Our dinner table was built for four people, ideally two adults and two offspring. Three full grown adults is doable. Four full grown adults is possible but slightly uncomfortable. With myself, Jan, Meghan, Milan and Roman we had five. Five fully grown adults, a massive plate of turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, a green salad, a fruit salad, green beans, rolls, cranberry sauce, gravy and butter.

Roman was busy pouring beers which were distributed with cheery “Na zdraví!”

“No no, you are doing it wrong.” Milan smiled. “We do not just tap the glasses. Here we will show you our special electrical engineering toast.”

“What?” Meghan and I asked in unison. Jan looked amused.

“This is a special toast. Here, first you pick up your beer.”

We picked up our beers.

“Then you say Na zdraví, 'to your health'.”

“Na zdraví!”

“Then you tap the top of your glasses together. Now the bottom of your glasses the same way. See it's electrical engineering toast because it's positive pole, negative pole ... like that.

“Lastly you tap the table below you with your glass like this. THEN you drink.”

We stared skeptically at Milan.

“What? It's true, that's the way we toast in the Czech Republic. Honza, tell them!”

Jan nodded. “He's right.”

“I have never seen anyone do that in a bar.”

“Me neither,” Meghan added.

And that would remain true for my entire time in the Czech Republic. I never once saw anyone do this “toast” unprovoked, but I was instructed on how to do it several times by several different people in exactly the same way: top tap, bottom tap, down on the table then drink, don't break eye contact. This leads me to believe that it's an artificially preserved custom for the benefit of foreigners.

“Here, move this over to the coffee table by the TV.” I handed the massive pot of mashed potatoes to Meghan. Since it is not customary for Czechs to have dinner parties the essential serving ware and bowls were absent as well. We did the best would could to improvise.

“Not until I get seconds” Meghan grinned gleefully. “...is that okay?”

“Dude it's Thanksgiving.”

“Well I dunno, may be you're dead set on leftovers.”

“It is absolutely impossible for us to eat all this food,” Jan said, still looking overwhelmed as he slid back into his massive leather office chair that we had wheeled out to the table. Even after one serving, by all appearances we had barely touched the food.

Poor dear, I didn't have the heart to tell him that this was actually a modest Thanksgiving selection. There were no yams, no turnips, no creamed onions, no spinach and only a single cake and some fruit for desert. Thanksgivings with the more Italian side of my family traditionally include pasta dishes, eggplant, ham or roast beef, three or four pies, chocolate cake of some variety, and at least one tray of bakery cookies, possibly two if there was a miscommunication between my mother and one of my Aunts.

As Meghan plumped another mound of mashed potatoes on her plate and reached for the butter we inevitably started talking shop. Okay it was bad form to do so at the dinner table, but certain cultural considerations made us both unwilling to approach our normal conversation topics: sex, Old Town drug deals, places we'd gotten drunk and people we'd gotten drunk with.

“I started working at KB the French bank. They're totally cool. Teach for an hour, then go down to that weird black cube building and have a cappuccino with a croissant.”

“What weird black building?”

“The one with the bookstore on the corner.”

“Dům u Černé Matky Boží” Milan provided, almost as a side comment to Roman.

The building is not actually black beyond the first floor, but  Dům U Èerné Matky Boží-- The House of the Black Madonna-- is so called because of the black statue of Mary that stands watch over the corner, gilded in elegant robes and held preciously in a cage. It is unremarkable by modern standards but is impressive when you consider that it was built in 1911 when many of its construction techniques were revolutionary feats of engineering.

It is a building that when you read its history it gives you hope for our own recyclable disposable city. You know how alarming it is to watch landmark buildings in New York turned into banks, Starbucks or other capitalistic banalities. Well the Black House was originally designed as a department store with a cafe. Ten years later the cafe was out of business, as were most of the shops, and the impressive support-beamless design was destroyed to convert the building into bank offices. Thirty years later the bank was gone, the wood framing torn up and what remained converted into office space. When the Communists were finally run out of town the building was reborn again as a museum of Czech art and cultural only to be closed eight years later. In this last reversion the cafe was fully restored, an art book shop opened up downstairs and the rest of the floors appeared to be office space. This current incarnation seemed prime for the tourist market but a few months after Thanksgiving I saw the signs announcing the art book store was going out of business, to be replaced by a urban clothing and skate shop.

And so it goes...

“I love working there. They are so mellow about everything.”

“It must be interesting,” Milan finally said. “To work for so many different companies.”

“Sometimes,” Meghan shrugged. “It's really the same thing over and over again.” She looked to me for confirmation. “Right?”

“Mostly.” I nodded. “The best is having a couple classes on the same level...”

“...you plan one lesson and teach it three times.”

“Exactly.”

“Do you ever find yourself wanting to say stuff in class that could get you fired?” Meghan asked.

“What kind of stuff?”

“About sex and drugs or just really tell a student off ... you know, stuff.”

“Actually I always seem to say that stuff anyway.” I said-- Milan and Roman giggled at the table, earning a curious sideways look from Jan. “...so no.”

“Well I have this student, let's call him Tomaš.”

“Tommy!”

“Shut up-- anyway  Tomaš always says really inappropriate things in class and I'm never sure how I'm supposed to handle them.”

“What kind of things?” Jan chewed on his knuckle and swung his chair side to side from the head of the table.

“Really inappropriate things in this obnoxious voice like 'oh this weekend I just hung around drank and had lots of sex.'”

I grinned, “You should have said 'Oh honey it's not called sex if you're by yourself' in the sweetest voice possible.”

Cackles erupted and the table jerked a little below us.

“But that would get you fired?” Milan nodded wisely despite the question form.

“Nah, I say stuff like that all the time. Czechs are kind of low key on the moral outrage scale ... I think most of my students are amused by it. Still you try to be careful.”

“Well to be honest,” Meghan began again. “It's not like you couldn't just fall into another job if you wanted to.”

“And almost all the English teachers I know here have side projects.”

“Side projects?” Jan asked curiously. I swirled the cognac round my glass, watching the star shaped ice cubes melt into frail white slivers. It's funny how certain alcohols are permitted during meals while others are solely the terrain of cocktails and drunks, and still others are betrothed to their Masterpiece Theatre crowd ... isn't it? Drinking cognac while eating dinner seems like a totally absurd thing to do now.

“Most are tourists, some are looking for a career in art, writing or whatever.”

“A sincere English teaching English teacher is a rare thing,” I smiled. “Take my friends Angelo for example:

“Angelo teaches English at the same school, but he's really more interested in public policy. Apparently he's something of an advisor at the Ministry of Education.”

“Really? Does he speak Czech?”

“Somewhat. He did an interview for Czech television a few weeks ago, but apparently they subtitled his Czech ... in Czech, so ... you know.”

Light snickers trembled across the table.

“He's much much better than most though,” I added quickly. “It's not as if he's a poseur or anything. He's good, just maybe not perfect yet.”

“How'd he score the job in the first place?” Meghan asked.

“The mayor's bodyguard flipped him.”

Angelo was a wiry looking guy with long shaggy hair and a sloppy goatee. He was short (not that that should be held against him) and rattled on at length to just about anyone in the curious accent of an urban Southern. I imagine to the Czechs he must have had a terribly hypnotic effect. Much in the same way animals freeze up in the face of threats they cannot properly identify. He always spoke very very fast, but his words were always clear and perfectly pronounced. Once he substituted a class for me and when I asked my students who the agency had sent and what they'd done they replied with stars glazing over their eyes and good humor “They sent ..... Angel-- They sent us an angel.”

The story goes that Angelo met the mayor of Prague at a gymnastic competition. Although I have no independent confirmation of this fact, Angelo tells it in such a way that the mayor seems to be quite fond of attending events that involved prepubescent girls in skin tight clothing.

Most Czechs living in Prague view their government as extraordinarily corrupt, thus these stories and others like it tend to amuse Czechs and occasionally delight them. The juicer bits of the truth get fed by the public's growing dissatisfaction and current controversies until they've become fables of awkward times. Like all things in the Gothic City it's impossible to mark the point where pageantry ends and scandal begins.

I was quite sure that 90% of everything Angelo said was totally bullshit until traces of one of his insider scandal stories hit the Prague papers, so take this account with a grain of salt but do not doubt the truth in its spirit either.

Anyway, for whatever reason the mayor of Prague was visiting this gymnastics competition and Angelo was there too-- I never did get a straight answer about what Angelo was doing at such an event himself. As he passed by the mayor and his entourage, Angelo noticed the mayor's suit was crisp and new. So new, in fact, he had forgotten to take off the tags.

“So I reached out just to pick them off and WHAM! I was on the ground and the ceiling was spinning.”

Over time certain points of the story have yielded to elements that best illustrate the disfigurement of government. For example, it has never been explained exactly how Angelo went from lying dazed on his back to writing briefs and applications for the mayor, but the details of tags, the description of the bodyguard, never change. I don't know, I find most of Angelo's stories kind of an interesting reflection on the course of Czech politics: amusing allegories even. The gymnastic competition is never a big international affair, always a small local one with relatively meaningless prizes. The suit is always Italian, very expensive. The bodyguard always invisible until the very last moment. And these are all apt metaphors for the Post-Communist movements of the State. The new Czech government is quickly forging career politicians: everyone seems to have humble beginnings and a day job on-hold. At the same time these men and women of the educated common class try to carry themselves in the same manner as their peers from nation states with Noble heritage and controversies centuries old. The Czechs come off a little awkward in this regard.

All the while shocking corruption lurks in the background. By far, the Czech Republic is one of the least corrupt of the former Soviet states, but that's something like being the least drunk at a frat party. At the time I was living in the Republic there were several scandals involving ministers absconding with large amounts of public money.

What remains to be seen is how the Republic will grow in response to these issues: is the Republic becoming a peasant democracy where study and hard work can open up the doors of Prague Castle to anyone? Or will they mold their own ruling elite and cohabit with the other princes of the EU? We may admire the former, but we also forget that our own country has never lived up to that ideal. The Czech founding fathers were artists and philosophers, some from wealthy families, some not. Ours were lawyers and landowners. The only “people's politicians” we have had have been forgeries.

But that does play into what I have always loved about the Republic: the government does not pander to anyone. In America we waste so much time worrying what the rest of the world thinks, we waste so much money trying to win a global popularity contest that our elections are mush. Meaningless statements made by meaningless people. We have had the same government for over two hundred years, we cannot imagine a new regime. And except for minor alterations, our way of life has gone largely unchanged for generations. Because of this we take for granted our very being and put off maintaining the health of our society so that we can look cool on the global stage. We do incredibly stupid things, pass ignorant policies and disrespect our own culture all the while looking to a foreign audience for applause.

In the Republic things are very much “wait and see”. Self-interest is the name of the game, sometimes the self interest of the Czech people versus Europe and the United States, sometimes the self-interest of individual politicians over the State. But it's refreshing even considering its corruption.

“God, where did you find Stove Top Stuffing in this country? It's just like home.”

“Oh, my mother sent it to me.”

“You get packages up here?”

I shrugged. “Yes?”

“I've had such problems with mail. It's so confusing and people are so unhelpful.”

“Really? My experience is completely different. My mother got the address wrong on a package she sent once and the mailman actually tracked me down to deliver it.”

While we spoke Milan was showing off his new camera to the others around the table. The video recording function was of particular interest and Jan was busy amusing himself taking rolling footage of us making funny faces around the table.

“So anyway,” Meghan turned back to me, plopping a morsel of white meat in her mouth after dragging it through the gravy. “I'm going home for Christmas.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, my mother bought me the ticket in August just in case things here didn't work out. I wanted to let you know in case you wanted me to pick up anything for you back home.”

It had never occurred to me to ask, but it was brilliant. Brilliant but so strange, made it seem like she was just going to stop by my parents' house on the way to the store instead of on her way to a continental jump.

“Huh ... no I don't think so, but I'll let you know.”

“Okay.” Meghan smiled. “You're staying here for Christmas right? See Old Town Square and all that?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh I remember,” Jan said suddenly. “My mother wanted to know if you were religious.”

The motion at the table stopped.

“Ummm...” I hesitated, pretending to be lost in trying to pluck a cherry tomato out from the salad bowl. “Yes and No?”

“Well she asked because she and my father always go to midnight Christmas mass, and if you will want to you can join them.”

Meghan cleared her throat, grinning foolishly at me. “You're going to his house for Christmas?”

“Yes of course,” Jan said. “Why would I leave her home alone?”

“Well I...” I was blushing. Good God I could feel it! The heat rising up from the deepest part of me and the tingling of everyone's eyes glancing in my direction. Even Roman, who still said nothing, seemed to inquire curiously.

“I didn't think you were serious because you were drunk at the time.”

 “I was serious. And I wasn't drunk. I remember everything.”

 “Really?” I smiled snidely. “You remember taking pictures of Andrea passed out after she fell down the stairs?”

 “...vaguely.”

He was lying I could tell.

 “And insisting that the four of us go to that herna bar Solarku, you remember that?”

 “That I remember-- you don't like Solarku?-- But four? There was you, me and Andrea ... who is four?”

 “Peter.”

Jan opened his mouth to say something but frowned instead.

 “You remember Peter: blond, half-Canadian, half-Czech...”

He shrugged.

 “We met him at the student club ... brought a book with him?”

Jan shook his head.  “... as you said, I was drunk.”