatchably special atmosphere without being too precious.

2. U Bulinu, Vinohrady

Technically this is a restaurant but so is number one in the worst list. The staff are weird but friendly (one waiter insists on wearing a single white velevetine glove at all times, as if in mourning for Michael Jackson) and for some reason the walls are filled with photos of people with horns. But don't let that put you off: the food's great and the place comes with a bafflingly translated, ludicrously convoluted origin story printed inside every menu. Great fun, and proof that "traditional" Czech pubs can be excellent.

1. V Lese, Vrsovice

So it occasionally gets overrun with earnest looking Magic the Gathering-types, but mostly V Lese gets it right: often-decent bands play in the semi-refurbished basement while people sit around on knackered furniture upstairs. Prague's "older crowd", usually hardy enough to show up anywhere selling booze, are put off by the loud music, meaning there are refreshingly few tobacco-addled, double-denim-rocking snaggle-tooths to be seen (sorry, old Czech men, it's true). Instead nice young people in nice clothes chat amiably and roundly fail to assault each other with the strength of their booze-breath. Call me bourgeois, but it's literally a breath of fresh air.

On Crossing Schengen Borders

Derelict border control point at Bad Schandau

In the strange world of European Union administration, world-altering events take the form of tedious bureaucratic elisions. So it was that the Schengen agreement, almost as an afterthought to a free trade deal, removed all border controls for millions of people. If all the accumulated stuff of Europe was to circulate freely, the functionaries decided with an absurd flourish, people would have to follow. To perpetual amazement, and with more than a hint of wariness, people could suddenly just walk into other countries legally and by the most direct means.

I can remember taking the train from Slovakia to Austria in 2006 (the year before Slovakia entered Schengen; its legal obligation, having joined the EU in 2004). Armed police and sniffer dogs patrolled every carriage, kneeling under seats and checking passports. Two years later I went back to Bratislava (Slovakia's capital) from Vienna, and a friend could carry a bag of weed as freely as he would on the local metro.

On the journey from Posnan, in Poland, to Berlin, you have to change at Frankfurt-an-der-Oder. These days the train dodges the old, impervious checkpoints at the border, the crossing of which goes unannounced. You board a more modern train in Germany, and the language of the staff switches. Apart from that there's little noticeable difference. It's all oddly straightforward. Perhaps because I'm from an island, where all countries seem impossibly distant, but this process of switching over - undertaken with the same level of gravity as a change of coat - still amazes me.

From Prague to Dresden, in Germany, the change-over is even smoother. At the Czech-German border station in Bad Schandau, the Czech staff simply hop off and tip their hats to their boarding German counterparts. In turn the Germans nod and clamber up the train stairs. It's a sort of modest Schandau ballet. Announcements are made in German, Czech and English throughout. A pleasant jingle - the same on both sides - blares out before each station. On the approach to Bad Schandau the train runs past the deserted border control point, visible across the expanse of the Elbe/Labe. It is a ghostly thing: overhanging the river bank, it's a reminder of an alternate, long-dead modernity which involved lots of papers, offices, and long car inspections.

Either side of that building there is pleasingly little difference: only the paintwork on the villas that line the river gets a bit glossier on the German side. The people look basically the same. For countries with a history of bitter enmity, there is little today to distinguish them. This is strangely reassuring, as if to suggest that the past can be buried in a new European present of underlying similarity. Then again, similarity is hardly a bar to conflict.

Although it's become incomparably easier for Europeans in the Schengen zone to travel, the authorities still watch over things, and they have their preferences. When my girlfriend first went to Dresden by train the police got on, gave the different compartments the once-over, and ignored everyone except a Vietnamese family, whose passports they then proceeded to check. No one like to be singled out, especially when everyone else goes without questioning. Of all places, the German Military Museum in Dresden contains a stark reminder of what the internal removal of passport controls means for outsiders trying to get in: on display are two ladders cobbled together from thick tree branches, both used by would-be immigrants to scale the fences between Morocco and the Spanish towns of Ceuta and Melilla on the north African coast. These two exclaves, encircled by miles of metal fencing to protect them from local populations, mark the southern borders of the EU. Freedom of movement within the EU has been accompanied by increasingly hysterical concern about who else is coming in from the outside. A reminder, then, that such freedom of movement is only permissible for EU authorities insofar as it is not emulated beyond EU borders. Those who hold up the EU as an example to be emulated throughout the world would do well to bear this contradiction in mind: in a situation of inherent inequality, the benefits that pertain to the privileged few risk being undermined if they are spread too widely.        

Prague is not the best place in the world...

Our road: Luzicka, Vinohrady, Prague

One problem with expat writing is the tendency to varnish the image of one's adopted home. Few people ever moan about where they've wound up living because everyone ultimately wants it to look appealing. This is one of the major motivations behind writing a blog, after all: to convince the world, and yourself, that everything is just swell. But I can honestly say, despite living here and really liking it, that Prague is not the loveliest place in the world. It's just quite nice. And what most self-affirming blog bilge tries to conceal is that most of us, even the most upwardly mobile, successful and wealthy of us, live in places that are basically just quite nice, and that we happen to live in them largely by chance. For the rare few who have always had a dream place - say, New York or London - you either get lucky or compromise. The rest of us are basically happy if there's a decent pub nearby and good connections to a supermarket. I fall into the latter group: I didn't always want to live in Prague but I do (for now). It'll never be New York, and there's good reason for that.

Near our flat: Part of a city centre or just a village?

Prague has always occupied a peculiar position between the cosmopolitan and the backwater. As seat of the Holy Roman Emperor its splendour was apparently unrivalled. But mythologising this cosy knot in the Vltava proves too easy. Rudolf II might have relocated to Prague in 1575, but this dotty mystic was more an advertisement for eccentricity than raw imperial power. Modern times recall little of Prague's old eminence, instead turning the ancient metropole itself into a nicely fossilised anachronism. Its pre-Hapsburg landmarks - Hradcany, the Radnice, Charles Bridge, the Tyn Church and so on - lie upon it like an ill-fitting suit of armour. Bohemian defeat at Bila Hora (White Mountain) put paid to native religious ambitions, piety subsequently ditched for reasons of national resentment (this long before any atheist-communist put pen to paper). So began the national Dark Ages (doba temna), the conclusion of which - depending on how pessimistic the person you ask - remains uncertain.

On our road

Every year in January Prague briefly renews this national Dark Age. Life retreats indoors, seams of churned snow clog every street, and a fog thick enough to cushion a fall descends on the city. In the long winter, the quiet back streets of Vinohrady (the suburb where we live) linger, empty and without purpose, after the short dusk. Dog walkers tuck their heads inside tufty hoods and rustle through the darkness. By day the sunken murmur of coffee-drinkers defines all interiors; the weary thrum of trams as they accelerate up and down Vinohradska and Korunni does the same for the external world. The drooping pastel apartment blocks blanch beneath the snow and floods of mist. Everything assumes a murky, discoloured layer of browned ice. Shattered faces seek out the reassurance of subterranean cafes. There's something deeply charming about this: the act of exchanging a bruised, mottled world for one of intimacy and warmth. But still, where's the vibrancy? Where's the energy and relish of city life? This, then, is when a place (like a person) has become truly familiar: when its defining quirks are at once annoying and endearing.

Vinohrady with snow

Jiriho z Podebrad farmer's market in February, Vinohrady, Prague

Perhaps it's the tedious reality of all cities: beneath the florid exteriors, all are secretly tethered down by the rigorous monotony of work. It's only in the imagination of the day tripper, off to see the bright lights, that cities are carnivalesque playgrounds. Yet there is a difference between Prague, with its working week austerity and its sleepy, empty weekends, and the bigger European cities. Where can compete with, say, London or Berlin, which in their different ways daily regurgitate the truly vast human energy - financial, industrial, administrative, creative - they draw in from around them and the rest of the world? That, I suppose, is the benefit of being a global entrepot sucking in and redirecting global trade and finance. Though historically it was London which played that role, Berlin's expensive postcommunist make-over, relatively cheap rents, and strong artistic and cultural traditions have led it down a chaotic path to resurgence. Yet chaotic is the key word: Berlin's social contradictions are in fact what make it so appealing, not the success (or indeed lack thereof) of "modernisation" (i.e. liberalisation) of the city's economy. Despite the buzz around innovation (Europe's third "most innovative" region, apparently), the excitement of Berlin comes as much from the opposition to gentrification as the actual process itself. Squats and artistic collectives have fought long and hard to preserve Berlin's cheapness and the right to social benefits and subsidy of the arts. In this sense, Berlin's older - sometimes communist-nostalgist - citizens have something in common with the progressive student-led young: the demand for affordability. There is a certain convergence of tradition and newness in the context of radical changes, making the city's future look open to those who can seize it. The same cannot be said of the deeply polarised society of London.

Wintry quiet: the school on the corner of our road

Neither can it be said of Prague. Although this city's ongoing liberalisation has generated extraordinary concentrations of wealth, an increasingly difficult-to-fund welfare system has tottered into what are seemingly its last days (the previous government only held back because its momentum suffered from corruption scandals; some social pruning seems inevitable, even under the new Social Democrat-led coalition). And while the city has continued to grow - especially relative to the rest of the country - no satisfactory recycling of profits into social welfare has been implemented. The Czech Republic has an apparently investment-pleasing flat tax rate of 15%, making vital maintenance work costly for both municipal governments and private community groups (many apartment blocks remain cooperatively owned but underfunded). Thus the housing-stock is deteriorating, while, increasingly, average-income Czechs are pushed out to the periphery. The Czech economy is finally emerging from a recession of record length. unemployment, low by European standards, still stands at over 8 per cent.

To this observer at least this process has given the centre of Prague an occasionally neglected, stripped-to-the-bone feeling. Lots of the old early 20th century buildings in Vinohrady, where I live, have had expensive renovation work done to them, presumably by private individuals or by co-ops, who have subsequently been unable to afford their upkeep. As such the walls are regaining their famous communist-era layer of grime. Chunks of plaster and paint regularly fall down from the roofs and balconies, requiring whole pavements be roped off to avoid falling debris. And there is a lot of dog shit. What better evidence could there be of continuing alienation and distrust of the capital than the willingness with which people let their dogs excrete on every available surface? Talk about passive protest. To my endless frustration, this means it's risky to ever lower my guard: look up for falling shrapnel; down for fresh droppings.

The not so discreet charm of the bourgeoisie:
Monuments to a vanished class in Vinohrady, Prague 

But Prague still exercises a strange attraction. The city's grandeur is sweetly tempered by its element of the shambolic; its Old Town cannot be beaten for sheer beauty; its skyline is a perfect blend of symmetry and asymmetry. Vinohrady, this twice-gentrified suburb with its uptight, ageing population and suspicious curtain-twitchery, mounts the eastern slopes of the town like some civilisational still-life: the ruins of a vanished kingdom where everyone aspired to bourgeois respectability and kept a cat on a neoclassical balcony. It is the final remainder of the new bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century, which built entire city quarters in tribute to itself. The new world of the 21st century stands uncomfortably in its shoes. 



Photos by Siobhan