Letter from Prague | All stories

When I first saw a little maltese puppy happily trotting alongside its owner, my first thought was – “where the heck is its leash?” The pair waited on the corner of a busy street, and when the pedestrian crossing’s green man appeared, the dog knew it was time, following his owner without a word of instruction. Both made it across the street without a scratch.

Upon arriving to study in Prague, I was warned that the taxi drivers weren’t especially friendly. “They hate Americans and speak no English,” said my friends who had studied here the previous year. I was prepared for the worst.

Though the history of Prague dates back over a millennium, it was a surprise to read recently that the historic city only got a unified administration 230 years ago. Previously its four towns comprised one city territorially but were actually independent of each other.

Every Winter Olympics has its defining, overarching moments of success and victory, moments which we look back on years later, remembering where we were when they happened. In 1998, it was the Czechs winning gold in hockey in Nagano; four years later it was Aleš Valenta sealing victory with his acrobatic jump in Salt Lake City, and in 2006 it was Kateřina Neumannová in Turin winning gold in the 30 km.

I used to attend a lot of conferences in Prague. As one Czech minister gloomily remarked at the time, the only thing that has increased in his, and my, sector were conferences.

As an opponent of smoking who’s got a dodgy lung, I have for years been a strong advocate of the Czech Republic joining the other civilised countries of Europe and introducing a ban on smoking in bars and restaurants.

There seem to be signs for everything, everywhere in Prague. Perhaps the best policy is to try not to take any notice of them and hope that they will go away.

As is customary at the close of every year, the press draws up lists and analyses in an attempt to summarize the year that has passed. Many Czech publications seemed to strike a fairly sombre tone this past week, as they looked back at the corruptions scandals, disappointing elections, embarrassing fall of the government and so on. Even the massive floods that hit the country in the summer took the backbench to unpleasant yet glaring political affairs of the country this past year.

One thing I’ll give the Czechs: they do Christmas really well, adhering to their rich traditions in a way that does much to nullify the creeping commercialisation of recent decades.

When I first lived here in the mid 1990s, many Czechs would tell me that they very rarely went into the centre of Prague. It’s full of foreigners, they would say, it’s too expensive, it just isn’t a place for us. C’mon, I would counter, it isn’t that bad – and you can’t just give up on the historical heart of your own city.