A Return to Prague
Photo by DaLiu
My memories start at the leaves. They were gold spades that swirled at my feet, hopscotching over the cobblestones as gingerly as my limbs until I approached the red tram at the top of the hill. The doors would screech open, and I’d find a seat by the window for the steady descent into the city. For one brief moment, the view would clear and all of Prague poured out into the distance. It was like a postcard slipping into a slot, a bright brevity that filled me with excitement.
It was a different world in the fall of 2008. I was 21 years old, studying abroad in a Central European city that still seemed largely removed from Western influences, and therefore felt even further away from my family in Southern California. A Black man was running for U.S. president for the first time, and I watched his candidacy with the same word famously emblazoned in block letters below his face. It took hours to download movies to stream, which wasn’t what it was called, and they cost up to $20 a pop. I wasn’t texting much—it took patience to type out every letter on my flip phone—and I had a separate Canon camera I’d saved up to buy that was more important.
One of the first things the program’s leaders did for the 100 or so American students under their supervision was organize an orientation. They led us to our new school, told us where to take our ID pictures, and pointed out landmarks to look for if we got lost. I used a notebook to scribble down directions and street names as fast as I could. There was an almost immediate ease among the students, like teaching one another where to do laundry and which tram stopped in front of our dorm. The internet couldn’t readily follow us, so we couldn’t spend a majority of our time on it, as about a third of Americans currently do. I was homesick occasionally, but I never felt isolated. It wasn’t hard for us to live in the moment given the few months we had together. In many ways, we were all we had.
