The heat in Prague has been brutal the last week. Its the kind where the apartment never really cools down and stepping outside feels like walking into an oven. Besides from countless cold showers and fans, an easy and fun fix has been the Vltava. Swimming in the river to cool off is one of those things I didn’t expect to be doing when I pictured an internship abroad. The water sits in the low 60’s so its the perfect temperature to cool down. I’ve also been expanding my palette. I tried svíčková for the first time, a traditional Czech dish of beef in cream sauce with bread dumplings. It was way better tasting than it looked so I’m taking the pictures with a grain of salt. I’m now slowly working my way through the rest of the local menu and hoping to find more great dishes.
At work, I have been completing a customer validation project, and it’s where I ran into a main workplace challenge. The hardest thing to assimilate to has been the language barrier. In completing this project I have been interviewing colleagues. One of my colleague interviews was conducted entirely in Czech, so I had to work through live and online translation just to get my questions across and understand the answers coming back. When you can’t rely on quick back and forth, you lose the small clarifications that make an interview useful. I learned I need to slow down, ask simpler and more direct questions, and confirm I actually understood what was being conveyed before moving on.
It isn’t only the communication with some team members. Our company CRM system and our Slack team channel are both in Czech, so day to day I’m translating the tools I work with. Reading a customer record or following a thread takes an extra step every time because of this. This is not a complaint. It’s just the reality of working somewhere that runs in a language I’m still learning, and it is forcing me to be more deliberate and intentional than I ever had to be back home.
Outside of work, the part of Czech life I’ve found hardest to adjust to is the dullness to interactions, especially in daily service. In the US, service is built around constant attention. Prague runs the opposite way. At most places you’re expected to seat yourself, figure out the menu on your own, and walk up to the register to pay when you’re ready. Nobody comes to take an order until you make it deliberately noticeable your ready and you wont get water in general or a refill for your drink unless you ask. The first few times, this threw me off. I’d sit there waiting for someone to come take care of me and this rarely happened. It felt kind of cold almost like the staff didn’t really want me there. The hardest part of this was getting rid of the habits I came in with. I kept expecting the American version and then getting thrown off when it didn’t happen. This type of dullness can appear at work too. Feedback comes with no cushion and people just say what they think. Back home that would come off as rude but here it’s normal, so I’ve had to start hearing it as people being honest.
Throughout these experiences, my professional development has pushed forward more than I expected. The language barrier taught me not to assume shared understanding. In an American office I could talk fast, lean on casual expressions, and trust that everyone was on the same page. Here I have to communicate clearly, check that my point landed, and accept that some precision gets lost in translation no matter how careful I am. This has made me a sharper and a more careful analyst because I stopped taking my inputs for granted and started confirming them.
The bluntness taught me something similar about reading norms instead of assuming mine are universal. What looks rude in one culture is just normal in another, and a someone who can’t tell the difference will misread people constantly. For a finance career that will most likely involve international clients and colleagues, this is a skill I’m glad to be building now rather than later. Learning to adapt to how other people communicate instead of expecting them to adapt to me is an extremely important skill I look forward to honing with my remaining time here.
