Megan Eaves

as you may notice, my last post was in november. it is now march the fourth. i would love to say that time has just gotten away from me here in my enjoyment of prague, but that would not be enitrely truthful. time did get away during december and january, when we had friends visiting for the holidays and then were off for several weeks for our dublin wedding and subsequent honeymoon in lisbon and rome. and i suppose i could’ve blogged about all that, but i didn’t.

so here we are in march.

any of you that have been following my personal blog regularly for a few years will recall when i lived in china and blogged about the strange and wonderful things that happened to me on an almost daily basis. at present, i can barely lift my creative spirits enough to blog once in four months. [tweetmeme]

prague is a tough place for me to be. that’s what no one wants to tell you, but that’s the truth. i want to justify that statement with some reasons, but i will keep it short, lest i become too whiny.
a) working at home does not afford me much chance to interact with people, full stop.
b) most expats here are already in well-formed cliques. (not to say we haven’t met some nice people, because we have.)
c) czechs (in general), like most host cultures, can be standoffish. (not to say we haven’t met a few nice czechs, because we have.)
d) i don’t speak the language and have decided not to learn. that is another blog post unto itself.
e) going out to restaurants can be a pain because there is no smoking ban.

even as i write those down, they seem and feel trite to me. shouldn’t i be able to “get over” these feelings of general downness about prague? i suppose it didn’t help that, for all of january, i was reading the unbearable lightness of being by prague-born author milan kundera. it is the story of four people, three of whom are depressed, sad-sack czechs that can’t get over their miserable lives. this was part of the lost entwife’s read-alongs and i was somewhat grateful, otherwise i never, ever would have read that book. but it was fully depressing, made worse by the fact that i was in prague when i read it.

despite all that, i like it here. and by “here”, i mean europe. i mean this apartment. i mean socialised medicine and my husband’s great job. i mean cheap groceries and cheap booze. and i sort of mean prague, but only on certain days.

since i’m finding it difficult to verbalize my inside out feelings for this city, i’ve instead decided to try photographing it. but these won’t be the types of photos that you normally see of prague – of its wonderful cobbled laneways and dark medieval spires. these will be photos of prague’s more regular corners, it’s ugly signs and its brutalist ex-commie tower blocks. of the stuff i see everyday when i walk to the supermarket (which, oftentimes, is the only human contact i have between 9am and 6pm).

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