A true adventure

First: happy birthday mom!

I say this blog is for my daily adventures, and let's face it, not every day is an adventure (I can only get lost so many times). But today, Sheldon and Dan stormed back into town from Poland on their way to Israel. Cue adventure music.

I met them in Old Town at about 430, just as it got dark enough for the street lights to come on (it was absolutely incredible weather today - not a cloud in the sky, and all the snow made everything bright and beautiful). We started walking toward a pub, any pub, but were stopped by the Western Union currency exchange...where Dan and Sheldon proceeded to spend 15 minutes trying to figure out whether or not they would be getting ripped off by changing their Polish money to American dollars (to do this in CR, you have to go via Korunas). After grabbing the calculator from the man behind the counter (who was really trying with his English), and yelling for a bit, we were finally on our way again, no money having been exchanged.

Ah, but how could we pass the Swarovski crystal store without going in? Admittedly, Lorraine (Dan's mom) has a fantastic collection of Swarovski crystals. But the timing. Dan and I left Sheldon (who had taken yet another calculator from another clerk in his quest to figure out whether it would be less expensive to buy the piece here) and retired to a nice little bar. Two beers later, no Sheldon.

Realize what the plan had been: they had been under the impression that Czech Airlines allows more luggage than they actually did. To solve their problem (remember how much luggage they brought?), they wanted to leave one of Dan's bags here, with me. Which meant Dan and I were going to take a cab down to Branik (my neighborhood, south of the city) with the bag, and then come back to meet Shelly for dinner.

Well, after lots of attempted conversations with Lorraine (in the USA), one lost pair of gloves (Dan took them off in the crystal store he thinks. Or the exchange place. Point is, they're gone), a recharged cell phone battery (we happened to be sitting next to the store where they had unlocked their cell phones. Of course they were tight with the guy who worked there, who was nice enough to let them charge their phones), and me finishing my homework for tomorrow (score!), the plan had been altered. We would get the bag to my place, grab dinner around here, and they'd go off to the airport.

But first they had to reconfigure their bags. We spent a good half hour in the luggage storage room of the Intercontinental Hotel as Dan, calm and orderly, took out what he needed, and Sheldon, frantically, took vodka shots.

Cab ride home was uneventful (comparably...remember we're talking about two hugely tall men in a small cab filled with hundreds of pounds of luggage, a driver, and another small human being). I awaited, with bated breath, the final meeting of Sheldon and the Jančářik family. Tomas and Sheldon in the same room just seemed way to good to be true.

Oh but it was so true and it was so glorious. I introduced them (and immediately felt horrible for not giving the family proper warning), and after a few frantic moments (Zuzana in her pajamas, the bag they were storing here covered with snow, no one knowing what was going on), we finally settled down, Dan in the library checking their flight status, Sheldon and Tomas polishing off a whiskey bottle (Tomas: "It's not very good", Sheldon (upon tasting it): "This is real shit!").

There are so many things I could say, but I think my personal favorite part of the evening was Sheldon's realization that Tomas spoke German. From then on, Sheldon spoke nearly exclusively in Yiddish, admittedly a related language...but not that related. Zuzana (now changed from her PJs) Tomas, and Jonas (occasionally translating) listened intently as Sheldon told (mostly in Yiddish) jokes and travel stories, described his restaurants, gave Zuzana a recipe for pickles, and generally was his outlandish, strangely charming self. (Dinner, by this time, was pretty out of the question. Oh yeah and the cab was waiting outside this whole time. But don't worry, Shelly had invited the driver to dinner with us. They were tite.)

Anyhow, time did pass and they did leave with a huge laugh from the family here. Phew! As I told Tomas and Zuzana, any other host family would NOT have had the same reaction to the HurriKane (ah! more puns!), so I was very happy.

An insane afternoon/evening. I've been hanging out the rest of the night, trying to memorize the Czech numbers and days of the week. To end it all, another fantastic quote from Tomas, upon my talking about a bar that had closed at midnight even though it was full of people drinking (spoken in Czech, translated by Vaclav):

"Evan, if all of them drank like you, the bar wouldn't do very much business."