I always imagined my 21st birthday to kick off somewhere in Chicago. I would take my first steps into that forbidden world of a bar to wild applause. I would receive handshakes, congratulations for having made it so far, the bartender would hand me free drinks all night and every time I took a sip, more applause. Maybe silver confetti in the shape of martini glasses would fall from the sky.
You see, I missed a lot of keystones in American Coming of Age Culture. I didn’t go to prom, or graduation. In fact, I picked up my diploma four weeks after the fact from a little, curly haired woman somewhere in the depths of my school. She had an awful cold and hacked all over my most sacred document before handing it to me with a sniffled, “congratulations.” For my eighteenth birthday my parents would be pleased to know I didn’t buy porn or cigarettes.
I suppose I always assumed I would make it up on my 21st birthday; it was a fabulous thing to say I was going to have it in Prague. In America, especially Chicago, it’s almost impossible to walk into a bar under 21 unless you have a very good fake, it’s always just a bit stressful trying to pick up drinks for a party, and how many readings had I missed because the establishment they were held at was off-limits to minors? I didn’t want to take 21 shots at midnight or anything, I just wanted the world to open up to me.
The thing about Prague is, the drinking age is 18. Though I wasn’t going to reach 21 for a week, suddenly I was still able to go out to bars with the rest of my 21 year old companions. For a week, I had not felt left behind, or too young. For a week I was already accepted into the world of glass bottles filled with dark and light liquid stacked against walls, and bartenders bringing me what I asked for without a second thought. For a week, I was privy to those secret conversations I always believed people had in bars that made each of them understand the other perfectly.
When I turned 21, we went out in celebration. We drank at dinner, and then went to a pub or two, and needless to say there were no free drinks, the bartenders did not care that in America I may have been a big deal that night. It was just another birthday, more anticlimactic maybe, than others might have been, but still, ordinary.
It wasn’t just that 21 isn’t a big year here in Prague, it’s more that I had already grown up. Before I got to Prague, 21 meant adulthood, maturity, grace, maybe not being afraid of the dark, and knowing which way to turn at each cobblestoned corner. My last week as a 20 year old, I flew across the world to live in a foreign country, began to learn the basics of a different language, saw a concentration camp, the effects of a country controlled by communism, beautiful architecture I never dreamed I would see in person; towering spires, a castle, buildings where artists and geniuses lived and worked and laughed and drank together. If my last week as a 20 year old could give me all that, just one night when I happened to turn 21 could not possibly compare. I still may not always be graceful or confident or mature. I am secretly still afraid of the dark and you couldn’t pay me to find my way easily around this city, but though there isn’t any confetti and applause, I have a map and will read it carefully to find my way.
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