Living in Prague and Learning Czech: Part 1

Ja jsem Americanka. Pracuju jako vyzkumnik.

I am American. I work as a researcher. 

I was in Czech class. Our assignment was to introduce ourselves and I was practicing some of my new vocabulary. 

It was late February 2021 and it was my first week in Czech. Unbeknownst to me (and yes, I should have done my research), Czech was experiencing its worst—and a brutal—COVID19 spike in cases and deaths. At 1,800 deaths and almost 115,000 cases per every 1 million people, it was ranked as second in the world for COVID19 deaths per capita. 

So, yes, the COVID situation in Czech was actually worse than the US. I hadn't done my research because I just assumed that the US was the worst. Who can blame me when we are at over 520,000+ deaths to date? 

In spring of 2020, Czech was praised around the world for being one of the first to institute a mandatory mask policy, and their case numbers remained low for the first six months of the pandemic. It wasn’t until October that they saw an alarming increase in cases. 

Yeah, I can't read the Czech either. But you get the idea. Numbers were low and now they're high. I got the image from this website if you're interested in more. (Remember that Europeans write dates opposite of us. So the first date on the X-axis is March 11th and the most recent date is February 26th.) 

Just as I was arriving, the cases just kept increasing and hospitals were filling up. Soon after I arrived, all the countries surrounding Czech—Austria, Slovakia, Poland, and Germany—closed their borders to anyone coming from Czech. 

Three days after I arrived, the government instituted a mandatory N95 mask mandate in all public places, especially public transportation. 

Can you imagine if the US government tried to do that? People would be rioting in the streets. 

Luckily, my partner’s brother, a dentist, had gifted me an N95 mask before I left Colorado, and I had been wearing that since I arrived. Luckily, because N95 masks were mandated, every corner store carried them at a cheap price and I bought five for 80 crown (less than $5). Were they really N95? Probably not. I think they were counterfeit. But they looked like one, and thus passed any inspections. 

On February 26th, 2021, Czech declared a national emergency. It's because the UK and South Africa mutant strains are running rampant, apparently. 

I say all this to explain that, needless to say, all restaurants, gyms, and ski resorts were closed. The Czech class was, of course, conducted online using a video chatting platform called BigBlueButton. 

The teacher was a volunteer—the class was completely free, offered by an anti-fascist political group called D-Zona. The class was called “Czech for Anti-Nationalists.” 

Eastern Europe was ravaged by war many times in recent memory. The collapse of Yugoslavia alone caused much violence and even genocide, not to mention Soviet occupation for almost forty years and Nazi occupation before that. Czech has had its fair share of hardships and nationalist sentiment has been behind a lot of it. 

More recently, Europe has been torn apart again by the left and the right. With the Syrian refugee crisis since 2011, Europeans started getting protective, xenophobia, racist, and Islamophobic. As a result, right-wing groups, sometimes called fascist, started to take hold in many countries and Czech was no exception. Some other groups started to come together to fight against this. There are lots of groups in Czech working to help migrants out. And that includes D-Zona. Indeed, I am considered a migrant here now. I even had some people reach out through some contacts to give me information about an NGO that could help me if I ever had legal issues with the complicated bureaucracy that offers no English language services. Now, of course, my privilege is above and beyond what most migrants are facing. But the class only had three other people, and the teacher encouraged me to join. It was open to all. 

Stay tuned for more about my life in Czech.