#6 Ticket to Ride

My son has learned the phrase, “the imp of the perverse,” and we’ve all been using it lately. Everybody knows what this imp is: it makes you do what you know you oughtn’t to do but you do it anyway. This week, I decided to give my imp of the perverse full rein. I smiled at old men on trams all day (and this trip I actually got smiled back at a time or two.) I rode facing the front of the tram when I stood, instead of the sides, as the Czechs do. And sometimes I played around and instead of holding onto one of the four orange rails hanging along the ceiling of the tram, or onto the back of a seat, I stood surfer-style in the aisle. I took the seats marked on the windows with a green cross, but gave them up to the elderly or infirm, since it is for them, and not the merely middle-aged and tired, like me, that these seats are reserved.
I didn’t, however, talk loudly to my traveling companions or use my cell phone, or act like I was being offered some black market jewelry for sale when the tram inspector flashed his badge. I had to draw the line somewhere.
Riding public transport is a big thrill for me. What can I say? I grew up in a tiny town, and the biggest city aside from Brno that I have ever lived in was Athens, Georgia, where during my first week I rode a city bus past my stop twice before I figured out how to make the driver stop. Here, public transport is cheap, or at least it seems to be. For less than a dollar (10 Czech crowns), I can get a non-transfer ticket for a ten minute ride, and for five crowns more I can ride for an hour and get on and off the trams, buses, and the trains as many times as I want.
But my favorite is the two hour, six zone ticket for a mere thirty-seven crowns (a bit more than two dollars) because I can take a slow train into the countryside for an hour and then come back. The slow trains stop at almost every tiny station they come to, even the ones with grass growing tall along the tracks and peeking out from the cracks in the platform tiles. The conductor announces each station over the loud speakers, but if you miss it, or can’t hear it for the screaming of the brakes, you can see the names on blue metal signs that don’t swing in the wind as the train pulls in. Except for the occasional Coke machine that often sits brightly against the slightly sooty station wall, most of these stations look abandoned. But the train still stops and someone almost always gets on or off.
I like to take these train rides this with my husband and son sitting in the high-backed brown vinyl covered seat across from me, so I can
look from their faces to the passing landscapes, like a collection of 19th pastoral paintings, in the huge window beside us.
I used my twenty-one crown, sixty minute ticket yesterday to visit someone in Holasice, a tiny village just ten minutes from Brno. After we got off at the station, we crossed the tracks and walked along a worn path framed on the sides with wildflowers, many of which reminded me of the blooming weeds I like back in America. Next to a Queen Anne’s Lace was growing a leggy plant with small papery, pale lilac blossoms somewhere between cosmos and a poppy. Its name in Czech means “the one who waits.”