On Monday morning i got up bright and early (that’s actually not a contradiction here since the sun rises at 4) and attended my German class. Two hours later i was back in my apartment, furiously packing for my next big adventure. Thirty minutes after that i was at the train station waging war with the ticket machine. At first i went through the entire process until it asked me for my bahncard and i realized i had left it at my apartment. Then i had to start all the way at the beginning again and got as far as the part where you pay, when it wouldn’t accept my money. I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t taking my money, but as i was looking for different bills to try i ended up finding my bahncard. So i started back at the beginning again. When i got to the end though, it still would not take my money and i realized it was being stingy with the change. It would only accept near perfect change or a credit card, neither of which i possessed. At last, seriously annoyed, i went in to the ticket office to buy it from a person. Why didn’t i make this my first option? Because about half the time the tickets are cheaper when you buy them from a machine and i’m a stingy traveler. Thankfully i had also arrived at the train station really early.
After acquiring my ticket, i enjoyed an hour ride to Nuremberg, a five minute panicked search for the bus, and then a four hour bus ride next to a very cool Russian lady. The lady was having trouble getting the sim card out of her phone so she asked me to help. I did my best, but it was really stuck in there. She dropped one of the other pieces while she was working on it though and i was able to ask the guy behind us to pick it up for her in German. Of course this whole time she’s talking to me super fast in Czech and i’m just nodding along politely. I figure in Germany they always pick up when i don’t understand, so maybe she just feels like talking? Then she asks me a question, though, so i told her (in German i think) that i couldn’t understand. We then proceeded to have the great get-to-know-you conversation (a personal favorite of mine) in a combination of German and English. She was fluent in German since she had been working there, but she also spoke broken English. I am obviously the opposite, so i mostly spoke in German and she mostly spoke in English and in that way we were able to understand almost the entire conversation.
At last it was 6:00 and we were pulling into Prague! This was the first time i had left Germany since arriving in Europe and it was so cool to see signs in a language that i didn’t even understand a little bit. Czech is so different from anything i’ve ever studied and it was actually kind of refreshing to have absolutely zero clue what people were saying. I actually expend a lot of effort unintentionally when i’m around Germans because i know it a little too well to tune it out, but not well enough to really understand.
Anyway i had arrived at the Prague train station and it was time to find my friends. My friend Robyn is from Maryland and we lived together two summers ago on Summer Project with Campus Crusade for Christ in New Hampshire. A couple of weeks previously she had posted on her facebook that she was looking forward to her trip to Europe. Of course, being in Europe myself, i was curious as to which countries she would be visiting. A few facebook messages later and i was getting to stay with her family in Prague for three days and she and the friend she was traveling with would pick me up at the train station. (Needless to say i’m a huge fan of social media right now.)
Of course picking me up at the train station ended up being a lot harder in practice than theory. I realized when i got off the bus that i wasn’t 100% positive where we were meeting, but i remembered German train stations usually had a main info stand in the middle area that seemed like a logical meeting place. Of course these train station had no less than five info areas. Crap. So i starting cycling through them, figuring that Robyn and her friend knew where they wanted to meet me so if i walked around long enough i was bound to run into them eventually. I didn’t. I wandered that train station for about an hour wondering what my chances were of finding a hostel at this hour or whether it would be better just to sleep in the train station. I had my laptop with my so i started trying to get online in case Robyn got facebook messages to her phone (yeah i really miss my cellphone. Meeting up with people was so much easier back in the good ol’ days of texting…). It turns out Burger King had wifi, so i stood in line to get the password. Of course there were two Burger King networks and the one i had gotten the password to was also the one i was barely picking up a signal for.
The internet was a fail, so i ended up just walking down to what i decided was maybe the most likely spot to meet them (i had already spent maybe 20 minutes waiting there) and just chill there for the rest of the night. So i’m walking down the ramp, i turn the corner and there in the distance is a shinning yellow UMD t-shirt, a wonderful pink UMD baseball hat and in between the beautiful face of my friend Robyn screaming my name with the same sort of relief i felt.
The rest of the night was decidedly less stressful. We took the bus back to Robyn’s family’s apartment where her aunt fed us traditional Czech “pancakes”* which were kind of like hashbrowns… kind of. She also gave us Czech beer and we all had a glass of champagne to celebrate Robyn’s cousin’s completion of her law exams. Then we all hung out talking for awhile (in English yay!) and headed to bed.
*I’ve had Czech pancakes and i’ve had German pancakes and neither of them tasted anything like American pancakes. I guess if it’s flat and round and made in a pan it’s a pancake?
Barefoot in the Rain 