Six months before Bernie Sanders and his new wife, Mary Jane O’Meara Sanders, spent a 10-day April honeymoon in the Soviet Union, my then-wife Maggie and I were honeymooning in Prague, which at the time was celebrating the 60th anniversary of the 1917 Soviet revolution.

The city was packed with Communist party delegates and officials, and it was awfully hard to find a hotel room. There were relatively few western tourists, the smell of soft coal was in the air, there was no English spoken (Maggie knew a little German), and there were few street lights compared to Western cities — a seriously different realm.

All to say there was nothing especially curious or bizarre about honeymooning in Eastern Bloc countries of the late ’80s. (We also visited East Germany.). Maggie and I wanted to honeymoon in a realm that was free of western corporate signage. I’m glad we did this. It was bracing, exotic.