Prague June 5

By Eric

One day we sat at tables in front of the Franz Kafka cafe sipping beers, soaking up the atmosphere and waiting until we were hungry enough for dinner. I felt like taking a nap and was also waiting for that feeling to pass.

We sat at the end of a table for four. A man came by and asked if he could sit at the other end of the table and we said, of course.

We talked between ourselves for several minutes, not saying much. I wasn't in the mood to talk. But at some point the man next to us started talking to us and in a few minutes we were having a good conversation. Torsten was from Wittenberg, (East) Germany originally but now lived in western Germany near the French border.

He was one of those rare people you meet that quickly seems like someone you've known for a long time -- a person who would be a friend no matter where or when you met him. And it was not just because he was a nice guy. It turns out we had a lot in common, despite our hugely different child hoods.

A few minutes later we were joined by Torsten's two friends, Andreas and Jenz. They were all 37 years old, and had been friends in Wittenburg since childhood. Every year for 20 years they had been meeting in Prague. All of them spoke excellent English.

The next thing we knew, we were following to them through the alleys of Prague to their latest favorite pub: The James Joyce. I think we passed the Hemingway on the way. It was a literary night.

Torsten, Jenz and Andreas were anxious to tell us about cold war days. They had to go to Poland to see The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi (they saw Star Wars on video). And they and other East Germans used to come to Prague to meet their friends and relatives from West Germany. There was a particular restaurant on the Moldau river where people typically met but the restaurant has become a lousy tourist trap now (according to our E. German friends).

For some reason East Germany's government seems to have been even stricter than Poland's or Czechoslovakia's.

Our friends said wall fell at just the right time for them. They had just finished college and were ready to start careers. The wall fell and suddenly they had lots of new opportunities. They had nothing to lose. Their parents weren't so lucky. Torsten's mother had worked for 45 years in East Germany but her pension didn't amount to much in West German currency. So now Torsten helps support her. "She's proud and doesn't want help," he said.

Amazingly, it turns out the Torsten does almost exactly the same thing I did before we started traveling. He programs chemical control systems using Visual Basic. He was telling me how great Visual Basic 6 is. The last version I used was VB-4.

I asked Torsten if he spoke French since he lived near the border. I had unwittingly discovered a German joke. Some Germans apparently think of French as a rather feminine language. If you ask a German if he speaks French and he answers, "yes" it could mean he's gay. Instead they answer, "Yes, but I have trouble with the language." It's just a joke and none of these guys took it literally.

When the East German (DDR) mark was eliminated, East Germans could exchange their DDR marks for West German (DEM) marks at one to one for the first 3000 marks and two DDR for one DEM for the rest.

From the Franz Kafka cafe, we walked through the confusing old streets to the James Joyce Pub and started drinking Guinness. The Irish pub was especially full of very drunken Scotsman wearing kilts. I'm serious. Just about every bar in Prague was full of drunks wearing kilts, often without shirts, allowing their big white beer bellies to disgrace everything from Pizza Hut to Wensaslas Square.

Scotland was to play Czech in Prague the following Wednesday. This was Saturday. I'm mostly Scottish and I love the country, but many of these guys were not making a good impression.

Our German friends told Joan the Scots don't wear anything under their kilts. Jenz, the only married one of the three, said for sure they don't. "How do you know?" Joan pressed.

"I saw it in the toilet," he said. I turned to Torsten and said, "He probably speaks French too."

Jenz is a border guard but a nice guy anyway. He works in Berlin. Now that they don't have borders, they use border guards to protect government buildings and the entire capitol of Germany was moving to Berlin from Bonn as we spoke. He was the only one of the three that was married. He has an 11-year-old named Katya who is already wearing platform shoes.

Pointing to a singing group of skirt-wearing Scots, Joan said, "maybe one of those guys will be your daughter's boyfriend in five years."

"I don't think so," he said. (Joan: it was so funny, whenever they disagreed with something, they just said I don't think so, and the "think" came out sounding like "sink.")

But Joan kept on. "Maybe she'll want a tattoo."

At this Jenz contorted his face in disgust. He said maybe he would let her get a small one. Later he said that she is still into girl things. For instance, she has a pet pig who eats chocolate.

Andreas was the only one of the three still living in Wittenburg. He worked for the county government. He told us unemployment in the former eastern Germany was about 20 percent, as opposed to about 8 percent in the west.

All three guys communicate using the internet but they say only about five percent of people in eastern Germany have internet in their homes. They have to pay by the minute for all internet time so it can get a lot more expensive than in America. They said they use the Net to send email and photos.

Joan teased them again. Were the photos porn?

"No no no. We are solid citizens." Andreas said. He was laughing, but he was serious.

They kept ordering rounds of beers (Guinness). We never got dinner and my stomach was a upset so I'm sorry to say I had a hard time keeping up with them.

About 1:30am they walked us to our tram stop. Good thing, I had no idea where we were. The tram was amazingly efficient considering the time of night. We were home in 15 minutes.

Partying with Torsten, Jenz, and Andreas was one of the best things that happened to us in eastern Europe.

next: Siren call of an American expat

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