I discovered early on in my stay in Prague that really weird coincidences happened with alarming frequency. For instance, I would regularly run into friends in front of the Astrological Clock or on the Charles Bridge. Now, admittedly, these are two of the most central and heavily-traveled of Prague's many landmarks, but still the "chance encounters" became so frequent and predictable that I would actually use them as a locator tool. In other words, if I wanted to find a particular person (keep in mind that most of the expats, even the ones who were living in Prague, didn't have phones) I would simply go to the Clock and/or the Bridge and there they turned up.
One afternoon I accompanied my friend Matt on a mission to invite roughly thirty people to a party at his hostel that Saturday. This was a diverse bunch of expats, mind you. Some were young wanderers, some actually lived and worked in Prague, and several were American hippies of Czech descent who lived in Prague but had no known means of support. None had telephones.
In two hours of wandering, including an hour sitting on the Bridge, we had connected with every person on the list, either directly (in at least fifteen or twenty cases) or through friends or roommates. Let's just say the reliability of the Prague "bush telegraph" was just a wee bit spooky.
A more cogent example is what happened after I met Ivana. I decided to ditch my London-to-Los Angeles return ticket and stay in Prague. I needed a job, but the prospects were less than appealing. All my friends were teaching English, at salaries of 3000-5000 Kc ($120-$150) per month.
I made the decision to stay in Prague on a Friday, three days before my flight was due to leave London. The next Wednesday -- five days after I "moved" to Prague -- Matt came up to me at a Celtic Ray concert and said (I swear to god this is true), "How'd you like a job as an Assistant Editor on a French TV movie? It pays 6000 Kc a week, and you gotta' speak French."
Now this was a little much! I don't mind telling you that this particular little incident scared the hell out of me. From this point on, I knew. You see, I was by profession a film editor, and I speak very good French. And 6 grand a week (roughly $240) was a fortune in a city where a good dinner-for-two was four or five bucks, and where the trendiest disco carried a hefty $1.35 cover.
Twilight Zone Music, Up and Fade Out
In the dense and magical book, Magic Prague Angelo Maria Ripellino describes Prague thusly:
City made grotesque by eccentric humours, city auspicious for horoscopes, metaphysical clowning, outbursts of irrationality, chance encounters, combinations of circumstance, improbable complicity between opposites, that is, for those "petrifying coincidences" Breton speaks of (p. 6).