July 8-9, 2003

Getting to Prague was a study in contrasts, a meeting of extremes united like magnets of perfectly opposite poles.

On one side was my train from Amsterdam to Frankfurt, Germany. Sleek and contoured, each car had digital seat numbers with an indicator marking which had been sold and which were vacant. Inside, in addition to general seating, there were a couple compartments of six or eight seats, closed off by clear sliding doors. Food carts stocked with goodies motored through the aisles, powered by men and women in crisp uniforms and gleaming nametags. Seats were cushy. One car had an enormous bar.

I rode in one of the little closed-off compartments with four Korean students who spoke almost no English, but were extremely jovial traveling companions nonetheless. Through clumsy sign language we laughed about the oppressive heat in the cabin -- the one flaw: We left late, and the air-conditioning had broken, so we sat there roasting for a while -- and the one who spoke remedial English drew out of me that I'm from California and was headed to Prague. After that, we quietly shared snacks and napped. They hopped off the train in a small town outside Frankfurt, leaving me alone with my journal for the last forty minutes before we disembarked. At that point, on paper, I was still in Paris and heading to Bruges.

It's always difficult on a trip to juggle the present with the past. The desire to commit to paper every single thing you feel and see duels in perpetuity with the urge to actually be feeling and seeing things. This takes you a step further away from the marvels you meant to write down a mere day earlier, and the cycle repeats. I guess everyday life is a bit like that, too. All the minutiae you swear you'll never forget slowly become smaller and smaller until there's a point at which you can't go back, because if you do, you'll never quite catch up to yourself again. Inevitably, the journal entries fall by the wayside, taking shape on mental scraps you shuffle and file away until you have time to sit down and let them flow. For me, that was stopping for a cup of coffee or a Diet Coke and writing my postcards, or relaxing at the hostel for an hour with a beer before going out that night. Any quiet moment where it hits you that you could be scribbling, you seize. But as soon as you stand up, the past stays put and you're back to living -- which itself provides new fodder, if you can stop for a second and let it. That night on the train, it was just forty minutes, but with the silence and the pitch-black night obscuring any of the German scenery, it felt like an utterly private little oasis where I could gain some ground without missing a step anywhere else.

Compared with the modern comforts of the Frankfurt train, my ride to Prague was a dinosaur. Boxy and wee, it had a narrow corridor that ran alongside each compartment, which seated six. I didn't want to spend the cash on a sleeper car -- money better used on a nicer hostel, I reasoned -- so I just resolved to sit up and doze off, figuring the length of the ride and the lateness of the hour would take care of any discomfort or adrenalin that might otherwise keep me awake.

The cabin, as it turned out, barely fit the five of us who showed up; we fervently hoped No. 6 wouldn't show, and blessedly, that phantom never did. The faux-wood paneling resembled nothing so much as the side of an old-school Buick Wagoneer, and the window kept snapping shut the second the train hit full-speed, so we tied a backpack to it in order to weigh it down and hold it open. The maroon, furry seats were a decent size, but even sitting up, our knees grazed each other; when we reclined them, it was practically a violation.

Luckily, everyone rocked. There was a Dutch couple on the way to a wedding, a Korean student, and a girl from Seattle, Stacy, whose father ran a farm in Iowa and makes ten dollars a year doing it. She was married, twenty-one, and had been camping in the Pyranees with her uncle, and she was about the opposite of me: Far more outdoorsy and low-maintenance than I can hope to be even on my most laid-back days. It was nice -- she was very much herself.

We figured out a zig-zag system, wherein we each managed to secure a foot-resting spot on someone else's seat. We conferred a little about jobs, touched on everything from music to politics, and compared our educational cultures. The Dutch couple, versed in their language, German, French, English, and a trace of Spanish, were amazed at the relative ignorance of Americans when it came to speaking foreign tongues. Stacy and I explained that much of it has to do with the language's utility inside our borders -- Europe's much smaller, criss-crossing country lines is quicker and easier, and you can get practical experience with the language you're learning, whereas in the States, it's not quite as laid out for you like that. They accepted that answer, even as Stacy and I sheepishly admitted we were a bit ashamed of ourselves for only possessing a cursory knowledge of Spanish. As we chatted idly and dozed intermittently, we also laughed a lot, and even cringed as a unit when the passport inspector banged on the door to check our papers, and booted six people next door who'd had the wrong papers. We were in a remote part of Germany at 3 a.m., and it was pitch black: Not the place you want to get caught without paperwork. They yelled at the conductors and shook fists at Passport Control (a short, stocky woman with a perpetual frown and her towering, muscular male cohort), and threw around all kinds of cash until finally getting dragged onto the platform to sort it out at the ticket office. Which was closed, due to the lateness of the hour; my hand found my passports, hanging around my neck, and squeezed them gratefully. And I felt very lucky to have gotten thrown in with four other people with whom I was compatible, and who weren't getting lippy and belligerent with the powers that be.

We pulled into Prague at 8:30 a.m. A side note: A lot of these major cities, logically, have more than one train station (Prague has four: Praha Hlavni Nadrazi, Praha Holesovice, Praha Smichov, and Praha Masarykovo Nadrazi) and some trains stop at a few of them at a time. This, for me, always led to some level of panic when our appointed arrival time hadn't come, yet the sign outside said "Amsterdam," and I couldn't figure out which Amsterdam station it was (in that case, it was the airport station, and a friendly passenger alerted me that I had one more stop to go). Here, it was a very, VERY desolate-looking station on the outskirts of town, and in that second I couldn't recall whether I wanted Holesovice or Hlavni Nadrazi, and I had to frantically fish out my ticket. Scrambling and cursing and brow-furrowing ensued. If you get out at the wrong station, who knows when the next train's coming or how far you are from a Coca-Cola Light.

The Prague train station confused the hell out of me, I don't mind admitting. Like a lot of languages that use the occasional Cyrillic characters, there's not always a logic to how things look -- and when there is, reason flies out the window when it comes time to verbalize. There's no looking at a word and getting its gist, the way you can with French, Italian, or Spanish. It's a totally gist-free tongue, Czech is -- "Praha" is the most intuitive word they've got -- and so the signs hanging all over the train station weren�t much help in guiding me to the tram or the Metro. And although the city has -- largely unfortunately -- been greatly Westernized in the last ten years, English and English-speakers aren�t nearly so common there, so the train station was a test of my fraying, tired patience.

Once I finally found the Metro, the ticket machine didn't accept bills -- only Czech coins, which I didn't have yet -- and there was no visible ticket vendor. The Czech Metro, like those in most other cities I encountered, is a funny thing, in that it's essentially an honor-based system. You can get away with riding it and not having a ticket; all you have to do is get your blank ticket stamped by the validation machines, and it becomes invalid. If you don�t get it stamped, you can use it over and over again, but if a conductor catches you, you're thrown off and charged a heavy fine. Without knowing how frequently the conductors troll the trains, and not wanting to be an enemy of the state on my first day -- and also, let's face it, I'm one of those people that fears the repercussions enough to adhere to almost any rule -- I chose not to give up and cheat. (That would come later in the trip.)

I stood there feeling very helpless for a second as the desperate yen for a bed washed over me; my tactic was to stare at the walls in the hope that something ticket-shaped leapt out at me. Eventually, mercifully, it did, in the form of a gaggle of Japanese tourists clamoring toward a tiny, unmarked kiosk. Tickets! But she had no change, either -- an epidemic? -- so one by one she pointed all of us toward an even smaller, less distinguishable booth that blended right in with the wall. The woman trapped inside that chameleon luckily succeeded in selling us Metro tickets, and I lugged everything downstairs.

Because I'd had such luck with hostels, I picked one at random from the Lonely Planet book without actually booking it in advance. I plotted the Metro ride, hopped off at the right station, and undertook the fifteen-minute walk up and down cobbled hills to the Clown & Bard, so chosen for its stupid name and the promise of a bar inside. But when I got there, the excessively rude desk clerk turned me away, tossing me a free map and yawning that I could use their phone to make one call if I liked. As if it were prison.

By now, I was dirty and exhausted, and suddenly becoming shelterless didn't really improve my mood. I wanted to throttle him for being unkind and dismissive, but instead I hoofed it back to the Metro station, using that time to vent the string of creative obscenities that had been bubbling at the back of my throat. After my slog, I sat down on a bench at the station, found the Old Town Square location of a Traveler's Hostel that was part of a chain all around Prague, and figured I'd try my luck there. If they couldn't fit me, one of their other locations probably would.

Another walk. Another hike from the nearest station to the front door of the hostel. But the hot guy behind the counter had a bed for me, and that's all I really needed at that point. I gratefully took the key, deposited my stuff, changed my shirt, and chose to hit the streets to shake off the pains of the morning.

My mood was fairly foul. Not every introduction to a city can be a fairy-tale confluence of beautiful people, perfect weather, and a good hair day, but still I felt sad that my first moments in Prague were ones of total frustration and irritation, not to mention exhaustion, as the night train hadn't afforded me any real shut-eye. I needed to boost my spirits. Something had to inspire me. I realized even then that it seemed faintly ridiculous to let a vexing morning dampen my day. After all, I was in Europe. I wasn't sitting in traffic on the 405 or staring at the same piece of road day in and day out. I was Elsewhere, and after the events of my lovelife that year I'd been relishing that, so as I slogged up Dlouh� toward Old Town Square, I promised myself that by the end of the day I'd be smiling again.

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