The Eye Abroad
closely watched trains
PrintThe scene of the train pulling away from the platform was almost picture-perfect. Children hanging out the windows, relatives shouting their last goodbyes ... and me, sprinting uselessly down the side of the track as my train sped into the Czech countryside. I had planned a weekend in the small Moravian town of Olomouc with some friends, seeking a brief escape from the spring breakers that had recently descended in hordes on Prague. We were looking forward to a quiet weekend of good food, pretty cathedrals, and world-renowned microbreweries, away from the daily madness of cosmopolitan life. Unfortunately, my (usually) harmless habit of running perpetually late left me watching the train with my friends aboard fade quickly into the darkening horizon.
Overly confident in my resourcefulness after a successful stint in Budapest on the previous weekend, I decided to take the next available train and meet up with my friends at the hostel in Olomouc. After all, how much trouble could I get into on a three-hour train ride? When the next train left an hour later, I grabbed a window seat, popped half a Tylenol PM, and turned up my iPod, feeling pretty smug in my independence.
I was jolted awake about an hour later as the train came to a screeching and sudden halt, and groggily glanced out the window to check the station, and instead saw ... nothing. No station, no houses, no lights—just the train track extending indefinitely into the vast, silent countryside. As the conductor opened the door to my compartment and yelled something indecipherable in Czech, everyone quickly gathered their luggage and started pushing their way out of the rickety train. Confused and disoriented, I tapped the conductor on the shoulder. “Prosim? Mluvite anglicky?” From his hassled response (in Czech) and violent hand gestures, I gathered that no, he did not speak English, and furthermore that, if I did not immediately exit, he was very likely to conquer the language barrier by physically throwing me off the train.
One thing I have realized about studying in Prague, with its large expat community and isolated population of English speaking students, is that “immersion” into a city culture does not necessarily mean learning the language or local customs. In fact, while I have met plenty of Western Europeans and students from just about every college in the States, my interactions with Czechs have been brief, formal, and almost completely in English. Immersion has come more from learning the winding streets, public transportation system, and cheapest non-touristy bars. Stranded on the side of the tracks, with no map, cell service, or Czech-English dictionary, was an experience I was wholly unprepared for. My smugness of the hour before quickly vanished and was replaced by a panic that I hadn’t felt since I was a lost five-year-old at the Atlanta Zoo—except that this time, there was probably no friendly woman in a monkey hat to take my hand and help me find my way.
“Excusing me, but you are an English-speaking, no?” I warily turned around, expecting a suspicious-looking Eastern European man, ready to prey on the obviously lost and vulnerable American girl. Instead I found a group of suspicious-looking Eastern European men with broad toothy grins on their faces. “You should be a-coming with us, the train it is a Russian and a no good.” After weighing my non-existent options (and checking that I still had my mace) I reluctantly followed them the mile along the track to the next station, where we waited for a train to pick us and our fellow stranded passengers up. I surmised from their broken English and my severely limited Czech that my particular train was a relic from the Communist era, built in the ’60s or ’70s, and one of the few that the Czech train controllers still liked to use as a “novelty” once in a while—at reduced ticket prices, since they usually broke down somewhere along the way.
Overcoming my initial reservations, I found my saviors friendly and boisterous as they made friends with the passengers around us, passing around cans of Pilsner and spontaneously breaking out into Czech drinking songs.
They were eager to share their colorful stories with an American separated from her usual herd, and I heard of their double lives as musicians/exterminators in Prague, adventures as “testers” for the infamous “cafes” in Amsterdam, and childhood experiences growing up in various small Moravian towns. During our hour-long wait and over the course of our train ride, I tripled my Czech vocabulary, completely reversed my impression of Czechs as reserved and unfriendly, and received various invitations to dinners and parties in the homes of my newfound friends and other fellow passengers. When we finally arrived in Olomouc and I stepped off the train, I waved goodbye to my travel companions—who were hanging precariously out the windows—already feeling nostalgic for my few hours of true immersion, and glad that I was lucky enough to miss my train.
Nishi Kumar is a Columbia College junior studying abroad in Prague.
2 April 2009
vol. 6, issue 8
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