Lines

You know how when you're little and you're in elementary school and you have to walk in lines everywhere? Somehow that sticks with you and you instinctively know how to stand behind a person and wait your turn. That didn't catch on here. 

When we were in Vienna, we walked into the embassy for our appointment. The room had one small window to receive applicants. On the floor by the window was a large box made of black and yellow caution tape, denoting where the applicant  would stand while being attended to. 

There was one woman at the window. To the far right of that window was a section of tables that had one man sitting there playing with his phone. I lined up behind the woman. I stood there for a minute or two. Tonya had gone to sit at the tables to wait. I perceived that the man who was sitting there was looking at me. Tonya said, "I think he may be next in line." She was correct. Although not in line, he was next in line. So I sat down to wait, figuring this was the custom of how to wait in line. 

As I sat there, just outside of the box on the floor, another person came in. It was actually two people, a younger woman and an older woman. They sat down beside us. I began to think we were on the right track. Then they got up to get in line. "Oh we're actually next," I said, or something like that. They had a look on their faces like, "Well, you weren't in line." What was happening? Mercifully, the guy at the counter had something wrong with his paperwork so he was called to the back. I quickly got up and leapt into the caution square on the floor. My place in line was secured. 

Later that day we found a large assembly of food trucks that had gathered in museum quarter. We found something that looked good and we headed to get in line. There was no line. There was a group of people that were seven wide and four deep. The worker kept saying, "Once you have ordered please move to this side." He was gesturing to the left side of the food truck. Everyone nodded and continued to order and not move at all. He probably made the same announcement twelve times. Then he would have trays of food and call out the order and no one would step forward to get it. Who had ordered it? Of the 489,000 people standing in what can only be described as a misshapen horde of madness, no one moved. I began to wonder if they even knew why they were standing there. Perhaps hunger had won. Perhaps it was a famine flash mob. No one moved. 

Then the time came to head home to Prague. As we tried to enter the subway train, people moved so slowly that we nearly did not get on in time. Perhaps they were survivors of the food truck Hunger Games from earlier, because they just stood there when the door opened. We had to literally push people on the train to get on it before it left us. Don't know why we had to, considering the train was nearly empty. The door opens and people enter the train. That's usually how it works. This time, it was the door opens and nothing happens. 

Then there was the bus. Oh the bus. They are very large, bright yellow buses that have only one door for passengers to enter that is in the middle of the bus. Another door opens to the right of the passenger door to load luggage. Once again, we have the bus attendant pleading with the group to place the luggage on one side and then move to the other. Once again, no one moved. We all just stood there in this international bottleneck, moving precisely nowhere.

Once we were on the bus we drove pretty uninterrupted to the town of Brno. We stopped to unload and reload passengers. A lady at the back of the bus got off and then back on and then off again. I guess she was confused with where we were. There were two stops on this trip: Brno and then Prague. They look nothing alike. 

Finally, we were pulled over by police just outside of Prague because there was a wreck that blocked the highway. We were in a fairly large parking lot with a McDonald's. We went in to get a drink, but all I could see was another line...

Above: The police and our bus. Also a guy we called Italian Ryan Gosling. 

Next week: What exactly are we even doing here?