Jemma had been living in Prague for six months, teaching English and working for the Prague Pub Crawl, her duties entailing instructing correct usage and getting drunk with Prague’s tourists. Before this, Jemma spent some months travelling Europe, and before that had a similar stint in Edinburgh where she took up residence for a little under a year, working and saving up funds for more travel. Jemma, an Australian native, had left her home of Melbourne over two years ago and has been travelling or working in Europe ever since. It was on the pub crawl over a couple joints that I learned all of this from her.
“So what’s it like, living in Prague?” I ask, taking another sip from my frothy mug of black beer.
“Well, the first few weeks were kind of crazy”, Jemma says, “but I just moved into my new apartment last month, and it’s starting to feel like home.” We are at Propaganda, a communist-themed bar located in New Town, Prague. Jemma sips from her glass of red wine, eyeing suspiciously the murals of Stalin and Marx surrounding our booth.
Jemma had sandy-brown hair, the colour of which would make you think of Australia if you pictured it. She was tall, with blue eyes and a smile of assurance. “What about you? How long has it been since you’ve been back in the states?”
“I left at the end of August, spent four weeks studying in London, and from then on I’ve been at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. So ... damn, that’s five months now I guess.” Though the time of five months seemed to so puny compared to multiple years, the act of having to calculate it caught me off guard.
“And you said you’re in Prague over your Christmas break? Didn’t you want to go home for Christmas?” she asks.
“You know, it might sound weird, but no. I mean, I’m in England for a year, so right now, this experience is only half over. And, I don’t know, but I just don’t view America as being a part of that experience. Prague is far more relevant for me right now than the states. Plus, I had a great time spending Christmas in England. What about you? Do you miss Australia?”
“Yeah, of course I do” she readily assented. “At first I didn’t, but I think it’s a growing thing. As I’ve learned so much about life in general from Europe, now I really want to start it. I want to start my adult life and I know that has to happen for me in Australia. I know I’m not going to be leading pub crawls and getting drunk with tourists every night for the rest of my life. So it’s not like I miss Australia so much as I need some growth and development in my life. What about you? Do you miss the States?”
Such an obvious question, but one I have never really been asked, my mind stands still at her question of discerning simplicity. I think hard and gather my thoughts. “Ok ... my first thought is yes, of course I do. But ... for the fact that I’m in England for a definite, specific amount of time, the feeling doesn’t quite sink in. I know for certain that on June 18 my term will be done, my exams will be taken and papers handed in, my student visa will expire and I’ll be flying back to the States. I’m not here open-ended, so when that day comes, who knows if I’ll be ready or if I’ll want to leave yet. Do you know when you’ll be returning to Australia?” I ask as I bring my mug to my lips, taking in another delicious gulp of Kozel.
“I think relatively soon. In the next six months for sure, but after Prague, I still want to do a bit more travelling. But, suppose I wake up tomorrow and want to leave, at that very moment, I don’t have enough money for the flight home” she laughs. “It’s kind of surreal, but if I think about it, at the moment I’m stranded here. I need to work, and a lot, for just to get myself home even if I wanted to.”
“How long has it been since you’ve been in Australia?”
“Two years.”
“Damn.”
“It just seems so long ago. I don’t understand it.” A sip of red wine. A gulp of black beer.
“No, I know what you mean. I think our perceptions of time are very dependent on our location. They kind of move with us from place to place.”
“What do you mean?”
“Alright, so I before I left for Prague, like a week or two ago, one of my mates turned 21. Now, this guy was my best mate when I lived in Norwich and we were 7; and, after chatting for a few minutes and a couple beers, it seems as if we’ve stayed as inseparable over the years as we were when we were 7. And I think back to those days, and it doesn’t seem too long ago, but it was fifteen years. And then if I think back to July and try to picture my buddies and I sipping beers by the pool, it’s harder to place. It seems so far back. Living in England, I am reminded daily of the times I have spent here. And then on the other side, whether I’m in London, or Norwich or Prague, nothing visual reminds me of America. Does that make any sense?”
“Yeah” she laughs, “there’s not too many parts of Prague that remind me of Melbourne.”
We stay in Propaganda for over three hours, talking. The usual suspects showed up in conversation: sex, drugs, rock & roll, but we mainly talked about books. Both of us loved to read. She talked almost without end about Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and I might have minded had I not felt the same way about countless other books. She talked about the vagrancy of Kerouac’s text and how she has never really had a home for the last two years. This idea struck me hard, for though I had indeed been away from America for months, England has always given me the feeling of home.
Jemma had yet to attend university; rather, her studies were of the Italian alps and Belgian beer. She majored in staying in a 180-bed, one room former warehouse-turned hostel and where not to leave your bags before getting on a bus. When I think about the two years spent in America of formal education and being force fed theories and political governance and literary schools of thought, Jemma’s two years of study seem to stack up fairly evenly. In the abundance of minutes we spent talking about Jack Kerouac, I was out English-majored. She knew far more about it than me, she had lived it.
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