By Shuan Sim and Tori McCarthy

Students at NYU in Prague seldom go native, but a small group recently had a short glimpse at the life of ordinary Czech high-school students.

Ten NYU students took part in a brief home-stay October 14 with students of the Gymnázium K.V.Raise in Hlinsko, a town 153 kilometers southeast of Prague.

“One of the things about NYU is that the kids live in a bubble,” NYU instructor Dinah Spritzer said. “They tend to hang around other students and don’t make an effort to hang around other Czechs.”

As with any good cultural exchange, the annual trip proves enlightening for hosts and guests alike. Spritzer recalls a previous visit, during which an NYU student of Indian heritage captured the attention of many Hlinsko girls. The girls wanted the young man to stay at their houses because, as they said, “he was of a different flavour.”

Foreign visitors are a novelty in Hlinsko. In the town of 10,000, people tend to greet each other on the sidewalk. It is an industrial town – factories and smokestacks stand side-by-side with apartment buildings – but peaceful. On a recent visit, the local dairy processing plant and textile mills gave off no noise or odor. The only thing emanating from the Rychtář brewery was pride.

The home-stay, originally conceived as a trip for students enrolled in Spritzer’s International Reporting class, was open any student enrolled in NYU in Prague. Spritzer created the program with help from Lada Kusa, an English teacher at Gymnázium K.V.Raise.

Kusa’s students performed Kurt Vonnegut’s play Harrison Bergeron in English for their visitors. The host students spoke English to their guests throughout the visit, interspersed with brief lessons on words not commonly found in language courses.

Local teens knew a lot about New York City, mainly from American TV shows and other media, but they were less keen on large cities in the Czech Republic. “Prague and Brno are more historical. I don’t like this,” said Jan Šmok, 15. “Maybe Pardubice is the town for me.”

Pardubice, a town of 90,000 people 30 kilometers north of Hlinsko, is also on the radar screen of Martin Firbacher, 16. He would like to study computer programming at the university there and not in the larger cities of Prague or Brno. “The students there study too much,” Firbacher said. “They’re nerds.”

Firbacher said he would like to return to Hlinsko after university. “I don’t like big cities and polluted air. I can perhaps be an indie game programmer and work from home,” he said.

If you go
Stop by Betlém, an 18th century urban conservation area within the city. A CZK 25 admission lets you see early Hlinsko settlers lived, with historic timber houses, looms and a toy workshop. If you’re lucky, you might catch a demonstration of a ‘music wardrobe’ – a wardrobe-sized windup music box with drums, cymbals, bells and a player piano that can play eight songs.

The definition of ‘small town’

By Kaitlyn Meade

I was inclined to call my hometown of 90,000 people outside Houston a small-ish sized town. The only attractions in Pearland were a movie theater and bowling. Now I know the difference.

Hlinsko, by comparison, has 11,000 people. In some ways, it fulfilled my expectations of quiet, sleepy houses tucked away into the rural landscape. On the other hand, there are numerous pubs and even a few dance clubs, setting this small town apart from American suburbia.

The high school we visited, Gymnázium K. V. Raise, was quite different from mine. My high school had 4000 students packed into two huge campuses, a football stadium, two auditoriums, a tech shop, and a strict dress code.

The high school in Hlinsko did not offer extra-curricular activities, nor did it require student to wear ID badges with barcodes around their necks. But it did provide a strict regimen of classes to prepare students for university.

The students of Gymnázium K. V. Raise had inserted contemporary references into their theatrical adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s short story Harrison Bergeron, which they performed for us. The score featured music by Green Day, for example, and an actor threw a shoe at a tyrannical figure resembling former U.S. President George W. Bush. It made me wonder if that is how they see America, or if it is just a reflection on Bush.

Over dinner, the father of the family with whom I stayed started a conversation by asking me, “What do you think of Mr. Obama?” In the resulting conversation he demonstrated his knowledge of American politics, whereas I stumbled through a discussion of Czech politics trying to make some meaningful comment that did not involve former dissident-turned-president Václav Havel.