Where is my home?

I returned to Prague this past weekend after a three-week tour of the eastern seaboard of the United States. It began with a class reunion weekend in Washington, D.C., where I spent my "formative years." As I haven't yet gone bald or grown fat, I was more than a little curious to see who had. Call it: Revenge of the Nerd.

Now, if you don't get the reference, don't worry: only Americans of a certain age would remember the "Nerd" series of films. They came out in the late '80s. The later instalments were strictly straight-to-video fare. But I digress (as well I did at the reunion. It can't be helped).

From the nation's capital it was on to New York City, the one place in America that still feels like home after ten years of living abroad—in Brussels, the Balkans, and the Czech Republic. As most Radio Prague listeners will know, the Czech national anthem is "Kde Domov Muj"—"Where is my home", or homeland. It's a particularly relevant question for me personally, now that I am married to a Czech and a permanent resident here, and have a toddler son who has only set foot in the U.S. twice. He can't pronounce the all important English-language article "the" and doesn't see much of a need for it. His home, clearly, is Prague.

I moved around quite a bit in my youth. I was born in one state, spent elementary school in another, hundreds of miles away, went to high school in Washington, DC (which is not a state, but never mind), went to university in yet another, and took my first real job in New York. My last U.S. address was in Manhattan's financial district, just off Wall Street, in an 1850s brownstone that was never up to code and is now to be torn down. It was more or less a squat and my old roommate has only just moved out. Several boxes I packed up and left there a decade ago now sit unopened in another friend's Brooklyn loft. One day, I will open this time capsule.

But that New York loft is gone forever. And with both of my parents now retired and living hundreds of miles from their previous homes—my homes—Kde domov muj? I live in Prague's historically working-class neighbourhood of Zizkov, just across the park and a few grotty streets away from Radio Prague. I know my green grocer, have a local pub, and so on. But it is only within the walls of my family's apartment, where I feel truly at home. The second I step out the door, I'm not, in the sense of belonging. From 1992 to 2002, the Czech Republic saw the world's greatest increase in the number of foreign residents, I read recently. But the language barrier remains.

Of course there are loads of little homey touches, so to speak, that I sorely miss and was reminded of these past weeks. There is no Sunday newspaper or brunch tradition in the Czech lands, although you can buy last week's New York Times—for $16 dollars—and make an ersatz day of it. On the other hand, the streets here aren't overrun with monster SUVs, the odds of being shot are minimal, health care is a human right and affordable—in fact, nearly free, as is education—and public transport child friendly. That's important to me now that I'm a dad. Just try navigating the New York subway with a stroller, or getting around the average American town without a car.

It's good to be home.