Travel.

Alissa had to be back to Brno before me for teaching so I had the house to myself for a few days and got to take the train back alone. Following the pattern of my travels here so far (wonderfully easy or nails-on-chalkboard painful) it was a long day. I missed my 7am train so closely that I got to watch it pull out of the station. I took my ticket to the window and explained my situation, asking for the next train to Brno, which I thought was @ 11:45. The woman told me I was going to take a circuitous route to Wratslaw (Poland), Hranice (Czech Republic), and then on to Brno, leaving in half an hour. Great! I said. So I get on the train, the conductor checks my ticket (which is a handwritten form, instead of the usual machine one) and tries to ask me what I'm doing on this train, which was eventually headed to Berlin. I told him I was getting off earlier and which stops I was taking after that, but he looked very concerned and told me that I needed to get out at Katovice and take the Polonia train from platform 1. We went round for a couple minutes, but I finally got the message.

So I get out and wait for the train. When it arrives I talk to their conductor and ask (sort of) if this is the train to Polonia. He gives me the “you foreign idiot” look with surprise and says no. (I find out later that there's an express train named Polonia, just like the town.) It's about quarter to 10 now. So I go to the ticket office, wait in line for a few minutes, jockeying with all the Poles who line up sideways, and get told to go downstairs to the other office (nothing is labeled in English). I do the same thing, waiting twenty minutes, and get told to go to the other window. I do and finally get a ticket agent who speaks some English, but I'm at the wrong window again. So I wait a few minutes in the other line, and kowtowing with my “I don't know any Polish, do you speak English?” in terrible Czech for the fourth time that morning I get to tell her with hand signals and a map what happened. She gives me the “idiot foreigner” look with a little bit of pity and eventually makes me understand that the next train to Brno goes through Ostrava and doesn't get there until 2:30. Great. So I wait for 4 hours, and at the appointed time on the right platform a train pulls in. There's no conductor so I end up pointing at the train and quizzing the passengers “Wien Sudbahnhof?” (Vienna – Main Station?). A kind Austrian family that's debarking says no that's where they're going. So we wait, and wait some more. The platform is filling up and people are beginning to look antsy. There's some announcements in Polish and one of the Austrians is able to pick 'late' out of it. There's some other Americans on the platform, and I eventually overhear a German sounding nun taking pity on them saying that the train has been delayed an hour. Great. So I wind up hanging out with Pete and Greg and Lynn, who'd each graduated just graduated from college. We all compared notes and talked about where we'd been around here. (Her – Southern Czech bike trip, Prague, and Kraków. The boys – Northern Czech Republic, Prague, Germany, Kraków, heading back to Czech Republic.) Was nice to hang out with some people my own age for a while. More hustle on the platform with 15 minutes to go, we gotta move to another one. When the train still hasn't shown up at the appointed hour, there's another announcement and it's back to the first platform. We keep waiting. A train pulls up under a ticker that says it's bound for a Polish town, but everyone jumps on so we Americans follow suit and are rewarded with our own compartment, something of a coup.

Pete and Greg are both from Baltimore and we know lots of places in common from my time at American. Lynn is from New York, went to Ann Arbor for dance, and Greg is a stage tech, so they actually knew some people and institutions too. We whiled a couple hours away playing cards and killing the last of a bottle of absinthe the boys had. Much merriment and relaxation. Lynn admitted that she doesn't trust herself or Europe enough to drink when traveling alone so she'd been sober for a month. The boys, in comparison, had been going through their digital cameras and finding pictures that neither one of them remembered taking. Unfortunately my stop was first and I had to jump off in a hurry.

My phone had enough juice for the arrive at midday trip I'd planned, but by 5:30 when I got to Ostrava it had totally run out and I had to sneak behind the soda machines to recharge and answer the 'Where the heck are you?' texts from Denis and Alissa. Had a minor heart attack when I looked at the non-daylight savings clock, telling me I'd have to wait until 8:30 for my next train, but fortunately the computerized signboard had the correct time and I only had to wait an hour for my train, which was quiet, unless you count the guy who came by four times asking for cigarettes. Looked like he stepped out of the '80's on Whidbey Island. Wrinkles acid washed into his jeans, a denim jacket, missing at least one tooth, greasy blond hair, and a weatherbeaten tan. But my train got there at 9, 14 hours on the road later, and Alissa met me to take the bag of her stuff I'd brought down. I went to the Boland Half-way House for English Speakers in Brno, proprietor Denis J. Smith. We went out for a couple drinks at Charlie's Hat (Chaplin, that is) and I crashed for a good 12 hours.