Letter from Prague | All stories

On Monday, Czech schoolchildren will return to their classrooms after two months, among them some 93,000 first graders. In recent weeks, we've seen some serious back-to-school preparations. The contents of shop windows changed from swimsuits and inflated toys to schoolbags, pencils and the like. Also, reports on television have been showing how much all the school supplies are costing parents this year.

This past week marked the 38th anniversary of a key event in 20th century Czech & Slovak history: the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. I'm too young to have witnessed the event, but still it's part of my consciousness and a milestone that changed the lives of many people I know.

There's a Czech saying that goes "Vsichni jsme si rovni ale nekteri jsou si rovnejsi" - all men are equal but some more equal than others...in other words there will always be an elite for whom the rules can be stretched. And the Czech elite certainly does its best to keep this saying alive.

Every summer the last few years my wife and I have regularly planned vacations around the Czech Republic and areas we've travelled through have included southern Bohemia, the Moravian wine region in the southeast of the country, and the Czech-Moravian highlands. Each year we take mountain bikes as our main means of transport and combined with the railways the match-up usually works great: many trains offer special cars for bikes now and the system works fairly well, as long as you remember a few important things.

"You're in Prague, not home. But home for now!" It was a line in an email I received a few days ago, from someone I met while on vacation recently. He wrote to say that he hoped I'd had a good trip home—or to Prague, that is.

It is difficult to stay away from the weather in my Letter from Prague this week as the unusually long heat wave seems to be dominating everybody's life right now. It is not fun travelling on public transport, or just moving from one place to another in the capital. There is over 30 degrees Celsius in the office and at home it is not much better, not even during the night.

Just by I.P. Pavlova metro station there is an unusual "museum" - a shop there which sells mobile telephones and paraphernalia has set up a display cataloguing the history of mobiles in this country. Its most prized exhibit is a classic early 1990s "briefcase" phone, which as you can imagine is as big as a briefcase, though considerably heavier at around four kilos.

Prague is wilting. Although summer is short and precious in this part of the world the present heat-wave with temperatures around 33 degrees Celsius appears to be more than most people can cope with. There has been a mass exodus from the city to country cottages, the embankments of the Vltava river are crowded with swimmers and breweries are working overtime to meet demand.

Coffee is just one of those things that North Americans and Europeans will never agree on. Both claim to be the originators of contemporary coffee culture. Europe has been importing and serving it in its cafes since the 16th century; however, it was probably the mass coffee shop chains of North America that made the activity of "going out for coffee" a part of the everyman's daily routine and a form of entertainment as commonplace as going to the movies. The only thing that both cultures do agree on, it seems, is that coffee is delicious.

I'll give you an instance of how an afternoon in Prague can work itself up into something special, even from a dull start. It was a Friday. I had finished a meeting at 2.30. It was wet and grey, but I suppose I should point it was Good Friday. I was taking the cut through the old monastery garden that gets one to the Wenceslas Square tramstops when I had an idea. Instead of waiting forty minutes at Masaryk Station for my next train, I could pop in to Our Lady of the Snows, the vast, tall monastic church, across whose ancient garden I was now hurrying.