Johanna Breen's Reviews > The Thing about Prague: How I gave it all up for a new life in Europe's most eccentric city

I read Rachel Weiss's 'Me, Myself and Prague' in my first few months of a two year spell of living in Prague. At times when I was reading it I was able to feel smug and self-satisfied about her falling into pitfalls I had avoided. Meanwhile at other times I picked up some great tips about places to go, things to do (the continually moving lift somewhere near the Lucerna was a great one) and various coping strategies.

This book therefore showed great promise, particularly as the three years the author spent there coincided with my own time in the country. Imagine my disappointment to find her pretty much exclusively hanging out with expats and not really telling us much about Prague life at all (except for the bit about her flat in Žižkov, which was way cool and the bit about the synagogue, which is super boring, oh, and all the moaning about bureaucracy too).

Weiss pitches up and lounges around in her Dad's flat for several months before she gets a job and a flat of her own. How many real people have that luxury? She also seems to think that because she's an Aussie she can turn up in a foreign country with only the basics of the language and demand a premium for her services. 'I might be living in Prague but there was no way I was going to live on Czech wages' she says . Why not? The Czechs have to do it. Oh yes, and the EU and Shengen were created with the sole purpose of making life difficult for Aussies and Americans in Prague and should be done away with d'you hear?

Ha! Maybe I'm just bitter because my Czech experience consisted of working in a soul-destroying job at a multinational. Still, I enjoyed every minute of my free time in this amazing country and the people were fantastic. Weiss is a fine writer and her prose is super-engaging, but the portrait she paints of the Czech Republic is bleak and she doesn't exactly cover herself with glory here either.

If you're hoping to move to Prague, for God's sake, don't read this book, read her other one!