WhyTravel

It was 1994 when I landed in Prague for a vacation with my parents and my long-term boyfriend, Ron. They call Prague “The City of a Hundred Spires” with good reason, but it is a lamentably inadequate description that misses the sounds, smells, and souls that are essential Prague.

We emerged from the Delta flight to Ruzyně International Airport and descended the metal staircase onto the tarmac. I smelled it right away. It was the mingled scents of a hundred spires, myrrh, hand-forged iron, roasted chestnuts, the Hapsburgs, war, Communism, good beer, and a hundred thousand souls. Later, I learned to distinguish each of them, as well as the smell of soft, brown coal burned for heat and the leaded auto exhaust trapped in the valley on the days of winter inversions.

I grew up believing my grandfather’s father was from Prague. One of my great-grandparents was from Prague, one from Hungary, one from Germany, and one from another eastern European place referred to only as “the old country”. My grandfather, the first generation born in America, thought we were crazy to visit. He clucked his tongue disapprovingly and shook his head as he turned away. He simply didn’t get it.

We four were still in the airport at the northwest edge of the city when the thud reverberated inside my chest and head, the echoes of a medieval church door sealing inward for the night. It was the unanticipated sound of Prague lodging itself in my soul. Prague’s assertion came from a stew of reasons, but also, I believed I was personally connected to the place through my genes. As it turned out, you do not need a genetic connection for it to lodge in there. Prague is irresistible anyway.

The four of us had come for a short vacation, not due to family connections, but from a sense of adventure. Ron and I had traveled together before, but it was the first time we had gone on a vacation with my parents. I caught the travel bug early. I was 26 years old and he was 28.

Our tour consisted of three and a half days in Prague, a short flight to Budapest, three days there, and then home. As the scuffed white mini-bus deposited us, with three strangers and a heavily-accented guide, in front of the towering old Hotel International in Prague 6, I already felt cheated knowing the departing flight ticket was in my bag waiting in an envelope stuffed with travel papers.

The two receptionists at the front desk took our passports and walked into the back office, with no explanation. We waited. The carpets of the once-elegant hotel that housed Communist party bosses in the past, and possibly that day, were worn pink and burgundy. They harbored decades of Soviet dust and procedures. The chandeliers hung lopsided, offering a lonely working bulb. The flocked wallpaper was stained and peeling. There were cameras between the joists in the walls, now exposed, that probably hadn’t worked since the 80s. The receptionists hadn’t come back with our passports. I still felt shortchanged. I didn’t want to go to Budapest. I would shed a few tears when we left Prague.

Over the coming decades I would shed a lot of tears on planes. I never really knew why. I would also learn later that my great-grandfather’s Prague origins were another one of those family “misrembrances” passed down from generation to generation. But in the meantime, Prague was in my genes and in my soul.

Ron and I moved there one year later. We broke up there too and he moved home, while I stayed. It was my best of times and worst of times. It was all very much like a dream. I made lifelong friends there and sometimes we tell each other what is real and what was not, but everybody knows we are just guessing.