Tag: Prague

Friday Flickr – Prague

A few days in Prague whetted my appetite for Eastern Europe.

It’s a few years since I visited Prague. I had a few days there over the Easter holidays and managed to pack an awful lot in. Although I know Western  Europe fairly well, I’ve spent very little time in Eastern Europe. Probably because when I first travelled in Europe all those years ago, I avoided Eastern European countries because they all required visas. Since then, they were never really on my radar.

Prague was a great introduction. As well as being a beautiful city, I found it easy to navigate and reasonably priced. I discovered some great museums, gorgeous architecture and a fascinating (and ultimately horrific) Jewish history.

Memories of communism are never too far away, but it struck me how quickly people had moved on. The huge McDonald’s outside the Communism Museum being one example of ‘then and now’.

My short sojourn is Prague whetted my appetite for Eastern Europe, but it’s now several years later and I still haven’t done anything about it. Looking back through my photos and reliving my memories makes me realise how remiss of me this is.

Click on the image below to access the Flickr album.

Prague

Thinking about communism

How quickly time passes. Not only do the young children of Prague have no experience of communism, their parents won’t remember it either.

As I was sat on the bus coming back to Prague from Terezin, I was thinking about how different life is now to how it was just over twenty years ago. It’s 23 years since the Velvet Revolution ended communism and this seems like no time at all to me.

I’m glad I went to Russia back in the ’80s as I feel this enables me to appreciate the extent to which people’s lives have changed. Of course two holidays of carefully orchestrated experiences won’t have given me a real idea of what life was like under communism, but I’ve got a much better idea than someone who hasn’t experienced it at all. When I was in Russia, it wasn’t the major things that surprised me. I expected the food to be different for example, but it was the unexpected things, the things I took so much for granted I couldn’t ever imagine them possibly being different. I suppose it was the whole feel of the place, the vibe. The honesty, the civil obedience.

So in my few days here I keep looking at people my age and older and thinking how different their world is now to the one they grew up in. For the older people, they will also remember life under the Nazi occupation as well as communism – even more change for them. When I see people in their 20s walking around and looking like normal young people who could be from the majority of the world – their dress, their hairstyles, the music on their t-shirts, their casual deportment and mannerisms – I wonder how their parents can recognise their lives at all.

Every generation’s children is different to their parents and parents may fret about how their offspring or the general ‘youth of today’ are behaving, what they’re wearing, what they’re listening too, what their attitudes are. But this example must surely be the most extreme. The young people of today will either have been born after the fall of communism or be too young to have any real memory of it. A bit like my memories of the power cuts of the ’70s – a bit exciting, but no sense of hardship or the bigger picture. What changes their parents have had to cope with to get to where they are today.

What is even more sobering and makes me feel really old is that some of these young people will have children of their own – that’s already a second generation of children with no experience of communism. A generation that not only doesn’t know communism itself, but one whose parents also don’t remember it.

Prague

I’m going to Prague.

At Easter I usually go to Germany for a week to visit my brother and nieces. Then I head off somewhere by train for the second week. Alternate years I go to Amsterdam to visit friends and the other years I try to go somewhere new and different.

I’ve just spent several hours on the internet trying to find cheap flights and cheap hostels and cheap trains and generally put my holiday together. After looking at a whole lot of random places I’ve decided on Prague. I’ve never been here before, not even in my inter-railing days when I had brief stops in cities all over Europe. I don’t know much about it apart from that people seem to like it and it’s pretty popular, so now I need an Amazon browsing session to order a guide book and a few more hours to do google research.