Sometimes people think that I am Slovak. It’s a fair guess, but no, I’m not; even though some of them tend to ‘convince’ me about that too. ‘Come on, you have a Slovakian passport, don’t you?’ – sounds one of the frequent questions. Yet, I’m a Hungarian.
Blending in? …never really
So how come a Slovako-Hungarian guy ends up in Prague? I guess, because it is a great city for studying (among many other things, of course…). The possibilities are almost unlimited. While roaming around the ’Czech metropolis’ – yeah, they call it like that – you may notice that universities are scattered all over the city. A bunch of private and state universities, where you can study art, philosophy; institutions, where you can master your technical, linguistic skills, or learn to become a doctor.
Many nations live here together peacefully and mostly without affecting each other. If you decide to come here, maybe to settle down and start to study at one of these universities, it’s better to be prepared: there is a fairly good chance that after a while you are going to be surrounded by your own ‘kind’, your own people. It’s not that Czechs are particularly unfriendly or antisocial, is rather the fact that in this city almost every nation has it’s ‘representatives’, who tend to gather into groups and hang out together. And if that happens, it’s really hard to learn the language properly, because Czech is, well, kind of difficult…
Don’t mind, don’t care…
I could write hundreds of pages about my experiences with Czech people, about how I see their mentality or their attitude to life, but nothing would express my overall view of them more than one of my favorites of Czech filmmaking (e.g.: One Hand Can't Clap / Jedna ruka netleská, Loners / Samotáři, or Empties / Vratné lahve). Of course these (kind of) films are highly exaggerated, but they are also true in their odd way.
These movies contain everything what I would say about the Czech mentality if I had to describe it. I often wonder how they were even able to make their own revolution. It seems to me that sometimes they tend to be really calm, careless, even unconcerned. At least the people whom I’ve got to know. Yet, I still couldn’t decide whether this attitude of theirs is a good or a bad feature. I think it’s neither, it’s just the way they are.
Still, they and their language can always surprise you. Even if you’ve managed to blend in (more or less), to learn the language on a fairly acceptable level and maybe even to find a Czech girlfriend…, you can never be sure, when you’ll face a weird situation mixing up these two words - tulit and tulák -, on the peak of your romantic night. The first one is to snuggle, the other is a vagrant, a rover…