Looking Back at Our Expat Year in Prague

One year ago, we were making the decision to stay in Prague and finish out our expat year, or fly home to Vancouver three months earlier than planned. I can still remember constantly refreshing the news on my laptop, staring at Colin with big indecision eyes, and the absolute adrenaline burst that got us through packing up our apartment and booking flights in less than 24 hours.

At the time, we didn’t know if we had made the right decision. At our core, I think I was Team Stay while Colin was Team Go. I didn’t want to give up on our expat year. We decided to move abroad for a year and I didn’t want to fail. I didn’t want to miss out on anything.

While we were trying to decide, my mom told us that whatever decision we make is the right one. And at that point, all we wanted was some finality. Our lives felt completely up in the air. And every day we stayed in Prague was another day we had to choose to stay. But if we chose to leave, that was it. We couldn’t go back.

Those first few weeks back in Vancouver were rough. We anticipated our homecoming as a bittersweet ending to a full year abroad. We planned to hit up all of our favourite restaurants, hang out with all the friends and family we had missed, and bring our travel mentality home to Vancouver, exploring our city like tourists.

Instead we came home to two weeks of quarantine, closed restaurant dining rooms, limits on seeing friends and family, and rules forbidding our plans for a fun summer exploring Vancouver. My main client work, in weddings and travel, dried up and I found myself, like many, spending my days baking, binging Love Is Blind and glued to the news.

Things got better. We moved into a bigger apartment so we didn’t have to spend the whole day three feet away from each other. Colin got his x-ray job back at the hospital and felt like he was meaningfully contributing not just to our household income but to the fight against covid. I found new work and added reading, writing and hanging at the beach to my list of weekly activities. Despite lockdown measures, we got to see some friends and family (from a distance) and eat all the foods we missed (via takeout).

While I was mostly on board with our plan to leave Prague when we did, looking back now I’m confident we made the right call. Prague entered a pretty tight lockdown just as we were leaving, meaning any time we had left in the city would’ve been spent stuck in our apartment. Since my jobs dried up, money would have been very tight as Colin wasn’t working and we wouldn’t have been eligible for the Canadian government assistance programs. Flights became less frequent and more expensive as the months wore on, meaning our journey home could have been even more stressful. We also might have missed out on the awesome apartment we’re now in!

Still, it sucks to think of what we missed. None of it would have been possible with the pandemic, but we had plans to host Colin’s cousin for Easter, travel to Berlin in late April, meet up with Colin’s family in London in May, journey up to Scotland and road trip through Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg on our way to Paris to catch our flight home.

We had a bucket list of Prague places we wanted to see before we left. We never made it to nearby Karlštejn Castle, the spa town of Karlovy Vary or Plzeň, the home of Pilsner beer. We didn’t have a last meal at our favourite restaurants or a last look from our favourite spot to catch the sun setting behind Prague Castle. We didn’t get to enjoy the massive grocery haul we had purchased the day before we decided to leave (in hindsight, I regret not packing the toilet paper and soap into our suitcase).

But then I think of all the things we did get to do, all of the opportunities we said yes to. Just the fact that we did it, that we moved to Prague, is incredible. We had no reason to go. We didn’t have a deep connection to Prague or a job that was relocating us. We moved simply because we wanted to – or I wanted to and Colin eventually wanted to. We wanted to live and travel around Europe, and we freaking made that happen!

We originally planned to move to the UK in the fall of 2019 where Colin would work as an x-ray tech. I’m so grateful we threw that plan out the window and moved up our timeline. Leaving for Prague in June 2019 and Colin working with me online allowed us to have so many incredible adventures. If we had stuck with our original plan, we probably would have gone on just a handful of weekend trips before things shut down.

Instead, we made the most of our nine and a half months abroad. We created a life in Prague where we found favourite restaurants, discovered new parks and beautiful sunsets, made new friends, got new jobs, learned a few words of Czech, rented an apartment, and enjoyed a world where cellphone plans are reasonably priced and beer is cheaper than water.

Abroad we traipsed through the gardens of Vienna’s Schonbrunn Palace, bought Colin a new work wardrobe in Dresden, castle hopped in Sweden, made plans to retire in Tuscany, drank beer at Oktoberfest, climbed castle stairs in Budapest, stomped around Pompeii in the rain, ate the best gelato in Rome, strolled the Christmas markets of Salzburg, saw a much too long play in London, fell in love with Seville, camped in the desert in Morocco, and hiked up waterfalls with Ellie in Slovenia.

And in the quiet moments, we grew together. We navigated leaking sinks, dog training, Airbnb hosting and never quite knowing which bin was which when we took out the garbage. We drove on unfamiliar roads, cooked with new ingredients, paid with funny looking money and just accepted the piercing alarm that sounded the first Wednesday of every month.

We tackled the hard stuff that comes up when one person is suddenly unemployed and the other is suddenly responsible for the finances, all in a new country where neither of you speak the language. We took big leaps, planning trips to places we didn’t know, putting ourselves out there to make friends, doing our first photo shoot and saying yes to being on a TV show. We found new hobbies, new jobs, new skills and a new appreciation for each other.

Our year in Prague was challenging. We had to work so hard to get there and maybe harder to get through daily life. But it was so worth it. For every stressful moment, I can think of five memories that put a huge smile on my face.

Looking back, I am so grateful that we did this. It was one of the best and most memorable years of my life. And I’m so glad we did it when we did. If we had waited just a few months or a year, it may have never happened. As tough as lockdown in Vancouver has been, it would have been 10 times harder if I wasn’t riding on the high of all of my travel memories from our expat year in Prague.

So while there’s so much we didn’t do and time we missed out on, I choose to look back with no regrets. The adventures we had fill me up and the timing worked out just right for us. I wouldn’t change a thing.

My only wish is that our expat year in Prague isn’t the only time we move abroad!