ARTS & CULTURE
EXACT CHANGE I
was the one who wanted to go to Prague. My friend and spring break travel buddy, Mel, had chosen the other locations—she had managed to convince me about Vilnius, and we had agreed on Krakow. Prague was not high on her list of priorities. Despite having done hardly any research on the city, I worked hard to convince her that we needed to see it before the end of the semester. I had a very particular image in my head. The Prague I expected was small, quiet, and quaintly beautiful. The Prague I encountered was large, commercial, and crowded: a tourist city that defied expectation. At first blush I was a little disappointed. But, as one does when abroad, Mel and I adapted. With a few days of travel already under our belts, we learned a handful of useful Czech expressions and set off to discover the Prague that lay outside our imaginations. We visited the Museum of Communism, whose small theater looped video footage of 1989 protests in Wenceslas Square, and whose gift shop—particularly the coaster set depicting a fanged, leering matryoshka doll—was a blatant “fuck you” to the former Soviet Union. We wandered around the elaborate Prague Castle gardens, taking pictures of the noisy resipage 34
counterpoint / april 2016
dent peacocks. We escaped an afternoon of freezing rain by holing up in a smoky pub, drinking cheap, enormous pints. Then there was the Metro. Mel and I spent ages jammed in with tourists and commuters, riding long, slow-moving escalators down to the train platforms, gawking at indecipherable ads and stark signs naming each stop in Soviet Bloc reds and yellows. The most important thing to know about the Prague Metro is this: it operates on an honor system. There are no turnstiles. You buy a ticket that’s good for a certain amount of time—twenty minutes, forty minutes, an hour and a half— and timestamp it before entering the platform. The only way to pay for tickets is with exact change, in coins. Mel and I were unprepared for this on the morning of our last day in Prague. We had planned to leave our backpacks in a locker for the day, before taking an overnight train to Krakow. As we descended into the nearest Metro station, we realized that neither of us had change. We stood before the bright yellow ticket dispenser, trying to decide whether we should venture back up to look for an ATM. Meanwhile, all around us, suit-clad commuters were striding past into the Metro, without so much as a glance at the ticket dispenser. Maybe they all had annual passes. Then again, maybe they didn’t. It would be unfair to say Mel and I were equally at fault. I remember saying
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