Saturday
B had set the alarm for 7 am. I wanted some extra sleep so I persuaded her not to get up just yet. Instead she came over to my bed and we cuddled. Eventually, half an hour later, we both got up out of bed. B packed while I showered. For breakfast we ate the fruit I had bought last night, after which we went downstairs to check out and say farewell to our wonderful hotel with its pleasant, subdued interiors and an ice vending machine on each floor (– the machine on our floor was broken so I usually took the staff lift one floor up to get my cupful of ice cubes). At the reception desk, we were offered a free ride to the airport in the hotel mini-van with Mario, one of the Hotel staff, which we gratefully accepted.
It was a short drive to the airport. We checked in and went to stand in a long line for the security control, after which we got to sit in the departures lounge. It was the usual mind numbing wait for our gate to be called. I used the time to write my journal and look at pretty girls walking by. I tried to read The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis but I just wasn’t getting into it; it was much harder to summon up enthusiasm for the book now that we were leaving Lisbon.
Our flight was delayed by half an hour and it was a real relief to finally get to board. The seats on the plane were plush grey leather, and during the flight little LCD displays flipped down from the overhead compartments to track the progress of our flight across a map of Europe, as well to show Safety First, the old silent Harold Lloyd short that ends with the iconic scene of him hanging off a clock tower. All of which certainly made a pleasant change from the last couple of years of flying Ryanair. On the other hand, the food they served us was dire. B had a couple of spoonfuls of her dessert, which was a chalky approximation of chocolate mouse, and fed me her cheese and crackers.
We arrived at Prague desperate to make our connecting coach at 5:35, which thanks to our plane’s late arrival we were on the verge of missing. So we rushed through the airport – and since we’d travelled within the Schengen area there was no passport control, a novelty for me – and eventually came to a standstill at the baggage reclaim. I sat and stared glumly at the baggage carousel, feeling resentment at its having halted our momentum, and waited for our luggage to make an appearance. B went away to fetch a trolley and to ask for directions.
Once we’d loaded up our baggage on the trolley the race was back on again – and we literally ran through the adjoining terminal buildings trying to get to the pick up point for the coach – for which we had only a few minutes left to spare. I find it more than a little surprising that in our panicked gallop – with me pushing the trolley ahead of me and B chasing up behind, following in my wake – in all our hurry and our rush, that we didn’t come to mischief on the polished floor. We got outside, to the parking lot, but the coach was nowhere to be seen — so thinking we’d missed it, B and I boarded another bus that would take us near to the Prague Florence bus terminal, from where we hoped we could take our connecting coach to Brno.
But just as this bus was pulling out, we spotted a large mustard yellow Student Agency coach pulling into the airport parking lot – this was our coach, the same one that had merited all that pointless haste and breathlessness just a few moments earlier, arriving 10 minutes later than it meant to (– and neither was this to be the last of our difficulties with the Czech Student Agency bus company and their annoying habit of not arriving or departing to schedule). The driver of the bus we’d boarded graciously stopped the bus and allowed us to get off to catch our coach.
As we drove through the Czech countryside I commented on how beautiful a day it was, and how much hotter than I’d been expecting for this part of the world. According to B this was no fluke: she explained that summers in central Europe were often this hot and sunny. Well, I had to bow to her superior knowledge since I’d never visited the region before. Of course the very next day, the skies began to cloud over and the rain to fall and the climate became rather more temperate and more familiar to me. We were not to have another such glorious cloud-free day during the rest of our trip, and we spent most of this one being driven around in a coach.
After a short ride that took us into Prague, the coach dropped us off at the Prague Florence bus terminal, a shabby, grey, concrete edifice, from which we awaited our connecting coach to Brno. The coach ride into the centre of Prague itself had had quite an impact on me; I was dazzled by the grandeur of the city: the monumental scale of its buildings, and the opulence of its streets and its piazzas. You were under no doubt but that you’d arrived somewhere once auspicious, a former seat of great wealth and power — and which had managed to hold onto something of the majesty of its glory days. I was to somewhat attenuate my high opinion of Prague on my following visit, but that was still about a week away.
While we waited, I bought a baguette from a sandwich bar in the bus station — that was to be my main source of nourishment for the day. We boarded our Student Agency coach at 7pm, and took two seats right at the front. As we got going a tall blonde stewardess passed through the bus offering us magazines in Czech, and headphones to listen to the film they were showing on the in-coach TV monitor, some dreary 90s flick starring Ethan Hawke and Angelina Jolie. The bus juddered rhythmically over the bumpy, pockmarked, highway, as we drove through an enchanted fairytale landscape of tall, gloomy Bohemian forest silhouetted against a luminous grey dusk.
After the movie they showed an episode of Friends subtitled in Czech; it was as comforting as a warm bowl of ever so slightly lumpy porridge. We arrived at Brno at around about 10pm. Earlier on, back when we had a wifi connection, B had been on Google maps and noted down some directions on a piece of paper. This was all we had to go on to find our hotel. I was delegated the arduous task of wheeling around both pieces of heavy luggage – my trolley suitcase with her holdall perched on top of it – as B ran on ahead, first in one direction, then the other, trying to figure out the location of the Hotel Kounicova. It didn’t take too long for me to reach frustration point with my unwieldy burden and to start complaining after her, at which point she also got upset. It had been a long day, one in which we’d covered most of the breadth of mainland Europe. We were both exhausted after our journey and just wanted to turn in for the night: so it was understandable if tempers were beginning to fray ever so slightly.
We got on a tram at B’s suggestion; the interior was bright and well lit after the darkness of the streets. Unfortunately neither the tram driver, nor most of the passengers seemed to know enough English to give us directions – though eventually, working our way down the tram, we found one who did: a bespectacled young man who was able to tell us we’d overshot our destination by two stops. So we got off at the next stop and started walking back in the direction we’d come. B asked directions from a few middle aged ladies who happened to be wandering around at night, but none of them spoke English (it seemed as if they only let the older ladies wander around at night, the streets were mostly full of men and pretty Czech girls during the day).
I found it strange to be in a place where so few people seemed to have even a rudimentary grasp of English. I wasn’t used to it, although to be honest my experience of mainland Europe up till then had been limited to more Anglophone-friendly countries like Germany, Italy and Portugal. In a way I guess it was reassuring: it meant that, even here in the heart of central Europe, there were cultural strongholds where the locals had managed to hold out against this worldwide imperative for everyone to learn English and partake of a common globalised monoculture to which so many other parts of the world have succumbed – as I later found out had Prague itself. Regardless, we were still utterly lost, with little chance of guidance from the locals and with rapidly dwindling patience.
B’s formidable linguistic skills also failed her here: Italian is her native tongue, but she’s fluent in English, German, and French, able to get by in Spanish and indeed practically any other Romance language, as well as most Germanic languages – and to top it all off she has a doctorate in Linguistics. But on the other hand, she had never studied a Slavic language before and as it turned out was as lost as I was – which worried me a little because I’d gotten used to her being my authority in all things linguistic. The words on the street signs and the billboards, the store fronts and the bars, all seemed so exotic and unfamiliar, with their multiple diacritics and extended sequences of consonants: there was very little chance of puzzling them out using clues from English or the little French I’d learned at school, the way I’d been able to do the first time I’d visited Germany or Italy.
Eventually we found a portly lady with an excitable little dog who had enough English (the lady not the dog that is) to direct us towards our destination. We ended up traversing a long dark street called Kounicova, and hoping and praying that the hotel of the same name was somewhere nearby. It felt like we had been walking for hours, but in reality it was probably just over 45 minutes; my shirt was completely soaked in sweat, and my back, always the first thing to give out during any kind of prolonged physical exertion, had been troubling me for a while. B insisted, nay demanded, to relieve me of luggage hauling duties for what we both hoped was the final stretch of our journey – and although it wasn’t the most gallant of behaviour on my part, I let her do it.
So, this time I went on ahead while B struggled to bring up the rear. The street was deserted, but I found a bar that was open, and went in and asked the pretty bargirl for directions to the Hotel Kounicova; it turned out that it was right next door. To be fair to us, the hotel was very easy to miss, given that from the outside at least there was nothing to distinguish it from any of the other apartment blocks in the vicinity.
We went into the reception. The receptionist was a rather dour and careworn middle aged blonde who’d probably been once very pretty, about 30 or so years ago, but time had not been too kind in the interim. She was a woman of few words and most of them in Czech and I could only speak to her in English, but in the end I think we understood each other. I filled out a few forms and she told me I had to pay for the room up front. I went back out and found a nearby ATM and withdrew 4000 Czech crowns. When I came back the logician Alexander Rabinovich was standing at the reception desk checking himself in.
We took possession of our room which was on the third floor. It was a spartan two bed student dorm type affair with a a window that looked down onto the courtyard behind the hotel; what little furniture was in the room, two tables and chairs and some shelves, looked worn and shabby. We shared a bathroom with the room next door which was a cause of some consternation for B. But she was tired enough to save her complaints for some other time.
I hadn’t had anything to eat since that baguette in Prague so I went down to the bar and had a Starobrno and a big bag of potato crisps or `chips‘, as the name on the front of the pack said, there was no other food to be had.
