In the morning Mom woke me up at 3 a.m. and luckily I wasn’t tired at all, so I got up. Then I did some stuff on the PC and at about 7:45 we set off. For the last 2 hours before leaving I was looking for 2 things: a book on Android programming and the invoice for the phone.
The book was under the things Mom had brought me to change into. I searched the whole room, but as usual I forgot to look under those. I even got into another argument with Mom over it :-/.
As for the invoice, I had definitely told Mom that Dad could put it into his accounting if I didn’t return the phone, and of course Mom only took in the first half of the sentence. So only when I reminded her of that did she suddenly remember, and I had everything I needed to head out.
Right before I left she told me she would be thinking of me and keeping her fingers crossed. I thought that was unnecessary, because under the Civil Code I simply have two weeks to return goods, and there was nothing wrong with the Lumia – except the battery, but that could easily have been by design. Originally my sister wanted to drive me all the way to Nova Karolina in Ostrava, and from there I would have walked the 3.7 km to Ostrava main station, where I would catch either local trains or express trains.
However, since they were going in her boyfriend’s car, which he was also driving, he decided they would pick up two girls in Havirov and drop me off only in Tesin – not even in Havirov. And as always I just nodded along to everything, partly because I wouldn’t have saved that much anyway, and I’d probably have had to get out in Havirov, buy a ticket and then wait half an hour for the next train.
I was in Tesin at about 7 a.m., and since my train didn’t leave until 7:43, I just went to withdraw money from the ATM, but I couldn’t get a single crown out of it. I tried these amounts: 500, 1000, 2000. So either someone had cleaned out the ATM or it’s a big fail by the post office. Then I bought a ticket and went for a walk to the state border, taking a few photos along the way (up to here I wrote this on my phone on the train, so sorry about the punctuation, typos, etc.) of things that caught my eye.
I got to the station, but I still had to wait another 15 minutes – I was there 5 minutes early so I wouldn’t miss the train, and the train was 10 minutes late. The station announcer said it was due to a “locomotive fault“. I got scared, because I had no idea what had happened. Before I boarded, some bearded guy asked me whether it went to Svinov. I told him yes. Because the train was late, and it was clear to me that we wouldn’t make the connection in Svinov, the guy asked the conductor when his train left Svinov.
Well, I’m only guessing that; I just heard them talking, but not what exactly they said. As we were approaching Svinov, he went to the door and I followed right behind him and asked whether he was going to Studenka. He told me he was getting off here in Svinov. (I’ll add that it makes sense to me now – he understood that I thought the local train went to Studenka, or he thought so himself.) We arrived in Svinov at about 8:43. I went straight into the station hall, where 3 people were standing at the only open ticket window.
I checked the departures board and there were still 3 people there, just different ones. Luckily the saleswoman (read: the lady behind the window) was quick and my turn came soon. I asked whether the express train at 8:48 stopped in Studenka. All I got was the answer “48 Studenka Brno”. She didn’t even look anything up, she just fired it at me and off I went. I thanked her politely, and after a few steps I glanced at the clock – it was 8:46. So I broke into a sprint, nearly broke or at least twisted my ankle on the stairs, but I made it.
I still waited there for 2 minutes, and if I remember correctly some other train even passed by.. Anyway, our express arrived on time, I got on, and so did the bearded gentleman. We didn’t stop anywhere, and the main thing that caught my attention in that carriage was the mileage counter. It supposedly showed an incredible 320 thousand km :). I got off in Studenka and began my 12 km long walk there, and then the same distance back. Actually, I only had one piece of paper, with 1 map on each side:
So here’s how the walk went. I walked really slowly. Fortunately, most of the time I was walking between fields and not between houses, where there are usually lots of dogs, which I’m panicky afraid of. I always took the right road, except in Petrvaldik, where, rattled by the dogs and holding a map that was mirror-flipped, I took a wrong turn. Part of the blame also goes to a tractor that pulled out of the intersection, and I couldn’t think of anything better than that it must be coming from the farm around the corner, so I went straight/left.
And I had even taken a photo of the sign saying Petrvald 2 km to the right. But again there were dogs in the way, especially one that I would have had a really hard time getting past. So when it started to feel like I’d been walking through Petrvaldik for quite a while, I looked at that photo, and then asked a man who had come to pick up some mail, and he told me exactly: to the intersection, turn left and keep going straight.
So I went back, looked at the sign once more, and then just walked. I followed the map and completely forgot that I was supposed to look for a church, since it would be somewhere next to the church. But I found it quickly – they had glowing neon banners saying “Eurotel” and “T-Mobile“. I returned the old phone and bought a new one.
I definitely didn’t make a mistake, Windows Phone is a truly, hopelessly weak system (or could it be down to the Nokia Lumia 710 itself, or even to my hands? 🙂 ). I had barely left Petrvald when I wanted to call Mom, but just then she called me herself. So I told her how it went and wanted to talk to Dad, but he supposedly wasn’t home. So I told Mom to give me a missed call when he got home and I’d call him right back, now that I had all that credit.
On the way back I took hardly any photos; instead, on a bench in Petrvald, I tried to put the micro SIM card in about 15 times. It never occurred to me that, with today’s MiniSIM craze, it actually takes a regular SIM card. So I tried inserting the MiniSIM a thousand different ways, but it just wouldn’t go. Over those 24 km I also saw countless planes, and every time I was walking along a narrow road and a plane started changing direction, I felt like a Tatra truck was thundering up behind me – as always, I had earphones in.
On the way back I was already thirsty, so I was on the lookout for a shop called Hruska, which I’d seen somewhere around here but couldn’t remember where. On the other hand, I completely forgot about the Jednota Coop at the end of Albrechticky. But when I got there, I couldn’t buy anything anyway, because they had a break from 12 to 2 p.m., so I had no choice but to keep going. Even though I looked everywhere, I never came across Hruska, so I don’t know :-(. Before the turn-off to the station, while I was walking along road 464, Mom gave me a missed call.
I arrived at the station in Studenka, where a lot of people were getting on a bus, so I immediately got scared, but I kept going – thirst was driving me on :). The only thing at the station was a Relay kiosk, where for 48 CZK I bought a larger Coca-Cola Light and the smallest sparkling Bonaqua. My train was already second on the departures board, but it didn’t say which track and platform it would arrive at. So I went to platform 1 and started drinking. Let me tell you, when I took a sip of that perfectly chilled Coca-Cola in the heat, I felt like I might burst a stomach ulcer. But I drank a lot of it and nothing happened to me :). While I was sitting there resting, 3 trains passed by me – and what speed that was!
First a Pendolino went by toward Brno. Then an express train, also toward Brno, and right behind it a Pendolino heading to Ostrava. As that Pendolino approached, I got so scared it would sweep me away that I grabbed hold of the bench and held on tight to my bag. Unbelievable how fast something can whoosh through a station – I reckon it was definitely doing 140 km/h. With the second train I was maybe lucky, since it stopped in Studenka, whereas this one didn’t stop there, let alone the Pendolinos.
Then I went to have a look at a RegioNova standing behind some freight cars, and went back to the waiting room several times because I still didn’t know which platform my train would leave from. It only showed up when they made the usual announcement: “the train will arrive at platform 2, track 2“.
What surprised me most was that they either number them by the total number of tracks, including those without platforms, or in some other way – in any case, Studenka has platforms 12 and 15 – I heard those 2 on the announcements. So I got on the local train, an old “pantak” unit, and rode 4 stops to Svinov. On the way I wrote the beginning of this blog post in the messaging app, because without a SIM I couldn’t get into any other app. I was really pleased with the keyboard – of course it doesn’t have as many keys as a regular laptop keyboard, but you can still type almost anything on it very nicely and, I’d say, above all quickly.
From Svinov there was a direct train to Tesin; I found it right away, sat down and kept playing with the phone. The train left 5 minutes later; in Havirov I called Mom, then Dad, who then picked me up in Tesin. At home I tried putting in a regular SIM and everything worked, so I’m glad I have a better phone for a lower price. At home I also measured the speed of my mobile connection from O2 and got this result 🙂 :
And of course, as always (well, usually), photos at the end. Today it’s a bit different, though, because the photos mostly show things I don’t mention here, and they come with comments: The domain ran out like prepaid credit on an Oskar SIM.