Wednesday’s first moments of consciousness are hard to pinpoint. As I recall, I awoke a few times that morning, and each time had the same moment of wondering why I was lying on my back (I’m almost exclusively a side-sleeper), fully-clothed, mouth dry as the Sahara, and each time I’d sink back into the mind’s deep darkness again. However many times this played out, when I finally came-to on a more permanent basis I had enough power trickling through my crusted brain to wonder at each of these things again, and what’s more, to try to recall how it was that I got to my bed to begin with.
I could remember, with a high level of fuzziness, my confused journey from the bar to the hostel: how I’d just started to succumb to despair, when I finally saw the Mad House sign suddenly pop up right in front of me. Google Maps had led me right, and I’d somehow followed its instructions more or less correctly, despite being at the point where I had to practically sound out the letters of the destination as I typed them in. Now as for how I got from the front door to my bed, that was and is a mystery. Two sets of keypads and a locked door lay between the street and the bed I woke up in. It’s comforting, I suppose, to see that I have some kind of baseline ability to return to safety, even with my wits away from me.
The price
I would happily have lain there well into the afternoon if I didn’t remember that, of course, this morning the Lost and Found office was open, with my bag inside it. I literally had to do a little countdown in my head (a willpower trick I’ve done since I was small, that I often don’t use since it’s so effective), groaning as I pulled myself upright. I felt embarassed about the volume of that noise for half a second before I remembered that everyone else was definitely not waking up for a few hours yet (it was about 10AM).
On the way down the stairs I started thinking that I should surely have some kind of headache, and I paused for a moment in the middle of the steps, listening to my own thoughts, and finding the inane chatter that I expected - I was still tipsy, just. I got breakfast and coffee into me as fast as I could and set out for the bag, wanting to retrieve it and get back to my bed before the last drops of alcohol left my system and I had to weather the consequences of my actions.
Getting the bag was actually very easy, it was visible behind the desk from the moment I entered the building, and it cost me 3CZK for the storage, which is about 10 pence. By the time I had it back in my room the headache was beginning, but instead of lying down I figured I should probably go get more food, more water, and some painkillers.
A zombie in Prague
If, at say 13:00, on Wednesday the 3rd of September, you had been in Prague, and travelling through it you had strolled through the square beside the National Theatre, and observed the people sitting on the benches in the shade, you would have seen among them a young man, sunglasses firmly on his face, hunched like a wilting flower over a deli-sandwhich, chewing it with pained slowness between swigs from his bottle. If you squinted really hard you could even have made out a small, faint cloud of self-pity floating about a metre above his head.
It is an obvious shame that my only lengthy excursion into the city took place while my head felt like it had been used as a gong. I had managed to walk out across the Charles’ bridge the day before, which I think I forgot to mention in that day’s post (I am too lazy to reread my own blog). Wednesday’s travels took me to the Astronomical Clock, the aforementioned National Theatre (I am a sucker for anything even adjacent to Brutalism), and the little islet in the middle of the river that the hostel staff referred to as “Rat Island”, for the little beaver-like creatures that live on its shores.
I managed to get some good pictures, both distracting and motivating myself with trying to get all fancy with angles and shadow. At least, they looked good through the viewer - it’s the little point-and-shoot Kodak that I got from my brother’s room after he left for Canada early in the summer. I’d previously tried to make an anologue record of my summer, but the first attempt ended when a friend fooled around with it and ended up somehow jamming the film so badly it was unusable. We’ll see how wise an investment this second roll was when I get these developed.
Party hardly
Do you remember how I ended the last post, saying that I would not be on the pub crawl the night after.
Well.
Hear me out hear me out - I had a splendid nap after my little walking tour, and awoke feeling almost totally cured. Furthermore, I realized I didn’t have much else to be doing, except walking around at night (which seemed ill-advised), or just reading until bed (tempting, but on my last night in Prague this seemed like a waste). Further-furthermore, at dinner I was peer-pressured into it. So.
But my days did it blow. Like my word. Despite the mistakes I’d made the previous evening, the evening’s activities - bowling and karaoke - are objectively fun. The first gave a good opportunity to chat to people between bowls, the second had good music and the (unreached) potential to inflict my music taste upon an entire bar full of people.
The bar crawl had naught but drinking to offer me.
Well that’s not entirely true - the first bar had beer pong. It was a converted cellar with an open bar, the caveat being that the drinks were not very good at all. The music was too loud to have a conversation, it was weirdly hot for being underground, and I very quickly realized that if you weren’t drinking hard there was not much to do at all. I did manage to have a conversation, while practically shouting, with Connor, from California - he was one of the Americans who’s names I’d forgotten before. He was also studying Computer Science (as a matter of fact quite a few people I’ve spoken to are).
The second bar was much like the first, except no more free drinks, further underground, and somehow even warmer. My train the next day was 10:30. I made my goodbyes and left.