Tennis in Prague in the Spring

Prague, May 2004

Dear Friends and Family:

Am staying in a hotel with tourists, lovers in their 60s and families with pre-teenage children in tow. Our group had trouble finding a business hotel with three available rooms for this last week in May, the only time when all three of us could come to Prague. Tonight, though, I am suffering from the flu and I begged off our formal dinner. I spent a few hours on email, took a warm bath and now am enjoying lobster bisque in the hotel’s bar with a glass of Czech cabernet sauvignon.

I am very happy in this bar. The walls are covered with black and white photographs of Prague in the 1930s and one can imagine the beauty and elegance of Prague in the pre-war years. The photographer seems to have preferred a particular street corner where pedestrians were more concerned with avoiding the deep puddles of water than in avoiding the lens of the camera.

It’s hard not to fall in love with Prague. It’s an old city, preserved by accidents of history where the old streets are still very narrow and maddeningly complicated. They were streets created by people who walked on rural paths until one day houses started to be built, and then rebuilt and then rebuilt.

However the legacy of the Soviet period is still evident in Prague. Many of the cities of central Europe benefited from being under Soviet influence. Some new buildings were built over the years but the old sections of the cities were protected from modern development. However the Soviet mentality was not always such a blessing.

Earlier this week when my room still had not been made up at 5pm, I called the hotel’s front desk. “I think that the maid has forgotten me,” I joked. “Didn’t you put up a paper?” the receptionist asked, initially suggesting that it was my fault that the room hadn’t been cleaned. Her remark was a hint of the former Soviet approach to customer service: the client is always at fault. It’s hard to believe such traces continue, even as the former Soviet hotels increased their prices from$1.25 a night (for bare-bones rooms in 1990) to $125 a night for the same rooms in the same hotels a year later to now $300 a night for very new hotels with very nice rooms. “Your room will be made up immediately,” the receptionist then responded, catching herself and following the contemporary mantra that the customer is always right.

However some of Prague's residents would prefer still more modernization. Last week-end after several desultory efforts, the hotel's front desk found a tennis coach with whom I could hit balls. Tomas is a bored (and single) civil engineer, who told me that he would rather spend his life teaching tennis than working as an engineer. He described Prague as a museum--an old town with no economic life. “Nothing is working in the Czech Republic,” he complained when I remarked that the temperatures at the end of May were still just above freezing. “Nothing is working here. Why should the weather be any better?”

At 40, Tomas is just a little too old to have benefited by the accession of the Czech Republic to the European Union this Spring. The economic reforms to permit accession to Europe brought Czech-land(as we used to call the Czech Republic) into conformity with all the rules and regulations of western Europe—but they haven't yet created a business environment with good jobs for this smart, single, energetic, and handsome 40-year-old from Prague who is still looking for love (and a good job) in all the wrong places.

Sue