Letter from Prague | All stories

I’ve found myself paying increased attention to significant Czech anniversaries recently and was intrigued by one the other week: May 21st was the 132nd anniversary of the installation of the first telephone in Prague.

The Czech Republic today remains Europe’s only nation which does not restrict smoking in pubs, bars, cafés and other establishments. The government is pushing to change this, with the Czech Parliament soon due to vote on a comprehensive smoking ban. But despite strong public support, the initiative may run aground over opposition against the bill among lawmakers.

Around a decade ago I had a flat in Vinohrady, near Flora. One day, not long after I’d moved in, a couple of older residents, members of the building committee, knocked on my door to check on something. While we were talking, one of them asked brusquely how much rent I paid.

A friend of my wife’s once said the good about the Czech Republic is that wherever you go from here, the food is always better. That’s probably no longer true, if it ever was, but Czechs have certainly had a tough time adapting the often appalling communist-era fare into a modern cuisine. But in some ways, such as in the quality of groceries, Czechs are still stuck in the past.

Prague welcomed Easter early this year, maybe even earlier than usual. The cold weather and the return of snow almost made me forget a few weeks ago that spring and the Easter holiday are around the corner. But the rows of identical house-like stalls that one morning landed on one of my favorite squares in Prague – Náměstí Míru – served as a somewhat cynical reminder.

There was a story in the news lately about a new mobile phone app to help people avoid paying for public transport in Prague and some other Czech cities. Called FareBandit, it allows users to share information about the whereabouts of inspectors. The app won a local industry award, and the subject received quite of a lot of attention. But it instantly struck me as being one of those ideas that’s only “cute” for the short period it takes you to actually think about it.

With a few notable exceptions, television in the Czech Republic today does not offer much original entertainment. Members of my generation, sometimes referred to as Husák’s children, can only look back with nostalgia to the 1970s and 80s when communist-controlled Czechoslovak TV produced some true gems in the history of television. But digging through the archives can quickly turn into an obsession as it indeed has in my case.

My ears pricked up recently when a guest on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs selected as one of the songs he’d like to be stranded with a track by Louis Armstrong – recorded live in Prague. The LP Louis Armstrong in Prague: Lucerna 1965 was extremely familiar from the racks of the city’s secondhand shops. But I had never picked up a copy.

The first ever direct presidential election brought renewed focus on a trauma that continues to haunt Czech society even sixty years after it occurred. The forced deportations of some three million Germans from Czechoslovakia after the end of WWII still divide Czech society, as does the historical role of Czechoslovak president Edvard Beneš, who sanctioned the move.

Before I actually moved to Prague some seven years ago, it was very much a strange city to me as I only briefly visited here a few times over many years. Since my arrival, I have come to know and like many aspects of life in the capital. But my perspective has again changed radically since my wife and I became proud parents of our twin boys just about a year ago.