I was finally able to meet up with Jana, whom I had accidently stood up due to the train that never came to Budapest. After sending emails and text messages back and forth, it looked like we would be unable to meet: she had her surgery scheduled and then had to go teach for a month at a children's camp. It would be a little hard to swallow: me being in the Czech Republic and us not hanging out, but it looked like fate had conspired against us.
Finally, though, I got an email that said: "You can go by train at 9:13 Am from Prague hl.n. It's train Praha-Harachov, I live in Plavy. I can wait at the station. I hope I wil be back from the hospital. But my boyfriend wants to celebrate something in the evening and I promised I wil come.(at about 7 PM I must be with him.). If it fits you tomorow,you are welcome."
I was dead-ragged from being up late, but I got my butt to the train station at 8:30 AM to buy a ticket to Plavy. In my rudimentry Czech (the language is related to Ukranian, but barely) I tried to buy a ticket. The lady told me that the Praha-Harachov train did not go to Plavy, and before I could answer, the person beside me pushed in to buy his ticket.
A word about Slavic lines: there are none. There are simply mobs at windows and you push your way in. Any hesitation at the window--fumbling for money, unsurety about train routes--is a valid reason for you to get pushed back. This is absolutely normal and you learn not to be ruffled by it and instead push your way forward as ruthlessly as the people around you. Still, I was sans ticket.
I went to the next window. Perhaps, I wondered, I had to change in Harchov and then go to Plavy? I asked if the train went to Plavy. Yes, I was told by the attendent, it did go to Plavy. Slightly confused and not knowing who to believe, I bought the ticket anyway, hoping Jana was right.
On the train, I asked the attendent: yes, it went to Plavy, he said. Reassured, I sat down. I remember Jana saying she lived about an hour from Prague. After an hour, I asked about the stop. The attendent told me Plavy would be two more hours. Two more hours? Now I was worried if I was even going to the right Plavy. Was there more than one place in Czech Republic called Plavy? I didn't even know where her village was located geographically. I didn't even know if the train I was on was going north, south, west or east.
Settling in with my book, I decided to wait and see. At worst, I'd catch the train right back to Prague. Two hours later, I was starting to get worried. The attendent had left the train, most of the passangers had gotten off, and all semblance of civilization had dissapeared out the windows. We were currently going through heavily forrested land only occasionally interrupted by a dillapidated house or two.
I asked other passangers: Plavy is coming, they said. But would it be the right one? Finally, the train stopped, not at a train station but in the middle of a field. Plavy, said the other passangers.
Are you joking?
Hesitantly, I got off my only means of conveyance in the middle of nowhere in a foreign country where I didn't know the langauge. I turned my head and, thankfully, Jana was standing there. Plavy turned out to be a small village in the north of the Czech Republic, just 40 kilometers from the border of Poland. It warranted a train stop, but not an actual station, hence me getting off in the middle of a field.
Jana didn't even live in Plavy, though: she lived in Haratice, an even smaller village in the hills above Plavy. Jana was exhausted from her exploratory stomach surgery that morning (she turned out to be okay), and I was exhausted from staying up late. So it turned out to be a rather subdued, but nice, afternoon. I got to meet some of her family, and her sister made us a lunch of mushroom soup and some sort of cake made out of a vegetable I had never seen before. Not knowing the English word, they showed me the vegetable, and I can only say that it looks somewhat related to eggplant.
Jana, above Haratice and Plavy
Afterwards, Jana and I did the only thing people do in her village: we took a walk. We walked in the hills and forest around the village and then went "mushrooming". This means a completely different thing where I grew up, but here it meant finding mushrooms to make more soup with. We hung out at her house for a while, showing each other pictures of our travels and talking about life in general, but by then I needed to go: her boyfriend was coming up to see her after her surgery and I had to catch one of the few buses heading back that day to Prague.
Taking a walk in the Czech countryside
Jana 'shrooming
We hugged good-bye, not knowing when we'd see each other again, but it was still good to see her and a bit of the Czech countryside I wouldn't have seen otherwise.