Prague 1970 and 2007

In one of those really curious parallel universe events, Sandy and I both studied abroad in Austria and visited Prague in 1970 and 2007. She was with a BYU group in Salzburg, I was with a Stanford group in Vienna. To add to the small world syndrome, our son Chris did a shorter summer study abroad in Vienna in 2007 with BYU, taught by an old friend of ours, Alan Keele.

Sandy just put the following up on Facebook, which is a bit less permanent than a blog, which is easy to archive. So let's start with her observations and then I will add some of my own.
Sandy:
In 1970 Prague was a grimy and dismal place. A wall around the corner from our hotel was splattered with what looked like fresh blood. Stand-up bars served something that resembled whipped Pepto-Bismol. A postal worker informed us that we couldn't buy stamps to send letters to West Germany because no such place existed. Students identified us as East Germans and couldn't be convinced otherwise. The West really didn't exist for them. It was two years after the Prague Spring.
I asked my friend Steve to take a picture of me by a city well in the old town. I had assumed a thoughtful and properly depressed expression. He told a joke and then snapped the picture. I was highly irritated. Picture #1.

Joe: I was wearing longish frizzy hair and a second hand Russian greatcoat from a pawnshop in Vienna when I visited Prague. So nobody thought either I or my Stanford in Austria buddies were East German. They quickly accepted that we were American. (It is a compliment to Sandy's group that their German was good enough to be taken for German -- ours was definitely not.) But they were delighted to tell us how much they liked rock music and hated Russia, at least the USSR politicians who had ordered the Soviet Army to invade them..
The town was clearly socialist in a way I almost miss parts of. There were cheap cafeterias, priced for working class people that were also great for poor students, who had already spent way too much abroad. The students we met were intensely interested in politics. They thought the attraction some of us had for Marx was naive. When they heard that some of us were going on to visit the USSR, they were appalled -- why visit people who had just invaded them to put down the political opening or liberalization of Prague Spring in 1968 -- but they also grinned wisely and said things like, "Just wait until you see what 'really existing socialism' looks like." And they were dead right.

Sandy: The Prague I visited in 2007 was a decadent party town full of revelers from everywhere in the world. The Karluv Most bridge was full of musicians and bright lights at night. The old buildings downtown were the same, only with clean windows and charming little ice-cream and tea shops in every block. The well was still there, in the old town. We took a picture. It was okay to smile, this time. Picture # 2.

Praha 2007

Joe: I was a little ambivalent about the change in Prague. People were no longer worried by being jailed over toxic politics. The city was much less drab and clearly very prosperous. But also much more globalized and westernized. They probably making a lot of money off the European and American partiers who had crowded to Prague for cheap, world famous beer. But the quaint little bookstores where we both (separately, obviously) bought classic books in German were long gone.