Within moments of landing in Czechoslovakia (as it was then still called) in the late spring of 1990, I could sense a country in hurried and dramatic transition yet keeping intact a quirky and ironic soul. The currency clerk at the Prague airport seemed befuddled about the correct exchange rate between US dollars and Czech crowns, and he gave me a tiered rate roughly averaging the market rate. An hour later, as I was checking in to my hotel, the same fellow appeared in the lobby, looking even more flustered. He had tracked me down because he needed a few hundred crowns back or would have to pay the difference out of his own pocket. A week later, as I was leaving the country, the same teller exchanged my crowns back into dollars, with a shy smile of recognition.