Trams are made for loving

I have never considered myself to be particularly prudish. However, since living in the Czech Republic I have had to question my belief more than once. It is those unspectacular incidents in my daily life in Brno that make my cheeks redden, almost every day, and particularly often in the tram.

Here's my snapshot for you:

A young couple is squeezing into tram number one at the main railway station (Hlavní Nádrazí). They are heading towards the first single-space seat on the left, the one that is reserved for people with a dog. The man sits down, positioning his girlfriend on his lap. He is dressed in red trekking trousers with black patches on his upper leg, along with quite worn-out trekking boots. His top-half is covered with a fleece sweater which his girlfriend cuddles up to. She is svelte, like most of the girls in the Czech Republic. The girl is wearing a striped cap in order to protect her smile from the cold. At least, I think she is smiling, since her face is not visible - it seems to be melted together with her boyfriend's. Soon they begin an exchange of heavy tongue-to-tongue action, making salivating noises. The man places his hand on the back of her head, pulling her even closer. While the two lovers are almost eating each other up, the other people in the tram remain stoically calm, ignoring the couple completely. They stare straight in front of them, but not out of the window. Nobody is smiling; they are mostly sitting stiff and indifferent. Meanwhile, the couple stop for just a second - they smile at each other, exchange a few playfully naughty words, and, of course, start making out again, this time even more affectionately. When it is time for them to leave the tram, almost at the traffic junction Mendlovó Námestí, they stop kissing and cuddling, hop off the tram and jump on each other again while waiting for their bus to arrive.

It might be an act of moving on from the remains of the past: by transferring private moments into public ones, young Czechs are able to rebel against the remains of the former Communist system in Czechoslovakia, in which their parents often retreated completely into their own privacy in order to protect themselves from the system. Thus, in short: kissing and making out could be an act of rebellion, and of changing traditional national habits peacefully and with plenty of good feelings for those involved. This is, in my opinion, a lesson we can all learn from the young Czechs here!

Today I have once again witnessed young Czech people nearly making love in the tram. Taking a deeply embarrassed look around the inside of the tram, next to the advertisement of some cough candy I noticed a poster for the latest exhibition in Brno's city museum. The theme, and this comes as no surprise to me, is 100,000 years of sex.