It’s been a long nine years since I was last in Krumlov, and it’s our first time as a family. I quickly discover that the trip from Prague to southern Bohemia is noticeably less depressing that it was all those years ago. Sure, the motorway to ČeskéBudějovice is still not finished, but we arrive with a sense of hope and somewhat optimistic that things are moving forward and that we will see the completion of a road befitting the 21st century sometime during our lifetimes.

The fact remains, however, that a least halfway on the trip from Prague we felt sorry for the tourists – especially those from Japan who are used to some kind of level of standard and some of whom might even complain when a train leaves the station a few seconds early– who have to spend several hours traveling along country roads in order to cover a distance that public transport back home can cover in dozens of minutes at most. When they get off the plane at Ruzyně, they must feel like they’ve traveled back in time. Seen in this context, I understand their gentle, smiling faces – they are clearly grateful that they survived the trip to Krumlov in the first place.

In the end, our arrival in Krumlov isn’t entirely without complications, and the city’s historical center catches us literally with our pants down: We didn’t realize that Google Maps would be capable of finding the address “Latrán 21” but that the GPS would refuse to guide us to the actual house. Instead, it announces “You are here” right at the “entry forbidden” sign on the edge of the old town. This definitely doesn’t happen everywhere, and we take it as a kind of warning: Even GPS doesn’t want people to drive here. From that moment on, we are on the lookout, constantly expecting some kind of betrayal or attack (at the very least, on our wallets). Will time prove our worst fears wrong?

It will naturally take some time before we are able to properly sort through the many impressions from immediately after our arrival in order to form a more comprehensive picture of what is going on here and how people live (or don’t live) here. Our first contact with the locals is behind us, and we are a little nervous, because a friendly welcome looks different. But maybe it’s just a little bit of grandstanding at the outset, a kind of struggle for position between us and the locals, who are making clear that they don’t like the UNES-CO project because, as they put it, it makes them look like idiots. Maybe we can get to the core of the matter after a few conversations: Besides, even they say that the entire town is in a state of undeclared war: There’s the people from downtown, some of whom “privatized” and some didn’t, and then there’s the people “from the housing estates” and the greater surrounding area, who feel that town hall doesn’t pay much attention to them and spends most of its time and energy on the downtown. But one important thing: The local people who talk with us are not aggressive, and their original stance towards us seems to have changed. We’ve been invited for beer and have received small gifts, which is really nice and we are appreciate it. But for now we don’t know whether we’ve won over any greater sympathies from the larger portion of the local population.

It’s probably like re-inventing the wheel to say that Český Krumlov, despite all the historical ups and downs it has experienced (especially in the 20th century) has remained an exceptionally beautiful town and that, considering the number of tourists, it is absolutely understandable that for a lot of people it has literally become a source of money. They will definitely not want the current situation to change in any way. On the other hand, those who didn’t have as much good fortune, who got the “leftover” space outside the center, and who don’t get much from the mass tourism are justified in arguing that the current situation is unbearable and that tourists complicate their lives.

And we’d be re-inventing the wheel again if we noted that at first glance it is simply impossible to lead a normal life in the current conditions in the historic city center: All that will be left (logically) is a few businesses and the last (a few dozen?) Mohicans who don’t mind the rumbling of roller suitcases along cobblestones, ridiculously high prices for everything, and so on and so forth. At the same time, however, I wonder whether we are seeing a problem where there isn’t any. One example: When I was a kid, my neighbor had a giant aviary just a few meters away, in which he had at least several (but probably more like hundreds) of parrots, some of which were bigger than me. The noise those birds made was absolutely terrible, and everybody who came to visit us, without exception, was horrified and asked us, “How can you live here and not go mad?” The point, of course, is that over the years we’d gotten used to the parrots’ squawking. We had learned not to notice them at all.

I am guessing that the locals have done the same thing. In any case, you have our word that we will set out to meet them in an attempt at discovering what things are really like here. Keep your fingers crossed for us.