Letter from Prague | All stories

English speaking foreigners to the Czech Republic who are interested in the language are often befuddled or even annoyed by the feature of formal and informal speech in Czech grammar, called vykání and tykání - that is, the formal, plural “you” and the informal, singular “you”. Nowhere is that characteristic more frowned upon than in multinational companies, where new employees, called “formal you” at the job interview, are renamed “demotic you” on their first day of work, and told to address everyone else accordingly.

I have never been a fan of reality TV and would be hard-pressed to watch any programme where people try to meet a suitable partner or spend weeks cooped up in a fishbowl of a room trying to see how they get along. But one show, which has caught my attention is Den D (translatable as D-Day but known in English as Dragon’s Den). If you’re familiar with the programme, you’ll know it’s a show where entrepreneurs try to persuade investors to put money into their start up businesses.

I am writing this letter before I head off into the country on my by now very familiar train route to Mariánské Lázně. The route has been plagued now by improvements, read European Union funded optimization as it is termed, for the last three of four years now. I think the idea is that eventually the trip to Nuremberg, Germany, will take 20 minutes or a half hour less. The result for the recent years had been 20 or 30 minutes more on the travelling time.

Though my flat is wonderful – bright, cosy and quiet – my building is another story entirely. I swear I invariably get a huge pang of envy on visits to friends who live nearby, specifically in the Žizkov-Vinohrady-Vršovice area.

Winter came early this year, with piles of snow yet again taking Bohemia and Moravia by surprise. The guidebook Lonely Planet has even placed Prague’s Christmas market in Old Town Square among the top five in Europe, calling it a Gothic midwinter fairy tale. But the reality in the Czech capital over the last couple of weeks has been rather different.

Chimney sweeps do not usually occupy the front pages of Czech newspapers. But over the last week or so chimney sweeps and do-it-yourself tips on how to care for your chimney have been all the rage. The cause is a new law next year calling for annual safety checks on chimneys amid dire warnings that there are not enough sweeps to meet the expected demand. Apparently, sweeps became a rare species in the last decade with only one school giving lessons but they now seem to be on a comeback.

Next month thousands of Prague residents, myself included, will be paying in advance for a year’s travel on the city’s very reliable, easy-to-navigate integrated public transport network.

It’s something that happens every once in a while to all of us: you’re waiting to pay for items at the supermarket or grocery store and at the very last second you notice the underside of your egg plant is covered in mold. Or the ends of the cucumber are soggy. Or something in your cart is just plain off. It happened to me most recently at a supermarket after racing through overcrowded aisles I noticed only at the check-out that an expensive pack of peppers was thoroughly rotted. It’s the kind of moment that you vow you’ll never go back to the place

A Czech, and American and a Russian are stuck on a desert island, lost to the world, and one day they catch a golden fish. “Put me back in the water,” says the fish, “and I will fulfil a wish for each of you...”

The Czech Ministry of Education called recently for the country’s public service TV station Česká Televize to show more films with subtitles. The suggestion is that the language skills of Czechs will improve if fewer of the movies they watch are dubbed.