Saturday, August 16, 2008

Wet Wet Westerners on the Metro

Prague is very wet. It has rained every day so far. Today is the first day I’ve felt cold – Coral’s been complaining that she’s freezing since we got here. It’s really not that cold. I wore jeans today, for the first time, and if I hadn’t been standing in the rain without an umbrella I would have been fine in something more light weight.

We ventured beyond our neighborhood today. Explored the path from our home in to Lesser Town, Mala Strana. It takes one bus and one metro. It’s the same route I’ll take for school, expect I’ll add one more bus after the metro, which will drop me closer to school and allow me to avoid the tourists crush coming off the Charles Bridge. (We did not take pictures of the Bridge, or anything else other than the area immediately surrounding my school – and a cool statue Coral liked hanging over a restaurant.)

We got off the metro and walked around a short bit, took in some of the beautiful architecture, had a seriously overpriced lunch, and made our way back home. We only lasted a few hours as the rain continued throughout our journey.

It wasn’t too much of a challenge finding out stop and getting our ticket and everything. I was thrown off just a bit as I had a weekday bus schedule and we had to take the weekend bus – different numbers on the weekend line. However we managed.

The way back was slightly more exciting. The tram leaving Malostranksa was pretty crowded and Coral and I ended up in the same car, different ends though. When some of the people cleared we ended up sitting across the aisle from each other – for all of one stop. That’s when an older man got on, approached Coral immediately, and started speaking – I thought he wanted to sit down and was asking her to move a bit as her bag was encroaching on the seat next to her. Instead, he was asking for her ticket.

We got hit by the ticket inspector on our first venture out. And it turns out that our tickets had expired. We were hauled off the metro and he took us to the big poster in the middle of the station to show us in English that our ticket was only good for 75 minutes and that we had used that up – and then to show us the other side of the poster which gave him the authority to fine us on the spot – 700 crowns. (We only had about 280 on us.)

I explained and said I needed to find an ATM. We walked up a few flights of stairs, around a few corners, out on to the street and he could not find an ATM. We just kept following him, waiting for him to tell me to pay up. Instead, when it became clear that neither of us had a clue where to go he just handed me back the expired tickets, told me to get new ones, and let us go.

That was super nice of him – we came across him again when we made our way back down to the metros station. He smiled. It was a little scary, no, that’s too strong, it was a little unsettling, but turned out well and wasn’t a bad experience, much more of a learning one.

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