Hasselhoff will have to wait even more.
I decided to hurriedly change plans mid-morning and elected to take the earlier afternoon train to Prague so that I could check into my hotel at a sensible time of day and just crash if necessary.
The morning was spent inserting caffeine and toast and determining how, exactly, I’m going to get to Bialystok as it appears I’m going to Bialystok now and there’s work on the line between Berlin and Warsaw which makes getting to Bialystok a slightly long-winded affair. In the end, I organised myself a route through Brno and found a hostel (eek) to stay in, then at lunchtime girded my loins and set off bravely on the bus by myself to Hauptbahhof to catch the 15:16 Eurocity to Prague. In the short time remaining in Berlin I managed to procure some fridge tat (quite expensive), even though I feel as if I didn’t really do enough tourism to deserve one.
I spent far too much time this morning consulting vagonWEB and comparing the train map to the one I was being shown on the ČD website and ultimately decided to trust the people operating the train to provide an accurate representation of the seat I was buying over, well, someone else. It quickly became apparent on boarding that the Čésky Dráhi’s idea of a “window seat” and my idea of a “window seat” are far from congruous and I felt I’d been robbed of my 3€ reservation fee.
This is not to say that I didn’t have a window seat. I just had a seat between two halves of a window which technically fulfilled their promise of a window seat. I suppose that technically the description was accurate, I’d just expected the entire window. Perhaps someone has been reading too much Kafka.
Once again, the seat reservation proved to be an unnecessary expense and once we were moving I found an alternative seat in the direction of travel with a complete window which was entirely satisfactory.
The weather was better last time I dribbled through the window at the glory of this route, but I still enjoyed it tremendously and made sure to watch out of the left side of the train from Dresden onwards as it snaked through the valley and along the Elbe, giving spectacular views of mountains and occasional cliffs over which lurked an almost eerie fog. Sometimes a church or some kind of fortification would valiantly poke through from the top of a mountain and, now that I know there isn’t a Good Schandau that I’m missing somewhere, I made a mental note to get off the train there one day.
At about 6pm, somewhere around Decin, a short snippet of Dvorak announced we were in the Czech Republic and it was time for something to eat. Had I still been sitting in my Kafka seat at this point, the fact that they’d chosen the opening seven notes of Humoresque would’ve been enough to push me over the edge.
With its being happy hour, a good hearty meal served on real china and with a beer served in a proper glass and a pudding with proper custard on a proper plate set me back around a tenner. Replete, I took far less than a thousand steps to return to my seat where I wallowed in joyous postprandial somnolence until it was time to get off in Prague central station.
Prague Hlavní Nádraží is something of a maze, but I eventually found where I was supposed to be going, got my metro to Pánkrac then, checked-in, showered, and discovered my comfy bed.
