Long, long day.

Ugh. What a day.

We woke up early, had a nice breakfast at the hotel, checked out, and walked to te train station to catch our train to Vienna, which departed Praha at 10:42 and was scheduled to arrive in Vienna at 15:22.

Our day went like this:

10:42am: Our train leaves the station. Luckily for us, we made reservations and had seats, because it was another train that was full beyond capacity, with people overflowing into the hallways. Our six-person compartment actually had seven people in it - we shared it with a Slovakian girl about our age named Martina, and a group of four Colombian girls who couldn't have been much older than eighteen, who took turns sitting on each other's laps since there were only three available seats.

11:00am: Aforementioned Colombian girls start giggling embarrassedly when Steve lets them know that he understands Spanish and therefore knows all their secrets. Hahaha.

12:00pm: Our train makes it to another station still in the Czech Republic and an announcement is made that there are technical difficulties of some kind and our train will be delayed at the station for another hour.

Well, great. The owner of the apartment we're renting in Vienna is expecting us at 4pm. Ugh.

12:45pm: Another announcement is made that tells us we are going to be bussed to a different station, and we will catch another connection to Vienna from there. These announcements are being made in Czech and being translated by Martina, who is from Slovakia but is studying in the Czech Republic, so THANK GOODNESS we have her. When we exit the train to make our way to the bus area, we stick with Martina, figuring it would be in our best interest to make friends with someone who speaks the local language.

We go outside and there are HORDES of people waiting for buses and, no joke, maybe five or six buses to transfer the approximately two thousand people to another station, which is a good twenty minutes each way. Plus there is apparently some kind of big metal music festival going on in northern Czech Republic so tons of angry metalhads were yelling and pushing and generally being obnoxious while we were trying to get on buses.

As we wait, more trains are arriving at this station. Martina overhears that, due to the slightly stormy weather, a cargo train had dereailed and taken out some electric posts, which was why our train could not press on - and neither could any of the other trains running this direction. So the crowd never gets much smaller even after several busloads of people are taken away.

2:30pm: We FINALLY make it in to a bus and are taken to a tiny little train station in a tiny little town. There is a small area of shade away from the hordes of people camped out next to the tracks, so Steve, Martina, and I sit down. Over the next two hours, the three of us are half engaged in conversation about every subject we could think of and half trying to figure out what the heck was going on. Eventually Martina found out that we were not going to be getting on another train to Vienna, but one to Brno, where we would have to change and get on a train to Breçlaw, and from there change to another train to Vienna.

AAAUUUUUUGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

5:00pm: A train bound for Brno finally makes it to the station and we hop on.

6:20pm: I guess the rails have been cleared, because we get to Brno in time to jump onto a train bound to Vienna..... THAT IS THE EXACT SAME TRAIN WE STARTED OUT ON!!!! Except now it is packed to three times its capacity, with people standing in literally every possible available space. So much for our reservations....

9:30pm: We finally make it to Vienna!!!!!!!!!!!

Twas a long, long day.