CZECH REPUBLIC - Pretty Prague. Need to go back.

It took me four different trains to arrive in Prague from Zurich, and eight hours of sitting in old uncomfortable seats, watching the outside world go by. The last train I took from Frankfurt, Germany was decades old and well-battered, similar to the railway employees' personalities. I entered my little six-seat couchette and sat in the only seat left, seat number fifty-two. I was surrounded by huge old Czech women that constantly filled any void in their talking mouths with everything from a massive spread of food laid out all over the rest of the train car. I was so hungry, I hadn't had a scrap of nourishment for hours, and it was torture watching and hearing the sounds of delightful food being consumed by these ladies who could have spared their expanding bodies the abundant flavoured cream-cheese they smeared over pumpernickel bread. I think they saw me salivating because one of them grabbed an unwanted bag of dried up muffin parts and pushed it towards me, offering me the dregs of their feast which they surprisingly didn't want to devour. Good thing the muffins were protected in a layer of plastic or I'm sure they would have been absorbed by diffusion into the overeaters' torsos as fast as the rest of the train car buffet was going into their mouths.

As we were getting closer to the end of my train travel I was getting a little nervous about which stop was Prague main station, since the announcements over the train PA were in Czech. I asked the woman in the seat across from me, who wasn't part of the feeding frenzy and wasn't mistakenly hauled into an insatiable chewing mouth, if she knew if Prague was our next stop, hoping she would understand my English. To my relief she replied with an Australian accent, and said she didn't know where the hell we were either. It was 8:30pm and it was quite dark and gloomy outside the main station in an unfamiliar city in which I hadn't yet booked any accommodation for. I decided to follow the Aussie lass to where she was staying - not in a lurking-in-the-shadows, drooling-psycho-stalker way, but together, walking through the uncertain streets and precarious park where the drunken old down-and-outs lived on benches surrounded by discarded wine bottles and liquid human waste.

Melinda got us lost at first but we eventually found our way to the cavernous empty hostel and into one of the dorm rooms. This place was like a cold neglected prison, complete with non-English speaking prison guards, who would come into our room at nine in the morning and kick us out so they could clean our cells. Hungover or not, we had to be out on the streets by nine. The restroom and shower facilities were co-ed and to Melinda's dismay the shower stall doors were translucent. I was worried about the numbers of women they'd have to resuscitate after I had violated the toilet. After Melinda had her shower, I told her I couldn't see that much of her naked wet body through the glass except for darker bits, like nipples and public hair, but I could see everything quite clearly when I climbed up and looked over the side of the stall and on the multi-angle internet video broadcast being secretly taken with the hidden pinhole cameras in the ceiling and flooring. Melinda just looked at me and nervously laughed, hoping I was joking.

The two of us and our other cell-mate... uhh, I forget his name, went for food late that night and a few beers at a local bar. When we entered the bar I noticed how everyone looked weathered, hard and tough, and lacked joyous welcoming smiles on their faces. The old haggard female bartender looked like she had worked there since birth, and had been involved in too many baseball bat bar brawls. I was scared of her, and the rest of the motley crowd in the place. I wasn't about to be an obnoxious drunk in this fine establishment - I was sure I'd have had to collect my head from the street after the repulsive bar wench sliced it off with a broken beer bottle and tossed it out the filth-crusted window if I misbehaved in any way. We drank quickly and roamed back to our room. At about three in the morning, I was awakened by a small Italian fellow asking me to see my bed ticket. Apparently, the hostel over-sold our room and the unlucky chap shaking me awake came back to the room too late. He woke up the whole room, but no one was about to give up their bed at three in the morning - we all had valid tickets and it was too late to care. We're not sure what happened to him.

Touring Prague was very pleasant. The weather was amazing, the buildings were magnificent, and the Sex Machines Museum and Torture Museum were only a short stroll from each other! The most interesting of the exhibits in the sex museum were the large antique mechanical masturbatory appliances fitted with wooden dildos. They were large machines that you pedal like a bike. Lots of painful looking anti-self-gratification tools, ancient chastity belts, and plenty of patent illustrations of insane items that were probably never allowed to be manufactured filled the three floors. In the Torture museum, it was pretty much the same. About sixty interesting ways to kill, maim, mutilate, cause misery, suffering, disfigurement, all the things that make a party.

My American buddy, Chandler, with whom I almost drank myself to death in Brisbane Australia, was somewhere in Prague and I eventually found him hanging around the train station jumping on and off the trams without buying tickets. We reminisced for thirty-eight minutes and then went to a movie. Chandler told me that he hosts Pub crawls on Wednesdays and Thursday nights - great, just when I trying to cut back on the boozing, my friend in Prague is in charge of thirty or so unruly young people bent on killing themselves with alcohol, and today was Wednesday. I went back to my hostel for some sleep before the fracas, and then met up with Melinda, Jenn, and ... damn, I forget another name ... who were also residents of my room. I suddenly had ten people following me out to the Pub Crawl, five Aussies, one Kiwi, two lads from England, and two Canadians. I was the pied piper leading the party people from their pied-à-terre, to the place to get pie-eyed, hoping it wasn't going to end up as a pie in the sky.

As the night went on, thirty of us were staggering in the streets, from one pub to the next, riding trams without paying, being crazy and clamorous and balancing our beverages in plastic cups. Dancing, yelling, drinking - we were definitely an obnoxious bunch of young tourists.

In the morning, while we were trying to get our well-earned sleep, a ranting old biddy came in without knocking or practicing any type of politeness whatsoever. We had to vacate. The hostel decided they weren't going to be a hostel any longer and were changing back to university housing. We were all kicked out onto the street at nine in the morning with no other place to go and all our cumbersome bags from around the world sitting in piles while we tried to figure out where to go. We all just kind of quietly and slowly dispersed, going different directions in a daze. Jess and I went on a five-hour latte binge, sipping six slowly over the time we occupied the premium patio spaces. Fueled by the caffeine, our conversation became increasingly intense as the time ticked by, our personal secrets and desires leaking out during the hours of inactivity. We later burned off the energy by getting lost in the confusing streets of the city centre while searching for a travel agent. I finally said goodbye to another person from another country who could have been a good friend, if only she lived a little closer than fourteen thousand, seven hundred and sixty-five kilometres away in New Zealand.

I decided to buy an overnight ticket for my five and a half hour train ride to Bratislava, since there was no available hostels to lay my weary body. I was going into a sleeper car! How exciting, I haven't had this experience yet! My train was leaving at midnight - I had no where to go and it was only eight. I thought I'd go to the train station and do some internet stuff, or eat, or look at Czech girly magazines while I waited. The Internet place was closed, there was nothing decent to eat, and the porn mags were too difficult to examine in a busy station. So I just sat on a cold marble step and watched the homeless people drink their cheap beers and get kicked out of the station over and over. Drunk toothless people with soiled trousers can be quite entertaining. Finally I walked up the two billion steps to platform number two and watched my train pull up in front of me. I found my sleeper and it wasn't really the kind of sleeper I thought a sleeper would be. It was a couchette that folded down to convert into a berth. 'How comfortable', I thought as I sunk my finger into the two-inch foam thing I was about to lay on. 'Wow, what unique shapes those brown stains on the dingy yellowing pillow make', I was also thinking. These old trains have so much character. The train ticket collector/checker came by, asked me for my ticket and told me to use the lock on the door, and secure it with the chain, and then we started rolling. I tried to sleep, but the ride was rough. I kept sliding from side to side banging against the back of the seat every time the train sped up or slowed down. A couple of hours into my journey I felt the urge to pee, so I unwrapped the chain, unbolted the door and fought my way to the toilet. I was bouncing off the walls in the little washroom - their was no handrails to secure myself, I had to hold out both arms against opposite walls and direct the urine stream with only luck. Then a loud pounding on the door startled me, and I said 'Hold on.' Louder pounding again seconds later while I was concentrating my unsupported aim made me mad and I said 'HOLD ON!' again. The third bout of pounding was interrupted by me irately sliding the door open, wanting to relieve myself on whoever's shoes waiting impatiently behind the door. I was confronted with a gun-toting customs officer using his beating baton as a door knocker and saying 'back to seat' with cold severity. "Shut up, stupid head", I wanted to say, "I had to go pee, I wasn't trying to evade the border police, I didn't even get to wash my hands". But I politely went back to my seat.



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