Precerpt from In with the East Wind: A Mary Poppins Kind of Life - Prague First Trip
First Trip My first chance to visit Prague came when I was a dean at the Defense Language Institute. The Czech instructors excitedly prepared me for the experience, including some efforts to bump up my language skills. One had a sister in Prague and told me to contact her, that she spoke excellent Russian, which was nearly a second native language for me. Two instructors (a married couple), Jan and Sharka, were taking leave at that time and would be in Prague; they were well integrated into the literature and art scene there and promised to contact me while I was in town. Jan was an author in his own right, the friend of Havel who shared Echo’s 1968-1989 discovery, and had quite good English, which would come in handy (well, almost handy) on one occasion. Traveling from Germany I started out in Garmisch. We had a program there, FLTCE (Foreign Language Training Center Europe) that I had worked with from afar. The languages taught there were the ones taught in my sch...