Laundromats, Prague Style
By Michael Owen
Contributing Writer

In Salt Lake City, my hometown, public transportation is somewhat problematic because mostly homeless people and students, neither of whom pays taxes, use it. As a result, conservatives in Utah (virtually everyone) repeatedly decry efforts to improve public transportation, unless you include freeways, which are supported by all. For instance, Governor Mike Leavitt has spent his almost eleven years in office trying to overcome statutory barriers to construct a new freeway through the endangered wetlands east of the Great Salt Lake. He will soon leave this project to his successor because he has been asked to head the Environmental Protection Agency.

In Prague, the problem of public transportation—like the problems of individual ambition and political dissidence—was solved in pragmatic fashion by the Communist regime. Cobblestones were torn up and workers burrowed deep beneath the city, working feverishly until it had placed tram rails in the streets and Metro tunnels in the earth. I am sometimes mistaken for a Communist back home, because some of my clothes are black and I keep up on what the Clintons are doing, but I am not a Communist and I don’t even like them. Nevertheless, their legacy in designing a comprehensive people-moving infrastructure in the populous, many-districted city of Prague is to be applauded. Whereas Salt Lake City has only a rudimentary system of buses and trams, many of which were purchased to impress Olympic visitors and then discarded, Prague has an efficient, usable grid of buses, trams and Metro lines that together make it possible to get almost anywhere in the city faster than walking.

I say almost anywhere because there are exceptions. The other day, I had to do my laundry, since my fascist airline has now reduced to 50 pounds the weight limit for each of two bags you are allowed to bring on an international flight. This means that I was able to fit barely more than a sweater and some of my underwear into my suitcases before, frustrated and exhausted, I loaded them into the car and got dropped off at the airport. In Prague, I quickly exhausted my supply of clean clothes, so I loaded the dirty ones back into my suitcase and walked to the tram stop. I decided to take the tram to Laundry Kings, in a different neighborhood, because I heard it was the cheapest of Prague’s laundries. Most laundries cater to American students studying abroad who do not realize they are being exploited, or, if they do realize, are powerless to do anything about it because it is a powerful oligopoly and they are just American students. I don’t know what native Praguers do about their laundry, but then they probably are not, like me, obsessive-compulsive about the unbearable stench of cigarette smoke. In any case, they are relieved of the urgency that would compel a person to take all of his clothing on a tram.

Laundry Kings is on Dejvická, near the number 18 line, so I headed from my hotel to the nearest tram stop, at the Národní Trída Metro station. Our tram stop is a major hub of the system, and the 18 goes to it, so within a few minutes I had boarded.

Everything had gone smoothly so far, except that on the sidewalk my luggage had fallen apart. Arriving at the tram stop, I had assumed the uninterested air of someone who is subjected to the plebeian use of public transportation, but does not care because his giant suitcase will undoubtedly command the respect of the locals. (On a related note, I have started using my tram pass—its vinyl holder, really—as a wallet, so that I can pull it out whenever I am buying something. I can set my pass, with its Metro logo, on the counter, and the person behind the counter will see that I am in Prague for at least a month, whereupon he or she will embrace me as one of his or her own. My friend Katie says the person will actually see that I am another loud, uncomprehending American, only here longer and with a credit card stuck in his tram pass.) But after waiting at the stop for only a few seconds, I was approached by a man who said something in a foreign language and handed me one of the wheels from my suitcase, which in retrospect had been lopsidedly dragging because of the missing wheel. I spent a moment trying to put the wheel back in, but my tram came. I was distracted while I got on and took a spot near the back, where, subjected to lurching centrifugal forces, my suitcase and I could fall on surrounding passengers every time the tram turned, a frequent occurrence since the 18 goes up a hill on a road that might be faithfully described as serpentine.

At my stop, I knelt down on the sidewalk, dirtying my knees and blocking other pedestrians, to work on my broken suitcase until it could be half-rolled to Laundry Kings, which, in order to mitigate its overpriced laundry services, sells a liter of beer for 15 crowns (about 50 cents), not that I could afford it since I was out 300 crowns for laundry. While my clothes dried I struck up a conversation with another American who is studying abroad, and then walked back to the tram and swore, if I am ever a Communist regime, to buy everyone a car.