A Phantasmal City: Sandeman Tour in Prague, Czech Republic

By Michelle Fang


This past weekend, Sireesha and I took a weekend trip to Prague. While I was unfamiliar with the capital city of the Czech Republic, the Sandeman tour that I participated in allowed me to forge an emotional connection with the dark and gothic city that was once at the heart of the Bohemian Empire.

The tour guide Lauren, as we found out, was a petite ball of unbounded energy. I felt as though her aura pervaded the old stones and lopsided cobblestones of the Prague streets, breathing life within an otherwise dull existence. Truly if this was a production, then Lauren was the star actress. All the previous tour guide stereotypes that I had racked up in my brain dissipated as my eyeballs could hardly keep up with Lauren’s theatrical arm movements and dramatic poses as she pranced across the cobblestones like it was her stage. The performance space encompassed the entirety of Prague’s old town square and its surrounding regions and as the production moved from site to site, the audience followed with much gusto. There were no costume changes, as Lauren simply wore a T-shirt indicating she was the tour-guide but spiced it up with her eclectic taste of floral tights and torn jean shorts. Thankfully she chose to forgo the stereotypical tourist flag and uniform, which allowed me to visualize her as more of a performing character who we chased through the streets of Prague in an attempt to keep up to her quick strides.

The tour was very much a performance as it elicited a wide array of emotional reactions from the audience members. Through a series of well illustrated dialogues and historical recounts, the audience was invited to connect emotionally to a rather chilling history of Prague. I felt as if I had entered a time capsule, and stood amongst the Czechs as they fought for liberation across the decades of communist rule, foreign invasions, and finally the moment of liberation as the state became Czechoslovakia and eventually just the Czech Republic.

In addition, many of the stories “performed” bordered between reality and fantasy, leaving the audience to delve into their own subjective interpretations of it. When explaining Jaroslav Rona’s bronze statue of Franz Kafka, Lauren in a mysterious tone described it as “a nightmare that Kafka had dreamt of where he was surrounded by dense fog and through this fog, he saw himself riding on a headless and handless giant unable to escape.” And through this phantasmal dream, us listeners were able to connect with the real statue standing before us, quite real and yet not as real as the dream we had “experienced.”

Finally, a somber moment that I recall vividly was when we visited a Jewish cemetery and Synagogue, where Lauren reminded us of the horrible treatment of the Jewish peoples by Hitler and the Nazis.  The grim reality of tens of thousands of bodies buried unmarked on top of each other truly chilled each of us more so than the piercing Prague wind. It was as if Prague’s weather was the perfect complement to the entire tour. What began as a slew of histories and entertaining facts accompanied by a playful breeze led to a somber note about the Jewish sufferings among the deadening cold of the night. Yet, when the lights of Prague came on at night, the audience experienced stories of glory and liberation amid the gothic yet regal background of Prague’s castle. While the tour as a performance did not have technical additives, the weather was almost a perfect background to the ever changing tone of the stories, making the combination of everything magical and captivating.