Journeying Home - 9/23/2010

Hotel Savic - From where we begin our journey home

Out of the hotel at about 7:15 am, and despite the marathon trek last night for a restaurant that only periodically manifests itself in the physical realm, we felt up to hauling our luggage over the cobblestone streets to the train station. So we get there and see on the Departure screen our train number and destination but there is no platform where we were to load and it was about 20 minutes before the train was suppose to leave. Hmmmm, were we suppose to guess? Finally about 10 minutes before we were suppose to depart, the number 7 appeared, which, of course was the platforme the furthest away from where we are, so we all made a dash. I swear the Czech do some of this stuff just to amuse themselves with the frantic tourists. I got the same sense of this when I was trying to figure out how to say Thank you in Czech. I asked many people how to pronounce "Dekuji" and got all sorts of pronounciations so that everytime I pronounced the new version, the person to whom I'd be saying it would stare back at me blankly. I think it is a conspiracy among Czechs to have a little humour at the tourists' expense. Frankly, though, after seeing what they have to deal with in terms of the tourists, I can't blame them for this mildly sadistic method of amusiment, if it is in fact the case.

Yay!  Hear comes our seat!

Anyway, up to platform we go and now, being the savvy travellers that we are, we look for our car number, 27. So we trek on down, 24, 25, 26 . . . and it ends there. There are no more cars, no more numbers. Like the Wine Shop, we have phantom seats on a phantom car. ARE YOU SERIOUS? Rick, sensing an impending breakdown on my part asked that I watch the luggage and took off to find the conductor and ask what is going on with our tickets. As it turns out, they were planning on attaching another car and that they just hadn't gotten around to it yet. They finally did get around to attaching a car, car #27, and there, indeed, were our seats 63 and 65. So all-in-all no big deal, but just enough to get the heart racing. We got just a skoche too cocky and the travelling Gods had to remind us who is in charge. Travelling certainly keeps you wary and humble.

Goodbye Prague. I really do hope to return. I feel as though I've only just scraped the surface of experiencing this interesting, complex city and I hope we can spend a Christmas here when it is quieter. I sense much seathing beneath the surface of what we experienced. Next time we come, I plan to spend more time in advance boning up on the history, art, and literature of the area. Didn't get a chance to see the Jewish Quarter, explore the Cubist artwork, visit the museums of Kafka or Dvorak, but hopefully I will again someday.

My work table on the express train

We arrived at the Frankfurt Airport, after having transferred onto our last high-speed train of the journey and from their we took a shuttle to our airport, the sparsely accommodated Holiday Inn Express, which, apparently turns off the air conditioning at we later discovered.  We dumped our luggage and then shuttled back to the Frankfurt Airport to eat a Le Pain Quotidean (we ate there a couple of times when in Belguim) and then took another shuttle to the Steigenberger Hotel where we had arranged to meet up with Rick's former boss from Colorado, Steve, who happens to be in Frankfurt for business.  Sat and talked with Steve for a few hours over beer and wine.  Steve listened to our travel stories and asked lots of questions. Steve added to our tales funny stories of his own.  It was great to relive the memories so soon after the experience.  Thanks Steve for being so interested!  We took a cab back to our hotel and settled in for our final night in Europe.  Lot going through my head and I'll be posting some final thoughts after I've been given some time to mull them over during the flight home.