Nothing has really changed

I was born in 1986 and grew up in a small town near the Austrian border. Until the age of eight, I lived in an estate block and I had lots of friends. I remember an old abandoned house which (at least in my imagination) was inhabited by some dark power. We used to send someone up there and they had to show up in the window on the second floor to prove that they had walked through the whole building. Today it is a veterinarian practice. For me the 1990s were not a decade of great transformation, or great history. I simply lived in those times and watched the world through the eyes of a child. Once our town was visited by Václav Havel; we saw him waving from the train and laughing. Never before had I seen such a crowd.