moving back to DC

I think I would like to keep this blog going, although it obviously now has little to do with Prague. But I've tried keeping blogs before and I'm going to try it again, dammit!

I'm moving back down to DC in 4 days, and for the first time I'll be living off-campus, in a house one block away from the AU Tenley Campus and just a few more from the Tenleytown metro stop. Today I was browsing DC Blogs and came across this entry. To spare you the details, it's about a guy in Petworth escaping a possible-mugging situation, and the post inspired over 60+ comments about nighttime safety in the DC area.

Reading this gave me a HUGE reality check. In Prague, I never thought twice about safety. The city has very little violent crime, and the only crime you're really warned about is pickpocketing. I regularly made 10 or 15-minute walks home by myself in the middle of the night, anywhere from 10 pm to 4 am. There were a few occasions when I'd see a drunk guy stumbling around in front of me, or someone would start walking behind me about 30 feet away, and yes, I'd feel a little nervous. But the nervousness was mainly created by my own instincts as an American, and no one ever caused me any trouble in the four months that I lived there.

Another example of the difference is something that happened in Vienna. Anna and I were leaving a club by ourselves at around 2 am, and were having a hard time figuring out on our map how to get back to the hotel. A group of 4 or 5 drunk guys came around the corner and headed right for us. Of course my first thought was that they were going to hit on us, be creepy, follow us, whatever. But no. Instead, they asked us if we needed help with our map and pointed us in the right direction for our hotel. Then they moved on their way.

I can't imagine that happening in DC! Every time I've had someone approach me at nighttime it's been sketchy and freaked me out. The Tenleytown area is certainly safer than Columbia Heights or Petworth, and my house is quite close to the metro. But I still can't take 3-am-solo-strolls home any longer, and that is really sad. We say our country is the most civilized and progressive in the world, but a girl (or guy, as evidenced by that blog post) can't even feel safe walking home at night. There's something wrong with that.