What is that thing for?

A place like Prague will take you back in time if you give it half a chance.  It might have emerged from hardships and shortages 30 years ago, but some habits aren't lightly relinquished.

Objects from the past are a constant surprise. There's our flat's little washing machine studded with cheese graters. Bill vaguely remembered seeing something like it decades ago, when he was a GI in Europe. At least it isn't the kind with a crank and rollers instead of a spin cycle.

Many working-class Prague apartments like this one still have wash lines strung across the bathtub and from poles extending from each balcony. These aren't "nice to haves," designed to leave clothes with the linenlike scent of sunshine and crisp air. They're necessities, leftovers from the day when a clothes dryer was either unheard of or a mark of affluence. I also discovered, folded up beside the fridge for rainy days, an indoor clothes rack the like of which I haven't used since the 1970s.

Each flat's wash makes its occupant an open book. The lady upstairs likes to do her wash first thing Saturday, when it drips onto Bill as he sits on the balcony with a morning cigarette. Below us to the left is a healthy sort who runs through puddles, grows herbs, and likes fresh-smelling towels. Above us two floors is someone who either works for the city or runs after dark, wearing a reflective vest. Apartment clothes lines quickly make the privacy of a home clothes dryer seem so luxurious that I found myself asking Bill, when we noticed some upscale apartments without balconies, "I wonder where they hang their damp clothes?"

And then there's the implement that I've seen only at restorations of colonial New England homes, now open to the public as museums. Like 18th-century property owners who aimed to keep their imported oriental carpets and pine floors pristine through muddy Massachusetts winters, the housekeepers in our Prague apartment block demand boot scrapers that Americans couldn't find even at a vintage hardware supply outlet, let alone know what to do with. Our Airbnb hostess also requests that guests remove their shoes upon entering the flat.

Compared with a U.S. supermarket's hundreds of varieties of, say, waters, sodas, cookies, and cereals, there are relatively few different choices here. But take away the Czechs' hundreds of varieties of handmade breads and sausages, and there'd be hell to pay. More space is devoted to baked goods  here than to Winn-Dixie's fresh produce, deli, fish, and butcher sections put together. We don't know what half of this stuff is, but we're doing our darnedest to find out.

At the Kolbenova flea market we could not only purchase our very own cheese-grater washing machine for $110, we could take home a creative, but outrageously dangerous, means of heating the lanai on a chilly night. "You have to light it with a match," Bill said.

"Foom!" I thought.