LEAVING PRAGUE:  THE ROAD TO SHANGRI-LA

The new millennium had come without massive computer-related disaster, terrorist attacks, biblical Armageddon, or indeed incident of any sort other than a lot of large parties.

I had survived the Koh Phanghan Millennium beach party. Never mind all that crap about how the Millennium REALLY started in 2001. Horseshit. Just look at all the zeros in 2000, and tell me that’s not a good reason to get drunk.

Koh Phangan is an island on the east coast of Thailand, famous for its all-night Full Moon parties. On December 31st, 1999, ten thousand or so other people and I got wasted on the beach and danced as Western Civilization’s odometer ticked over to 2000.

It was good. I kissed a lot of girls. At 12:00, they turned off all the lights and music on the beach to frighten us, then turned them back on. Like in that Jennifer Lopez video.

January first, 2000, saw me making my way painfully back to Ko Samui by boat. I made it back to my small $3-a-night beach hut by 3:00pm that day. I laid on the bed, vibrating from the amphetamines I’d taken the night before, listening to the fan whir, the lizards chirp, the rain patter on the leaves of the coconut trees, the scooters zip past on the road nearby.

Finally I gave up trying to sleep and walked into the village. All the electricity was still working, but that was no surprise – most of it was powered by generators. I stopped at an Internet cafe and looked on MSN.com. Nothing in the way of a major disaster anywhere in the world. Apparently very little even in the way of clerical or billing errors. If God had rendered judgment, He’d done it in private.

Well. What a disappointment.

Okay. So. Then. The new millennium. Time to get to Prague.

“English teaching in Prague” always had something of the mythical about it to me. It was up there with El Dorado, or Shangri La. When I went on my first backpacking voyage around Europe in 1992, Prague had only recently opened up. The Cold War had ended, and Capitalism had emerged victorious! Everyone was talking about going there. The city of Kafka, of Kundera, and really cheap beer. “I’m going to teach English in Prague!” was the cry of a generation.

I spent five days there in 1992. I remember a city of great medieval beauty where it was raining constantly. I remember not being able to find my way anywhere, streets changing names and winding through centuries-old plazas. I remember people being constantly rude to me, and a ticket inspector taking $8 from me as a fine because I’d bought the wrong kind of ticket. I remember trying to buy a pen and being unable to find one anywhere.

In truth I did very little during my five days in Prague in 1992. I don’t think I even went to any bars, because I could never find them. Also I was totally exhausted from five days in Bulgaria and Romania in which I’d slept very little and spent most of my time fighting my way through long lines at train stations.

But I always thought I’d be going back soon. Somehow it didn’t quite happen.

In December of 1999 I was on the island of Ko Samui in Thailand. I’d been working on another island in Thailand, but had lost my job under a cloud. I relaxed and swam and waited for the Millennium. I also spent about an hour every evening at an Internet Cafe, looking for a new teaching position. I decided it would be somewhere in Eastern Europe or Russia. Time for a change. I’d done Asia to death. I scanned websites, sent out resumes, followed up leads, posted messages. Technology. In my first three jobs I’d just had to turn up in a city and hope for the best.

I got an offer to work in Sarajevo that excited me a bit, until I foolishly admitted that I didn’t have a CELTA. Well fuck you too. The first concrete offer I got was for a large school in Prague. Good old Prague! Like returning to Mecca. And surely the easiest first stop if you wanted to see Eastern Europe.

I spoke on the telephone to a DOS of the school there. He seemed friendly, yet very professional. Well, no problem. I’d been an English teacher for nearly five years, I could fake professionalism as well as the next bozo.

They offered me a job, starting January 6th.

I bought my plane ticket and assured them I’d be there, if the world didn’t end.

It hadn’t.

But it was a long damn road to Prague.

I left Ko Samui on January 2nd, still hungover from the New Millennium party. Taxi to the port. Ferry to the mainland. Overnight bus ride to Bangkok. Checked into a hostel, slept uncomfortably. Spent the day buying some odds and ends. Bus to the airport in the afternoon. On the evening of the 3rd, onto the plane. Six or seven hours to Bahrain. A long stopover there, in the very modern airport full of duty-free elctronics shops, and then back onto the plane and into Prague some six or seven hours later.

I arrived in the afternoon. A nice Czech woman from the school met me. From palm trees and sun to snow and castles, plus jetlag. It was all a bit of shock. I’d taken the last of my blue valiums on the airplane, but sedation doesn’t exactly equal sleep. To describe me as “frazzled” would be putting it mildly.

They put me in my flat – a huge grey Soviet concrete block. The flat was brown and smelled of generations of cheap tobacco. But the TV did have Fashion TV, MTV and Animal Planet. My room was small and filled with Czech books and houseplants. I had a roommate, but he wasn’t there. I was a little afraid. I hadn’t lived with anybody since college. And here I'd recently passed my 30th birthday.  I collapsed into bed that afternoon and slept restlessly all night to the next morning.

I got up early the next day for my first day of work. I put on a blue shirt and tie and trousers, still feeling exhausted despite all my sleep. It was still dark. I crept into the shower, hearing my mysterious roommate snore in his room. I went outside and made the ten-minute trek to the school by bus and metro. Greyness, brownness, coldness, and darkness formed my first impressions.

The school was empty when I arrived. I envisioned the staff room in Bangkok in the morning, filling slowly with hungover teachers smoking, bantering about the night before and drinking coffee. I looked forward to meeting the very professional-sounding individual who interviewed me on the telephone. He had sounded like an interesting guy.

Imagine my surprise when he turned out to be a hairless gorilla.

He was the first arrival. He was wearing ratty jeans and a t-shirt as I recall. He introduced me to the manager of the school, who spoke in such a thick Scottish accent he couldn’t be understood at all. Then to the other DOS’s, who were mostly bloated football hooligans, misshapen and swollen from years of Czech beer and potato pancakes.  "Aw'oite moite, noice ta meetcha."

Then the other teachers arrived. They were mostly unattractive women in their twenties who immediately began complaining about everything and preparing for their classes – this consisted of making six hundred photocopies of twenty different activities and then cutting them all up into little pieces. I’d never seen so much preparation. Pretty much everyone was wearing ratty jeans and sweaters.

I quietly took off my tie and slipped it into my jacket pocket. I figured I was haggard and weary enough looking to fit in otherwise.

Welcome to the world of the professional trained ESL teacher in Europe.

next:  Working in Disneyland: Prague 2000

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