Ian Zwaschka is a high school English 
teacher. In 2024/2025 he served at the Petr Bezruč Gymnázium in Frýdek-Místek as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant. With a BA in English, Creative Writing, and Cinema, and a year of teaching in South Korea under his belt, he slipped into the rhythm of a Czech college-prep high school as if he’d been there for years. During his grant, Ian energized students with a popular improv club, joined the local folk band Ondrášek on stage, presented at an academic conference, and dove into Czech lessons so he could chat with locals instead of relying on wild gesturing. Somewhere between the mountains, the music, and the everyday wonder of a town of 50,000, Frýdek-Místek stole his heart. So when a job offer from the Vocational High School arrived, Ian didn’t think twice. His Czech adventure was not ready to end.
The Czech Republic was once a postcard to me – a saturated image of the Charles Bridge with Prague written in cursive at the bottom. The Bohemian lands were once a digitized halftone print of my heavy-browed, concave-cheeked second great-grandfather, Šimon, that I found on Ancestry. The Czech language was once a few words that I heard over intercoms in the Czech and Slovak Museum, or abstract sounds interpreted to me through subtitles of New Wave movies. The Czech people, to me, were once only authors and actors.
Now, I have been living in the Czech Republic for a year and a half, and I would like to acknowledge what led me down the path that I feel I am on now – and why I continue to follow it.
My interest in the Czech Republic began in my high school years. I started reading more thanks to avid English teachers who nourished my curiosity and redirected my angst to healthier outlets. This curiosity became self-reflexive, even solipsistic, at times when I was younger. I wanted to find some meaning to hold onto. I asked my grandfather where we were from, what our name meant, what he knew about the history. He explained to me we were Czech, but he did not elaborate much more than that, only telling me that the members of our family were homesteaders – horse ranchers in Minnesota.
I asked my English teacher which Czech authors he knew to try to learn more about what “Czech” is, and he suggested I read Kundera, Hrabal, and Havel. I read them slowly, and their words went over my head. As college entrance approached, I researched scholarships for Czech ancestry. The Czech and Slovak Museum in Cedar Rapids offered one. The scholarship required sending proof through a family tree, so I dug on Ancestry and prepared disorganized information on Czech mysticism, which I found at the library. My application was rejected because I lived outside of the museum’s radius. I cried on the phone, begging them to accept the application. The person on the other end of the line, whom I did not know but would likely later be my coworker, said they simply could not accept my application with my address in Des Moines. I spitefully ignored contacting the museum further for years to come.
As my university days progressed, I grew more attached to cinema. I wondered how I could discover more about Czech identity from this angle. I decided to research Czech directors, so I discovered the New Wave, classic Czech comedies, and some stop-motion animators. I kept wondering how I could get closer to discovering more about this place, its people, and how it might still be affecting who I was because of my ancestral connection to it. I learned from some friends that Fulbright was a way to approach studying abroad, since neither my family nor I had the resources to pay for something like that while I was still an undergraduate student. The university’s advisors recommended that I get in contact with the museum in Cedar Rapids to begin building my resume for applying for this prestigious grant. I sent an email the next day to see if I could start in some capacity as an intern. Shortly after, I began working part-time.
At the museum, I worked in the shop and instructed visitors in the galleries. I bought books on Czech history, read more Czech fiction, and borrowed DVDs from the museum’s library, for which I purchased a special European disc player. I had betrayed myself for not coming to this place earlier, out of petty anger. I learned more about my family, the reasons they immigrated, and the revolutions of 1848. I studied mass European immigration to the US. The country was slowly being constructed in my mind through dissociated sentences, grainy images, Mucha puzzles, calendars, garnets, glass ornaments, mugs, and Krtek cartoons.
Meanwhile, my application for being a Fulbright ETA in 2022-2023 in the Czech Republic was waitlisted. My bitterness from rejection grew deeper. I wondered if it was right for me to make it there. I asked myself if I ever would. Everything seemed to be holding me back from seeing this place. I had an unsettling feeling that I should not have put as much significance in my life towards this country as I had. Why had I wasted so much of my time on understanding a place that didn’t seem to want me?
Since I had been tutoring English to non-native speakers and received a teaching certificate, another recommendation given to me by my advisors, I decided I should focus on somewhere other than the Czech Republic for once. People told me there were lucrative English teaching jobs in Asia. Most of the movies I had been watching from that continent were from Korea. Why not just go and teach in Korea? So I did.
Korea means more to me than I could have predicted, and much of my heart still remains there with the friends that I made. However, I was not made to work there. The first few months overwhelmed me. I was working 50 hours a week, plus preparing in the evenings. I was exhausted from being around elementary school students all day.
I sank into a depression, and I decided to spend the little free time I had in the evenings creating a new application for Fulbright in the Czech Republic for the 2024-2025 academic year. As I waited for the results, I made friends in the comedy community in Seoul that I will never forget. I sometimes still wish I could perform improvised comedy to large audiences and laugh onstage alongside those funny, kind people I met and formed deep bonds with in Korea.
When I was accepted as a finalist for Fulbright at the beginning of 2024, I wondered if it was what I even wanted anymore. The complicated and stressful visa process that would ensue, applying as an American citizen in Korea through a Czech embassy, made me even less sure that this was the path that I wanted. But, I went through with it, driven by an insatiable determination to know more about this place, see it, understand it, piece together those abstract variables. I was approved for my visa to the Czech Republic only a week before I was scheduled to start my year with Fulbright. I stopped in the US to see my family and finally moved on to the Czech Republic. I was finally going to see what “Czech” is – what “Zwaschka” is.
Looking down on Prague as I flew in, I immediately recognized the city, which seemed to be shrouded in red to me. There it was, completely whole after being so fragmented and reconstructed in my imagination for so many years. It served as a dominant image of the country, and yet, on my first visit to the city that represented this country to me, I was only in the train station for 30 minutes. I’ve only ever returned to Prague as a passer-through. The first time I saw the Charles Bridge made me weep, but now every time I feel that I am transient. I do not belong, and it feels like all others, even friends of mine who live there, are temporary specks of presence in the ancient city. It remains elusive to me.
I met with my first contact provided by Fulbright in the airport. From there, I have a strong memory of looking at myself in the reflection of a blue České dráhy train window, my translucent image looking as if it were projected onto the passing landscape of the country I wanted to see so desperately for all those years.
Arriving in the city I would come to call home, Frýdek-Místek, and recovering from the worst jet lag I have ever experienced in my life, I was anxious to explore. I went on long walks, took pictures of the squares, and tried to encounter as many new scenes as I could. Standing on the bridge over the gently trickling Ostravice and feeling a warm summer breeze while seeing sparse clouds loom over the top of Lysá hora, I felt like I had finally reached a place that was representative of the serenity and peacefulness that my family might have once felt in this country.
As school began, I sought out experiences that could teach me more about the place. I was lucky enough to have colleagues who were willing to help me learn the language and introduce me to the folklore culture in our region. As an upright bass player, a colleague of mine’s husband was coincidentally able to offer me a bass that I could play in their folklore group. With this group, I was able to learn about the rich history of our region and see how rich the history was in specific locations all around the Czech Republic. People in the group would point out minute details between costumes in different localities and explain why these things existed historically. I never thought that I would look at the differences in blueprinted skirts the way that I do now.
Photo: Ian plays the upright bass in kroj from the Lašsko region at the Frýdek-Místek International Folklore Festival, June 2025.
I continued to enjoy the pace of life here. I was able to slow myself down, to read, to write, to spend time with friends, and to observe my surroundings. I was taken on hikes where people pointed out objects in nature, such as mushrooms, ferns, blueberries, and specific mountains with their consonant-heavy names. The world was being pointed out to me in a way it had never been before in any place I had lived. My curiosity and familiarity grew uniquely and synchronously. Having people who were inspired to teach me and let me practice the Czech language with them also deepened my curiosity, making me more enthusiastic about exploring having conversations that I could never have if I did not understand the language. I became increasingly certain that I wanted to stay here, to study here, to belong here.
I do not say all of these things to make it seem that the year before was always coming up daisies. I certainly struggled with losing and creating relationships and learned how to be more honest with myself and others. However, while in the Czech Republic, I learned how to gently approach these parts of myself that I want to improve, and I no longer berate myself over my shortcomings.
I searched for jobs in as many places as I could, and I was lucky to come across one in the same city. I jumped at the opportunity last year, as I wanted to continue deepening my understanding of all of the things I had encountered in the previous year. It was at a different school, a průmyslovka rather than a gymnázium. Still, I was enthusiastic about seeing the differences between these types of schools in the country and making connections to even more people in my community. Unfortunately, I was again hindered by visa complications since I found my position at the school so late in the year last year, but I was able to recover and begin at the school at a later date. Again, I was motivated by my curiosity about this place and the connections that I was forming, which I did not want to lose.
I am now experiencing being a teacher to the fullest rather than being an assistant or a tutor. I am planning all of my own lessons, grading, substituting, and making the classroom space with the students our own, a place where we can communicate and learn together. I do not have as large of a support network handed to me on a platter as last year with Fulbright, and I am no longer the fresh, new “American guy” that the teachers want (or are prompted by others to want) to get to know, but the connections I have made with those around me are more than enough, and I still am gifted to see and hear from people involved with Fulbright this year as well. It is a network that you can always reach out to again, and I appreciate the people involved with Fulbright Czech Republic for this.
Having lived in the Czech Republic and abroad for about two and a half years has taught me to value the curiosity I had when I was younger and to appreciate the places I inhabit. Looking back on the years, I see points where I allowed myself to get in my own way and prevented myself from pursuing my own curiosity.
Another realization I have had while being abroad is that I never held the same curiosity I had for the Czech Republic towards my own home while I was living there. I only sought to look outside of it for so long by analyzing other countries, like the Czech Republic, and I ignored my surroundings. Being here, I enjoy continuing to learn about all that Czech culture has to offer, but I also have a renewed fascination in America, its history, its localities, the places and ideas I overlooked while living there, while I was focusing too much on myself. I can analyze my country and my culture from afar and realize that many Americans, caught up in the struggles of daily life, do not explore the history and specificity of their locality – their geography. I watch movies about the US the same way I once watched movies about the Czech Republic. I can see the mythology of America fragmented and dissected. I can see how my Czech ancestors participated in that mythology – that they bought into it and participated in stealing land from native peoples in the plains, backed by the armed forces of the US government. I can respect that I am American, that I was born on that land and raised there, but I can also see more clearly, being far away from it, what the implications of being an American are.
I wanted so badly to understand the Czech Republic, and I’ve been wanting lately to understand, so badly, the United States. I realize more and more that there is no understanding these abstract spaces.
Now, the Czech Republic, to me, is the kind, smiling face of Iva when she hears me construct a new sentence. It is my students who sew buttons with our improv club’s name on them, fold paper stars and give them to me after class, and ask me if I miss home. It is dancing in my panelák to Ty Kytaru Jsem Koupil Kvůli Tobě. It is meeting Milan, Ksenia, and Blair for lunch and talking into the evening while Milan and Ksenia’s children play with their toys in the other room and come out occasionally to snap my finger with a prank gum package. It is holding Barča’s hand at the kitchen table. It is people.