Up and out
I woke up with a runny nose and a vague sort of sadness. The runny nose was a touch of some kind of cold, that would hang around for most of the day (or the second day of a hangover? Surely not…); the sadness was that it was time to leave Prague, and through a combination of bad luck and ill judgement I’d wasted a lot of the time I’d had there. I hadn’t read as much as I’d planned, hadn’t seen as much as I should, hadn’t had as good a time as I’d hoped. I’d met more people than I’d expected to, sure, and they’d all been friendly. But none of these connections had been deep, and most fellow travellers had had this peculiar quality behind their friendliness, this lack of solidity, almost. So many introductions and conversations and cultural comparisons, and I felt like I’d managed to meet only about two actual, real people. Lying in my bunk, light snoring echoing all about me, and the ambience of a busy street floating in through the window, feeling lonely and tired.
… I am not trying to say that my time in Prague wasn’t good, or that here I succumbed to despair. I did enjoy it, and am glad of the experience, and for the connections I did manage to make it was well worth it. I’m only trying to show that I was headed to Berlin with my heart set on a different sort of experience, one with more of the quiet reflection I’d been hoping to gain from my time away, and with more time spent meeting people with more on their minds than beer and rocking bunk-beds.
The Ghost of Caleb Past
Luckily I was shaken out of my melancholy, and by none other than the my own past self, who had a gift for me. I found it over breakfast - like the Responsible Travelling Adult that I was, I loaded up the PDF ticket for my train, which left Prague Main Station at 10:30. Once it appeared on my screen I lazily flicked through its tiny print, looking in case my platform was already on it. It wasn’t, but what I did see made me feel like considerably less of the Responsible Travelling Adult that I had been just a moment earlier: 11.09.25.
Surely this was not the date it appeared to be. It was - there it was further down below, and in bold up in the top-right. Well then surely it was the expiration date, not the date of departure - nope. It was the only date on the entire ticket, and look there, it was accompanied by a 1030 each time.
Oh no.
And lo, a second ticket was bought, at twice the price of the first, and four hours later. Those four hours were spent reading, though, making up for lost time I suppose. I’d brought The Left Hand of Darkness with me, sort of on a whim - it had met my eye literally as I left my room on Cromwell Road, so it came along with me. I’m very glad it did though, not only because Le Guin is probably my favourite author, but because 15-year-old Caleb had really not understood a lot of it when he first read it. The start of the novel, if you’re not familiar with it, throws you in the deep end in terms of world-building, terminology, and the culture of the fictional planet it takes place on, as well as having some very dense layers of motivation between players in a large political game, already in full motion as it begins. Rather than try to get all this I think I just skimmed the dense parts and hoped it would make sense later, but this time (and time I had a lot of) I managed to understand the moving parts as they happened, and was just in awe of how many ideas were swimming around in the same book. The thoughts around gender I’d grasped a little bit the first time, as these were obvious and are what most references to the book will mention, but the musings on identity, patriotism, changing cultures… I’d love to read it a third time, maybe even dedicate some post to it in here. But you should go read it first.
Moving, just keep moving
What more to say, really, other than that the train was delayed, four hours to Berlin, and very warm. Not much. But this time, on arrival, I did myself proud and remembered my bag. Finding the hostel was pretty easy too.
I’ll write more about the hostel (the Sunflower) in tomorrow’s post - right now one of my room-mates is trying to sleep, and my typing probably isn’t helping. Auf Wiedersehen.