“This ship is not for going to places, but for getting away from them. When I stop at a port, its only for the sheer pleasure of leaving it. I always think: Here’s one more spot that can’t hold me.” - Gail Wynand, The Fountainhead

And thus so, I left Prague.

There was another sleepless midnight train ride through bohemian Bohemia and into rugged Bovaria. This time I shared a cabin with a young man, my age or maybe 3 months older, and a younger woman, maybe 3 months younger. We sat in silence. We didn’t talk or smile at one another. And we certainly didn’t look each other in the eyes. They were my friends none the less. I felt uneasy when they shut the cabin door and closed the curtains.

At 5am I woke with the graceful ferocity of a 300 pound panther. Glossy blue eyes and taught chest, the chirping cadence of my cheap plastic alarm clock alerted me to presence of a new sight out my window. The slide had changed in the projector. This time it cast the industrial efficiency of a Slovakian train station. I was back in Bratislava - the communist block in capitalist reform. Like a bright coca-cola advertisement atop a gray square building - three windows each level, regulation size - I stuck out like a sore thumb. I was back only to leave. It was cold and still dark from a morning to shy to come and break the gloom.

On a bus ride back to the airport I pondered my Czech redemption as glorious golden rays broke from the East. Your political science class was wrong. An unfortunate interpretation of a stone cold ideology didn’t break Soviet communism - sunrises did.

Look around. You are surrounded by drunken american exhange students reveling in the excitment of their new found freedom and debauchery in a new country. The air is slick with smoke, your body is warm, your head light, and your ears inundated by extremely loud 80’s rock music coming from a DJ on a stage just to the left of you. Or is it the right? Things get so dissorienting in situations like this. The roof and walls seem made of hewn stone. Are you in a cave? Off to the sides of the walls and maybe towards the back, across from a stacked bar, dirty couches are occupied by dirty bodies, clad in tight button up shirts or short skirts. They are sweating and rolling their heads to clear out the alcohol they have consumned all too rapidly in their excitement. You know they will regret it in the morning when they wake sick and with no memory of this wonderful night. Once more swing your head around. Immediatly around you, in the space between that DJ on the stage, the bar, and the stained couches to the sides is a space occupied by flailing arms, bodies writhing, feet moving, hips pulsing off time and off tempo. Any and every song change is greeted by cheers and raised drinks and awkward tight kneed jumping. The american exchange students are excited at everything all at once and for no good reason in particular. Wait. Was that the opening note to a Depeche Mode song? Do you like Depeche Mode? You can’t remember. No matter, you’re back in the moment. You are in Europe, in Czech, in Prague, in the old town, in a club, doing things you would be too embarrased to repeat at home. You are here, now, the song has started …and everyone else is already dancing like drowning children.

These night start with a simple proposal.
‘Who wants to go dancing?’ Ben’s friend Kelli asked
‘Me’, of course I do. Why else am I in Prague but to go dancing tonight? ‘Where are we going?’

Tuesday night there was a dinner at the internet cafe/restaurant Tulip with Ben, his roommate Mike, Kelly, and another TOEFL english teacher named Mike. We ate next to a table of loud american exchange students who at one time came over to ask us if we were part of their study abroad program. We talked breifly with them. Some of them were going to Barcelona for the next weekend, which I was really excited about. I wrote out a list of all my favorite places in Barcelona so that they were sure to have a good time. We finished dinner and before heading off the the 80’s club around the corner, debated whether or not to drink some absinthe. I had never had it but didn’t want to go at it alone ut since no one else was really keen on the idea, remembering their first experiences I’m sure, I passed too. Ben decided he didn’t want to join us at the club and so the two Mikes, Kelly, and I headed down the dark cobble stone streets to begin a carefree night.

The club was full of drunk and obnoxious American students from the same group we had encountered at the restaurant. They had just begun their year abroad program at Charles IV University and were living up some of their first nights free from obligation and reality. I tried to remember if I was ever this obnoxious at the beginning of my study abroad year in Barcelona, Spain. And I cringed when I realized that I probably was. We relaxed at couches on the side of the walls while self-righteously snickering at all the crazy kids. We took in the situation, promising amongst ourselves to get up and dance at the right moment, when the music was right, when we were feeling it. As the night went on and our couches grew warm we began to hear better and better music coming out of the DJs rotation. We rose at the exact moment we collectively recognized a Talking Heads song. Dancing is easy and incredibly fun when you have no one to impress but yourself. Kelly, Mike, Mike, and I danced like total idiots to every song that came on and danced harder when the DJ started moving into the best of 80s music: Dramarama, The Smiths, New Order, Joy Division, and the like. It was a carefree night and we were so happy to be alive and young. The drunken students made way on the dance floor as we jumped and bobbed, throwing ourselves in any direction the music took us. We only stopped dancing at times when we had overexerted ourselves and felt like we were on the point of throwing up from the heat and the sweat and the loud noises. We were not the first on the dance floor, but we were the last. The very last. And we continued to dance, just the three of us, until 5 in the morning when the DJ went home.

Undesirable and unexpected as they were, I nevertheless recieved two kisses that night. They were from two exchange student girls who I think missed the mark of the traditional European pecks on the cheek. Or else were to drunk to be shy, I couldn’t tell. And what would a disco be without that one gay guy who tries to hit on you the whole night? His classic line was, “hey, do you want to have the most memorable night of your life?!!” and then kept asking me if I wanted to go outside to get some fresh air. No.

At 5am (or whatever time it was when the dawn starts breaking in Prague in late summer) we walked Kelly to her apartment beyond Frank Ghery’s famous Dancing House on the banks of the Vltava river. She thanked us for sharing one of the best nights of her life. She was beeming with joy from a night well lived. We were all fulfilled and complete. It was the kind of night you want to have over and over again for years to come. This is the reason I go abroad. Not for mountains, or oceans, or languages, museums and art galleries, or architecture, but for those rare nights and moments when I can lose myself in a place with new friends and forget all else but that which is immediate and real. Immediate and real. Oh, Dear Lord, let every night be immediate and real.

Once again, I am home. The tales recounted below and from now on are travel memoires and not daily updates from the road. Also, my computer has died so until it is fixed I can’t upload new photos. So sorry, but maybe the suspense will keep you interested long enough to keep reading these emails and looking at my website.

During the night I was awoken several times by loud foreign voices coming into the dorms at hostel 99 from a night of rawkus behavior in the little southern Czech town of Cesky Krumlov. These are the kinds of sacrifices you have to make to sleep on a budget away from home. But this night, being young and adventurous, I was only upset at myself for not having joined them. They must have had better stories than I did. And for this reason, until I am too old or too dumb or too pretentious to realize my loss, I will be proud to sacrifice many more nights of sleep.

Morning came and I awoke to an already half empty dorm room. I stripped the sheets from my bed and did my chores while Ben brushed his teeth in the cleanest communal bathroom I have ever seen. Before we checked out we went round the corner to the corner market and bought breakfast of bread and juice. Then we used an hour of internet time at the dorm to catch up on emails and remnants of our digital lives. I turned in the keys to the front door and the hip hostel attendent who was busy zoning out to the ambient noise of Sigur Ros, reached in a drawer to hand back my key deposit.

We wandered the town for a bit and took some back streets we hadn’t walked the day before. The town was actually a whole lot smaller than we had imagined and there wasn’t much more to do. But that was perfect, there was nothing to distract you from the quaint beauty of the white washed walls, jagged streets like crooked teeth, trickling stream which framed the town, tall stain glass windows of the church, and chateau looming on the hill above. I marvelled at how simple and beautiful the scene was and how simple and beautiful life felt here.

We took a long time deciding where to go for lunch. Nothing looked to great but we eventually settled for a place round the corner from the church that had goulash on the menu. Bohemian/Bovarian food (Goulash, bread dumplings, schnitzel, beer, & beer) is perfect for refueling a hungry traveler. Afterwards we did some more walking through streets we had passed many times before and then led ourselves out to a park on the outskirts of the town on a river bank. There I fell asleep on the grass while Ben read his new used books and then wrote in his journal. I woke a half hour later, feeling abnormally refreshed from my nap, and spent some time reading Ben’s copy of Crime and Punishment. Some local kids were causing trouble in the veranda just a little ways off.

Then it began to rain. We hurried off to the center of the town, over two bridges with the raindrops dancing in the water, and into the town square. By the time we arrived at the square the rain was coming down hard. Its a well known rule of travel that you never eat in main town squares because the prices are almost always 10% higher than the next place round the corner, but this time we didn’t have anywhere else to go. We took a table at the nearest cafe. We continued reading our books over cups of exotic coffees - Amarettos, Africans, Turkish, etc. - while the rain crashed down around us in the tiny town square. It began to relent a little tiny bit about an hour later.

Our time was coming near to an end in Cesky Krumlow, so we found a postoffice and mailed our postcards to friends and family, and then a grocery store for snacks on the bus ride back. We picked up our things from storage at the hostel and crossed the bridge out of town and to the bus station. There weren’t any schedules and the buses weren’t properly marked so, thankfully we caught the right bus at the right time.

I looked through the foggy windows at the countryside passing.
Sounds of voices mumbling,
old bus jerking,
and creaking doors.
We pulled from station to station,
town to town,
admitting new riders.
The fog,
rain,
and condensation on the windows
cut us off from the outside.
We were all in this together,
the people on the bus and I.

At night we arrived at a metro station on the outskirts of Prague. Took a long connection in then walked across the bridge to Ben’s place to set our things down. We met up with Ben’s flatmate Mike at a cafe in Prague city center after we had done so. He was wearing the snazzy pink button up and trying to hit on the blond waitress. Unsuccessfully I think but at least the coffee and carrot cake were good. Then we went back to the apartment. At first I was weary, then tired, afterwards I lay down and I slept, and because there was no state to go from that, I woke up. In Prague.