Revelations on a night train
I recently went on a visit to the very easternmost reaches of Slovakia, not for the first time in all of my years of Czech and Slovak endeavour. But this was the first visit I’d made after having come to live in Prague. And there were a few surprises in store…
I left Prague at around nine o'clock at night, furnished with a very plush Slovak sleeping cabin, so pumped full of dry heat that I had no choice but to open the window wide and stick my head out to watch the capital disappear. My next impressions come from six o'clock the following morning, when I was woken up by the conductor returning my tickets shortly before the train reached Košice.
Waking up some 700 kilometers away from Prague, my first impressions were how similar everything looked to back home. First there were the buildings, both in terms of design and urban planning. On the outskirts of town were clusters of 'chaty' or summer cottages, then big villas, then 'paneláky' or blocks of flats. And then there was the forestry and the way the land appeared to be used. All of this sameness was only enhanced by a grey drizzle which could have made what I was looking at a Czech landscape, or a Scottish landscape, or a winter’s morning just about anywhere I know.
So, it was this sameness that surprised me, but then I started to wonder at my own surprise: these two countries were, after all, one and the same for nearly three quarters of a century. What had I been expecting? I asked myself. And I'm not sure that I quite know the answer.
I had been to this part of Slovakia before, so I couldn’t plead utter ignorance leading me to the wrong conclusion. Rather, I think my view of Košice had been coloured by my recent years spent in Prague. I don’t want to spark any diplomatic uproar, I hadn’t heard anything negative about Slovakia there, but rather the whole episode reminded me of the way that a couple of my friends living in London talk and think about the rest of the world. I was recently visiting a friend who suddenly realised that they hadn’t left London for over a year and a half – when there is so much crammed into one city you can almost forget that there is a world outside.
Or, another example, years and years back I was an English assistant in a French primary school, and the five year old children took turns to ask me and marvel over how people in Scotland had pens, and computers, and televisions and cars.
As I woke up in that railway carriage, I found myself marvelling that people in Košice had paneláky, and chaty, and big secessionist villas too. And the reason that all of these obvious things struck me as so shocking was because I have become a regular Prague inhabitant and life for me starts at Čechovo Náměstí and ends at Kotlářka. It was a rather good thing to take a break from my normal surroundings, to show me, among other things, the sort of relationship I'd built up with hlavní město Praha.
