Pozor schod

During the past weekend I had 6 visitors from Belgium in the apartment. Eva, Maggy, Elie, Annelies, Rob and Filip were all very enthousiastic about Prague.

There is still a long way to go before people in Western Europe will realise how cities like Prague are catching up with their home cities like Brussels and Paris and how in many ways Prague already has taken the lead.

It was very confronting to experience the differences between Belgian and Czech culture in this way. I had no idea about how much I already changed over the past months. The Czech culture is way more silent and people are really listening to each other. I noticed that in a Belgian group of 7 people on average 3 people are speaking at the same time. Because of this people need to speak louder to be understood. In a Czech group only 1 person is speaking while the others listen.

The Czechs also are much more aware of their culture, history and heritage. Petr gave us a tour of the national museum and he was really able to answer all our questions about the history of the Czech Republic and the city and the famous figures represented by the statues.

A last theme of the weekend was the overall cleanliness of the city here. People do not even think about throwing trash on the floor, even when in the whole metro system there are no trash bins.

To finish, here are some atmosphere pictures: