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Darragh Gill Erasmus Experience

Before I went to the Czech Republic the only other recent trip to Europe was to Madrid for a week and before that growing up in Munich from 1997-1998. I wouldn’t return to the mainland until 2016 and of course a lot has changed since then but I didn’t really notice because in 1997 I was a toddler.

Even before leaving there was a mountain of bureaucracy to scale at St. Peters with various documents I had to copy and scan then resend then get new documents and break into my IT Carlow account because I forgot it over the Summer but eventually I got on top of it and was away.

I got the plane for the 19th of September 2016 about 2 days after the New York/New Jersey Terrorist incidents so in the airport I was on top form. I got this great seat at the back where the whole row was free so I slept for the whole 2 hours. It was pretty sweet.

Arriving in Prague however was a disaster; I had anticipated the country to not be very English language friendly so I thought “It’s so close to Germany so everyone must speak German!” but I couldn’t have been more wrong. It helped but still led to massive confusion for all parties involved. I got from the airport to the train station alright by means of Swartzfahren which was handy but had to buy a ticket to get to Ostrava. It cost 300kc(€9) to go 400km plus you get a free coffee and water which Ianrod Eireann can take note off.

At that point I had missed my train because I couldn’t make head nor tail of the timetable through the exhaustion of lugging around 40kgs of luggage after being awake for 18hours. I got the conductor to tell me when I had arrived in Ostrava so all I had to do was relax in my cabin with an old Czech man with no way to communicate so you can guess how quietly awkward the journey was.

I arrived at 3am to a strange ex-soviet train station shrouded in smog and darkness, the view was obstructed by unending cargo trains filled to the brim with football sized lumps of coal. The air was filled with the overwhelming smell of industry and roar of a strange mixture of modern and antiquated machines. Walking out of the building that on the surface looked modern but in the darkness of the early morning resembled a stereotypical Hollywood vision of an Eastern bloc structure.

Looking around I saw a stout grey haired Czech man with a large moustache and fussed uniform having a smoke outside of his parked trolleybus. Luckily for me I had written down the address of the college dormitory on a sheet of paper which after a quick exchange in our shared broken German he decided to drop me there free of charge.

Sitting on the rickety autobus I could see a kaleidoscope of illuminated grey whizz past the window and while going down these new streets I felt a weird feeling of misdirection. For all I knew I could’ve been in some part of Glasgow or Aberdeen as Ostrava looked remarkably similar.

The bus stopped and the driver brought me outside, pointing in various directions and speaking in Czech. He was telling me to go down a road and turn a corner to reach the college dormitory but I didn’t understand anything and was so tired I just agreed with everything that he said. I thanked him in my lacklustre grasp of the German language, grabbed my stuff after he tore down the empty road.

Stumbling around a foreign country in the dark with 2 bags strapped around my neck and a large suitcase which was quite literally my cross to bear. I looked around completely demoralised. At 3am it was a ghost town. I decided to wait until daylight to look for the dormitory so I pulled out a sleeping bag and slept at the bus shelter.

My Erasmus “Buddy” was meant to meet me at the Train station but he was “busy” hosting the welcome drink event in a local bar so I was on my own. As I rested at the bus stop, bus after bus of students poured out before me. At the time these people seemed so strange and hostile as I looked on in fatigue induced bewilderment but soon these strangers would become close friends. It would be me stepping out from a bus at 4/5am with my mates in front of the poor souls sleeping rough in the coming months.

As the sun began to rise I decided to do what I should have done 2 hours before hand. Picking up my bags I heading in the direction of the students.