Darkness fall early on this Sunday afternoon in December. It's around three o'clock, and I'm wandering around a neighbourhood with many apartment buildings. It's quiet, and it's windy. People are walking their dogs. In many flats lights are on. In the city centre Advent is slowly reaching its commercial climax. ATthe Christmas market in town a band is covering songs of the BeeGees. Snippets of music are blowing over. There's not a lot of christmas decoration to be seen behind the windows. In many homes the christmas trees arrive on the 24th.
One fourth of the Czechs lives in paneláky, uniform appartment buildings erected in the 60s and 79s. Back then they were grey, and over time dreary and mirthless. Now they've been painted over in pastel tints.
These buildings fascinate me, with their concentration of households stacked on top of each other. Whether you are in Ostrava or Cheb, the layouts of the flats are remarkably similar. The same thin walls hardly filtering the sounds of life of the neighbours. Of toilets flushing, doors slamming, tv and radio playing, of laughter and fights. Laundry is drying on the balconies, and the smells of cigarettes and fried schnitzel come through opened windows. Life is lived skin to skin, and the trick for privacy is pretending you don't notice that very fact.
In the midst of identical appartments and similar lives you create a space for yourself. The fixed elements - of life events, IKEA furniture, family circle, daily routine, holidays, latest fashion, tv programmes and what was on offer in the supermarket nearby - form the materials out of which a home, a life is built. You shape them, stack them, drag and reorganise them, undergo or resist them. You put your mark, you breathe your atmosphere. Maybe you complain and dream of something better. But in the end this is your home, this is where you come home time after time again.
And however far you travel, this coming home is what the heart wants most.
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