At home I'm a snazzy snoozer, but on the road I'm one of those sunrise fun-guys. Up with the horizon and down for coffee while Sara slept. The coffee lady spoke no English, and her German was worse than mine. She smoked, her face lit up by electronic slot machines, and waited for the water to become coffee.
It kind of went like this:
"Ah, twin coffebeans, with many pleases."
Malken sucker?
"Ah, yes. Meelk and sooker."
How many sucker?
"Twins, ah, double sooker... sucker. Pleasure."
Where else are from?
"California"
Americas! I think Yugoslavischer.
"Ha ha."
I am Tarkish. Ankara. Pay two euro.
"Ah, Turkey. Ok. Oh... this is only single coffecup. I needquire twins."
Two sookers! I put already. Sookers I put in past. Pay two euro."
And so it was a morning of coffee and packing for the train to Prague. The ultimate goal was Ljubljana, but that's a 14-hour thing, so we decided to break it up with a quick overnight in Prague. Easy to get to and nice to see.
I'd really been striking out with my day-trip planning (Crooked Forest? Nope! Gorlitz? Nah, son! Devil's Bridge? Not on your life), so it was nice to get a "win."
Last little tik-tak around the stones of Hermannplatz and down down into the beast what drags you to the train station. We still had our unvalidated tickets from the scene of the Great Transportation Crime, so we used those.
When we changed from the U-Bahn to the S-Bahn, a few stops from the Hauptbahnhof, a loud dude started barking out commands.
We excitedly pulled out out tickets, thinking he was the validation inspector, and how thrilling to be validated on the day he was checking! But it was just some camp counselor wrangling his charges. Alas, we were legal this time and got no credit for it.
It's enough to drive you to a life of U-Bahncrime.
We got that Bonnie and Clyde feeling again aboard the train. After a little bit of delay (plenty of time for beet juice and iced coffee), we boarded unsure if the seats we'd chosen were legal for the class of ticket we had.
The thrill of it! Life on the lam!
The dude with the rolled-up sleeves and the friendly mustache scanned our tickets without comment. We were in compliance! How boring-yet-relaxing! We took our shoes off and tore through our books. Four hours of smooth reading time. Glory.
The view was unremarkable and passed in a sort of flickerbook of suburban content and pastoral haze. Naps.
I finished The Way of the World and tucked it away in the luggage rack for some lucky traveler to discover. It was very beautiful and I feel about it the same way I felt about that weirdo Polish travelogue I read a few trips ago. It felt sort of... private.
Pulled into Prague and I had an emotional moment seeing the benches outside the main station. 18 years ago, I was kicked out of this same station in the middle of the night. I had been sleeping on the floor, my head on my backpack, when I was kicked awake and tossed out. They had to delouse the place, so all the lice had to wait in the cold for a few hours.
I sat on these very benches, my hands between my thighs for warmth. Old men drank from a bottle in a paper bag. It was the first time in my life I had nowhere to go. Two, maybe three hours shivering on that bench. Waiting.
The bench looked exactly the same. I could feel the cold, hear the crinkle of the paper bag.
We got a message from our host, she was going to be two hours late, and I went into auto-hate mode and called her a hateful name. Sara didn't approve. She was also upset about the delay, but my cussin' didn't make it no better. We had a long talk about the power dynamics inherent in certain misogynist terms.
These are the Benches of Learning. On two visits to Prague, I have learned two lessons on them.
And then we had a Vietnamese sandwich surrounded by Bohemian bricks.
Dumped our stuff at the place when Inna, our host, showed. She told us she needed, still, to change the sheets on our bed. Three hours late AND the room wasn't clean? I had, here, an opportunity to cuss again... and I didn't! My lesson from the Bench of Experience had taken! Bless this magical life-changing place.
Out into the friscalating dusklight for a quick cobble around the fairy-play prop storage warehouse men call Praha. Marvelous Mucha-inspired facades and charming crystals on every corner.
Past darkling towers and astronomical clocks, where fateful hands indicate arcane symbols, and ever riverward to the Karlov Bridge.
Castles on hills! Roofs with Italian red tile! Lovers! Martyr-Statues! Laughter and earrings. Painters, guitarists! It's the ultimate image of "Europe" from the Western imagination.
Everything else has aspects of it, deeper versions of parts of it, but no place else has all of it at once.
Mission accomplished. If the plan was to break up the trip to Slovenia with a night in Prague... we'd maxed it out. Bought some weird fernets in a liquor store hid in the dark of a storefront and drank them down.
A starry-eyed little walk past giant shingles depicting enormous Trdlo, the edible crust-cups proggers eat ice cream out of.
Then a quick little plate of mushroom risotto, a Campari and soda and a Goode Nighte's Sleepe.
In the morning, a long, lengthy, bus ride loomed. But... not as long as it could have been. Oh, it could have been much longer. Believe me.
No comments:
Post a Comment