I have discovered why it is so cheap to travel through the Czech Republic: it sucks. This country has the worst infrastructure of any country that I have visited on this trip. I am now quite tired and have to get to bed soon, so I will have to keep this brief, but I recommend that none of you ever bother visiting the Czech Republic. While it has some interesting historical sites, it is about as close in development to Germany as Hungary is to Austria: it is shocking that they share a border, let alone that they are in the same continent. While I started to worry, on the train ride back here, that I would have to try to shorten my stay in Prague in order to escape the Czech Republic as quickly as possible, it now seems to me that there is enough to see near Prague to make staying there for six days worth my while, especially as I can always admit to having planned things poorly and spend a day developing my course syllabi and watching movies if six days in Prague really turns out to be too much. I would like to claim that this will be my last-ever trip to Eastern Europe, but I still plan to spend a few days in Serbia and Bulgaria, which strike me as too historically rich to miss, and about a week hiking in Slovakia, which will be with a tour group. Beyond that, I hope never again to touch down on Eastern European soil, as it is generally an unpleasant part of the world in which to find oneself.
My day was marked principally by frustration. While I had a fine breakfast, I left the hostel a bit later than I should have and, accompanied by a friend of one of the hostel employees, set off to try to find Brno's ossuary and to visit its hospital. Walking with another person reminded me how much I like to be alone when travelling: I was suddenly deprived of the freedom to stop when I wanted, take pictures when I wanted, and examine things that interested me or change my walking route. This is not to say that the man with me did not help me, as his presence was very useful, or that I did not like his company, as he was a perfectly-fine person; rather, it reinforced the benefits of travelling alone. We found out, when we finally made it there, that the hospital was closed to the day due to a public holiday. We were told to go to a hospital near my hostel, at which point I decided to see Olomouc before trying to inquire into my health any further. I had gotten a new bunch of pills at the pharmacy outside of the hospital and figured that I may as well give them a try before seeking out a doctor.
I ended up missing the bus to Olomouc and having to wait for two hours until the next one. I visited a fantastic, and very cheap, ice cream parlor near my hostel and saw Brno's ossuary, which was underwhelming, as it was much smaller than I expected it to be. The ossuary, it turns out, was made for purely practical reasons: inadequately-buried bodies, and the corpses of people who had died of infectious disease, could not be left in ordinary cemeteries for fear of spreading disease, plus the cemeteries had run out of space for new bodies. The underground crypts of bones were not made by someone crazy about death or someone trying to make a high-order statement about human existence.
My trip to Olomouc was enjoyable in itself; while I slept through most of the bus ride, I enjoyed the city quite a bit. It had a much richer cultural history than Brno, featuring a huge university campus, giant gardens outside of its castle, and a massive statue in honor of having survived the plague (at some point; perhaps not during the Black Death); and, while it had the same crumbling buildings, dirty streets, and homeless people as Brno, I spent my time there profitably and wished that I could have stayed for longer. I tried to leave the city at 5:00 PM, only to discover that the next train would leave at 7:09. Upon arrival at the bus station, I learned, when I asked a local bus driver about buses from Brno, that it was unclear when the next bus would be leaving, as it was a Sunday. I waited at the bus station for an hour and was about to give up and return to the train station when a couple of overdressed young women showed up and convinced me, on the basis of information from some sort of fancy phone, that a bus would be coming soon. I waited with them for some time to no avail: twenty minutes after the bus for which they were waiting was supposed to come, the women invited me to catch a taxi with them to the train station. They said that, if they missed the train, they could always drive to Brno with a friend of theirs who was heading there, though two of us would have to ride in the trailer part of her pick-up truck. I decided that I had had enough of young women armed with information from their cell phones and bid them goodbye, sprinting to the train station and leaping into one of the carriages a few minutes before the train departed for Brno. My hatred of the Czech Republic was complete.
The train ride back to Brno was mostly relaxed. The sun was very gradually setting, and the effect of the motionless strips of cloud in the sky was to make it seem as though nobody and nothing were in a rush. The train rattled along from stop to stop, making horrific screeching noises at each station, and eventually got to Brno - which was, of course, totally unmarked; I knew that we had arrived at the station because of information that a woman at the train station had given me. I was very tired and unhappy not to have had the chance to visit the hospital before returning to my hostel, and I was disappointed with the Czech Republic's lack of infrastructure. Any country of this size in which trains between its two largest southern cities only run every few hours and buses do not come at all (I as reminded of being in Russia and waiting for a bus that might not come.) is bound to economically lag behind a country like Germany. It is clear that the Czech Republic is a vastly poorer country than Germany, just as Poland turned out to be, and, as a result, it is a good place in which to be miserable. While the country has an interesting history, I expect that that is more because of its having been Germany's neighbor than because of any concerted efforts by the Czech people to develop their own culture. This idea may be entirely fallacious; I suppose that I am mostly caught up in comparisons between the Czech Republic and Germany because the latter is so much better than the former, leading me to repudiate any strengths that the former might possess. I should enjoy the next few days here, as there is enough to see around here (as long as one does not take the bus, with which I am done), and I will have time tomorrow morning to properly visit the doctor and see what has been ailing me. My health seems to be gradually getting worse, though my problems are still localized to my stomach. I suppose that it is a common experience of travelers to get sick.
I wish that I had more time to write, but I am exhausted and have to go to bed; it seems that my capacity for writing is directly proportional to the amount of time that I have in the evening and inversely proportional to my level of illness. Hopefully, I will be well within the next few weeks and will have more energy, though that might be wishful thinking. My only real cultural observations about the Czechs so far are that they hate street signs and do not like being spoken to in Russian. The latter is understandable, as Russia forcefully occupied their country for several decades, though it is a pity that one has so much difficulty getting around here despite speaking English, French, German, and Russian, the former three of which should be considered lingua franca for all of Europe, more or less, as they were done two hundred years ago. While many young people here speak English, many older people speak only Czech; unlike the citizens of every other country that I have visited, they do not know a second language! The cities' lack of street signs, like its lack of connection with the superior cultures of the countries surrounding it (especially to the west), are to me yet another sign of its backwardness. My stay here has so far demonstrated to me that Eastern Europe is miserable, a lesson that I hope to carry with me for as long as I live so as to avoid planning any further extended stays in this part of the world. Nuremberg alone probably has more culture than all of the Czech Republic put together.
My day was marked principally by frustration. While I had a fine breakfast, I left the hostel a bit later than I should have and, accompanied by a friend of one of the hostel employees, set off to try to find Brno's ossuary and to visit its hospital. Walking with another person reminded me how much I like to be alone when travelling: I was suddenly deprived of the freedom to stop when I wanted, take pictures when I wanted, and examine things that interested me or change my walking route. This is not to say that the man with me did not help me, as his presence was very useful, or that I did not like his company, as he was a perfectly-fine person; rather, it reinforced the benefits of travelling alone. We found out, when we finally made it there, that the hospital was closed to the day due to a public holiday. We were told to go to a hospital near my hostel, at which point I decided to see Olomouc before trying to inquire into my health any further. I had gotten a new bunch of pills at the pharmacy outside of the hospital and figured that I may as well give them a try before seeking out a doctor.
I ended up missing the bus to Olomouc and having to wait for two hours until the next one. I visited a fantastic, and very cheap, ice cream parlor near my hostel and saw Brno's ossuary, which was underwhelming, as it was much smaller than I expected it to be. The ossuary, it turns out, was made for purely practical reasons: inadequately-buried bodies, and the corpses of people who had died of infectious disease, could not be left in ordinary cemeteries for fear of spreading disease, plus the cemeteries had run out of space for new bodies. The underground crypts of bones were not made by someone crazy about death or someone trying to make a high-order statement about human existence.
My trip to Olomouc was enjoyable in itself; while I slept through most of the bus ride, I enjoyed the city quite a bit. It had a much richer cultural history than Brno, featuring a huge university campus, giant gardens outside of its castle, and a massive statue in honor of having survived the plague (at some point; perhaps not during the Black Death); and, while it had the same crumbling buildings, dirty streets, and homeless people as Brno, I spent my time there profitably and wished that I could have stayed for longer. I tried to leave the city at 5:00 PM, only to discover that the next train would leave at 7:09. Upon arrival at the bus station, I learned, when I asked a local bus driver about buses from Brno, that it was unclear when the next bus would be leaving, as it was a Sunday. I waited at the bus station for an hour and was about to give up and return to the train station when a couple of overdressed young women showed up and convinced me, on the basis of information from some sort of fancy phone, that a bus would be coming soon. I waited with them for some time to no avail: twenty minutes after the bus for which they were waiting was supposed to come, the women invited me to catch a taxi with them to the train station. They said that, if they missed the train, they could always drive to Brno with a friend of theirs who was heading there, though two of us would have to ride in the trailer part of her pick-up truck. I decided that I had had enough of young women armed with information from their cell phones and bid them goodbye, sprinting to the train station and leaping into one of the carriages a few minutes before the train departed for Brno. My hatred of the Czech Republic was complete.
The train ride back to Brno was mostly relaxed. The sun was very gradually setting, and the effect of the motionless strips of cloud in the sky was to make it seem as though nobody and nothing were in a rush. The train rattled along from stop to stop, making horrific screeching noises at each station, and eventually got to Brno - which was, of course, totally unmarked; I knew that we had arrived at the station because of information that a woman at the train station had given me. I was very tired and unhappy not to have had the chance to visit the hospital before returning to my hostel, and I was disappointed with the Czech Republic's lack of infrastructure. Any country of this size in which trains between its two largest southern cities only run every few hours and buses do not come at all (I as reminded of being in Russia and waiting for a bus that might not come.) is bound to economically lag behind a country like Germany. It is clear that the Czech Republic is a vastly poorer country than Germany, just as Poland turned out to be, and, as a result, it is a good place in which to be miserable. While the country has an interesting history, I expect that that is more because of its having been Germany's neighbor than because of any concerted efforts by the Czech people to develop their own culture. This idea may be entirely fallacious; I suppose that I am mostly caught up in comparisons between the Czech Republic and Germany because the latter is so much better than the former, leading me to repudiate any strengths that the former might possess. I should enjoy the next few days here, as there is enough to see around here (as long as one does not take the bus, with which I am done), and I will have time tomorrow morning to properly visit the doctor and see what has been ailing me. My health seems to be gradually getting worse, though my problems are still localized to my stomach. I suppose that it is a common experience of travelers to get sick.
I wish that I had more time to write, but I am exhausted and have to go to bed; it seems that my capacity for writing is directly proportional to the amount of time that I have in the evening and inversely proportional to my level of illness. Hopefully, I will be well within the next few weeks and will have more energy, though that might be wishful thinking. My only real cultural observations about the Czechs so far are that they hate street signs and do not like being spoken to in Russian. The latter is understandable, as Russia forcefully occupied their country for several decades, though it is a pity that one has so much difficulty getting around here despite speaking English, French, German, and Russian, the former three of which should be considered lingua franca for all of Europe, more or less, as they were done two hundred years ago. While many young people here speak English, many older people speak only Czech; unlike the citizens of every other country that I have visited, they do not know a second language! The cities' lack of street signs, like its lack of connection with the superior cultures of the countries surrounding it (especially to the west), are to me yet another sign of its backwardness. My stay here has so far demonstrated to me that Eastern Europe is miserable, a lesson that I hope to carry with me for as long as I live so as to avoid planning any further extended stays in this part of the world. Nuremberg alone probably has more culture than all of the Czech Republic put together.
This statue says, "Faith for faith, love for love."
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