Always talk to strangers

'You need to get off at the Mustek or Muzeum station’, our driver says as he drops us off at the Prague metro. It’s the second thing he says after ‘Yes, sure I can give you a lift to Prague’.

Being at one of the first metro stations at sunset feels like this place has been awaiting us. By the time we'd get up the hill with the fountain at the national museum where we toss a coin as a conviction we are to get back, it’s going to be dark. August dark.

It’s A.’s first visit, mine second. The first time I got here, it was an early morning all planned stuff. Now it is a late evening, with no couch and all the flashes of all the roads with all the drivers lingering on. We note each of them down on a map of Czechoslovakia from 1992, excavated in a souvenir shop in the Jewish district of Krakow, where our travel began from. Not much has changed. Only the highways are missing but we don’t need them anyway.

The night transforms into a shelter. Things are unexpected and undemanding. Being unknown, we are no strangers. The picture I take of a wall with the sentence ‘Before I die…’ continued in all kinds of handwritings and colors of crayons turns out blurred just fine.

We pass twice by a place that A. says about:
‘We could sleep here if we'd find nothing else.’ We laugh.

And we walk the night away.

We meet twice a guy with his two dogs.

‘Do you have a place to sleep?’, A. asks him.
‘I have all I need’, he says, his beard and smile whitening the night that we are walking away.

We get to talk with a guy playing the guitar. The three of us climb the Petrin hill where he plays a song. A. records it.

‘Maybe you can sleep here, so warm, the view over the river, the city…’
‘I can’t stand the mosquitoes’, A. says, when a guy, known to our guitar guide, pops up to pronounce that he’d sing a lullaby to the mosquitoes so we’d have the once-in-a-lifetime chance to convert this hill into our bedroom.

We go down the mosquitoes’ hill to go up yet another one. That’s Prague. Krakow's flatness is left behind.

Our guitar guide has now the idea to head for a ‘Bohemian pub’.

‘Poets gather there’.

Sleep is the dullest pain when no poets are to be seen around. A. and I wave good-buy to our guide and go down this next hill to wander some more and come across a man, carrying a baby car seat, who shows us to the nearest hostel.

‘Coming? Especially at this hour I don’t have all the time in the world. Just for the record.’

He shows us and is carried by the night. So are we.