It's been more than a year since my last post. Since then I've
graduated college, traveled to Europe, traveled around the U.S., attended an
Artist Residency in Iowa, and got a job at a Starbucks in Needham, Mass.
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| One of the many tram stops downtown Prague |
Currently I'm sitting at my kitchen table in Prague, listening to
BBC on the radio and nursing a coffee addiction. The new flat I've just moved
in to boasts a half-sized dishwasher (a huge commodity in this city), and even
a washing machine, though my clothes have to be hung out on a line on the
balcony. It's not much, and is inconveniently far from Old Town, but I'm
reminded of the greatness of Prague's public transportation every time I skip
out my door to catch Bus 137 to the nearest metro, which will take me anywhere
I wish to go.
This part of the city is quiet and residential, and makes me
forget I'm even in Prague. During my free time I reminisce about the people
I've met and chatted with during my recent travels, most notably Freddy, the
charismatic taxi driver from Rockford, Illinois. He picked me up from the Clock
Tower Inn at 10pm, and though I was insanely tired and had been traveling for
more than 24 hours, Freddy's bright, loud voice and friendly countenance woke
me up. He wore a baseball cap, pullover, and blue jeans, a fairly typical getup
for middle-aged Mid-Westerners. Freddy asked me about my travels as he drove me
to my grandmother's home, and I told him about Prague and the beauty of the
city. Curiously, he'd been to Prague, and was descended from a Russian and a
Czech--he was fluent in Russian, though I didn't press him to show off his
skills, due to my incapability to comprehend that round, dark language of my
own heritage.
I told him about what I studied at college. He found my interest
in writing and music fascinating, and we fell into a discussion about eReaders;
both of us understands the need for them, and the convenience of them in
today's fast-paced, travel-oriented world, but we both agreed that the
connection between a person and a physical book with paper pages was an almost
spiritual necessity and cannot be replicated by electronic screens. With the
dawn of social media and Skype, the frequency of physical immediacy and
presence has fallen, in my experience, and to be enlivened by physical
closeness to raw materials and real human beings is something we should not
take for granted.
Freddy dropped me off and dragged my 50 pound luggage inside. He
gave me his card and thanked me for such engaging conversation. A week later,
he drove me back to the bus stop, and we continued our conversation, this time
talking about the state of popular music and the true greatness of classical
composers.
Later, in a roomy, homey Starbucks in Newton, Massachusetts, I sat
at a large table with my laptop, trying to write sleek, boastful e-mails to
local publishing firms in hopes of snatching up my dream job as an editorial
assistant. I wasn't alone for long; a man with a brief case and a disheveled
appearance sat down at the corner, and immediately began emptying the contents
of the case onto the table top. Papers and sticky-notes, folders and pens, all
covered at least one quarter of the table and inched innocuously toward my spot
in the other corner. After attaining a coffee, he messed with his phone and
sang along to the overhead music, much more loudly than just any ordinary person
would dare to sing in a Starbucks.
Soon another older man sat at the table at the chair across from
me, and set up his own laptop. The tops of our computers were touching because
of the limited width of the table, and the briefcase man made a humorous
comment--that was the spark of conversation, and the three of us at the table
began talking. Bill was a businessman dealing in sports equipment, and the man
across from me was Sam, a Jewish lawyer.
It was as if we'd all known each other for years, the way we
listened and spoke interchangeably. Both men were strong democrats, and when I
voiced my concern about the "issue" of women's rights being debated
politically, Bill announced with surprising conviction that women should rule
the world, because men had had their chance and had simply screwed everything
up. As a 3rd Wave Feminist, I felt a burst of satisfaction at this comment, but
I had to tell him that the ultimate goal should be absolute social, political,
economic, and private equality. He agreed.
The conversation moved through politics (skimming, to my
excitement, the Cuban Revolution, my newest obsession), and lingered on the
issue of public transportation in the States. I told them about Prague's trams,
subway, and buses, and how having a car was considered an annoyance and, for
most people, an impossibility (with gas prices soaring to 9 USD per gallon,
it's not hard to understand why). Americans, we all agreed, have a unique
relationship with their cars and their travel independence, and living in such
a large country has certainly aided that relationship. Americans get panicked
without a car, and yearn for the freedom of owning one so that they can go
where they want whenever they want without fuss. To some Americans, having to
buy a bus ticket, get to a bus station, sit and wait as it stops every five
minutes, is a nightmare. I used to think that way, but living in Prague has
changed my idea of transportation, and fewer cars on the road help to alleviate
and slow global warming from carbon emissions.
I asserted my opinion on trains in America, and how our locomotive
industry has fallen behind the rest of the world's, especially that of Japan, a
country that has utilized the latest technology, magnets. America, I told the
men, could create thousands of new jobs with a complete revamping of the
locomotive industry, and create a more efficient, planet-friendly way for the
everyday American to travel the country. Right now our trains eat up fuel like
starving grizzly bears, and are mostly utilized for the transportation of
material goods. Train tickets would be much cheaper than plane tickets, and
would provide an economic jumpstart in that it would provide jobs in security,
management, advertising, building, ticketing, planning, engineering, and many
more. Bill said it was a good idea, but the issue was still Americans'
attachment to their cars and their strange cultural unwillingness to even
carpool on any given day. Families like their minivans and like toting around
their stuff in a machine they can call their own. In this case, they don’t like
to share.
Among others, I met a young American Airlines flight attendant who
was worried about losing her job due to the bankruptcy crisis, and talked with
me about how she doesn't get paid until the plane is in the air--at the time
we'd been sitting on the tarmac for an hour waiting for morning fog to lift; a
young woman and her Chihuahua, T.J., who was dressed stylishly in the clothes
from her Build-A-Bear teddy bear; a young soldier who was flying home for the
first time in eight months, who told me how so many boys and girls think going
to war will be like playing their favorite video game, but once you're there
and see the reality of human injury, hatred, not knowing whether your next
footfall will set off a mine, you realize how serious it really is, and how
much the citizens of Iraq just wanted their soil back.
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Fellow world travelers touching the gold on a Charles Bridge statue,
which is said to bring good luck |
I've discovered how traveling and talking with people from all
areas and all walks of life really enhances one's understanding of one's place
in the world. Without even thinking about it, we go through our day passing by
dozens of strangers, never speaking to them or even making eye contact. But
when you take the time to start a conversation, or even just smile, you see how
open people are and how willing they are to know you and your story. In our
large, wide country, we Americans tend to forget how similar people are in each
region, and we allow our presumptions and generalizations about people to make
us feel separated from the rest of the country and the rest of the world. It's
our way of cocooning ourselves and focusing on individual concerns, which makes
us selfish and self-absorbed--if we could just interact with different people
without putting up walls, we could find out how collective our hopes and dreams
really are. And during this turbid time in our history, with the elections
coming up and with political and religious polarization, this realization of
the collective human experience is truly an essential step toward peace and lifelong
contentment.
My last piece of advice: Do a little wandering, and carry no
expectations with you. Just an open mind and heart.
