prague 1

So today has been a good, long, relaxing day, once again no sleep the night before, don’t want to risk missing trains or oversleeping. In my short time in Prague, I needed to figure out what to make of my schedule because with the eurrail and not extending the trip to Monday because of feedback session, Im left with 2 travel days and 2 exploratory days. Fortunately though I hear the city is not that big but my schedule of each day is far from figured out yet, I am going to try to wake up early tomorrow morning and maximize the sunlight because since we turned the clocks back last weekend, sunset is crazy early at like 4/5pm, and seeing things in the dark is really  not that much fun. There is, like in Budapest, a free guided tour tomorrow, but it’s right smack in the middle of the day, I had a lot of fun doing my own tour of Vienna courtesy of Frommers but maybe it wouldn’t hurt to join a group, it is from 11am-2/3pm, and kabbalat Shabbat is at 7 at the Spanish synagogue so there is possibly time to another self-guided frommers walking tour after the guided tour. Idk, we’ll see. Anyway, today has been relatively calm, only 3 trains, including the 1 hour or so dutch train to catch the international train so, God willing, only 2 long trains today, neither more than 6 hours, hopefully be into Prague before 10. This time because Prague isn’t nearly as far away as Budapest I was afforded the luxury of taking a later train, instead of 7:17, I took 8:20, but OEBB Austria site wanted me to take 8:35 to Amersfoort giving me 2 (TWO!) minutes to switch  from platform 2 to 1 (though if I recall they may actually be the same platform) as the international train to Berlin would be leaving at 9:37, but I was not going to take any chances given the shit that happened to me in Frankfurt not even 3-4 weeks earlier so I found a train from Rotterdam to Amersfoort about 15 minutes earlier and it worked out great with plenty of time, even came in on the same track the Berlin train would come on, mostly on-time too. Had reserved a seat, but decided not to make a fuss and took one behind so I could see through the whole window. You see because I bought the eurrail pass it’s like I might as well use the damn thing even though these cities I have been going to are all like 12+ hours away, have resolved to just take a plane to Barcelona, can’t wait to actually use a language I know how to speak rather than random words and phrases I pick up to get by in minimal communication (German, Hungarian, and now Czech, on top of the everyday phrases in Dutch, OI!). On the train from Amersfoort to Berlin I was initially in my own seat and thought I had found an electrical outlet but it turned out no, that was not for computers for some reason so I seceded. There was a lady in the seat across the aisle from me who was kicked out of her seat but some very rude (sounded like American by the way she spoke English) saying “I reserved this seat nah nah nah” so the lady moved next to me, for the first few hours I kept dozing off and looking out the window most of the time for the first hour or so, then I decided to take a walk down the corridor of the train in an attempt to find a food car, no such luck but I did notice that virtually all of the other cars had electrical outlets at the seats!! I couldn’t understand why my car didn’t, but oh well. After I returned to my seat, I proceeded to talk to, or more like she proceeded to talk to me for the ensuing 2 hours. There were hardly any pauses with which to respond with my own thoughts insights, she might as well have told …..holy shit, I just looked outside and thought we were in a tunnel but it turns out that 5:04pm a little outside of Berlin it is actually pitch black dark outside L. So sad fucking winter coming already, this weekend, then next I will stick around Rotterdam because we may need to work on the paper for Corp Gov but it probably wont be that much because we have absolutely nothing else going on during the week either, so maybe more Amsterdam, or Volendam, or Den Haag or Haarlem, keeping it local. Or use the Rotterdam pas to go to a museum. It really is a bit annoying not to have anyone to travel with  but I guess with how stressful planning Oktoberfest turned out to be (despite us all having an awesome time) people became reluctant to try to plan big group things, like we had the week before with the bike excursion and ferry trip to Kinderdijk, so from then on out it was just the small groups, and it seems that pretty much everyone came with 1 or 2 others that they stuck with…Nat, Adrian, and Noah;  Elijah and Mark; the Italian girls, the Indians, and then all the Europeans aren’t too keen to travel because they live here and can do it anytime basically, not to mention I was one of the only ones who had a week long break in October. Oh well, but maybe things are looking up because I got a pretty good self picture of me with the sign of Berlin Hauptbahnhof. So anyway back to the lady on the train, turned out she was from SouthAfrica I would have pegged her for German she actually had no idea what language I spoke initially because towards the beginning of the ride I was really drowsy and basically just mumbling responses, she later said she thought maybe I was Italian, or maybe French, I sort of take the Italian thing as a compliment being from New Jersey haha. ‘Where are you from?’ ‘New York’ ‘Where in New York?’ ‘ Welll actually New jersey’ ‘But you don’t have that accent we hear on tv!’ LOL. Michelle Churchill claimed she is related to Winston Churchill through a brother of his who moved to South Africa, will have to look that up on Wikipedia. She basically told me her life story, her work/career history, what she studied 10+ years ago. Michelle also told me about this marine engineering firm Dere (?) which she is an international HR recruiter for and requires her to go to Europe (where the company is headquartered) often for trainings though she is still based in South Africa. We talked about everything from sports, rugby vs. football how soccer is sort of boring, to our ancestries and passports and visas, languages and other stuff. That is one reason why it is not bad to travel alone. Traveling with afriend or friends you never get the chance to have a comprehensive conversation like that. Like Devon from Seattle on the Budapest tour, I will probably never see either again but it was a pleasant couple hour sof my life and made the 6 hour train ride go by faster as I spent the first 2 hours dozing and admiring the drab scenery, the 2^nd 2 hours talking (or being talked to) and the final 2 hours ish listening to music and drifting in and out of consciousness again. Now here I am on the train from Berlin to Prague, it is 5:20pm, and I sure do write a lot sometimes when I have the chance I have been writing probably for the last 45 minutes or more, well it is kind of like I am talking to myself and it sure as hell beats a diary or notebook you cant nearly write as fast in those mediums. When I reserved this seat, I requested window seat no problem, but the card came with saying Met Zijgang, I asked the clerk in Rotterdam station what that meant and she said ‘with side corridor’ so I thought oh great another compartment train like over night to Budapest, then I thought maybe it was one of those corridors on the side like the train from Frankfurt to Dresden but nope here I am sitting in a compartment once again, thankfully this time it isn’t shady people rotating in the middle of the night in Eastern Europe (Slovakia, Hungary) but 3 businessmen who have not said a word, if that will be the norm in this compartment I am fine with that I just hope my incessant typing is  not annoying them, I will be done soon maybe. So the last weekend I have confirmed from Goldie going to visit them, that will be good too as it is barely a couple hours away by Thalys and it is in between Corp Gov and Corp COmm so no work to worry about (reading, eh, I guess but if that course is anything like Corp Gov it’s like why read the papers, why have lectures at all LOL when 70% of the grade is the paper and 30% is the presentation and you have 5 whole lectures, 3 of which taught by one lecturer and 2 by another. Marius Van Dijke the social psychologist was more engaging and interesting subject matter than executive pay compensation theories of Jordan Otten but unfortunately we only get 2 lectures with him. Then the weekend after that is the first weekend of December and probably when we will need to start working on our paper for Corp COmm (3 week course after a monsoon of lectures the first week of December), then the 2^nd week I will try to escape to Barcelona, then the next weekend it’s DONE, haha, mom dad and Lisa come and travel between Holland, Belgium, and Paris with them for +/- 10 days, then go back, pack up my life in Rotterdam, and trek on down to paris for new years on Dec 30, home on Jan 4, up to Waltham to move in probably around Jan 14, Spring 2011 classes start Jan 18, graduation May 22 and then ???