Aren't long lost friends just great?

Well last evening here in Toronto was another one of those stellar nights where hot food, hearty brew, and some damn fine conversation intersect to create some of life's truly memorable moments. I had the good fortune of rendez-vousing with a wonderful old flame of mine, Julie Fernandez (@Julie Fernandez Carrasco on Facebook), as we spent the night catching up on what's been happening over the past six years of our lives.

Jules has since become a successful custom jewellery designer in the Beaches area of Toronto, capably running Vernissage Jewellery with her dad, Pepe, while becoming someting of a maven in her field. Julie's always been this way, which made her such a success in her former career as an bank officer at the CIBC bank. Given our time constraints, we couldn't possibly discuss everything we'd wanted to, but I got a good sense the business is keeping Julie on her toes. In her words, it remains an area of high challenge for her as she continues to carve out her niche in a heavily male-dominated industry. Julie's travel schedule remains full, her work is all-consuming in that way most idealize, and moreover, she's successful at what she does. And the neighbourhood fits her to a "tee." The Beaches can be best described as a comfortable lakeside remove from the bustling metropolis which is today's Toronto, populated in the main by older folks who made the Lake Ontario area their home during the forties and fifties. The quarter has since gentrified somewhat and has become slightly more trendy and hipster, but it maintains a healthy business community and the neighbourhood preserves the quaint charm characteristic of most "bedroom communities" while lying a mere hop-skip-and-a-jump away from Toronto's downtown core, Canada's largest.

Back around the time we went our separate ways, I moved (returned) to Europe, opting to hang my hat over in the Czech capital, a place that's been home over four significant and personally gratifying years.

Our conversation weaved in and out of the familar Toronto subjects. Given the multicultural explosion which defines the 21st-century megacity, we chatted about what it's like living in a town which is decidedly not purely "Canadian," yet somehow cleaves to a flavour of its former "Anglo-Saxon puritan" self despite the exotic proliferation of peoples who now call Toronto home. Julie spoke -- as she had in former times -- about her native Chile, and what life continues to be like for her as the consummate "insider-outsider," a feeling I know only too well from my own scribblings, chronicled in the 2006 award-winning We Are the New Bohemians: The Post-Communist Collection, my second work of fiction. Amazingly, Julie continued to describe herself (as I recall her doing) as a castaway Chilean stuck in a "gringo world," a reluctant gringo (i.e. American foreigner) of sorts who at once isn't quite Chilean, yet isn't quite gringo either. A brainy, independent, very charismatic latina not quite stuck in a white world, unable to fully commit to the local culture, detaching herself from her true cultural self, yet paradoxically not entirely acceptable to her own Chilean folk. The Chinese have a handy shorthand for these sorts of people: ABCs/BBCs (American Born Chinese or British Born Chinese). As they've been returning to China as the PRC economy heated up, they've become known as "returning turtles." I only wish I had a similar expression for it on the Chilean end. Julie?

Then we got to talking about Prague, and about how well I've absorbed into the local scene. I divested Julie of some of her not-altogether wrong impressions about Czechs and Czech culture, though she asked a wickedly good set of pertinent questions which really got me thinking about my future in the Czech Republic, things like:

• how well I speak and understand Czech.


• whether I respect Czech culture and identify with it.


• whether there's something about Czech culture I've latched onto and admire.


• whether I can see myself residing there over the indefinite future.

Admittedly, I didn't have adequate enough -- at least to my mind -- responses for all her great questions, though I can safely say I'm quite knowledgeable about all these areas on a technical (read: disengaged) level, if you follow my reasoning.

Basically, what Julie was driving at was whether there would ever come a time when I'd simply "dive in?" Like an aerial dogfight, would I ever engage my adversary and pursue, pursue, pursue? Whether I'd cease acting like the proverbial expatriate, what with one's expatriate habits and characteristic expat detachment, essentially how expats behave the world over, from China to the Czech Republic to Chile.

To be sure, I am better than most expats in the critical areas. For one, I speak and write better Czech than do some foreigners who have been living in the republic for twice the amount of time that I have. It shocks me how men (especially) wed to Czech women are clueless when it comes to the Czech langauge. How despite obvious pronounciation challenges -- yes, spoken Czech remains inscrutable for those easily tongue-tied -- the vernacular continues to elude certain foreigners. As for my reading comprehension -- if I may back-pat for just a moment -- I can safely say it's superb, and I write Czech relatively well for someone who doesn't use the language as part of his day-to-day work duties. Moreover, given my rigorous travel schedule across Europe, it shocks even me that I maintain a semblance of Czech language comprehension for someone who is not a native speaker nor is wed to a Czech citizen. Just to sum up the language issue -- the best way to wrangle down a language is to be in a committed relationship with a local. For true mastery, in my experience, a deft combination of immersion, a good ear, and compulsion are truly necessary in order to be a good speaker of tongues. Of course, I'd mentioned the sublimely talented Andreea Manea to Julie as an example of someone who possesses such skills, with her Spanish, French, English, and native Romanian (with passable Italian and rudimentary Greek) as examples of a divinely-inspired finely-tuned ear.

As for the Czech cultural issue, I have made it a personal crusade to bone up on as much as I can about the Czech national saga -- ranging from historical tomes (my favourites) to Czech novels and Czech and Czechoslovak films -- so that I can safely hold down a conversation with Prague locals about their nation without seeming like a disinterested tourist. I note that this isn't what's lacking in Prague amongst the English-speaking foreign community, at least from what I can glean as part of my occasional hobnobbing around prominent expat haunts. Most foreign residents I've spoken to have a good grasp of where the Czech nation has been, and where it's going. However, I'm still convinced that the true yardstick of success in any foreign posting is having a local "fixer," anything from a business partner to a romantic interest or husband/wife, who can attend to the most niggling things about life in a strange country or who might pave the way forward. I have had professional dealings with people like this who defer all official responsibilities to their Czech spouses, which in my estimation is quite shameless and ignorant. You know, someone who can call the electricity company when there's a problem with the latest invoice, for instance, or someone who can crack the whip on a better price on stock for sale. Personally, I haven't resorted to such measures and have opted to go my own way in many instances, labouring thorugh the occasional conversational flubs and boondoggles in order to be understood, convinced as I am that this is the sole way to learn. Prague, alas, is not Beirut or Karachi or Beijing. It remains a modern EU nation which -- I believe -- is on the cusp of something huge. It is easy to get around for those who choose to embrace it, and the Czech Republic -- despite its many many many detractors -- can and will do some truly great things...if only the nation can overcome its persistent also-ran underdog self-image, one which chronically dogs the 10.5 million strong Middle European statelet still.

My ultimate takeaway from my meetup with Julie was this: indeed it's been four captivating years since I moved to Prague, but have I really "dove in" to the place? Have I severed those comfortable bonds which have kept me firmly tethered to my old ways of doing things, those old mannerisms which are no longer of any use in the new society which is my home?

Ah, there's the rub....

I still don't have answers for these things, as I continue to struggle over the seeming efficacy of shedding old skin to permit the growth of the new. I remain of the stubborn opinion that our planet is not the hot-cold globe of former times. We are no longer dwelling in a 20th-century universe of stark opposites: of Cold War foes, of hard and fast ideological rules which threaten to polarize the universe into two embittered camps -- one left, the other right, one "Communist," the other "capitalist" -- which stare at each other across a fierce divide to keep us divided and divorced from each other at all bloody costs. In other words, I can safely maintain my individuality in a sometimes hostile, sometimes unforgiving environment because this world of today isn't all about "countries" anymore. Borders have since been obliterated and rendered meaningless. This "old-new" world is everyone's personal playground, provided one has the necessary equipment to get into the game (another dialogue entirely).

So do I have to dive in? Or is the fact that I choose to remain my own man firmly paint me as a social misfit, diametrically opposed to a melding with the mainstream, a persistent gadfly, critical, absrasive type who prefers to pine and snipe and grouse like a petulant child as opposed to just -- in the words of President Obama's 2009 inauguration speech -- "unclenching my fist" -- and merging with the liberating slipstream of the Czech day-to-day?

Thank you again, Julie Fernandez, for a night rife with engaging points of departure...