Prague

One of the best reasons to travel is to get a fresh perspective on one's own backyard. Here are reflections on a recent 10-day trip to London, Prague, Czechoslovakia, and Amsterdam, the Netherlands.Seminar in London. Things have changed. American businessmen used to be seen as gurus here. Now the attitude is, "By what rights do you Americans think you can tell us anything about management?" The fact is, Silicon Valley in California, Austin, Texas, Portland, Ore., and Raleigh-Durham, N.C., are defining the 21st century.

He was a refugee from Communist Czechoslovakia, a home builder in New Jersey and Ohio and, for two decades, chief economist for the National Association of Homebuilders.Now the entrepreneur has turned his attention to a labor of love: building homes in his native land."Obviously, I have an emotional attachment to the country," says 71-year-old Michael Sumichrast, who portrays himself as something of a missionary for capitalism. Along with his 26-year-old son, Martin, Mr. Sumichrast is plotting subdivisions in a dozen suburban areas around Prague.

PRAGUE, Czech Republic - Deep in the Klanovice forest just outside Prague in the heart of mushroom-mad Slavic Europe, Vaclav Halek stands above a small cluster of mushrooms, pen poised over a sheet of music paper. Within seconds he is scribbling musical notes, stopping only to chuckle delightedly, his hand waving in the air as if conducting an orchestra. Ten minutes later he has completed a musical score, one he insists he hears from the Tubaria hiemalis below. Half a mile along, it's the same again as Halek gently clears leaves from around his chosen specimen, stands back and calmly waits.

Prague. -- "Czechs have forgotten how to be responsible, to work hard, and to take risks," says Josefa N. in her soft way. She is retired, a widow, a yoga exercise enthusiast, and as of this month a suspicious founding member of the first Czech Association of University Women -- suspicious because the association's pledge of solidarity with the world's women smacks too much of the old Communist ideology for her taste."

PRAGUE -- With President Vaclav Havel convalescing from lung surgery that turned up a malignant tumor, Czechs are having to consider a future without the man who led them to democracy.They don't like what they see."There is no one to replace him, and nobody is even able to imagine anybody else," says Jiri Stransky, a friend of Havel's and head of the Czech chapter of PEN, the international authors' group."People know that he never was a liar, he never cheated them. He's always spoken quite openly and frankly with them, and that's enormously different from other politicians."

PRAGUE -- In a downtown assembly hall, a succession of clean-cut, confident men and women mount a podium to testify how their lives were changed by a wonderful discovery. "Friends, I feel born again," exults one spry, 60-ish former miner. But it's not the Lord that changed the miner's life. It's a California diet supplement, Herbalife. He brandishes "before" and "after" photos to rapturous applause from the largely blue-collar audience. By skipping two meals a day and taking Herbalife International Inc.'s vitamin pills and "high-energy" milkshakes, he claims, he shed 25 pounds in a year.

PRAGUE -- For many, working in close quarters with a parent might sow little more than ulcers or insanity. For Czech director Jan Sverak, collaboration with his father has borne much sweeter fruit: two Academy Award nominations."

BOSTON -- It seemed, at first, a simple if poignant tale: A little girl is saved from the Nazis when her parents flee occupied Czechoslovakia. Later she is saved from the Communists when her parents defect to the United States. The little girl grows up American; she is a great success. At age 59, she becomes the U.S. secretary of state.Suddenly it transpires that her family was Jewish, and that many of her relatives died in the Holocaust. ''All this was a major surprise for me,'' she says.

PRAGUE, Czech Republic -- Pete Sampras already had declared that he would be available for the Davis Cup semifinals in September.Sampras won't be needed. Nor will his fellow American Grand Slam title winners Andre Agassi, Michael Chang or Jim Courier, who, like Sampras, all chose to skip Easter weekend in Prague.That is because there will be no Davis Cup semifinal this year for the world's leading nation in men's tennis. Petr Korda, the skinny and streaky Czech left-hander, made sure of that yesterday in his home city, clinching a 3-2 victory for the Czech Republic with a resounding 7-6 (7-5)

PRAGUE, Czech Republic -- Eduard Krhutek shuffles through the pile of police reports on his desk and shakes his head in disgust."Before the revolution, we'd have maybe 40 or 50 reports a day," says the lieutenant colonel with the beleaguered Czech national police. "Now we've got more than 250."Four years after the revolutions, wall-bashing and democracy-building that brought an end to four decades of communism in Eastern Europe, the region's major cities often seem to have become rough-and-tumble battlegrounds for outlaws.