A few years ago, on a nondescript street in Paris, I came across an unusual brass plaque, mounted on a wall. "At this place, on March 15, 1973," it read, "Monsieur F. Verdu opened his umbrella because he thought it might rain."

It turned out there were dozens of plaques like this all over Paris, mounted as part of a student's art project ridiculing national monuments. But it struck me that there was also a tender genius to these signs. Every city is filled with millions of unmarked places that nevertheless recall some small, personal memory for the people who live there. The same is true of Prague and the foreigners who've been making it their home for the past 15 years.

Back in 1991, practically all the Westerners here were English teachers, most of them Canadians trained at a former Young Pioneers camp east of the city who congregated at a parachutists' club, appropriately located in a Narodní street basement. Many events were truly underground in those days: The most popular live-music space was a vast cavern under the former Stalin monument (the giant metronome sculpture swings there today, when it's working), where the air still reeked of old potatoes. The potholed dance floor was dominated by a gigantic skeleton created by installation prankster David Černý, and the closest thing to a screwdriver was vodka mixed with Dilo, a tinned orange drink made from apples. Soon after that, Radio Stalin changed its name to Radio 1, and started a proper cellar bar called Bunkr.

Sensing a demand, entrepreneurial young Americans started showing up, and opened laundromats, taquerias and newspaper offices. The notorious J.B. Shoemaker and his cohorts built a club called Ubiquity in the ornate dance hall of Slovanský dům, where go-go girls cavorted in cages and Belgians distributed exotic chemical compounds. Then they audaciously leased the Art Nouveau Municipal House and turned it into an expat playground, anchored by the Repré club (downstairs, of course), where they screened the pilot episode of a soap called Prague One, and a guy who had a local band named Dirty Pictures got to play "London Calling" onstage with Joe Strummer at a benefit for Bosnian refugees.

There were other odd hangouts. The building across from the Estates Theatre, now occupied by a black-light tourist trap, was the Russian Cultural House with a bar that looked as if it had been decorated by Yuri Gagarin, all orange-plastic dome lamps, vinyl couches and chrome. When the prostitutes worked on Skořepka, they took breaks in a cellar called U Kafků, alongside cab-driving pimps and Gypsy transvestites. At the Grill-Bar Nonstop on Vodičkova, the moneychangers celebrated successful nights with Bohemia Sekt and steaks smothered in butter. In a wine bar in the back of a vegetable shop near Dlouhá, you could sit next to Karel Kryl as he sang the songs that made him the Bob Dylan of the Prague Spring movement.

If Prague glittered at night, life was still rather grim during the day. The metro was packed at 5 a.m. with commuters (some said the communists maintained early office hours to deter the late-night plotting of revolutions), but many things didn't work. The rusty, sporadic hot water in my flat was generated by mountains of brown coal, and at my girlfriend's place it came out of a wall-mounted gas burner that would asphyxiate you if the windows were closed. The plastic-bagged milk from the Máj (now Tesco) supermarket went sour overnight, and when rumors circulated that there was a shortage of salt or toilet paper, customers bought armloads. The Jindřišská post office (where the staff routinely plundered international parcels) still used pneumatic tubes to communicate between departments, and long-distance calls were so expensive that my friends would drive to a town near Náchod to use a busted payphone that could dial anywhere in the world for free.

Such inconveniences have been replaced, and the Czechs I know are generally happier now — except for the nervous retirees and eternally cranky prodavačky. The women emerging from the salon below my place are no longer stuck with bad rinses that turned purple or forced to buy scratchy underwear. ("Was it Marks & Spencer?" I asked my landlady. "No, Marx and Engels!") Salaries — once withdrawn from banks after standing in huge lines — are now worth enough to let Czechs travel in better style than they did on the zájezd tours from the Florenc station, when everyone slept aboard the bus in downtown Rome or Istanbul to save money and ate only food they'd packed from home. And, of course, they can say what they want — although you don't hear any new jokes about policemen, and obscenities pepper conversations more than ever.

Thankfully, not everything has changed. The Blatníčka wine bar on Michalská is still intact, and the štamgasty (regulars) still queue at 3 p.m. for a seat at the U Zlatého Tygra pub. At the pools, the ladies still chat while swimming the heads-up breaststroke to preserve their hairdos. The metro escalators are endless parades of pouting beauty, and the train stations on weekends are still thick with families hauling apples and flowers from their gardens. The local bands (Sto zvířat, Psi vojáci) are as eternal as the offerings on pub menus. At 4 a.m., Prague's cobblestones always feel as if they're coated with lard.

And, on downtown newsstands, there's still The Prague Post. Although the country doesn't enjoy the luster it had with a playwright-president, and a cub reporter can't just walk up to a gate and get a guided tour of a coal mine or a weapons factory anymore, the paper remains a miracle of durability — just like the whimsical Parisian plaques, an ongoing series of small tributes to a city so many have come to know and love.