While I was at the hotel, I hadn't really talked to the people working there that much. The lady who was around the most didn't speak one little bit of English which really put a crimp in discussions. When I was checking out, however, I started talking with the desk clerk and we had quite a long, interesting conversation.
She asked how I liked Prague, why I had decided to come visit, and how I thought it, and the Netherlands, compared to the US. She said that when she was growing up she always wanted to live in New York City because that epitomized freedom to kids growing up behind the Iron Curtain. She was 13 years old when the Velvet Revolution happened so I asked her about Vacal Havel (the former president who died), about what it was like growing up under Communism, and about the traveling she had done in Europe.
She said that it was really boring living in a Communist Society. Everybody had the same things and there was never enough to go around. She remembered some games they used to play--they never had real games from the store but they would make up their own and one that was really popular was collecting pop cans--Fanta, Coke, etc.
She remembered her mother standing in long lines waiting for certain things to come to the store. Neither of her parents joined the Communist Party which meant they had fewer opportunities for advancement and she said that it was very difficult because her Dad worked so hard and it didn't make any difference: he got exactly the same pay as they guys who didn't work at all. I asked if there was resentment toward people who had joined the Communist Party and she said that the people she know mostly weren't members of the Party. It wasn't until after the Revolution, when she was in High School (and presumably consequently in a school with a larger catchment area) that she said she would meet people and they would talk about having gotten special things, or having different experiences and then they would know that that family had been part of the Communist Party. She didn't mention that she had any strong resentment about them but she did say that there were still a lot of people from the older generation who were upset that the Communist Party was allowed to exist in modern Czech politics and thought that it should be shut down because of their suffering in the past. In some parts of the Czech Republic there was significant political backlash after they gained their freedom but that may have been more noticeable in border regions where there had been more unpleasant interactions, such as in the area around the Sudetenland.
The clerk also talked about the Velvet Revolution and the fall of the Communist Party. She didn't experience it as a political revolution so much as a huge increase in social and cultural freedom. Before, she said, you couldn't go anywhere. (And remember that you could drive across the Czech Republic long-wise in about six and a half hours--it is a tiny little space to be stuck in). All of a sudden, you could just get in your car and drive across borders if you wanted to. She remembered going with her parents in their old car (it was an old, Soviet car, she said, and couldn't ever do more than 80 kph) and driving to Munich, Germany to get butter and sugar because you couldn't get any of that in Prague. They also went on longer trips around Europe. She said that just after the borders opened there was a huge flood of Czechs just driving out of the country to look around and to see what the rest of the world was like. When she was older, she said, she went traveling with friends and they hitch-hiked their way around Europe. Now, though, she said, she was too old for that. Now she worked in a hotel at home and watched other people do the traveling.
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