Leaving Košice

I am sitting in the Košice International Airport waiting to check in for our return flight to Prague.  The name implies something far grander than it is.  There are two gates – one for arrivals and one for departures.  We arrived about two hours early in case there were complications.  Other than a few employees we are the only ones in the airport.  The Slovakia version of “Who’s got Talent” called “Talent Mania” is playing on the television by the café.  I am thinking of all the random and quirky moments of our trip so far that I do not want to forget. 

For example, the Segway tours in Prague.  Two enterprising university graduates were trying to come up with business concept.  Tourism is big in Prague.  You see bus tours as well as walking tours all through the city.  These two entrepreneurs decided to add wheels to the walking tours and started a business called Prague on Segway.   During the first few days we were in Prague we would see these groups of middle-aged tourists all with matching white helmets riding their Segways through the streets and plazas of Prague, following their Segway riding tour guide like ducklings following a mother duck.  Unfortunately every time I wrangled my camera to catch a photo – they were gone. 

I have also been surprised/curious at the pink/orange hair color that seems ever present on so many women in Slovakia.  I am not speaking of teen-age trendy punk girls, but women from middle-age to quite elderly who lighten their dark hair to almost neon hues of pink and orange.  Baffling.

Yesterday we discovered a great little Internet café/bar in Košice called the Technik Cafe.  It had only been open a week, was designed all in black and white, and sported the tag line “technically impossible.” While our hotel claimed to have Wi-Fi through out, it really only worked in the lobby and even there was too slow to anything beyond send an e-mail or post a facebook status update.  So Josh and I packed up our laptops and headed to the Technik Café so I could upload photographs and he could attend his on-line advisory.  (Josh is going to school on-line and has “virtual homeroom” each day at the equivalent to 9:00AM in St. Peter.) So late yesterday afternoon (4:00Pm in Košice, 9:00 AM in St. Peter) Josh and I parked ourselves there (he with a coke and me with a glass of wine) to do a little work.  After about an hour the waitress came by and asked if I would like another glass of wine.  I pondered for a minute, but knowing that one glass is my limit answered "Ah . . . no."  A few minutes later she brought me a second glass of wine.  It took a minute to register before remembering that  "Ano" is Yes, and "Ne" is no in both Czech and Slovak.  So it was a two glasses of wine day for me.  

Frances Mayes is perhaps my most favorite travel writer.  In the introduction to her book, A Year in the World: Journeys of a Passionate Traveller, she writes, “The urge to travel feels magnetic.  Two of my favorite words are linked: departure time.  And travel wets the emotions, turns upside down the memory bank, and the golden coins scatter.”

The golden coins of my memory bank continue to take me by surprise.  As mentioned above, the only place we could get Internet in our Košice hotel was in the lobby.  Fortunately there were rest rooms right off the lobby, so each time I needed a bathroom I did not need to trudge up two flights up steps to our room.  Here is the odd golden coin part of that.  There was some kind of perfumey air freshener in the women’s bathroom off the lobby that smells just like my Aunt Ollie!  It just knocked me over when ever I went in there and flooded me with memories of this colorful relative. (She was my father’s older sister who ran away as a teen-ager and joined the vaudeville circuit.)  This morning while waiting for the taxi to take us to airport, being an experienced traveler, I made one last trip to the bathroom.  My Aunt Ollie died in 1986, but there she was again captured in that fragrance, and I welled up with tears.  As Mayes pointed out – travel wets the emotions.  

(Imagine the strange fake French accented voice on the SpongeBob cartoon saying “Five hours later” . . .)

The flight to Prague was uneventful, luggage arrived and after about a fifteen-minute wait our taxi driver appeared to whisk us over to the main train terminal to catch our train to Vienna.  There was only an hour and fifty minutes between scheduled plane arrival and train departure, but we decided to count on everything working like clockwork, as we wanted to arrive in Vienna this evening and have a leisurely day on Sunday since it is Josh’s 14^th birthday.  Josh was famished when we reached the train station and we managed to scrape our last Czech coins together to have enough to buy him burger at Burger King.  (His first, and I hope only, American junk food in Europe.) He wolfed his burger down and we took up residence in front of the large display board that showed the number of the departure platform for each train.  Finally, less than 20 minutes before departure a number “two” appeared next to the name Wien Praterstern.  The fit looking seniors next to us took off in the direction of the platforms and we followed.  After a rather frantic sprint down to the far, far end of the train, we found our car and hopped on.

That is where Josh made the heartbreaking discovery that unlike the trains in Sweden, this old train did NOT have outlets!  Four hours without a screen to entertain him! 

Unlike Josh, I love riding the trains in Europe.  I can just relax, read, or snooze a little.  I had hoped he would enjoy the experience also.   So far train travel seems to be something he at best tolerates.  Four days in Vienna (or Wien, as they say here) and we are off to Italy.  Which is probably why Frances Mayes keeps popping into my head.  So I will sign off with a few more of her words.

“The need to travel is a mysterious force.  A desire to go runs through me equally with an intense desire to stay at home.  An equal and opposite thermodynamic principle.  When I travel, I think of home and what it means.  At home I’m dreaming of catching trains at night in the gray light of Old Europe, or pushing-open shutters to see Florence awaken.  The balance just slightly tips in the direction of the airport.”

Or for me – the train station.

(12 hours later . . . )

Good Morning from Wien (Vienna) and Happy 14^th Birthday to my traveling companion, Josh!