Berlin overnight stop and day's local touring was OK but it wasn't enough to convince to come back. While in Berlin we received an email saying that a planned accommodation in Poland had been cancelled and so this left a sizeable gap in the plans, presenting both a problem to solve and an opportunity. Essentially there were now 8 days gap to plan, bookended by Prague and Warsaw. A much-considered option was to come back to Germany after Prague to see some of the towns in Saxony, doing a bit of a Bach/Luther pilgrimage of sorts. Nice idea but accommodation showed itself very expensive or unavailable, some travel practicalities difficult (e.g. luggage, sickness, fatigue) and so we deferred any decision until our planned five days in Prague showed its colours.
Train trip to Prague supplied one of those little human interaction highlights that are the best parts of all the travel. We had booked two window seats of a 6-person train booth and as we get on we see my seat occupied by an old man, looking very comfortable and cosy. I nobly resisted the temptation of turfing him bodily out of my chair (... cut to picture of the Father Bear and Goldilocks here ...) and waited stealthily for an opportunity to arise where like in Musical Chairs he stands up and I grab it leaving him out and forlorn. He was 90, and travelling alone back to Prague, but was bright and active and so I needed to watch carefully for my seat-changing attack as I'm sure he was on-guard. Well, while I waited ... and waited ... there was a little conversation in the booth. The fun thing was, unlike every other language encounter so far where everyone's knowledge of English exceeds my knowledge of French, Spanish, German, Dutch, Welsh, Cornish, Czech, Polish by a hundred-fold, the old man knew no English. Which matched perfectly my comprehensive knowledge of no Czech! The common language between us then was German, firstly interpreted by another man in the booth who disembarked at Dresden but then it was just he and I, so I prepared to lock horns in my high school German. Telling him that the post office was closed and that I drank lemonade wasn't going to convince of my morally superior right to my window seat (mit Fenster und Tisch) and so we both dug deep and had an infantile exchange of information in German. His, of course, was ten times my knowledge, but it was a lot of fun and I remembered a few words. In the end of it he never stood up from my seat and so I was defeated through his clever defensive strategy and so the game was over, Czech-mate. I marvel at such a man, 90 and travelling merrily. I amused him showing the mobile phone and its ability to look up words and translate them (Google Translate). 90 years old means born in Czechoslovakia in 1927, and seeing 1938's Sudetanland Crisis and German/Polish/Hungarian invasion, Russian liberation and end of war, expulsion of German population, Communism and its repressions, revolution and Russian invasion, Velvet Revolution, EU and modern times. That would have been a fascinating and terrible story to have been able to hear.
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