They brought all their stuff down and we waited out in the street between their apartment's ground floor door and the Globe. The taxi they'd ordered was late. Their train was scheduled to leave at 2:30 p.m. and the taxi arrived at 2:16 or 2:17 p.m. Julia and Simon were both very stressed out. We threw their stuff in the car and jumped in.
The cab driver was cool about it -- he was Czech of course but could speak a little English, enough to know we were in a huge rush and to tell us what he was doing to deal with the traffic. The problem was the tickets they'd ordered were a special deal only available to German mailing addresses, so they'd ordered them by proxy and had them mailed to Prague. The tickets were non-transferable, so missing the train would have been a dramatic issue.
Then it started to rain. The traffic and rain were hellishly frustrating, as was our inability to know exactly how far we were from the station. When asked, the driver continued to gesture with his hand and complain about the traffic.
So it got to be exactly 2:40, and then 2:41 and then 2:42 and finally we turned into the parking lot of the train station. The rain was as hard as I've ever seen it in Prague. Simon jumped out and ran down the open hallway while Julia and I carried some of their huge pieces of luggage into the doorway and the driver dumped the rest on the ground. Then Simon appeared at the far end of the hallway and yelled, "Come on!" while we wrestled the last bag through the door, all of us soaked. Julia took off down the hallway with a small bag, yelling back over her shoulder, "I am just going now, will you bring [unintelligible]," and then she disappeared around the corner.
The total weight of all the bags was probably 300 or 400 pounds. I started dragging some of them to the far end, nervous about leaving the rest unattended. When I had just dragged the last bad to the far end of the hall where the opening to the train station interior was, Simon materialized in a fluster and said, "Let's go!"
So we both carried all the bags as fast as we could, trying to roll the ones that could roll. That's how I got a big barbarian-vampire bite on my ankle. My sock got all bloody (not really, but some), and the water dripping down my leg didn't help.
Then we wheezed up the steps and onto the platform and past a cop chaperoning three miserable-looking leftist detainees with a dog and finally to the door of the train. It was still there. All their bags disappeared inside with surprising speed given their bulk, and suddenly I was standing on the platform alone while the two Germans checked around to make sure nothing was missing.
It turns out the train -- specifically the first-class car, which was their car -- was under repairs, so they didn't leave for at least thirty minutes. But if there hadn't been repairs, I think we would have just made it anyway.
I left before the train did, so I didn't get to take my cliche farewell video as planned, but I still took several pictures and videos that I will upload when I get home from work this afternoon. It's 10:29 a.m. and I will get off work at 4:40 p.m. or so.
Megan comes back in two days.
Megan comes back in two days!
I finished Don Quixote and it was worth it and now I am reading a book called The Shadow of the Wind by a Spanish author named Carlos Ruiz Zafon, and it was published in 2001 and takes place from the '30s to '50s in Barcelona which is where I am going at the end of the week, and it's the most pitch-perfect novel I have read in like two years. It's -- really really compulsively readable in the best way.
All I do is listen to electronic music and ignore my bosses at work (the Globe).
I have a little piece of paper -- actually one of the business cards I designed for the Globe -- on which in pencil I've written a list of the things I need to do today/soon. The list is:
"Jobs
Rent
vet
CS
ticket"
What that means is: I need to send emails to the huge(-ish) list of potential employers I found on craigslist and saved in my Gmail drafts folder; I need to cruise craigslist for more potential places to live in Chapel Hill, and then email the most promising ones; I need to call or otherwise contact an English-speaking veterinarian to find out how to get Hobbes castrated and also certified for plane travel; I need to cruise CouchSurfing and try to find a place to sleep in Barcelona on the night of the 28th; I need to find out whether the plane ticket from Prague to Cologne is still as cheap as it was last week.
I also just remembered I need to get Julia to call Airberlin for me to find out how easy/hard it will be to take Hobbes on board with us. Sigh.
I've made a five page flier for the Globe. It has taken so many more weeks than it needed to. Everyone wants changes all the time. Here's the most up-to-date version:
The text for most of the flier was written by people other than me and is terrible. Terrible terrible. I do not endorse this flier in the slightest, except for the map, which I am proud of and think looks great. The original was a straight screen grab of Google Maps.
I should get paid so much more for this.
I love to sleep.
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