Back in the Czech Republic

We were nearing Breclav so I stood up and started attaching my bags to myself. The elderly man sharing my compartment sipped his mandarin juice and eyed me thoughtfully. I thought he might be about to speak to me but he didn't.

That's usually when people speak to you, when the train's about to stop. They're afraid to say much before that because they might get stuck talking to you for the rest of the journey, but at the end they can satisfy their curiousity about you without fear of entanglement.Where are you from? Where are you going? That's all anyone ever wants to know.

It turns out that the optimism of yesterday's post was completely unwarranted. Yesterday was a dark day in every sense of the word. We're back to rain again and the people from the school in Paris wrote me back to explain that they'd made yet another mistake and actually I can't come to school there after all and then my train to Olomouc simply never showed up so that I was stranded at the train station in Breclav for hours and hours and hours with a bag of potato chips and an overwhelming sense of defeat.

If there was ever a moment on this trip (and, truth be told, there've been several of them) when I wished that I was with someone, it was sitting on that cold, concrete platform in the rain, tear-stained and beaten down and ready to just give in to whatever life lesson I was supposed to be taking from all this.

The people at the information center in the Breclav train station don't speak any English so obtaining information from them presented a challenge. After several increasingly desperate visits, they managed to convey to me that another train was going to Olomouc (what happened to the first train will remain a mystery) but that I'd have to change trains yet again and I wouldn't arrive at my destination until almost midnight. A seven dollar phone call to my hostel assured me that I could take a taxi from the Olomouc train station to avoid being mugged in the dark.

Lovely.

Many exhausted hours later, I was finally in a lumpy but otherwise perfectly suitable bed in a small town in the middle of the Czech Republic. It felt like a bittersweet success.

People often talk about going on a trip like this to 'find themselves'. I don't mean this in a melodramatic way but I actually feel that I've lost myself entirely. I have never in my life been less sure of myself than I've become on this trip, and that includes middle school.

I think part of the way that we understand ourselves is by a process of forced self-definition. We say 'I am like this' and we say it over and over until we believe that it's true. We say it to our family, we say it to our friends, we say it to ourselves. We say it to nearly anyone and everyone who will listen and by this process we develop an identity that can be put into words.

You may agree with me that we never remember our dreams, we only remember the stories that we tell about them until our false memory of that dream becomes more real than the dream itself. I think it's the same with ourselves, or with myself. It's not myself that I know but instead it's the stories that I tell about myself. The person that I think I know is a fiction.

Anyway.

I'll tell you something, though. If you're going to discover that you never truly knew yourself, I don't recommend doing so on the cold, rainy platform of a train station in the middle of the Czech Republic. If you're going to have that kind of realization, I think an ideal location would be a cushy armchair, preferably with a cup of hot cocoa. Of course, it probably wouldn't occur to you under those circumstances.

So here I am in the middle of the Czech Republic with a plane ticket from Budapest to Istanbul, a plane ticket from Bratislava to Paris, and a plane ticket from Paris to London but no accommodations beyond tomorrow night and no onward train ticket out of this town. I'm not quite sure what to do about all of that but if you've got any ideas, I'm currently accepting them.

This is a nice place, I think, but I haven't really seen it yet. All I've seen is that I have my own bedroom with a door that closes and that is enough to say that I love this town. Last night, the owner insisted on keeping me up to tell me all about Olomouc and its many attractions but I was already half asleep and the only thing I remember was him telling me something about a place that serves chocolate pie and I thought, 'Chocolate pie and my own bedroom? I must be in heaven.'

It occurred to me last night, while studying the illegible graffiti of the OS 4223 that going to law school may be an outrageous mistake. Ok, I know for a fact that 80% of you just groaned audibly (the other 20% are probably skimming this paragraph). I just don't know anything anymore, that's all. I just don't know one single thing.

Maybe to really find yourself, you have to lose yourself first.

I think I'm going to go find that chocolate pie.