It surprises me how quickly our year in this strange land is coming to an end. With less than three weeks left, we’ve already started making the rounds to say our good-byes. Our colleagues at the university took us out for lunch and a couple of beers yesterday. Today, the head of the English department and her husband had us over to their flat for lunch. Světlana prepared the “Czech national dish,” which consists of a pork cutlet, creamy sauerkraut, and dumplings. It was delicious as usual. Perhaps my preference reveals my origins and inclinations, but I’d take peasant food over nouvelle cuisine almost any day.

As we approach the end of our stay, it is natural to look back over the past year to take advantage of the abrupt discontinuities in the past and future—which normally form such a smooth continuum that it is difficult to make out the more remote moments distinctly—to catch a glimpse of how our Czech adventure has changed us. I’m a virtual voyeur trying to spy on my memory without being noticed—peering in through the train window to watch C. and I on the day we first enter the country, on a train from Dresden after a failed attempt to secure our work visas, speeding through a narrow river valley on a clear blue day, the names of the tiny villages abruptly switching from German to Czech—trying to listen to the naïve conversations in which we try to figure out what we’re getting ourselves into, how long we might stay, what our jobs will be like, what kind of friends we’ll make, how well we’ll manage to learn the language. The trouble is that I can only imagine what the topics of conversation must have been, and since I know the answers to the questions I am writing into the little white word bubbles next to our heads, I am unable to capture the very real sense of not knowing by which we were overwhelmed at the time.

Today we stopped at the store to buy flowers on the way to Světlana and Jiři’s flat, because we have become used to the custom by which a guest always brings flowers when invited to someone’s home. I call it a flat because they do, and that’s the word my mind now sometimes grabs when it needs the next word in the sentence I’m in the middle of. It happens to be advantageous as well, because I find that word much easier and faster to say than apartment and it sounds completely normal to speak of someone owning a flat, whereas it sounds strange to talk about someone owning an apartment (and the only other choice I have, condominium, surely misrepresents what it’s like to live in a panelák), but I will have to remember that it will sound strange and will perhaps even sound like an affectation when I return to the US. Regardless of what you call it, though, they live in one of the paneláks at the far northern end of town, and although their gray building is one of several tall imposing and mostly featureless buildings in a long straight row of tall imposing and mostly featureless buildings which in turn constitute a parallel series of such rows, their apartment itself is very nice.

When we first arrived in town last year, they were renovating their flat (though even Světlana, who has been studying English for more than 20 years, spoke of “reconstructing” it, under the influence of the Czech noun rekonstrukce, in much the same way our students have sometimes mentioned the ticket “controllers” on the trams because the Czech verb kontrolovat means “to inspect.” Of course, I should be calling the trams by their American name, but I haven’t heard that word once since we’ve arrived. I have noticed, however, the good fortune Tennessee Williams had in being born an American, because I have a hard time imagining anyone on any continent lining up to see “A Tram Named Desire”). They had just bought it, though the nature of the transaction was closer to a swap-plus-cash, which is somewhat common in the housing market here but so uncommon where I’m from that we don’t even have a word for it. They had formerly lived in a smaller flat on a different floor of the same building, and their current flat had been occupied by the buyers of their former flat, who needed a smaller place. They simply swapped, with some amount of cash thrown in to compensate for the difference in size. Most panelák flats 15 years ago probably looked a lot like cinder block dorm rooms, but many, like this one, have benefitted from the installation of new hardwood floors, bathroom fixtures, and kitchen appliances.

When we walked into the apartment this afternoon, we immediately removed our shoes at the door, and Světlana provided each of us with a pair of slippers, because we have become used to the custom in which it is inconceivably rude to wear shoes indoors. It now seems perfectly normal to change into an anonymous pair of guest slippers which have been worn by who-knows-how-many other guests who have also removed their shoes at the door, though I remember that it was a bit disturbing at first to share foot-sweat with strangers in that way.

It turns out—although I didn’t know it until a few months into our stay—that Světlana and Jiři are both devout Catholics. Jiři is a historian whose specialization is the underground Catholic church that sprang up during the communist years, the membership of which was so secretive and so paltry that women were ordained as priests. There is now quite a controversy about it, because the Catholic church in Rome refuses to recognize the official existence of the underground church, largely because accepting the ordination of women, even under extreme political conditions, would threaten and undermine the official church tradition, even though those women and all the rest risked their lives and sacrificed unimaginably to keep the church alive during those 40 years.

I must admit that I do not know many Catholics in the US, but I grew up in the socially conservative bastion of Wheaton, Illinois—where the religiously-affiliated college erected an enormous center dedicated to the history of evangelical missionary work and named it after televangelist Billy Graham; where students of the college were made to sign a pledge upon acceptance that they would refrain from drinking, smoking, dancing, and all public displays of affection. It was a completely dry town, where alcohol could not be bought or sold in any establishment until just a few years ago, and even then bars were strictly forbidden in favor of restaurants that, coincidentally, as if by oversight, also happened to serve alcohol. Cable TV was banned for several years after it became available elsewhere in the area because of its tendency to arouse prurient interest in viewers of certain channels (such as Satan’s own MTV). According to the original genus edition of Trivial Pursuits, there are more churches per capita in Wheaton than in any other town in America.

As a result, I have known many evangelical protestants of various colors in my life, and I had always thought that one fundamental tenet of devout religion was temperance. It seemed perfectly natural that intoxicating substances interfered somehow with moral virtue by weakening and obscuring man’s godliness and making it more difficult to withstand the temptation of, for example, the long-legged, long-lashed, loose-bloused lady blinking and posing provocatively at the other end of the bar. But perhaps that is but one more example of America’s famous puritanical streak showing its colors.

For instance, our devoutly Catholic hosts served bottled beer with lunch today. It is as integral a part of the traditional Czech meal as any other. Perhaps, however, it is an unfounded leap to assume that temperance is strictly an American trait simply because our Czech hosts poured us a couple of tall cold ones. Beer drinking is, after all, a defining Czech cultural trait. They are as proud of their beer as they are of their national hockey team.

When the students in several of my classes asked me what I enjoyed most about the country, I gave various answers about the character of the people, the history, or the free education and medical care; inevitably someone would raise her eyebrows hopefully and ask, “And what about the beer? Don’t you like Czech beer?” Here it is not inappropriate to have a beer at almost any time of the day. I’ve seen businessmen stop for a half-liter as early as ten o’clock a.m. At our hotel in Olomouc in January, a perfectly nice and respectable-looking grandmother in her mid-60s was having a glass with her breakfast at just past nine. Today, at eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning, I saw a group of guys down at the pub in our neighborhood hard at work on what I’m sure was not the first glass of the day.

In fact, it underlines the cultural difference that some of the Americans in the audience right now may be squirming a bit in their seats, objecting silently that these are clearly alcoholics we’re talking about. But that’s the curious thing. This country certainly has its share of alcoholics; many spend their days hanging around near the train station, belligerantly and unapologetically trying to stand upright and insult one another coherently. I wouldn’t venture to make guesses about the proportion of alcoholics in the population here versus in the US without access to some statistics, and even then, the criteria by which alcoholism should be defined may very well turn out to be culture-dependent.

For instance, I have heard it said in the US that drinking to excess, even if it only happens once a year (say, on New Year’s Eve), equals alcoholism, period. While it may be true that alcoholics will drink to excess even if they drink only once a year, it is not at all valid to deduce that everyone who drinks to excess once a year is therefore an alcoholic. In fact, it might well be argued that there is no point to drinking at all unless it is just a bit excessive. After all, it is in the nature of a drug to be administered until it has an effect; there’s no point for a dentist to use novacaine unless he actually uses enough to stop the pain.

It would be difficult to convince me, and much more difficult to convince most folks here, that there is anything flagrant about having a couple of beers now and then. In fact, there is something about the Czech approach to alcohol that in some ways seems much healthier than the American one. In America, we have declared it illegal for anyone under the age of 21 to imbibe intoxicating liquors, but no one is silly enough to believe that this law is actually obeyed. Our legislators have fallen under the same misconception that leads religious conservatives to prescribe abstinence until marriage as the only acceptable way to convince horny teenagers to control their roving hands, leaving those teenagers with absolutely no tools to deal responsibly with the consequences should they accidentally lose control. This is the same misconception that led Nancy Reagan to believe that the “Just Say No” campaign would do anything other than leave children unprepared to exercise any kind of restraint or responsibility once giving into a very natural temptation as a result of a very natural curiosity. One simply cannot legislate human nature to be how we wish it to be, no matter how badly we wish it. And so it is in our underage temperance laws: Despite our best wishes to be able to mould human nature through moral imperatives, we are simply telling our teenagers not to get caught.

In the Czech Republic, on the other hand, the legal drinking age is 18, but most kids enter a pub for the first time when they are 13 or 14. This is in line with most of the rest of Europe. With parents or without, it is apparently very difficult to get turned down for a beer at any age. As a result, kids who are inclined to go through the drinking-til-you-puke stage do so when they are young teenagers. They soon realize that it is not very fun, and they stop. (If we are being honest about American culture, we realize that many people go through such a stage, regardless of the law. The laws we have at best delay it for a couple of years, and our unspoken imperative not to get caught is actually a command to drink unsupervised, whether by waiting until John’s parents go to Lake Tahoe for a week, or by driving to the woods behind the Gas’n’Sip. In fact, we make it illegal for responsible parents to try to supervise their children’s drinking.)

Drinking is a very natural part of Czech life, and teens are initiated into a society of responsible alcohol consumption at a very young age. When the group of Americans showed up in Pilsen last summer for the TEFL program, and adults 21 or 22 years old ended up puking in the dorms on Friday nights after spending the night in a pub, the Czechs were absolutely incredulous! How on Earth can a 21-year old not know his or her limits, they wondered. They should have learned ten years ago! Public drunkenness is largely taboo, and there is a 0% legal tolerance for drunk driving; the social tolerance is not much higher. It’s quite simple: one sip of beer, and you don’t drive. Period. How much sense does this make? If it turned out that the rate of alcoholism here is lower than in the US, I would attribute it directly to the fact that it’s not taboo for young people to drink. As a result, they learn to assimilate moderation into their lifestyles while their lifestyles are still evolving.

a lot of people have lofty political ideas about the "velvet divorce" (the czech slovak split) but we know the truth behind the divorce, right?
once the liquor-drinking slovaks were off behind their own little border, the czechs were finally and easily able to edge out their german neighbors and become the highest per capita beer consuming nation in the world! yay czechs!

the good soldier svejk said that the government that would most lower the price of beer is the one that would stay in power. clearly that was wrong, but it betrays a czech sensibility: beer is a staple, like bread. liquid bread.

about alcoholism: you're considered an "alcoholic" here when the alcohol negatively affects your ability to hold a job, manage a family, etc. you're considered an alcoholic in the states when you are unable to go through a day without alcohol, regardless of how well you can get through that day with it. the whole "all or nothing" attitude of the states messes people up: "as well hanged for a sheep..." here it's possible to be a little naughty and not be thought deviant.