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“I’ll get naked if you will”: my first date abroad

You cannot move anywhere overseas and expect to live your American life. I was determined to adapt.|©iStock

You might as well know this going into today’s dispatch: I ended up naked with a Mexican girl in a co-ed spa in Prague on a snowy winter’s night on our first and only date. But that’s the way it goes when you toss away your old life and decide it’s time to chase adventure as an American living abroad. The story starts with my new life in Prague, where I landed in October 2018 after leaving the US. I’d been divorced for a couple years at that point and I had a profile on a dating app on which I wasn’t really active.

But late one-morning in December 2018 my phone chirped… I looked down to see a message from a woman I will call Maria (not her real name; protecting the guilty here). “Hey, I’m passing through Prague for one day and saw your profile. Wanna hang out and show me the city before I fly home?”

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Honestly, at that point I didn’t know enough about Prague to show her anything other than Old Town. But Old Town is pretty. Lots of ancient churches and interesting alleys and whatnot. And if nothing else, there are quaint bars and restaurants. And a traditional Czech spa. We’ll come back to that. I had nothing to do that day. She was cute.

“Sure thing,” I responded. “Meet you under the Astronomical Clock in Old Town at 2pm.” Thus began my descent toward unexpected nudity.

The #1 Reason Americans Move Back Home (And How to Avoid It)

We Americans move overseas for all kinds of reasons: chasing a job; escaping the unhappy life; in search of something new, exciting, and different. Or, in my case, all three at once. When you alight in your new country, you have a choice to make: Rebuild the normalcy you knew back home, just wrapped in a foreign diorama… or recognize that this is your chance to change, to build a different and better version of yourself. To take risks. To try new things. To explore a new culture.

The Americans who end up returning home are very often the ones who chose the former and disregarded the latter. You cannot move anywhere overseas and expect to live your American life. The game simply isn’t played that way. What you know as normal in America doesn’t exist overseas. So you adapt… or you burn out.

I learned this the hard way in my first months here. It’s why I later told International Living readers in 2021 that “what we love as tourists is never what we live as residents.” 

Back in 2018, I was determined to adapt. I met Maria at our appointed time and place. She was bubbly, a glass of Mexican champagne. Always laughing. Full of stories. Wanting to try everything.

We spent hours wandering through Old Town, stopping here and there for local snacks and beverages. We walked across the picturesque Charles Bridge into the Malastrana district, a nearly 800-year-old neighborhood below Prague Castle. At some point in a story about living for a while in New Orleans, I mentioned absinthe and noted that an absinthe bar—Absintherie—was close by.

Maria wanted to go.

When the Green Fairy Calls

She’d never had absinthe. But when in Prague, famous for absinthe, you have absinthe. Absintherie is as much a museum to absinthe as it is a bar that feels straight out a Parisian belle epoque novel. The waitress set us up with a traditional absinthe experience: the French drip, in which a single sugar cube sits on a slotted silver spoon placed atop the neon fairy-green absinthe, a vat of ice-cold water leisurely dripping a drop of water onto the sugar to both sweeten the drink and dilute the alcohol.

We spent a couple of hours talking about all kinds of randomness when we noticed through the door that it was snowing outside. “I’m Mexican. I’m not used to being this cold,” Maria told me.

“You know,” I replied, “there’s supposed to be a traditional Czech spa somewhere around here. I read about it. You have to, like, walk through some restaurant and go down some stairs in the back to the basement. Sound’s sketchy, I know, but you can get warm there in the sauna… oh, but you also have to get naked, I think.”

“I’ll get naked if you will,” she said without hesitation. Clearly, the centuries-old rumors about absinthe rotting away your critical thinking skills are very much accurate.

Buck Naked and Giggling

Which is how I ended up naked with a Mexican girl in a co-ed spa in Prague on a snowy winter’s night on our first and only date. Life is an adventure, doubly so when you’re an expat learning the cultural norms in your adopted country. But that’s also the spice of life, the little vignettes of your daily existence that root in your brain and that you will never forget because they are so very different from everything else you normally do.

I still talk to Maria on occasion. We still laugh about that moment—both standing in front of each other, buck nekkid and giggling about how we ended up here.

“I don’t even know your last name,” she said.

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