There’s something strange about knowing you’re doing things for the last time, and that’s basically where I’m at right now. I’m finishing my second-to-last week in Prague, so I’ve got one more week left before I’m done, and everything has this weird finality to it. I keep noticing the small stuff, like my last few rides on my usual tram or my last grocery runs at the store by my apartment, and it all sneaks up on me in a way I didn’t expect.
This week, after work, there was a French market in the city, and I went with a friend, mostly for the food, but it turned into one of my favorite nights here. We realized partway through that we were the only non-locals there. There was a live band playing, so we pulled up the lyrics on our phones and sang and danced along with everyone, even though we didn’t know a single word going in. By the end, it didn’t matter that we were butchering the pronunciation because nobody cared, and we had a great time. The market ends this Sunday, so we’re heading back for the last day.
Another highlight was a Vietnamese market about an hour outside the city. A local recommended it to me while I was at the market next to my work. I’m really glad I made the trip, because I had no idea there was such a large Vietnamese community in the Czech Republic until I got here, and it ended up being one of the things that stuck with me most. The food, the pace, and the way the whole place ran were completely different from the center of Prague, and getting to see that part of the country was one of the best parts of this whole experience. It’s not the kind of place you’d find on a tourist list, and I only ended up there because someone local pointed me toward it.
I also have to mention the matcha, because I’ve become a regular at one cafe here to the point where I have a usual order, and it’s one of the small everyday things I’ll miss most. It’s funny how the things you end up attached to aren’t the big landmarks but the little routines you build without even noticing.
Somewhere along the way, I realized the biggest adjustment here wasn’t the food, the language, or figuring out how to get around; it was learning how people actually communicate.
On the low- to high-context communication scale, the Czech, French, and German sides of the business I work with are much more low-context than I expected. People say what they mean, and there’s no reading between the lines because there’s nothing hidden there to read. If something in my financial report is wrong or unclear, my supervisor tells me directly without cushioning it or softening it with a “maybe we could take another look at this,” and without any long wind-up before the actual point. At first, that threw me off, because I read the bluntness as a sign of a bigger problem than it actually was, and if someone had messaged me that directly back home, I’d have assumed they were annoyed with me. Here, it wasn’t that at all; it was just efficient, and once I stopped looking for a tone or a hidden meaning that wasn’t there, the work got faster, and I stopped second-guessing every message I got.
My clearest miscommunication happened early on with a reporting request, when I got a short message asking me to check the numbers and assumed more context was coming, so I waited for it. It never came. Where I’m used to, I’d expect a follow-up telling me specifically what was off, or at least pointing me in some direction, but here that short message was the whole request, and the expectation was that if I needed more, I would just ask. So once I got over being confused, I asked directly what they needed and got a clear answer immediately, and that became the pattern for the rest of my internship. I learned to ask the question plainly instead of sitting there waiting for the picture to fill itself in, which sounds obvious now, but it took actually getting stuck once for it to click.
The flip side of all this is the social media work, where I run content for the French, German, and Czech markets, and there, the context differences completely change how I write. What reads as warm and inviting to the French audience can come across as too much to the German audience, where cleaner, more direct copy tends to land better, so the same post doesn’t work across all three markets. I’ve had to hold two modes at once, staying direct and literal with my team internally while adjusting the tone per market depending on who’s actually reading it. It’s made me pay attention to the audience in a way I didn’t before, because the message isn’t just what you say, it’s how much the person on the other end expects you to say.
The biggest thing I’ve taken from all of it is that directness isn’t coldness. I kept reading warmth or distance into how people talked when it was really just a different style with different assumptions built into it, and the people here weren’t being short with me; they were being clear. Once I stopped decoding everything and started matching that style, I got better at the work and a lot more comfortable day-to-day, and it’s a habit I’m bringing home with me.
