Abstract
In the second part of the memoirs (Cities), the author describes his studies at the Faculty of Science of the Charles University in Prague (1977-1982), the structure of courses and research of the time, life in student dormitories and recollections of normalisation-era Prague with its outer and inner life, dissidents, and urban legends, but also recollections of compulsory attendance of the military department of the university and the nature of army during this era. He describes his doctoral studies of parasitology at the Academy of Sciences in České Budějovice, from where he somewhat adventurously emigrated to Austria.
He goes on to describe the refugee camp, situation in the Viennese and generally West European community of Czech exiles, the general atmosphere of Vienna in the 1980s, his recollections of the Museum of Natural History, the Austrian Ministry of Agriculture, and the University of Vienna, places where he found employment. During the fall of the Communist regime in 1989, he was still in Vienna but soon returned to Prague, where he settled and joined the then new Department of Philosophy and History of Natural Sciences, which together with his friend, the biologist and philosopher Zdeněk Neubauer (1942-2016), he helped to establish.
Descriptions of the enthusiams and turbulences of the 1990s form the final part of the book, because the most recent two decades are still too close to us for adequate reflection.