Portál hlavního města Prahy

Gottlieb Roman Commandeur, 41, is an expat from Hamburg, living on beautiful King’s Vinyard aka Vinohrady or, blandly, Prague 2.

He taught German at a Czech-German elementary school for two years from 2006 and was mobbed by his superiors. „It felt like being tarred and feathered, then thrown off the Charles Bridge“, he says.

Instead of slinking back to Germany and his well-paid and recession-proof teaching job, though, he took a sabatical and wrote a partly autobiographical novel soon to be published. It’s even funny despite its being set in Prague.

Well into his second year of sabatical bliss, he’s also started an acting carreer under his real name which is substantially shorter than the one you saw above. Watch out for him in the musical „I love you. You’re perfect. Now change!“ in the near future!

Riding your bike in Prague

If you find your way through Prague, be it its beautifully-detached-from-reality-and-thus-totally-void-of-actual-Czech-people center or the ugloid but frightfully real outer recesses, with their dropped-lego-box look and feel of panelaky, you will find it hard to see any bicyclists.

The ones that do meet your eye from time to time will look hurried, haggard and hapless. They are probably kurýři aka bike couriers. And specially designed clouds always seem to rain exclusively on them. Being Czech and hence feeling like eternal victims they never seem to wear neither helmets nor adequate rain clothing.

This makes bikers look pathetic what with their wet dreadlocks and sagging smutty jeans rolled up to the knee on one side. And that is how the average Czech car driver wants to shrug them off by, too. One can literally hear them sigh in their newly acquired Porsche Cayennes: „Buzz off, cretin! You’re just too poor to own a car!“

Suckers on two wheels

Being West German - and thus full of hubris, at least according to certain locals - my personal reaction is: „You Czechs are 40 years behind!“ And it has become a mantra of sorts. The sign language of action for that, of course, is an erect middle finger:

- When I am being overtaken by a speeding car in one of those ridiculously dangerous narrow lanes next to a tram stop, where only a single sheet of paper fits between me and the side mirror whizzing by.

- When a bus sneaks up, starts to overtake me and then honks at the sound level of a starting Apollo rocket, exactly when it’s next to me.

- When a driver begins to yell at me through closed windows, blush with unjustified anger and gesticulating like a pantomime because I dared circumnavigate one of the myriad two-meter-deep and one-meter-wide potholes, thus slightly swerving into their path.

- When a so-called friend tells me, I am crazy and asking for trouble by riding my bike in Prague.

Not! But they will get an adequate answer:

Biking in Prague is smart

Try it yourself if you dare! It is dangerous, all right. But there are very few rules, as the police gives a darn about you. So ride on sidewalks or against the traffic in one-way-streets! Go through parks or even on the city highway Magistrale! You will beat any car and tram timewise. You will set an example for a more sustained and ecological lifestyle. You can stop going to the gym, because Prague really is hilly! You can even meet your future partner biking at the monthly demonstration called Cyklojízda!

Leap 40 years forward!

The bike demo starts every third Thursday from naměstí Jiřího z Poděbrad at 6 pm. It is escorted by police and always leads onto the Magistrale, which is totally cool. And the Czechs there really are 40 years ahead of their slow-witted compatriots. And that, my friend, means marriage material!

I’m thinking positively. That’s why I am riding my bike in Prague!