Le Mie Avventure in Italia: Czech Lessons

It’s been almost a week now since I went to Prague to visit my friend Cait and to get a taste of Eastern Europe, but I find myself still having difficulty collecting my thoughts on the experience. This semester I felt as if I was behind in the whole “backpacking through Europe college experience,” but now that I have left Italy once and seen how much I missed it, I’m glad that I am keeping my travels outside of the border to few.

Prague was immediate culture shock, the Czech airport was sleek, modern, and pristine, at baggage claim towering, pale faced Czechs surrounded me, and on the bus no one smiled or said a word the entire thirty minute ride into the city, I was definitely not in Italy anymore.

As I wandered through old town the next day while Cait was in class I couldn’t stop taking photos of the buildings. Living in an Italian Renaissance city is architecturally incredible, don’t get me wrong, but the style isn’t something you could describe as diverse. Prague’s architecture reads like a history book of the city’s struggles through regime changes, wars, and political strife. The skyline looks like patchwork, like a little model gingerbread village complete with pink, red, green, and yellow buildings lined up beside incredible gothic cathedrals.

That first day I sat by the Charles Bridge and noticed how perfectly the cloudy sky reflected the dark history hanging over Prague—casting a slightly cold, misty shadow on all of the beautiful buildings and on my sentiments. As the days went on, however, I made my way to the Franz Kafka museum, the John Lennon Peace Wall, Prague Castle and cathedral, and Vysherad, an area above the city housing the Church of Apostles Peter and Paul, and one of the most famous cemeteries in Prague. Learning about the intricacies of the past of the city helped me to see Prague not just as a melancholy, suffering, post-communist city, but as a city that has struggled through many occupations only to come out twenty years ago with their country, pride, language and culture intact.

I was happy to return to Florence at the end of the weekend, back to the foreign comforts, culture, and lifestyle I have grown accustomed to, but the appreciation I found for the Czech culture in only four days there has opened my eyes to the innumerable different histories, cities, cultures, and ways of life that occupy this world, and how few of them most of us have attempted to understand.