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When you bike simply to get to your destination, rather than enjoying the ride, the trip always seem to take much, much longer. I had to go only about 25 miles to get to the train station, but I was in a dour mood. The last 3 days of riding had taken quite a bit of out me. Between the heat and the general exhaustion and the feeling of being completely out of the loop due to the language barrier, I had had enough. Even my first stork sighting barely lifted my spirits.
The scene at the train station was appropriately hilarious, with the two ladies manning the counter laughing with me quite a bit at the exasperation of trying to explain how to get onto the train with my bicycle and also how to make a connection. 15 minutes later, various maps, diagrams, arithmatical manipulations and flow charts were written and I had a rough idea of how get to Prague with my bicycle.
Three cups of vending machine coffee later (which was surprisingly o.k.) the train arrived and I was chugging along. When I transferred trains, I ran into two mountain bikers headed back to the city after a 3-day bike tour. They spoke some English, and they helped me find the bike storage car. We sat together for the rest of the trip, talking politics and history and about Prague and whatnot.
Arrival in Prague was predictably nerve-wracking. However, I found a little pension near the station for a reasonable rate. Since it was 5 in the afternoon, and I was in Prague, it seems mandatory to do a little sightseeing, even though I didn't really feel like it. So I went to the old part of the city where all of the tourists are. Ugh, what a mess.
Swarms of tourists dudes drinking on the streets. Thai massage parlors above trinket shops. Buses unloading phalanxes of Chinese tour groups. And all of this smack dab in the middle of one of the most beautiful cities I've seen. I just wasn't in the mood for any of it, so I did the compulsory trek around the bridges, the canal and the old town and went back to my room, thoroughly disheartened by humanity in general.
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