Rachael Weiss

The author at age forty with a need to escape her overbearing family decides to travel to Prague from Australia and live there for a year in order to write the great Australian, maybe meet a handsome Czech guy and search our her roots. But it does not prove that easy at first. She has to grapple with on again off again water, rude check out chicks who never smile and the difficulties of the language itself. But she does cope. She manges to find an interesting group of friends most of them visitors like herself. She takes language classes and she goes to visit her family and in the process in spite of the communication difficulties comes to understand herself and where she has come from a little better. She includes chapters on her experiences hiking in the countryside and taking the waters at Marienbad with an Australian friend. She talks of what life was like for the Czechs under the Communists. At the end of the time she finds that she has created for herself a second home in Prague. She returns to Australia but after only a year there returns to Prague where she still lives. I really enjoyed this book. Like Almost French (for France) and The Promise ( for Italy) this warm and at times funny tale gave me a real insight into the Czech republic and its people.… (mer)