Urban Westling

“I have been to Czechoslovakia, well Prague, maybe fifteen times. But travelling with material maybe half a dozen times.” “We had this hidden compartment in the petrol tank and maybe something else. And sometimes we had it just in a bag. I remember at one occasion giving out a pack of Marlboro when we were passing the border. To make it a little quicker. I have one memory of buying a simple duplicating machine in Stockholm. The old type that used only blue colour. The copies were just in blue. It was a rather small machine and you just rolled it by hand. But I had to dismantle it in order to make it fit. And I had a bad feeling. Maybe they never could put it together again? Because we didn´t have any manual and there were lots of small parts. I never heard what happened to that.”

“It was very different. I can remember things, when visiting Prague, like the smell of coal in winter. We didn´t have that in Stockholm. I didn´t even understand what it was, first. But obviously, it was coal. It was rather grey, the whole scene. Not that easy to find department stores. There was I think one department store at Václavské náměstí. Behind the curtain. You had to know it was there. There was no big shopping window, you had to go behind the curtains to go inside this place. I remember these small sandwiches that I used to eat. Very nice small sandwiches, very cheap, that you could buy in bakeries. You could see them in shop windows. I did so because the menus were not in English, it was difficult to order anything. So I used to eat these things, these sandwiches. I remember also when we stayed at this hotel, 1979, when we met the new spokespeople of Charta, we stayed at this hotel called Na Moráni, it was rather a simple hotel and outside the rooms, we saw they collected the old soaps so we understood they will use them to make new soap. Which was a little odd, but probably the way it was.”