Michael Smith
Editors’ Note: Michael Smith’s early-90s Eastern Bloc adventures began in 1991 in Russia (Moscow and Leningrad). In 1992 he finds himself in Prague, capital of the then undivided Czechoslovakia, followed by Budapest (Hungary), and Vienna (Austria).
Following the 1991 visit to Russia, on offer next was a nine-day coach tour, starting in Germany, visiting what was then the single country of Czechoslovakia, Hungary’s capital Budapest, and finishing in Vienna, Austria.
Day 1
The silver Mercedes coach contained fifty plus seats. This being the 1990s, the twin words “health” and “safety” had yet to be capitalized and elevated to god-like status. I have no recollection of any seat belts onboard, save the one attached to the driver’s seat. Clearly, the potential dangers inherent in coach travel were either as yet undiscovered, or of little or no concern to our driver.
We left punctually at 9 am and drove to the border. Our first stop inside Czechoslovakia was a toilet break (always a tricky maneuver on foreign soil). In the era before on-board toilets, the frequency and length of “comfort breaks” within the motorway monotony were generally dictated by the demands of the weakest bladder on board. I was amazed we managed to reach the Czech border without that disturbing tap on the shoulder followed by “Er, sorry to bother you but…”
At these Czech toilets we had our first experience of the depravations that had been such a feature of Soviet-run Eastern Europe—we were expected to buy our own toilet paper from roadside vendors happy of their captive audience. As the alternative was beyond imagination, we were forced to participate in this blatant blackmail. But there was more. To allow us the full Eastern Bloc experience, the toilet paper on sale was also rationed. And rationed to about 4 cm2 per person. The feats performed on that day, behind those locked cubicle doors, were undoubtedly amongst the most daring and complex undertaken by any bunch of desperate tourists.
Physically relieved, yet mentally perplexed, we continued deeper into the Czech part of Czechoslovakia, reaching the capital of West Bohemia, Plzen. On the European continent, beer is frequently referred to as “Pils”, the name being derived from this town, where brewing is thought to have originated about 700 years ago. My travels have rarely led me to a more depressing place. Admittedly, thickening fog did little to add to any redeeming features that may have been lurking between the crumbling, grey factory buildings. While beer is enjoyed the world over, the process of creating it should be hidden from view (the same being true of sausages, chicken nuggets, and, possibly, government policy). Unfortunately, such attention to design did not match the utilitarian view promoted by the post-war Soviet occupants, who clearly believed that a brewery should possess the same aesthetic qualities as an oil refinery.
Once at the Hotel Kupa we had plenty of forms to fill in (another by-product of the Soviet occupation) before being allowed to proceed beyond the lobby. As group leader I was responsible for ensuring check-in at the hotel, followed by allocation of rooms to the students. The allocation of bedrooms is always a tense moment on any school trip as everyone wants to share a room with friends, while avoiding having to share with the loner. This requires from the group leader the fine arts of tact, empathy, diplomacy and, in the end, ruthless dictatorship.
In trying to reach our bedrooms we discovered that, at best, only two of the hotel’s four lifts were functioning, which was a shame as the restaurant was on the top floor and dinner was at 20:30. To the relief of those of us who had been on the Russia trip a year earlier, the food was most palatable in taste and generous in portion.
Day 2
The fog had lifted and we found ourselves residing in an example of Soviet architectural chic, a massive 22-storey, 168-roomed block of flats that had been converted into a hotel, presumably to take advantage of the post-Wall tourist boom of which we were playing a pioneering part.
At 08:45, following breakfast, we all met in the foyer to greet our local guide and travel into Prague. A typical feature of school trips is the feeding routine: breakfast and evening meal in the hotel restaurant, with a packed lunch available prior to departure for the day’s events. Today we would be treated to the usual piece of fruit, chocolate biscuit, and carton of juice, with the addition of a “sandwich” so large many of our party would be unable to eat all of it, even during the nine hours of today’s excursion. Imagine half of a thick French Stick, liberally smeared with rich butter and stuffed with cheese of an indeterminate origin. Bulgarian Cheddar, perhaps? However, just before we left the foyer it was pointed out to us that our packed lunches were in the restaurant on the 22nd floor (and still only two lifts were working).
Flexibility is a key element of any school trip, and already on our first full day we were forced to make an itinerary change. “Today”, our guide informed us, “Prague is closed.” So, rather than the fifteen-minute coach ride into Prague city center (a welcome break from the extensive coach travel of Day 1), we were forced to travel a further two and a half hours to the West Bohemian spa town of Karlovy Vary (aka Karlsbad).
In its heyday, the town played host to a variety of visiting, well-to-do invalids wishing to recover from illness by taking the famous spa waters, either through bathing or drinking. Keen to make the most of the commercial possibilities that are always attached to sick people, the town developed and sold distinctive China cups with a drinking straw built into the handle. Walking through the town one could stop at any of the free springs, fill up one’s cup before ambling to the next watering hole, sipping the foul brew from a delightfully ornate cup made to be gripped easily in the hand of even the most gentle of folk.
Karlovy Vary is built along a valley and we walked its entire length, possibly in the footsteps of Peter the Great, Beethoven, Brahms, Liszt, Tolstoy, Schiller, Goethe, Bismark, or Karl Marx, all of whom frequented the country’s largest spa. We visited a display of Bohemian crystalware, the ornate Colonnade Sadová, the even more ornate Mlýnská Colonnade, and the twelve natural springs that are the town’s biggest attraction. Some students were brave enough to try the spring water, and were surprised to learn that in the previous century doctors recommended patients should drink twelve liters per day of the warm, foul-tasting waters.
Probably the most impressive sight in town, however, was the Vřídlo (“The Sprudel”), a geyser with a three-storey visitors’ center built around it in the Yuri Gagarin Colonnade. Here 2000 liters a minute of 72.2 degrees Centigrade water shoot up 12 meters from a depth of 2500 meters. So high, in fact, that it was impossible for me to take a full-length photograph of it with my Russian-built camera.
From there, we passed the Yuri Gagarin Monument and, unusually, I didn’t have to explain who on earth (sorry, poor choice of phrasing) Mr. Gagarin was. Had I been asked, I would have been able to inform the inquisitive students that Yuri Gagarin was a cosmonaut (not to be confused with the American “astronaut”) sent into space to rescue the dog Laika which crept into Sputnik 2 while none of the white-coated, Russian boffins were looking, and was then accidentally blasted into orbit.
The more sharp-eyed among you will have spotted that my last point was more akin to a storyline involving Belgian cartoon boy-wonder Tintin and his dog Snowy than anything approaching reality. I made it up. However, the truth, as is so often the case, is equally as improbable. On 3rd November 1957, Laika was sent into space so that scientists could determine if space travel was viable for living creatures. She died a few hours after take-off. In 1960 four further dogs died in Russian spacecraft. Then, possibly due to pressure from the Animal Liberation Front, four months after the last of these canine fatalities, the Russians must have decided space travel was not for dogs after all, and maybe they should try humans instead. Enter Colonel Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin. On 12th April 1961 he became the first human to travel in space when he took off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in his Vostok 1. Given the Soviet track record in space flight up until this point, I reckon he deserves every statue erected to him—including the one we were looking at in Karlovy Vary.
With Gagarian bravery we then tried, unsuccessfully, to make some sort of inroads into our packed lunches while waiting for places to open so the yearnings of a number of students could be satisfied by some actual shopping.
As well as Yuri Gagarin, Karlovy Vary is also linked to another, albeit more extreme, form of communism through the town’s International Film Festival. In 1972, The Flower Girl won a special award, the first time a film from North Korea had achieved such international recognition. More unusually, the film was apparently adapted from a play written by Kim Il-Sung, the first Supreme Leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and heavily supervised by his film-obsessed son, future Dear Leader, and second ruler of DPRK, Kim Jong-Il. It seems Jong-Il assisted with the script-writing, casting, filming and editing. Jong-Il’s obsession with film drove him in the late 1970s to order the kidnapping of South Korea’s most famous film star, Choi Eun-Hee, and her husband Shin Sang-Ok, the country’s leading film director. The pair were “encouraged” by Kim Jong-Il to improve the ailing North Korean film industry. As a cover for their escape plans, the South Korean couple did indeed revolutionize the film industry north of the border to the extent that their 1984 film, Emissary of No Return, won the Best Director award at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival. Strangely, our paths would cross again later in the trip.
Following the shopping, we were on the coach again for a one-hour ride to Mariánské Lázně (aka Marienbad). Here the spas were cold, but not as cold as the drizzle that was now falling from grey skies. Colonnades were a recurring feature of Karlovy Vary and, presumably not wishing to be outdone by their rival neighbor, Mariánské Lázně boasts the Maxim Gorky Colonnade, and the Pavillion of the Cross Spring, a colonnade in all but name. It too can boast famous patrons, with Goethe writing his ‘Marienbader Elegie’ here in 1823. It is worth noting that many of the photographs I took on this day contain at least one student still eating the sandwich from their packed lunch.
We then had a further two and a half hour coach journey back to our Prague hotel (making six hours in total for those readers not keeping up). By the end of this, it felt as though we had spent two whole days on the coach, with respite only to visit toilets and colonnades.
The dark Czech clouds that had accompanied most of our brief time in the country did, indeed, have a silver lining as we ended the day with a five-course meal at the hotel restaurant, which, just like those packed lunches, proved to be far too large to finish. Clearly, we were not going to starve on this trip.
Day 3
In 1971, led by the same Tory party keen on Brexit nearly fifty years later, Britain joined the “Common Market”, the forerunner of the European Union. However, in 1992 much of Europe still remained outside the Common Market, and each country had its own currency. Today Euros are used almost everywhere on the continent but back then any international journey involved the currency exchange game so beloved of teachers of mathematics. In Germany we knew 1 Deutschmark (Dm) = 100 Pfennigs (pfg). In Czechoslovakia we learnt that 1 Koruna (Kcs) = 100 Haleru (h), and that we would have to carry out quick mental conversions if we weren’t to be cheated out of our “western currency”.
Today I wished to partake of the increasingly popular shopping phenomenon and, consequently, it was now necessary for me to enter the shady world of currency exchange. For my thirty Deutschmarks I was entitled to 522.90 Kcs, less the exchange fee (Poplatky) of 34.90 Kcs. That left me with a whopping 488 Kcs—surely that’s enough to by a Škoda?
Shopping in early-90s Czechoslovakia was not as straightforward as shopping in the West. For example, in most shops and supermarkets the number of shoppers was strictly controlled by the number of baskets or trolleys available. One was not allowed to enter the store without one, and any prospective customer had to wait outside until someone left.
Yes, today Prague was open. The river Moldau (Vltava) swings like a question mark through the center of the city, separating the Old Town (Staré Město) from the Little Quarter (Malá Strana, or Lesser Town), above which is the medieval castle district (Hradčany), once home of royalty, and containing Prague’s finest churches and museums. The New Town (Nové Město) is a late Gothic southern extension of the Old Town. Prague certainly has a strong pedigree as a capital city; Bohemia, Moravia, the Czech Socialist Republic, Czechoslovakia, and today, the Czech Republic (aka Czechia).
We drove through heavy traffic on an extensive coach tour of the city before stopping at the Castle District from where we walked to view the Changing of the Guard at the Matthias Gate, had a tour of St. Vitus Cathedral—which took nearly six centuries to complete (the Cathedral, not the tour), the Royal Place, and Golden Lane where alchemists, centuries ago (in the days before merchant banking), plied their get-rich-quick schemes.
After this we took the coach again to the Old Town where we ate lunch, this time another large piece of bread containing some sort of Slavic Salami, followed by another spot of shopping in the Old Town Square. Next we visited the Jewish Cemetery, including an exhibition of children’s art work from the second world war. Our guide marched us to see the Astronomical Clock (Procession of the Apostles), the Jan Has Memorial, Tyn Church and St. Nicholas Church. From there, two hours more of shopping, centered on Prague’s answer to the Champs Elysées, Wenceslas Square (Vaclavske Namesti).
My earliest childhood realization that not all things were well in the world came, as a Primary-aged pupil in the summer of 1968. I distinctly remember sitting on the living room floor at home and turning round to see black-and-white television images of Russian tanks rolling through the streets of Prague, capital of a country with a very strange sounding name. That’s not right, I thought, what are those tanks doing there? Tanks only happened in the second world war, didn’t they? In January 1968, Alexander Dubček was elected First Secretary of the Czech Communist Party and set the country on a course of political liberalization, or “Socialism with a human face”. It seems Russian leader Brezhnev was not quite so keen on this course of action, preferring “Socialism with a miserable face”, and in August sent troops and tanks into the streets of Prague, including Wenceslas Square, where I now stood. The irony is, when we arrived that afternoon, we found a demonstration. The main banner, unfurled just under the statue of Saint Wenceslas on horseback, translated as “Human life is worth more than Bolsevick Justice.” It seems that, maybe, some things had not changed in the intervening twenty-four years.
After an early dinner, our guide rushed us (like she did everywhere) to the Metro, and then on a tram, to take us back into town for a performance at the famous Laterna Magika Praha, the world’s first multi-media theatre, founded in 1958. We were going to see the ever-popular Wonderful Circus, which premiered in 1977 and is still being performed. The students enjoyed this type of theatre, which blended drama, dance, mime, puppetry, and film. My ticket cost 430 Kcs (so maybe I was being a bit optimistic about that Škoda). The programme for the evening informed us that, “The theatre has the unique privilege of presenting the whole of a lifetime in a single night. The comedy we offer you is as old as mankind itself—good and evil, love and hate, strength and weakness, happiness and sadness and at last wisdom and the understanding of what is really important in life.” (A good description of school trips, really.)
In the past year, Michael Smith’s fiction has appeared in Fabula Argentea, Witcraft, Literally Stories, Heimat Review, The Hooghly Review, Little Old Lady Comedy and many other online literary journals. To date, he has self-published Gruseltal, a humorous novel, and two collections of short stories, Fonts, then Songs, all available from online bookstores.
Website: https://frucht-schleifen.weebly.com/
