Summer in the City

Summer in the city this year happens to be in Prague – in the Czech Republic. Where I’ve spent most of the last 2 summers as well.

And in Prague there is this quaint custom left over from communism. It’s called cleaning the hot water pipes. Bottom line – we don’t have hot water –NONE – in our apartment for this entire week.

A little background. My husband and I bought a brand new apartment 5 years ago in a family-oriented neighborhood about 25 minutes by tram from downtown. It’s a place we cheerfully call the Queens of Prague. But like most of the city – the bigger apartment buildings like ours get their hot water and heat through pipes from a central plant. Similar to the Con Edison steam heat and hot water that is so much a part of Manhattan life. Unlike Con Ed, however, Prague water officials insist that every summer, they have to shut down the entire hot water system, section by section, so the pipes can be cleaned. Now it’s only for a week. 20 years ago when we first came to this country – it was more like 2 to 3 weeks. While the company’s engineers, we figured, headed en masse for their chalupy (farm houses) in the country.

Funny this holdover from Communism. In those days ordinary people did not question anything the authorities decreed. Well, they would say in public, of course they have to clean the pipes. Privately – when friends were sure no one they couldn’t trust was watching – there would be knowing winks and shrugs. “But what can we do,” they would say. And heat water for their sponge baths. Except they probably HAD no sponges in consumer product-challenged communist Prague.

Today Praguers aren’t much different. They still say “But what can we do” every time something occurs that Americans would insist on changing or fixing. It never seems to occur to them that other cities (like New York) have the same kind of centralized hot water – and still get to use it in its well-heated form all summer long.

Ah yes. But this is Prague. Just 20 years removed from the soul-shriveling fears of totalitarianism. Much has changed; capitalism booms and Czechs own their own apartments and houses. Women are as Euro-stylish as their counterparts in Rome and Paris. Most Czechs have traveled well outside the old Communist bloc and have seen – and to a great extent copied – how the other half lives.

But they still throw up their hands and intone “what can we do???” when the annual summer pipe cleaning arrives.

I hope my deodorant holds out.