Trains

“Is the small town a place, truly, of the world, or is it no more than something out of a boy's dreaming?” ~William Saroyan

March 9, 2013I had trouble getting to sleep last night. I am sure it was a mixture of sleeping in so late the previous days and the anticipation of travelling in the morning. When my alarm went off at 6:30, I snoozed it for five minutes. When it went off the second time, I rolled over to grab my laptop and checked email. Before I knew it, it was after 6:50 and I still had to get dressed.

I threw my clothes on, grabbed my passport, my Vigil triangle, my travel book, my money, and my camera. I’d transferred my camera into the case I’d packed my GoPro in. It had a neck strap so I could wear around my neck inside my jacket and not have to worry about it falling out of a pocket or getting snatched as easily.

Grabbing a granola bar, I was out the door. The others were waiting for me in the lobby when I got there. Lee had gone to Berlin for the weekend, but Thibaut and Leo were here. Their other roommate, Gonzalo was also joining us. He introduced himself, but I was a little flustered from running late and cramming my “breakfast” into my mouth like a good American.

We walked out to the tram. While the forecast all week had called for a sunny weekend, late last night they changed the prediction to rain. It wasn’t raining yet, but it was foggy. “Back home, we used to say plan for the worst, and hope for the best,” I said, quoting my Boy Scout training, yet again.

As we waited at the station, Leo noticed I was carrying my copy of Rick Steve’s Prague & The Czech Republic. “You have a book on Prague?” he asked.

“I do,” I said. “It has a chapter on Kutna Hora. There are some suggested sites, train details, and restaurants in it.”

“Oh very cool,” he said. “It will be our guide today.”

The fog was so thick, we could barely see across the road. When the tram came, it blasted its horn a few times to alert people and cars out of the way. As it pulled up to the curb, we got on and road it to the main station.

Walking into the station, I think we were all a little nervous. I know in my head, I kept replaying where we had gone with Lad’ka and what she had done. As the group started to head for the escalators, I said, “Isn’t the ticket office back there?” I pointed towards the sliding glass doors.

We went back through them and sure enough, it was. Staring at the monitors, we ran into our first problem. They were all in Czech. Thibaut had done all of the research for the train, so luckily, he recognized which one we were to take.

“Now my book says we want one that goes to the Kutna Hora Mesto Station,” I said. “That way we can get off at any of the three stops in Kutna Hora.”

“Yes,” he said. “This one goes to Mesto.”

We went up to the counter and asked for a group ticket. It was 830 crowns for all four of us. We all rummaged in our pockets and exchanged glances of how much we should each pay. “Here,” I said pulling out my wallet. “I have a 1000 crown note. I’ll pay it and we can settle up on the train.”

“I have 30 crowns so the change will be even,” Gonzalo said. He and I handed over our money and the woman printed the ticket. There was just one ticket that said it was good for four riders. She handed it to me.

“You will hold on it?” Thibaut asked.

“Sure,” I said folding it into the pocket of my jacket. “I’m an American, I like control.”

Riding up the escalator, we went to get breakfast. Gonzalo and I went to the little orange café that we’d eaten at on the way to Dresden. Thibaut and Leo went off down the hall to find a different place. Gonzalo loaned me a few crowns so that I could get a hot chocolate without spending more of my bigger bills. I ordered the Vienna hot chocolate, but passed on the orange yogurt this time.

We met up back at a table in waiting area. “Where did you guys go?” I asked.

“The French bakery,” Thibaut said.

We again waited, mostly in silence, for our platform to be announced. It appeared on the monitor just as we finished eating. This week, we were at 4S.

As we went down the hall to find it, we quickly discovered that the platforms were labeled with numbers, but not letters. Going up to platform 4, we looked around for the 4S. We thought initially it meant “South” but a different train came on the south side. We eventually found one of those electronic ticker banners that said “Kutna Hora” and stood under it.

I was trying to figure out what all of the Czech words on our ticket meant. “What do you think ‘trida’ means?” I asked.

Thibaut looked at it. He and Leo were both taking Intro to Basic Czech as well. We weren’t sure. From the context, we guessed it meant “class”—as in “second class”—but never completely figured it out.

Within minutes, our train pulled up. Once again, the coaches were arranged as the ones to Dresden had been. As we got on, the hallways smelled of an awful body-odor smell, but the cabins were okay. The seats were felt, with an orange and yellow pin-stripe design, but the head rests were hard leather bricks. Thibaut and I sat on one side and Gonzalo and Leo sat on the other. Because we were only a group of four this time, we had to share the cabin with one other man who was sleeping by the window.

We were talking for quite a while about sites in Prague, other trips we wanted to take, and the challenging process of attaining a Czech visa. I passed my book around so they each could read a little about Kutna Hora.

Kutna Hora is not a well know attraction in the Czech Republic (which truly is a shame because it was an amazing contrast to the bustling life of Prague.) In the middle ages, it was a mining town and is actually responsible for most of the silver used in Czech currency today. The two most prevalent sites to visit in Prague are the silver mine and Kostnice Sedlci.

The silver mine is closed until summer, but Kostnice Sdelci was open. This church, which looks like any other church from the outside, was occupied and run by monks in the 16^th century. They were firm believers that the church is a community of believers both living and dead so they would decorate the interior with the bones of deceased civilians. Today, over 40,000 skeletons have been used to decorate the sanctuary.

Fiddling with his phone, Thibaut punched in some numbers. “This is how much I owe you,” he said handing me some crowns.

“How much?” Leo asked.

“166 crowns,” Thibaut said.

Leo gave me 266 so that the change would be easier. Gonzalo gave me a few coins since he’d contributed 50, and also loaned me some in the café.

As we were talking, we realized that the train was significantly behind schedule. Trying to read the electronic sign we could see a red flashing number—first 15, later 20, and eventually 35. A woman in a conductor’s uniform eventually came to our cabin opening the sliding door; she started speaking rapidly in Czech.

When she stopped her explanation, we all smiled a little. “Anglisky?” Thibaut asked. (Meaning “English?”)

She looked at our confused faces a laughed. Then she smiled a little and blushed, before shaking her head. She thought for a minute. Then raising her hands and shaking them back and forth—in the same gesture an umpire makes when a player is safe sliding into home plate—she said, “Locomotive, kaput.”

We all laughed and said we understood. “Change soon,” she said and we smiled and nodded.

Shortly after that, the train did pull out of the station. Within minutes, the three of them were fast asleep.

I spent the entire ride looking out the window. Most of what we passed through was either farmland or heavily forested. The pine trees were packed tightly together. With the low hanging fog, it looked so enchanted and mysterious.

The train ride was about 50 minutes. About 10 minutes out from Kutna Hora, we stopped in the town of Kolin and a large group of elementary school aged children got on. They ran up and down the cars, each wearing a backpack with an ever popular cartoon character on it like Batman or Hello Kitty. The noise they made was enough to wake the group, but within minutes we were at the Kutna Hora stop.

Getting off, the crowd—made up mostly of the elementary kids—scurried quickly across the platform and down the stairs. I noticed the wheelchair ramp that went down the stairs was made up of just two yellow boards spaced about 12 inches apart and pitched just as steeply as the steps.

As we followed along trying to keep up with the group, we came up at another platform on the opposite side of the station. There was a small train—more like a tram—waiting at the station with a conductor motioning people to board.

“Should we get on?” Leo asked. There didn’t seem to be any other viable options.

I tried flipping through my book quickly. I remembered that it had said something about taking the local train. I wasn’t finding the info I needed so I asked the conductor, “Main station?”

“Yes,” he growled. “And city center.”

We got on.

The train was very much like the tram in Prague, but with a large bathroom at each end. The train rocketed along at a pretty good clip. After a few minutes, it stopped. The doors never opened, but when it lurched again, we were going back the way we’d come. Looking out the window, however, I noticed the scenery wasn’t the same. We must have changed tracks back at the stop and were not on a different line.

I flipped through the book a little. “Ok,” I said. “We get off at the first stop. That’s where the bone church is.”

We got off at the next stop. It looked like we were on the outskirts of a pretty small town. I tried to orient us based on the description in the book, but before I could, we heard a Czech voice behind us.

“Looking for the bone church?” it asked. We turned and saw an older man, probably in his late fifties/early sixties. “It’s down that road, about half a KM.”

“Thank you,” we said, and headed off.