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| Jablonec - highly recommended for a swim |
The final few days of our memorable stay had arrived, and
Bonny Bee had a little work to do, so on Tuesday 11 August, I took the children
out a short distance up the road to Smržovka, to the Museum of Military
Technology. A fairly unkempt place with smallish warehouses and garages housing
a variety of European and American tanks, jeeps, howitzers and radio equipment
from the 1940s to the 1970s, the children were full of the right types of
question: why was there war? Why should we need this stuff? Where is it usually
kept?
Nobody was allowed to touch the exhibits, and the children
were quite interested to know why we couldn’t run our hands down a 36-ton tank
or stick our fingers in the firing holes, so I accosted the curator and asked
her in front of the kids and a few other families, in a diplomatic way, why the
exhibits were off-limits. And her reply was quite devastating: people take
advantage of the situation and start climbing on the tanks to get a good
picture. One “genius” had lost his teeth, she said, from falling off the gun
turret of a British Challenger tank.
Fair enough, we all thought, and left it at that. It’s
rather sad that a few idiots can ruin an experience for everyone else, but
totally understandable action by the museum to prevent further undesirable
accidents. Anyway, after this, the children had a better understanding of
military equipment and their effects on our past. Now we are in the drone era,
will there be a lot more of these tanks entering museums soon?
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| Smržovka, Museum of Military Technology |
We jumped back in the car and went to pick up Bonny Bee to go for a ride somewhere. I was tired of making plans each day, so this was my day off and we would just improvise. We drove for half an hour and ended up in the town of Železný Brod, set on the gentle banks of the river Jizera. The town is nothing special, but alongside the river there are some lovely places to sit and enjoy the scenery. We had some lunch in a riverside inn and headed to Železný Brod’s main attraction, the Museum of Socialist Vehicles.
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| Železný Brod, Museum of Socialist Vehicles |
And what a place it was. Even the customer service was peak 1980, with a very bookish and charmless young member of staff, the only one, who got around on a 40-year-old scooter. She was explaining to some other visitors the types of vehicles they were viewing, and was annoyed she had to return to the exit to take our money and abandon us again. The whole time she spent ignoring us even when I was right beside her as she spoke to the earlier visitors.
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| Železný Brod Museum of Socialist Vehicles |
On the general level, Czech customer service is most
definitely not as refined as Polish, and not as amenable as Irish. But this was
a depth of frostiness I last encountered 35 years ago in the days I used to pound
the streets of Bratislava, Moscow, Warsaw and Prague. It was alive and well in
the Museum of Socialist Vehicles and it was another huge nostalgia hit.
Considering this girl was barely 20, I wonder if she had received extra
training to be able to achieve this level of detached icy coldness, or if she
had been hired based on her stern and grim-faced personality.
For the final two days of our stay, we decided we wanted to revisit a couple of the things that we most enjoyed. We would return to Farma Vysoká for lunch and the Ještěd golf course in the evening on Wednesday 12 August, and to the Jablonec reservoir one last time on the final Thursday. After a lovely lunch at the farm, we needed to buy a few new clothes for the children, so we drove to the central shopping centre in Liberec, and to take a stroll around the historic centre.
Liberec is a city with a rich history, reflected in the
buildings, such as the zoo that we had earlier visited. Liberec has a lot in
common with Manchester, such as being former big glass and textile producing
area. It also has an ornate city hall and iconic square, thriving shopping and
catering sectors, and a lot of satellite towns and cities that rely on it for
their economy.
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| The main square in Liberec |
On the day we visited, the city was bathed in a fresh, sunny glow, made more special by a group of visiting organ grinders from other parts of Europe, all lined up outside the city hall and taking turns winding up some typical songs from their regions, dressed in traditional attire. The crowds were not very strong, as Czechs can be quite sceptical of nostalgia, but the ones who were there enjoyed the spectacle.
We moved down Pražská
street, the main shopping thoroughfare, to look for some items to take home
with us. Coming across a shop crammed with ornaments, trinkets, vases, hanging
decorations, hand-made toys, clothes and porcelain vessels, I was sure we would
find a few items here. The main thing we needed to do was to buy a present for
our neighbours, who had been looking after our place while we were away, and I
knew this was the place. The children were also fascinated by the sheer number
of items for sale.
Time was getting on, so we made for the golf course, arriving in the early evening. We all played a lot better this time round, and I was delighted Dainoris had started aiming better. Milda decided to play with Livia in the toy room, and came out from time to time, to make sure we were still there! We sat down for raspberry lemonade and pizzas at the lovely club house café, and watched the sky go dark as the anticipated eclipse made its presence known to us all. It was quite eerie to hear the drop in noise levels coming from the trees.
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| Our scorecard |
We drove home in the dying light, arriving well after dark. The car’s nutty GPS sent me on a rather convoluted route along some very narrow upland roads. On the other hand, it did allow us to film a flock of deer grazing in a field and take some spectacular shots of Ještěd mountain (stationary with brake on, I wish to add).
Our final full day in the Krkonoše would be spent in Jablonec at the
reservoir, rounded off with a meal at the place we first went to when we got
here, the Hotel Adria in Kořenov.
The young lad who had served us that night was there again, and he did all the
things necessary to make everyone happy. We sat outside, but under their terrace
roof – the nights are sometimes a little nippy up there – and the children
played in the garden beyond, or sat with us to warm up. There was still some
wind, but I was determined not to go inside on our last night.
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| The Adria in the dying light |
Arriving back at the holiday rental, we needed to get all the bags ready for the Great Journey Home over the next two days. This was going to be an undertaking to rival the docking schedule at the Port of Rotterdam: first, we had to take the car back to the airport, somehow get all our many bags to a hotel near the central station, then next morning schlepp them to the train for the 10.31 departure to Berlin, change at Berlin Südkreuz for BER airport, hope the weight was all right, pick them up the other end, get a bus in the middle of the night to our car and drive home well after midnight. I was quite jittery about it all, but I didn’t let that get to me, like I would have done not so long ago.
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| The main square in Liberec again |
The morning of Friday 14 August started with a military-grade reveille as I went around making plans for clothes. I pack a separate small bag with everything we need for one night: clothes, toiletries, nightwear, phone chargers; then I carefully choreograph the morning routine with washing, breakfast, dressing, putting the dirty clothes in separate bags, packing the car up, and getting the kids to focus so there are no delays. Bonny Bee then goes around clearing the rest up into a final bag to slide into a suitcase, and cleaning the apartment as well as possible ready for the hosts to prepare for the next arrivals, apparently coming at 13.00, so we wanted to go as early as possible.
Speaking about the hosts, the family is charming,
hard-working and very driven. I learned a lot from them. The parents, in their
mid-to-late fifties, run three tourist apartments in their building. Their
eldest son does a lot of the work too, and the youngest son is picking up the
slack. They are building a wall at the back of the property to hide the hideous
blocks of flats behind them. Their own grounds are immaculate, and a stream
runs past the front of the garden.
We spoke to them on numerous occasions about whatever came
to mind, and they treated us like part of the family, which made it all the
more special. We had brought a couple of presents from Ireland, just in case.
One of them was a washing up towel from the Woolley Jumpers range – they make
everything from mugs to keyrings, pillowcases to fridge magnets with the same
sheep on them, and we felt they deserved this, especially after the mother had
done a load of washing for us and handed the clothes back dried and folded. I
had asked her how I could “thank” her, and she just said “say thanks, that’s
all”. But for me that wasn’t enough, so she got the towel, and a handsome towel
it is, if you ever get the chance to look through their range. She was
delighted, which proved it was definitely worth bringing it.
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| The place the owners stay in at Desná |
We said our farewells and headed on the road south, back to Prague. The airport is on the other side of the city so we had to negotiate the urban sprawl. It had come as quite a shock how long it took me to get through the Prague suburbs, but we made it to the airport before the clock had ticked past the daily rate renewal. The areas around Prague airport are currently being redeveloped to cope with a new rail link and flyover to separate cars, buses and taxis into the airport, and finding the car dropoff parking garage was a little bit of a struggle.
The main issue was the number of luggage items, but not only.
We needed to buy some child car seats when we arrived because the car rental
company charged more than buying new ones. This of course added to our already
mushrooming baggage. Despite being under our allotted allowance, we and the
children were never going to be able to get very far with so many bags and
suitcases. My idea was plain and simple: we post back the car seats and fill
the boxes up with clothes we have already worn.
Arriving at the car rental desk, the queue was even longer
than when we showed up. A Spanish family also dropping keys off was wondering
if we all had to do the queue too. I took the initiative and calmly walked to
the desk to hand over my key and the folder. The attendant smiled and wished me
a happy journey. The Spanish family followed suit and that cued an acute need
for trolleys. The only place we were going to have mobility freedom was at this
airport while we brought our stuff to the taxi rank.
Dainoris has recently become very much my assistant in many
areas, and enjoys going to places to help out. Pushing a trolley would be bread
and butter to him – I brought two from the car park three floors up and
presented him with one. We loaded our stuff and ventured out into the public
area of the airport to find a taxi. There was no way I was going to get all
this equipment on a bus. We didn’t have long to wait before a Vietnamese guy
with a large black van targeted us and offered an extortionate fee to take us
to our lodgings on Sokolská street near the Museum.
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| The National Museum Our accommodation was just behind the building in the background |
Reaching the location of our “hotel” for the night, which cost as much as four nights in the Krkonoše, we had no reception to negotiate – I had to fill everything in online in a time-consuming exercise that would have rivalled a Dutch council’s planning permission application. They sent a door code two hours before our allotted check-in. However, they also had luggage storage, and we could put our stuff downstairs until we returned later on.
We took the car seats and the bag with dirty washing with us and headed to the central post office. This historic building on the main thoroughfare from Wenceslas Square to Masaryk Station had around forty booths inside a huge atrium. Pulling off a ticket, we went to wait. We were fourth in the queue for foreign packages and it was going slow. I then realised we needed boxes and consignment slips. In a blind panic, I set off at speed to locate them. They were apparently at booth 12 and I could go there without another ticket. I got two but went back for a third. The woman kindly gave me a roll of sticky tape and the necessary slips. I hoped she would be the woman who took our number when it came up.
I was
about three lines from the end of filling in the last form when our number came
up. I decided to go over to the designated booth and fill the rest in when I
got there. However, I kind of expected to be confronted with a combination of a
world-weary drudge and a rude, stuffy clerk straight out of a Kafka novel. And
that’s what I got. I told her I would just fill the last part out while the
rest was being done and she sent me to another desk with the riposte, “there
are others who are ready. Fill it out and don’t come to our desks with
half-filled forms.”
I could
tell this was going to be a long process. Once I had filled it in, which took a
quarter of the time it did to serve the customer who took my place, I realised
I was in front of the world’s most miserable civil servant, and after a
quarter-century in and out of public sector workplaces, that takes some
beating. She then castigated me over the fact I hadn’t put a house number in
the appropriate box. Telling her we don’t have house numbers in rural Ireland, she
blabbed some poisonous words under her breath and produced one of those deep
sighs that I would reserve for having to get out of bed at three in the morning
to find a kid’s lost toy.
I had to
hold my tongue because she was actually dealing in our belongings; the ultimate
power play was very one-sided. She managed to do the rest of the filing without
having to resort to the level of abrupt hand gesticulations or widening her
eyes, and I took the three slips from her without giving her the “thank you”
she undoubtedly expected. We headed out into the mid-thirty-degree heat of the
city – I was so wet and sweaty from that and carrying the luggage that I looked
like I had stood in a car wash for thirty seconds.
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| The cubist interior of the Grand Café Orient |
We went off to eat a late lunch – it was about three in the afternoon – and I had the sudden idea of visiting the Grand Café Orient to see if some familiar faces were serving, and I’m glad I did. Ten to fifteen years ago, when we frequented Prague more often than the hairdresser’s, there was a waiter who would frequently make our visits to the café a more amusing or meaningful experience, and this was no exception, although this time there were five of us, not two. He remembered a lot from our visits, more than us, actually, and entertained the kids like he’d been doing it for years. Dainoris gave him a big hug at the end, which is unusual for him.
Following
this, we wandered to our hotel to check out our lodgings for the night.
The lift up was one of those where you can do the Spiderman impression as the
swing door closes. The type that I got stuck in in Spain a couple of years
earlier. Taking out the luggage I had prepared for one night, we entered the
code to retrieve the key to the room. Well, I say room; it was in fact a suite,
which accounted for the price.
There were two bathrooms, a large kitchen, two single
bedrooms, and a large triple bedroom with office space, TV, two balconies overlooking
the busiest road junction in the entire country, and remote-control air
conditioning. It’s the type of place I’d maybe rent if I were planning not to
go out for days, but it’s a total waste of money on people like us that just
come back to sleep.
Bonny Bee stayed back to work for a couple of hours, and I took the children out to find some activities in the early evening. We walked back down Wenceslas Square onto Vodičková, where there is a garden café. The staff member at the entrance issued a rather terse statement that the garden was closed off for another hour, but we could sit inside. It was still over thirty degrees outside and none of us wanted to do that. We chose to leave.
We walked through the Svĕtozor
shopping mall to the Franciscan Gardens, a hidden oasis of peace between all
the houses, shops and restaurants, where there is a giant playground. Just
then, a chalk board caught my attention. There was a counter straddling a fairly
well-hidden door, a portal even, where a girl was serving drinks and snacks
from a kitchen, including raspberry lemonade. That was enough to get me ringing
the little bell she had there in case she wasn’t visible.
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| The terrace at Langhan's, pulled from their website: https://www.clovekvtisni.cz/co-delame/kavarna-a-centrum-langhans |
To say this place, between a shop and a hidden garden, was
off the beaten track, was like saying Gaudí was a little showy. We had walked
around the mall for a good five minutes looking for the entrance like a
shoplifter and three decoys. Like a Southern Baptist’s wedding night, we just
couldn’t find the entrance, so the girl let us in by moving the counter out of
the way.
Inside this inner sanctum of secret gardens, the tables were located around the outside of a gravel-laden terrace. A canvas sail was tied to different points around the terrace and a huge raised trough with several taps pumping water around had a very random load of rubber ducks floating in it. Seeing this, the children barely sat down – they just played with the ducks and the water, as I sat there catching up on the day’s messages, upset that they preferred that to a chat with their old dad. I see it as a good sign, though, that I enjoyed their conversation.
The place was going to close soon, so we decided to wait for
Bonny Bee in the playground inside the Franciscan Gardens out back. To get
there, we discovered the way – we had to go further outside the shopping mall
onto the street itself and through an unfathomably sanitised corridor
resembling one you might find in a Spanish three-star hotel, past a security
guard, and in through another kind of “portal” on the inside.
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| Milda enjoys a refreshing strawberry lemonade |
After a while, their mother made it out of her work duties and joined us. The sun was casting long shadows by this time and we were getting hungry. I wanted us to have one more round of “happy food” and I knew just the place. Blatnička restaurant on Michalská has a good limited menu, with some fine dishes, even if it’s well overpriced. The streetside dining area was populated by Germans and the odd American. I don’t think the former appreciated our rabble destroying their speechless evening, and I got quite a few glances when I gave our orders to the woman who runs the place in Czech. They had let their kids eat the safe, familiar, boring cliché pasta dish, so when Dainoris chose the river salmon with rice and salad, and Milda wanted the goulash and dumplings, I couldn’t let the moment pass without saying a few words of congratulations. Whether they were subliminally to myself, I couldn’t tell, but my “happy food” mantra had clearly worked.
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| Food from Blatnička restaurant on Michalská |
After this fine valedictory meal, we wanted to take one last walk through the city centre and over Charles Bridge. Livia protested at the idea of going for a walk, and became more and more animated the further we went. Of course, whichever direction we chose we would still have ten to fifteen minutes’ walk, and for that reason we carried on. Charles Bridge was lit up with the dim but effective lamps making this one of the most romantic places on Earth, but Livia’s protests were dampening the mood somewhat. If you want to reason with her, you may as well ask the cat, because it’s not going to happen. Still, we managed some nice photos.
On the other side, we wanted a last drink before we took the 22 tram back to our humble lodgings, but all the hostelries were finishing up. We took the opportunity to get a head start on sleep: the day after was going to be a long one. Livia was quite relieved to get off the streets and into a relatively peaceful apartment. Relatively, because outside, the traffic was still thundering past; now and again there was the odd ambulance, but it was the number of drivers playing the most appalling music with the bass on that was the worst. Until the night club across the street started up.
We were fortunately too tired to notice, but if we had been
staying here for those first nine days, I think I would have bought a catapult
and found some small rocks. The noise was relentless. And that was why we were
able to sleep, I guess, because stop-start noise like people making
conversation even Spanish ones, can increase and decrease in noise levels,
whereas this constant stream of combustible engine, music and siren was just
white noise in the end.
The final morning, Saturday 15 August, was a gentler start than I had expected. The children played happily in one of the bedrooms and we awoke to the gentle sound of revving engines at the traffic lights below. Washing, dressing and thrusting everything into bags, we walked to the lift to go and retrieve our bags in the cellar. And guess what? The lift was out of action. The cleaners were around, so I’m guessing they had left a door open somewhere, as you can do on those preposterous relics of the twentieth century.
We hurried down the stairs and retrieved our stuff, bringing
it all to the porte cochère on the ground floor. I led the way with the
enormous suitcase on four wheels – you know, the ones that wander off at the
slightest breeze or incline – and a couple of other bags twisted over my
shoulder, the others taking what they could, and we made the ten-minute walk to
the station. It’s a very, very perfidious walk, because you see the station in
front of you, but the entrance is actually below it and about fifty metres
further forward. Never walk straight towards a building surrounded by
communist-era infrastructure; you may never find your way out again.
Arriving a good 40 minutes before departure, we stocked up
on in-journey snacks and bought a breakfast of croissants, pains-au-chocolat,
cinnamon whirls and coffee, and found a very unsuitable place to consume them.
Then we headed to our platform.
The Czechs have a word for Schadenfreude, which doesn’t
surprise me, and that word is škodolibost.
Considering almost everyone taking the train to Berlin was going to have
luggage, the wits in the controlling box had decided to let us all go to the
platform at the very, very end of the tunnel. The only one without an
escalator. The one with very little space to wait with such large bags. That
one.
The train trundled into the station and came to a halt. Our
carriage was three further up and I was in no hurry to rush, especially as we
had reservations for this journey. I let the minions all rush to their doors
and slowly embark while we enjoyed the last breaths of fresh air before the
hermetically sealed four-hour ride to Berlin. Fortunately there was still
enough space for all our bags in the luggage area, and we made our way to the
seats.
I had been sweating again, and looked like I had stood under
a leaky roof gutter in a thunderstorm. Other passengers were looking at me like
I was some kind of disgusting monster, which was my cue to have a wash and a
change. Czech trains are actually quite comfortable; better than the German
ones that serve Prague, anyhow, and the bathroom was clean, spacious and didn’t
smell of that putrid jollop they put in most railway toilets.
Feeling refreshed, we slowly wended our way through the Labe
valley towards the German border, past pretty villages with riverside houses,
hotels, parks, forests and cliffs. People got on and off at the stations – this
was also a commuter train, albeit for students, weekly workers and families on
their way to their country cottage – and soon enough we entered Germany,
leaving behind the hills and moving sedately across the plains of northern
Saxony and Brandenburg.
About ten minutes before we were due at Berlin Südkreuz, I sprang
into action, gathering our luggage nearer to the door so that we could
disembark without panic. The train was only due to remain in the station for
two minutes. We managed to get all the bags off and positioned ourselves away
from the edge. Mistakenly thinking Südkreuz would be a good place to eat, I
persuaded everyone to leave the station – there were apparently some
restaurants in the area, according to Google Maps. Wrong. The station is a
gastronomic wilderness unless you like kebabs or sandwiches as your main meal
of the day.
We went to the platform to await the train to the airport;
surely a brand-new transport hub like that would have plenty of places to eat…
wouldn’t it? While we waited for the train, a man with a football scarf
wielding an empty bottle of weak beer oscillated in front of Milda smelling of
an early start on the sauce: it was only about half-past two. He tried to
strike up a conversation – I forget about what – when Milda delivered the
killer line: “are you a drunk man?” We were screaming with laughter inside, but
we didn’t want to raise his fury, as we all know what angry alcoholics are
capable of.
The train arrived and we hurried inside before he could
follow us. Milda had dropped a toy and he picked it up to give to her, which
set up an awkward moment where we felt we had to engage with him. Fortunately
he remained on the platform and the train dawdled its way to the airport.
Arriving there, we were impressed by the layout. Underground
rail connections, ground-floor road transport, first floor arrivals, upper
floor departures. It’s all neatly contained in a huge glass-and-metal box.
There were just a few things missing from the public areas, namely a decent
place to eat.
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| Brown food menu |
Mövenpick had a deceivingly poor eaterie on the arrivals floor – despite numerous images of nature, huge jars of pasta, and some meaningless AI slogans on the walls, their menu was a perfect example of everything wrong with German self-confidence in the catering sector: Wiener sausage with bread or potato salad; veal sausage with curry sauce and bread; veal sausage with curry sauce and potato salad. The only variation was jacket potato with herb-flavoured cottage cheese. And that was it. Oh, and some soup. I asked the staff member if there was anything else that wasn’t beige or brown. No, there wasn’t. These culinary wonders for five of us came to almost fifty euro, which caused me to take a few photos to post warnings on appropriate websites.
For dessert, we moved back upstairs where there was some
light at a café situated in the middle of the hall. We needed to be there at
some point, and as we were four hours early, we thought we might as well see if
there was something less disappointing going on. However, for a café in the
middle of the departures hall in Germany’s principal airport, there was a
frighteningly low number of decent cakes and pastries. There was also a dearth
of any atmosphere at all. The place is as soulless as a Czech post office
worker.
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| Stuff they don't sell |
We hung around in the departure lounge café, Adler&Bär, a play-on-words of Berlin’s and Brandenburg’s coats of arms, for as long as humanly possible without springing a leak in my patience gasket. When I saw the Aer Lingus baggage handlers had opened up, I made a beeline for them, if for no other reason than to jettison our trolleys and head airside, where I hoped there was something better to eat.
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| A miserably dry cinnamon bun |
The staff at security were very kind, and made the
children’s experience as stressless as possible, which led us into the core of
the airport. With the usual mix of perfumes, chocolates and expensive bottles
(why would anyone in their right minds purchase a bottle of Moët & Chandon
for double the price in Berlin airport?) we found a gem of a shop called Die
Kleine Gesellschaft, where a Peruvian woman was selling all kinds of things for
children that you wouldn’t find in a chain store. I bought myself a lovely
colourful washbag to replace the one I had, which was far too small.
There was, in fact, a food court on a mezzanine, high up in
the gallery of the departure lounge of Terminal 1. It looked very similar to a shopping
mall dining area with various choices from more sausage to Chinese, Italian to
fish & chips. We settled on getting drinks from the main bar in the middle.
I noticed people at some food outlets cleaning tables and putting up chairs – and
considering it was only half past eight on a Saturday night in August, this was
another dismal disillusionment, but at least the place was consistent in that
respect. We managed to get a few dishes from the Asian outlet but virtually all
the others were closed or in a state of deep cleaning up.
The German word Feierabend is a compound noun, and a
most important concept in the national psyche. Feier means celebration,
and Abend means evening, and is used to describe the end of the working
day, both the closing up and the after-work hours that follow. Wishing someone Schönen
Feierabend is very common. Although we would wish someone a pleasant
evening, it doesn’t go the full distance in the idea of rest, relaxation, free
time and leisure as the German concept of Feierabend. And Berlin Airport
suffers from a chronic case of Feierabenditis, I fear. While we were
sitting there eating the final serving of food from the Asian outlet, the
rubbish collector went past clearing all the bins and tipping any used food
trays into a sack. He looked at us, smiled, and asked us politely to put our
waste at the edge of the far counter as he was about to start his own Feierabend.
The whole area was silent: people went about their business
going to their departure gates, but nobody was allowed a coffee. This is Berlin
Airport in peak holiday season, not Idar-Oberstein on a random Tuesday in
March. What do people do with overnight interconnecting flights?
And so the time came to head to our own departure gate.
First, though, we had to pass through ID checks. The automated passport control
barriers are no good with children as they can’t reach the height for the AI checker
to work, meaning we had to find a police booth open in the world’s largest
tribute to the Marie Celeste. The kids checking our passports were fine and we
were through and into the holding zone, which was full to bursting with nobody
holding a takeaway cup or a sandwich.
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| The Midlands of the United Kingdom from the air |
The plane journey was perfect in that it was uneventful and incident-free. Arriving at Dublin Airport showed the vast difference: people were sitting in cafés or standing around taking a breather after the luggage carousel. Music was playing – OK, it was Westlife, but it created a welcoming vibe. Airports are often the first impression people have of a new country and Berlin had failed. Dismally. The best airport arrival I ever had was landing in Marco Polo in Venice with the smell of piping hot pizza wafting down the gangways. That was the most effective way to say “welcome to Italy” without having to erect a single sign.
We had grabbed some trolleys and loaded all our luggage onto
them, and were now making our way to the bus drop-off area some distance from
the terminal. I called the parking company to send their bus out to get us, and
stood there waiting for them. A few other people showed up, including two women
who wondered if we were waiting for the same bus. When I told her we were, one
asked when the bus was coming. I told her I’d called but there was such a lot
of noise, I hadn’t heard how long, so she called herself and discovered it was
two minutes away. This is the kind of helpful collaboration I really missed,
and soon enough we all boarded.
At the other end, I walked through the vast parking space to
where I remember my car was and brought it round to the front where a guy was
hosing a short queue of cars down before they drove off. I had a full tank of
petrol but my tyre light was on and this place didn’t have a spare pump. I drove
to the Circle K in Finglas, a suburb of Dublin, where a homeless woman was
rough sleeping on the parapet outside the shop.
As I was pumping up the tyres to the specified degree, I
didn’t hear it go beep, so I asked Bonny Bee to tell me. The homeless woman
informed us the machine does go beep, and we should just wait for it. She was
right. More helpful words. I thanked her and asked her if she had everything
she needed. She was fine, she said.
And these short, polite conversations with strangers is this
country’s way of saying “welcome to Ireland”. We had made it back to our new
home.
EXTRA PHOTOS:
Jablonec looking sunny
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Portraits on Charles Bridge
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