In this post, I’d like to focus on my new friend, Honza. Born in a small town in northern Czechia, he moved to Prague to study electrical engineering and recently attained his master’s in the field. He now lives in a neat apartment in Prague 10, about a twenty-minute tram ride east of the city center. I met Honza during my first week here while skating at Vltavska skatepark, one of the only rain-sheltered parks in the city. I quickly became friends with him and his buddy, Lada, and started to skate with each other three to four times per week.
This previous weekend I was invited to explore Prague’s “signal festival”, an annual city-wide celebration of light/sound design and emerging technologies. I met up with him and nine of his Czech friends, many of which couldn’t speak more than a greeting in English, and began our tour of the festival at the Prague castle. I was able to talk to the few who did speak English about their lives. One person in particular, David, studied with Honza at university and is now planning to move to Japan. He told me he’d always been fascinated with trains, animation, and nature, three things of which Japan has lots to offer. Another was excited to point out historic sites to me as we wandered around the city. The festival was made up of eight or nine installations throughout the entire downtown. We walked about four or five miles in total watching light shows being projected onto old buildings, alien towers of light and sound reacting to real-time cellular interferences, and much more. Although much of the night I was subject to the Czech language and trying my best to listen and read body language, I had a fantastic time smiling with everybody and becoming comfortable in such a foreign scenario. I don’t think I’ve ever been so immediately surrounded by non-English speakers before and have certainly taken that for granted. Honza was really great with trying to include me by occasionally translating jokes people had made or playing translator between me and random people around the city that we would encounter. One man at the final installation approached me and asked something. Honza relayed that he wanted a cigarette and I happened to have one that one of his buddies gave me earlier. I passed it along to this man– he was covered head to toe in really intricate tattoos– and he told me, through Honza, that he wanted to give me a tattoo because I shared a cigarette with him and we had a laugh about it. Although I didn’t take him up on the offer (free tattoos from strangers are inherently sketchy), I’ve found that the interactions I’ve had where kindness translates even without language have been some of the most impactful and meaningful.
Another one of these incidents occurred the following night with my friend, Bennett, who came to visit from his abroad program in Barcelona. Honza, again eager to give me the “local experience”, asked us to come with him to a rave in an old monastery. Bennett was more than excited about this prospect. We met at Honza’s apartment and played games enjoying a big of Jagermeister as the two got familiar with one another. Once it was late enough to go to the event we took the metro and coincidentally met some skaters who asked us to come to their video premiere the following night at one of the skate shops in town. Regardless, we got to the monastery and realized Honza was not lying when he told us he had to give us a tour before letting us explore, the place was huge and full of nooks and crannies. There were five stages, three floors, and an entire church with a light and sound installation inside. We got the lay of the land and then he told us he was going to find some of his friends. Just then, a longboarder I had met and sat down with a couple of weeks before walked past and gave Honza a big hug. Then he turned to me and realized we knew each other and that Honza and I did as well– a great little surprise for the three of us that left me a bit heartfelt.
The event was full of young people in cool clothing, one of the stages featured carpeting and plush chairs in the center for the audience as a performance piece happened where someone walking on all fours on stilts with a sort of bug costume walked around the crowd, eventually falling over and metamorphosing into a human dancer draped in flowy cloth. The other stages had techno and dnb music and a more standard DJ setup, but this was something I most certainly would not have found if I hadn’t met Honza. Aside from the music and performances, it was captivating to walk around such a large and old building with staircases that lead to nowhere, a dark crypt-like basement with strange installations, and decorative arching ceilings in each room.
I’ve been so lucky to have met locals, become close with a couple, and have access to a true Czech experience in the eyes of some true Czechs. This weekend I’m off to Barcelona to visit Bennett and while it’s been great living with my roommates here and meeting locals, having a familiar face last weekend was comforting. I’m excited to spend some more time with Bennett this weekend and to enjoy some of the warm Spanish weather.
DU Abroad 