#1 Where is Home

I think it’s possible that I have fallen into a deep and serious relationship outside my marriage. Don’t worry. My husband knows about it. In fact, this relatively new passion is partly his doing. In early 2004, when he applied for a Fulbright Award to teach abroad, my response was to say, “Take me some place exotic, preferably where I can improve my skills in one of the languages I’ve already studied, but where everything will be completely different from what I’ve ever known.”

So, when my husband announced in 2005 that we would be going to Central Europe, I was a bit disappointed. I’m sure I sounded like a jaded four-year-old when I whined, “That’s not exotic.” Though honestly, I knew little more of the Czech Republic than that it was part of the former Czechoslovakia, one of the bonus words on my third grade spelling test.

The Czech Republic is a tiny country very close in size and outline to South Carolina, right in the center of Europe, not so far from Italy, up and to the right. It is a country which has at least one cathedral in nearly every town or village, more than 2,000 castles and ruins, rolling hills, and rivers which flow eventually into the North, Baltic and Black Seas in an elegant geographic metaphor for the country’s contributions to the rest of the world. The Czech Republic has a long and exciting history which reads like the script of every exciting adventure movie you have ever seen. Saints and kings, lords and rings, Nazis and Commies and reclaimed democracy: Czech Republic has had it all. And what’s missing from its history, you’ll find in the fairy tales that every Czech knows as well as we Southerners know Dixie.
It has a population about two and a half times that of South Carolina, though unlike South Carolina more than half live in the capital city, Prague. The rest are concentrated in small villages and towns.

I was wrong about how different living in the Czech Republic would be from anything I had ever known. It seemed as exotic and in some ways unnavigable as Istanbul. I was so busy with daily life, I didn’t even keep a journal. My letters and emails home to family and friends included cryptic one-liners about my experience:
“People don’t smile like southerners. Even the toilets are different!”
“Only about every three words in five have vowels. We found cheddar cheese!”
“Peanut butter and corn meal are in the foreign foods aisle.”
“I have learned to look out the window while riding on trams. Apparently, only bad girls smile at men they don’t know.”

When the time came to leave, I wept both for the home I missed and one I would miss and the impossibility of having them both at the same time. And when I returned home to South Carolina, I looked at my own culture with fresh eyes and missed my Czech home as acutely as I had my own home here. I found I missed the tolling of church bells and the screech of slowing trams as much as I had missed the peepers and hoot owls in my South Carolina backyard. I still take a basket when I enter a store here, even if I’m buying only one thing because Czech store keepers like it when you take a basket. I work as hard at remembering to smile at strangers as I did to not smile at the old men on trams. And I still get a little excited when I see cheddar cheese.
In a few days, I will be returning to the Czech Republic for five weeks to see Prague and to stay with friends who tell me, in the words of their national anthem, “among Czechs is my home.”