Coming into Prague, I did as much research on cultural norms as I could, knowing that no amount of reading fully prevents culture shock from setting in. Being from the Northeast, where keeping social interactions brief is just the norm, I didn’t think Prague could feel much colder than what I’m used to at home. I was in for a rude awakening. The degree of reservation here goes far past anything I’ve experienced, and at first it felt genuinely isolating — people reading as cold or unfriendly even when I knew, intellectually, that wasn’t their intent. My default interpersonal toolkit — reading a room quickly, building rapport through warmth and humor — simply didn’t produce the signals I was used to getting back. I had to learn to operate without that feedback loop.
One theory I have is that the U.S. runs on a kind of manufactured warmth. Manners are drilled into us early, tipping culture conditions service workers to perform friendliness, and from elementary school we’re taught our pleases and thank-yous and to smile even when we don’t mean it. That baseline doesn’t exist here — and honestly, once I adjusted, I stopped missing it. Walking into a shop, the norm is to say “Dobrý den,” grab what you need, pay, and leave. I tried saying thank you in Czech for a while, but I butcher it badly enough that I eventually stopped attempting it — and somehow that’s gotten me further than forcing it did. Czech public life is built more around efficiency and awareness of shared space than around performed pleasantries. There’s a collectivism to it: everyone understands they’re operating in a common environment, and that understanding goes unspoken. So when I can get a laugh out of my coworkers at lunch, it feels earned rather than given. That shift in how I read social feedback has been one of the more interesting adaptations of the trip.
The language barrier caught me more off guard than I expected. In most major European cities — Denmark, the Netherlands, even Spain — English is accessible enough that you can navigate without it. Even my research beforehand said most people in Prague speak English. That turned out to be less true than advertised. During my first week I spent an entire morning trying to learn basic Czech, and nothing landed — the pronunciations are unlike anything I’ve encountered, with no familiar reference point to anchor to. Even now, at the local restaurant I eat at near Máchova, there’s one server who simply won’t take my order because we can’t communicate at all. It’s a little off-putting, but I’d rather have no interaction than a tense one.
At work, the team speaks Czech all day. The guy who sits next to me, Adam, seems to be the office clown — there have been multiple moments where he’s had the whole team cracking up over something I couldn’t follow. Early on I found that frustrating. I’ve since learned to tune it out and just appreciate that I’m watching people’s actual daily dynamic play out, just in a different language. I’ve started building small mental profiles of each person based purely on context and energy — who laughs at what, who shuts down a joke, who drives the conversation. The only things I can actually pick out are company names when the team discusses the American stock market: I’ll hear a full sentence of Czech and then “OpenAI” surface in the middle of it like a buoy.
Lunch is different. More English gets spoken, and that’s become my window into actually getting to know my coworkers. Rather than fighting the differences or retreating into timidity, I decided to lean into them and find ways to appreciate what makes this place distinct. At one team dinner, a coworker and I got into a debate about the metric system versus U.S. customary — I defended Fahrenheit on the grounds that it maps to how people actually feel, he was adamant that anchoring a scale to water’s physical properties was objectively superior. It got the whole table involved, devolved into jokes about each other’s institutions, and by the end I’d developed a genuine appreciation for their school of thought. What surprised me throughout all of this is that my interpersonal instincts still translate across the cultural gap — I don’t feel like I need to become a different person to connect here. My boss seemed to notice too. At that same dinner he turned to me unprompted and commented on my ability to step into their environment and engage without hesitation. It was good to hear that something I couldn’t fully see from the inside was landing on the outside.
