Prague Part III - Coming back

The pictures don't match but here goes the last part of the trip.

We were actually taking the same train with the same guy wheeling the cart with drinks. That train was 30 minutes late, again. It was packed too. There were so many high school kids. Some of them were part of a lacross team. We didn't make reservations and got kicked out of our first cabin. The train wasn't well air conditioned and was amazingly hot.

We found a cabin with only one other guy in it and sat down, hoping no one else as a reservation. After a while, two people (a guy and a girl) came in and sat down with us. They spoke American English and it turned out they were grad students in Colorado. They're both from California and had went to undergrad in UC Santa Cruz. The girl was working in Germany for the summer as well. The guy was there visiting her and touring around Europe. They were just in Prague too. We had another interesting conversation with them, mostly about living in Germany.

After we passed the last city in the Czech Republic, we had to face border control again. The German border control people came first. The two people we just met had US and Canadian passports. The other guy on the train was German and all he had to do was hand them his ID. Didn't even need a passport. They hardly looked at any of our passports but gave Jingwen a lot of trouble again. The German guy asked for a German resident permit. I got one when I went to the Alien Registration office. She didn't get one for some reason when she was there. Her visa said that she needs one. But he finally backed off and stamped her passport. And then comes the Czech border control lady. She said that the "in transit' stamp that Jingwen got when entering the Czech Republic only allows her to go from Czech to a non-Shengen country. And she wasn't supposed to go back into Germany even though she had a visa for Germany. She didn't speak English and spoke to us in German. At this point, both the American lady and the German guy were trying to help translate using their not-so-great German and English, respectively. After several minutes of us all sitting there not knowing what to do, she finally stamped Jingwen's passport too. I'm so glad I have an American passport.

As if that wasn't enough, we had trouble with the ticket guy too. We already had our ticket checked once and it was okay. But this guy insisted that we needed 2 Bahn Cards. We thought that one Bahn Card can get discounts for up to 5 people traveling together. I think that is still true except when we got our ticket from the machine, Jingwen had put in that we had 2 Bahn Cards. So the guy charged us 22 Euros extra. Jingwen paid for this since I already paid for the Bahn Card.

When the train stopped at Dresden, the two grad students and the German guy got off. Believe it or, three more Americans came into our cabin. They had seat reservations but luckily there were still enough seats in the train. This time, we met a econ professor at Florida University and his wife and son on vacation. Well, the professor had a conference in Copenhagen and his family joined him to travel around Europe. They're now also staying in Berlin. We chatted mostly with the professor who teaches advance microeconomics to grad students. Kind of like 14.04, I think. They had been to Europe a lot. He said that since Florida is so hot in the summer, they always try to go somewhere cool in the summer, like Europe. Which was funny since it was so hot on our train. But he says Norway never fails them. You can always go high enough that it's not hot anymore. They saw the Midnight Sun near the Artic Sea on one of these trips. I was jealous. Hamburg is as far north as I've ever gone. I haven't even been to the other side of the equator!

Anyway, we said goodbye when we got to Berlin. I've really enjoyed these conversations with random people. That's what I've missed the most since coming here to Germany, I think. Not being able to talk with other people. I hardly know my officemates. Can't chat with them. And they're nice people too. I'm sure they would like to chat with me too. I don't know about random people at train stations though. People claim that Americans are easier to talk to than Germans.