PRAGUE, CZ (1994) “The New Paris”

Every time I came home to my dorm room, I prayed no gigantic, hairy Slavic person would be in the bed next to mine.

The opening of The Globe Bookstore 1993 Photo: Mark Baker

I went to Prague in the summer of ‘94 because my first novel was coming out in September and I didn’t want to sit around Portland for three months checking off the days on my calendar.

As you can imagine the waiting period before your first novel is released is a unique time in a young writer’s life.  You only have one first novel.  And you only get to wait for it once. 

As exciting and suspenseful as those final months were, it seemed imperative that I find something else to think about.  I had all this nervous energy flowing through me.  I needed to use it.

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Another factor:  1994 was the year that large numbers of young people started venturing into Central and Eastern Europe, to the dirt-cheap and still unsettled former communist countries. 

Prague, Budapest, Warsaw were just sitting there, waiting to be explored.  Western business was moving in.  Fortunes were being made (supposedly). 

If nothing else, these cities were an exotic place to kill a couple years after college, maybe start an ex-pat magazine, write a novel, or open a bar.

It was like Paris in the 1920s.  Time Magazine had published a big story about it.

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I arrived in Prague during the first week in July.  I was traveling light:  a shoulder bag with changes of underwear and extra socks. 

The airport was a little scary.  I remember the confusion of trying to get the right bus into the city center.  The language was indecipherable.  The infrastructure was old and worn out.  There was little guidance for tourists.  Prague hadn’t had Western tourists in decades, though that was obviously changing.   

I made it downtown and found a room in an empty school dorm (because it was summer).  Very few people spoke English which made everything difficult: figuring out the money, finding something to eat.

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