When asked by Czechs last semester what I was doing in the Czech Republic, I said I came to study "politika," politics, my language teacher's simplification of "public policy."

"Why would you come to the Czech Republic to study politics?” a talkative barfly named Petr asked me. “It is the worst."

Among other generalizations, my program's administrators and professors (all Czech) iterated to us that Czechs were politically apathetic and rarely cared to discuss the topic. Perhaps they were letting us American students down gently, before our enthusiasm about our own presidential election propelled us into conversational brick walls with Czech acquaintances.

But I found that conversation about the U.S. election season was actually much less widespread among my fellow students than I had expected. At times, it was almost possible to forget it was going on. But one evening, I heard the names "McCain" and "Obamu" – the quirky moniker resulting from Czech grammar — in the din of white noise from my host family's ever-running television. I renewed my efforts to probe my host mother's view of American politics. I asked whether Czechs were talking about the election, if they were excited about Bush leaving, if they were on tenterhooks about the historical precedents being set. She shrugged noncommittally: "America is far away."

I felt sheepish after my initial, genuine shock at what she’d said. I had assumed America loomed equally large in any European country, carrying logistical as well as psychological weight. My host mother forgave my textbook faux pas as innocent enough. But her reservations toward talking about politics were echoed in other conversations I had.

"I hate talking politics, because Czech politicians are terrible. How do they get in power?" said Petr’s equally talkative friend, also named Petr. "In France or Germany, in any Western European country, in America, if the leaders there did the things leaders here do — it would not happen. Here, they go away for a while, and they come back."

Petr 2’s comment was a common one I heard Czechs say about their politicians: that they are corrupt, and when some aspect of foul play is discovered, they disappear for six months and then return to their positions.

“A few years ago we elect red wine — it is like, we say, red wine is God." Petr 2 gestured appreciatively at his glass. "Then, days after coming to power, red wine says, 'We're friends with white wine. We like it. AND beer.'" Petr 2 laid out his metaphor for a particularly shady dealing between the two major political parties in the Czech Republic, in which parliament members tipped the balance of party control by influencing members of another party. "It is a knife in the heart," he said, grimacing and squeezing imaginary stress balls in the air in front of his ribs.

It was in this slightly contradictory atmosphere that I followed the big news stories breaking back home and observed the ripple effect felt in Europe.

As the financial crisis worsened, my peers shared newspaper headlines that seemed lifted from a futuristic doomsday novel.

But for the students in my program, the economic turmoil had its advantages. As the recession spread to Europe, the dollar actually began to gain against the euro and the Czech korun. Meals dropped from $6 to $5, conveniently passing the imaginary line in my head that separates the good deals from the overpriced.

Between classes, students crowded the computer lab in our study center, a low white building next door to a convent on castle grounds south of the city, calculating the downward progress of the price of flights to Barcelona and Amsterdam.

A month after the Dow Jones lost over a trillion dollars in one day, a national holiday commemorating the creation of an independent Czechoslovak state gave us our longest break of the semester. Students traveled far and wide, cashing in on the temporary, meager benefits of the crisis.

In Berlin, my friend Julia and I enjoyed the slightly weaker euro in combination with other soulful charms of one of Western Europe’s cheaper capital cities. We ate döner kebabs, a Turkish dish popular in the Kreuzberg neighborhood of former East Berlin, surrounded by other appreciative tourists. A man at the next table over, one of three clean-cut blonds who had managed to keep their hands and faces clean of sauce, got our attention and said he guessed that we were from Boston (neither of us are). I asked where he was from and he said he was from Finland.

"But you don't know where that is, do you?" he asked rhetorically, with a slighting glint in his eye.

His undisguised scorn stood out, but a note of schadenfreude toward Americans was present in some dose in many exchanges I had with Czechs about America’s economic problems.