The following is an entry I wrote on my travel blog that I kept during my travels after I graduated from IU.
January 19, 2004
Czech it out!
(Please forgive any typo’s here … I§m at än internet cafe in Prague right now¨! this keyboard is all wierd… lots of crazy characters … the punctuation marks are all in different places, etc. +ěščž+ýížéšžú see?)
The following was written on a napkin in our train as we rolled across the German country side on the 17th:
My brother is crazy. Here I sit on a train after a late night, heading for Prague. I have with me my camera, my coat, a backpack (no suitcase, of course) with 3 shirts, socks, zero pairs of underwear, a GPS receiver that won’t work on the train, a book and my brother.
Thinking ahead to our eventual arrival in Prague, I ask him, “So, do you know how to get to our hostel from the train station?”
He just starts smiling. “That’s a ‘no’ then,” I say. I consider the situation more. “Do we have a map of Prague?”
“Oh crap! I left that at the apartment. We’ll find one when we get to the train station.” Of course, I don’t add that it will be at 10 o’clock at night in a strange city that neither of us have been to in which neither of us speak the language.
We have no plan. Only the excited assurances from everyone that ‘Prague is awesome!’ or ‘Prague is beautiful!’
So, armed only with our debit cards, a combined 10 Euros in cash, our backpacks, an insufficient amount of underwear, and no idea where we’re going, we’ll try to figure it out. … This should be awesome.
I have to say that traveling by train is one of the most chilled out and easy ways to travel. You can actually get a feeling for the countryside (Germany had lots of beautiful examples) and there’s a nice floating feeling from the train gently bobbing. However, once it got dark, this nice pleasant feeling began to erode as the realization that we were getting closer and had no clue what was going on began to take hold. At 6:50, I wrote the following on the same napkin:
Czech Republic, on train, with realization that we’re doomed.
LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT, Nathan Shipley
- Computers: Andrew
- Car: Emily
- Apartment: Millenium properties
- Deck of cards: Jeff (if not already dead too)
It’s just getting snowier… We’re careening towards Prague… We just realized that our ticket only takes us to a stop 3km outside of the center of the town. We’ll just hope that they don’t kick us off at the earlier stop.
That aside, we continue forward, as visions of muggings dance through our heads, with hopes the police are soon to be there.
I am now officially ‘rather nervous.’ I’d say we’re doing very little at the moment to “have a safe trip!” as so many people implored me to do before I left. I think Jeff put it all quite nicely and accurately when he said, “Its a good thing Nancy doesn’t know about this otherwise she’d shit.”
Well, we didn’t get kicked off the train early, got off the train and ventured out in to the cold. Remarkably, the first place we went to someone helpful who spoke English, sold us a cheap map, and told us that our hostel was only a 10 minute walk from the station! Incredible! Score one for the good guys. We didn’t even get mugged.
We easily made it to our hostel and everything has been just fine since. This city is amazingly beautiful. At every corner we turn, there is another building or sculpture that is old and intricate, different from every other thing we’ve seen and just beautiful. I love the city.