Teaching is often finding that well worn dent in the wall. You know the one. It fits your forehead perfectly. Other times, well, other times it throws up gold like this.
One of my students, whom for the sake of privacy I will call Pepík, is a director of quite a large government department. He's been with this department for a while and so experienced its operations both under communism and liberal democracy.
Contrary to popular belief, people did travel under communism. It was just that travel was highly restrictive. All the members of a single family could not travel to the west together. Furthermore, there was only so much money they could take with them and permission was required. The request was called "devizový p?íslib" (foreign exchange promise). These restrictions didn't preclude business trips, and Pepík went on one to Brussels.
He didn't divulge the nature of his trip. It could be the nature of the meetings. Or more likely, given the department, it was pretty boring. The most noteworthy aspect of the trip was the array of cafés he saw. He wasn't used to seeing a whole street dedicated to dining nor so many people out eating.
A few months later, when he was back in Czechoslovakia, he saw a news report about Brussels. He remembers this because he wanted to show his family where he had been. The news report claimed to show footage of disaffected workers rallying against the capitalist system.
It didn't take Pepík long to realise that the rally was taking place in that same café strip he had eaten months ago. Nor did it take long for him to see that the so-called demonstrators were just people walking from café to café finding somewhere to have lunch.
