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Around Town

In with the out crowd

By Benjamin Thomas Cunningham
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
August 29th, 2007 issue

How many lawyers does it take to make a good farewell party?

As many as you can cram into a two-plus-kitchen apartment, if you're friends of Mark and Katka, one of the lawyering-est, translating-est, arty-est couples around Prague. Folks were spilling out of the kitchen, various groups were sitting on the floor and chairs and everyone else squished around a table laden with food in the living room. There were even wannabes piled up in the hallway.
The occasion was one of the city’s most common events — a going-away party. The couple moves to Luxembourg soon for Katka’s swanky new job.
Prague, for those in the expat community, is often a temporary home, a place full of transients ready to explore new teaching positions or return to some cubicle back in “the real world.” A few stay on, of course, but comings and goings are the norm.
Highly qualified professionals, too, find it difficult to stay put in Prague when more lucrative (financially or professionally) opportunities come calling from elsewhere.
The party on this particular evening celebrated both — an American-trained lawyer and his Czech spouse, moving to new adventures in “old Europe.” After years of dealing with the plodding machinations of Czech law, they seem happy, and maybe also a little sad, to be out the door.
In addition to lawyers, we met university professors and constitutional law experts, a key assistant to a chief justice, a ČSOB heavyweight, English teachers, Czech teachers, photographers and aspiring filmmakers.
It seems that a nostalgic mood often creeps into mixed gatherings of upwardly mobile folks in Prague. They start saying the old adage “If you’re not stealing from the state, you’re stealing from your family.”
This particular traditional Czech-ism came out of a discussion about “tunneling” (itself a very Czech term), businesses and other similar government issues. The word has been in the local press recently in connection with some political and corporate stories.
To be sure, it took Ondřej, a bank official, to lay out the distinct difference between “tunneling” and the English word “embezzlement.”
According to this particular money man, “tunneling” was coined during the chaotic privatization process following the fall of communism, in which most people sold the company shares they received from the state, and a few clever individuals ended up very rich.
The term refers to the not necessarily illegal ability to separate a company’s valuable pieces from the rest, then sell them off or profit from them in some other way. Embezzlement, on the other hand, involves finding a way to scrape cash directly from a business without others realizing what’s going on.
Or how about Radim’s comment, offered up after a couple of glasses of wine: “Paneláky and other big Soviet-style buildings have completely destroyed the character of many small towns in the countryside.”
I don’t know, don’t you think there’s something charming about big blocks of concrete with laundry flying from the balconies?
We also met Libuše, who has friends in the ski town of Crested Butte, Colorado (We do, too!) at least two Martinas, Eva, Marek, Alec, a Jan or two, Liz and another Beth, Josef, Josh and Ian, who didn’t tell us how his name is spelled, and, of course, Vojtěch, who introduced us to all of these fine folks.
To Vojtěch and his wife, who couldn’t make it, we’d like to say: “Never drink a Moravian red wine when an Australian Shiraz will do!”
Wait — it must have been too loud at that point for us to hear that one correctly. Maybe we got it backward? Time for another party!

Benjamin Thomas Cunningham can be reached at bcunningham@praguepost.com


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