The Czech media have a special place in my heart.

I have been following their evolution ever since I left Prague in the mid-1990s.

That’s why I was delighted to see an article in the weekend magazine of Hospodarske Noviny about children with disabilities… a topic which used to be taboo in Czech society… an ugly hangover from the previous regime and its tacky iconography of proletarian heroes with perfect bodies.

Unfortunately, my delight did not last for very long…

My jaw dropped as soon as I began reading the subheading:”…Jaké to je, když se do normální rodiny narodí někdo nenormální (What happens, when someone not normal is born to a normal family).

I couldn’t believe the language. The fact that it is still being used is a slap in the face of people like my friend Milena Černà, who since the fall of the Berlin Wall has been campaigning for the acceptance of the rights of disabled children and adults.

Milena manages Vybor dobrè vůle, a foundation originally set up by Olga Havlova (Vaclav Havel’s first wife) and has been doing heroic work for the integration of the disadvantaged.

The article I read is a sign that something is moving… but we are clearly not there yet.

May be we should drop the word “normal” altogether…

I can highly recommend “The Four Walls of My Freedom”, a book in which Donna Thomson offers us a new perspective on being human… one that goes beyond “normality”.

Every time I go back to Prague I find it almost impossible to leave.

I sit in a taxi driving me back to Ruzyne airport with my mind kicking and screaming… Invariably, I end up leaving a part of me there.

I took a four-hour walk through the city on Saturday, dodged hordes of Italian tourists on the Charles Bridge, visited my favourite church, shopped at the Christmas market… all this while thinking about the changes that have happened over the past 20 years.

Has too little changed? Was I expecting something different?

It is a confused Prague I visited last weekend. Or so it appeared to me….

The enormous fuss Czech President Vaclav Klaus kicked up over the Lisbon Treaty has reopened old wounds and reawakened nationalistic feelings. How sad that a project meant to bring Europeans closer to each other was used to open rifts between people and distort history.

Patience has never been a great virtue of mine. It doesn’t come natural to me. But during my years in Easter Europe, I had ample opportunity to get used to the idea that time is often all we need.

I walked up Nerudova on Saturday and looked down at the stunning beauty of Prague. Regimes and politicians come and go. This city has survived so many.

I know time will do its magic. Klaus and his toxic rhetoric will only be a faint memory some day.  A new generation will come.

This is the part of me I left in Prague last night…. This enormous hope I have for a place I love so much.

What do the EU Member States and Zerlina from Mozart’s Don Giovanni have in common?

I love the “La ci darem la mano” aria from this opera. Zerlina, a coy peasant girl, is trying half heartedly to resist Don Giovanni’s courtship. She is torn between this strong archetypal Alfa male and her boring, predictable fiancé Masetto.
She sings “vorrei e non vorrei” (I would like and I wouldn’t).
These lyrics began to buzz in my head last night when I heard the news of the EU leaders having chosen Herman van Rompuy as EU President and Catherine Ashton as foreign affairs supremo.

Isn’t it always the case? Member States want a strong EU with a strong representation …. and they don’t.
So we end up with an endless series of Masettos in Brussels. We have had so many since Jacques Delors.
It was in Prague that Don Giovanni was premiered  in 1787.
Are you thinking what I am thinking? I have a sneaking suspicion that today, up at the Prague Castle, Vaclav Klaus is smiling….
Not a nice thought.

Harvey Nichols is the last place on earth where you would expect to run into the conversation you have been trying to avoid for the past 20 years.

But I managed to do just that a few weeks ago.

I was about to bite into a spring roll at a fundraiser organised by my favourite charity when I ran into an American lady.  She was leaving for Prague the next day to attend a conference and… to my horror… she gave me the standard spiel about Westerners bringing democracy to Eastern Europe.

I have heard this a million times before…. I find it not only extremely boring, but also patronising, offensive, colonial… (at this point I always run out of adjectives).

However this encounter got me thinking. Did my work in Prague have an impact on anybody’s life?

As I said before, I feel I learned more from my Czech friends and colleagues than they did from me.
But I would be extremely proud to know that the articles I wrote for the German business press during those years contributed to attract investment to the country and made a place I love so much more prosperous.
Every time I walk through the streets of Prague - which now look so different - I ask myself if I really did. And then one day… something happened that felt like an answer.
Remember how in the old days people would sit in the Prague Metro with long faces and not look at you….
I had this image in my mind when I boarded a train at Vysehrad. I was standing near the doors when I noticed a schoolgirl looking at me. She kept staring as if she knew me and all of a sudden… she gave me this enormous smile.

I don’t remember what I was doing the day my life changed.

On 17th November 1989 the Cold War ended in Czechoslovakia.

Eleven months later I moved to Prague to work as a journalist and embarked on an experience that would shape the very essence of who I am today.
I was sitting in my kitchen this morning listening to Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances on the radio and…. memories began to come back .
I saw the face of my former editor, Ian Brodie, who arrived on a bus from Scotland one day to set up a newspaper in Prague. Central European Business Weekly was for ever struggling to pay its bills. Ian had the patience to edit the articles written by a young journalist with English as third language and long sentences that always managed to sound too German.
I also saw the face of the doctor who came to rescue me the night I collapsed with kidney stones on the floor of my empty Prague apartment. I have told her story before. She is one of the people who changed my world for ever (and not only with an injection…)
There were others. They all tought me the two main lessons I learned in Eastern Europe. The first is about human dignity and the importance of relating to experiences that might contradict everything you have ever known and how you look at life.
No matter how hard ideologies try to separate us, we will always have the language of humanity. We can use it to build bridges. It works.
The second is about the power of forgiveness. This is a difficult one. It requires a lot of courage. I learned it from a friend and his incredible story. I believe forgiveness is probably the only thing able to perform the right alchemy and heal memories.
The sun is shining today in London. It makes me think of the sun light over the Moravian country side in the summer. Its beauty is so strong that you feel your heart might burst.

I am so grateful I was allowed to see it….I am so grateful that the Wall came down…I am so grateful I was there.

My co-author Yang-May and I talked to podcasting guru Neville Hobson on Friday about the story behind our book.

I was asked how I came up with the original idea behind International Communications Strategy. To answer that, I had to dig quite deep into my memory.

It all happened when I was living in Prague 20 years ago. What they used to call the Golden City was such a great cultural centre before WWII thanks of the different ethnic groups represented there. The war and the madness that followed did away with all that.

I could never understand this terrible loss. When I left Prague in the mid 1990s, I embarked on a quest. I wanted to find a way that would help people from different cultural backgrounds to communicate and bond.

After that came my passion for understanding emerging economies and their communication models.

If you’d like to find out more about how Yang-May and I got to write the book, you can listen to the podcast .

Thanks, Neville. And we hope we’ll get to meet your cat some day…

Whenever I tell people than my mentor was a city not a person, I get funny looks.

From now on, I will be able to use the speech Obama gave last weekend in Prague to prove that I am right.

I was amazed that the US president and his speechwriter understood it so well … that feeling that makes Prague a very special experience:

“For over 1,000 years Prague has set itself apart from any other city or any other place. You have known war and peace. You have seen empires rise and fall. Through it all, the people of Prague have persisted in pursuing their own path and defining their own destiny”.

That’s exactly how it is. I don’t know how it works.

But after you have lived in Prague for a number of years, you get this feeling that, no matter what comes at you, you will always make it.

It is like an aura surrounding you (I don’t know how else to describe it). And you know you will always be able to face any audience or any vicious committee meeting because of this certainty that has come down to you.

Does it happen by osmosis? Do you get it by walking through the streets of the Old Town at night as I loved to do?

I don’t know but I was certainly thrilled to hear Obama call Prague the “golden city which is both ancient and youthful and stands as a living monument to an unconquerable spirit”.

I was never sure of the meaning of the expression “comfort zone”.

Having lived abroad for most of my life, it is a concept I never liked to dwell much upon.

But last week, I heard a great definition.

Someone was saying that, if you leave home to go and live in another country, you don’t leave your comfort zone, you enlarge it.

I love it!

So, I began thinking about my “comfort zone” and all the factors that, over the years, have made me realise just how much I have enlarged it.

Here are some:

• Having different homes. One where I grew up (Italy), one where I live (London) and one where my spirit feels most comfortable (Prague).

• A large extended family made up of all my friends in London and other parts of the world. Being with them always gives me a sense of home.

• The dizziness I feel when walking through London. I have finally accepted it! It is like a dance. The dizzier you feel, the closer you come to feeling at home in this never-ending city.

• My love-hate relationship with airports and planes. I hate airline food…. but I love being on a plane at night over the ocean… It is like being looked after by a giant cosmic force.

Photo: thanks to experiencefestival.com

Every time I enter the Moscow metro something tells me I’m home.

Fascinating… the kind of messages our mind broadcasts. It must be the fact that Prague has the same kind of subway.

I was in the Russian capital on Tuesday and, to my great delight, the moment I entered the metro, my system started telling me “You’re home, Silvia. We are taking care of you. The trains and stations must be familiar to you.”

So, I could switch off and dedicate myself to my favourite occupation while I travel: deciphering people’s thoughts.

I stood there looking at the faces of the passengers on the train imagining their hopes and tribulations.

It was my third time in Moscow. I love the food and I love the warmth of the people.

I was delighted to visit the board of IABC Russia. It is a great team. They are organising a great conference in February on communication practices in the BRIC countries.

I took the metro back at night and… the feeling was there again: the lure of the Moscow metro.

Photos: thanks to Elena Vasiltsova

I went home last weekend. To Prague that is, the home of my spirit.

Prague is the place where my spirit can roam free …tourists allowing.

I could not believe the masses of tourists on the Charles Bridge…and this in April.

So, I decided to wait until after midnight for my usual walk. No people in sight, just a half moon in the sky and the glorious might of the Prague Castle in the distance.

I began walking on the bridge and… it was like entering a cosmic cathedral. The beauty of the city is so overwhelming that I felt like a visitor from another planet discovering the shapes of a primordial world.

The statues on the Charles Bridge, dark and austere, blended into the night sky. They take my breath away. They look like silent mementos.

When I walk through Prague, the streets speak to me. I tune into the aura of the city. I observe the details on the facades of the Art Deco buildings and empty my mind. After a couple of minutes I have become part of Prague.

I am so good at it that every time I do this …a local comes up to me and asks for directions….

Like on Sunday morning, when I was waiting for the underground at Mustek station. I was a little bored so I did my tune-into-the-spirit-of-Prague exercise.

Less than five minutes later, a guy came up to me and asked in Czech how to get to Cerny Most. I remembered that it was at the end of the B line so I told him. I don’t look Czech and I definitely sound like a foreigner when I speak Czech, but that man was absolutely certain I could help him…

Mysteries of Prague…

Frank Kafka wrote in a letter to a friend in 1902: “Prague doesn’t let go of you. It doesn’t let go of us two. This little mother with claws. You have to adjust to it or else…You would have to set it on fire in two places, Vysehrad and Hradcani and this would set you free….”

I don’t want Prague to let go of me and… it never will.

photo: thanks to angelfire.com