Week Twenty

Monday - the day I should get out, hopefully. The doctor in the morning feels the ends of my fingers and looks at my shoulder (the only bits of my arm which are visible) - he reckons that the swelling is down enough to put a hard cast on: way-hey. From the hospital window, after breakfast, I watch the police sealing off the approach roads to the town centre - that'll be for the arrival of one or both of the presidents, I assume. An orderly comes round and takes me down into the depths of the hospital to convert my half-cast (as it were) into a full cast - incredibly painful, this process involves unstrapping me, bending my arm at the shoulder, and lots of physical contact around the fractures. I take a recuperative lie-down afterwards, and a painkiller.
As the morning wears on, I get slowly dressed to the best of my ability and pack the contents of the bedside cabinet (including the remaining stock of rolls from Milena) into a plastic bag. Nurses come round and strip the bed, and confiscate my hospital pyjamas (just as well I'd changed out of them) - it looks as if I'm definitely getting out today. Milla comes round just before 12 - checkout time at the hospital seems to be between 10 and 11: there was no lunch for me at 11.30 (no matter - I didn't miss anything). I'd pretty much decided to make my own way back to the hostel by midday, and was sitting in a queue waiting to see Dr. (MUDr) Masek when Milla arrived. Half an hour later we chat to the partially-English-speaking Doctor: he gives me a prescription for painkillers, and asks us to come in next week for "control" X-Rays. At that time he'll give us the X-Rays and a medical write-up (God knows in what language).

Off we go, past the bus station and the all-night garage: Milla keeps pulling ahead of me, since my walking speed seems to have dropped below 2 miles an hour - less up slopes. We stop at the big supermarket to buy a celebratory Capuccino Viennetta. The cobbles of the Inner Town are a nightmare, since any uneven step jolts my arm. En route we meet Marnie (she did go to Prague, and then returned with another lad from England - Joe) and Helen (new to me) and stop to chat briefly. Then back to the hostel, via a pharmacy (lekarna) to get my prescription: we arrange the beds and multiple pillows to an optimal configuration, and then I lie down and sleep.
Milla goes out again, on the hunt for Vaclav Havel and the Slovak President - we passed black cars, TV crews and soldiers in the main square on the way back. She discovers that, as he does in Prague, Havel has slipped out somewhere for a quick drink: instead of being in the Town Hall, around which the entourage and spectators are gathered, he's in the café of the Hotel Ruze. Milla waits for ages outside the hotel entrance, camera poised, but the presidents elude her - it seems there's a back door somewhere.

Evening comes, we devour our Viennetta, go along two doors to Domino to share a beer and send out a whole range of e-mails to alert people to my situation. During the session, my website mysteriously disappears: at least, the site is still there but no-one can get to it. A little investigation reveals that the company I use for website forwarding seems to have withdrawn my account: and just when I could have done with it most. Pah - nothing is ever easy.
Funds are getting fairly low, so we withdraw more money from one of Cesky Krumlov's innumerable (three, actually) ATMs before returning to the hostel and retiring (I'm exhausted).

I get up twice during the night - a.) sleeping is difficult, and b.) I have this large and heavy cast lying on my bladder while I sleep. Each time it's a major and painful effort to get out of the low bed - I will have to develop a better technique.
Actual daylight hours pass without incident - we go out for a walk, pick up doughnuts (kobliha) from the supermarket and discuss visiting the Egon Schiele Gallery (Cesky Krumlov's only serious gallery, inside an old brewery [pivovar]) - Helen spent an entire day there and enthuses about it. The entry costs seems quite steep to us (£2-£3 each) for an artist neither of us likes, though. The hostel is partially decorated in Egon Schiele Gallery posters, for temporary exhibitions, but these still do not convince us: one of them shows an exhibition of the Prague puppets used for their famous Don Giovanni productions. We wonder if we should have gone to see the show in Prague after all.

The day passes mainly in conversation - with fellow residents, with Blanka (who's great, and is keeping the whole 8-bed dorm just for us), and with Oskar: inspection reveals that his injury is in exactly the same place as mine - upper left fore-paw. With practice, I hone the story of my accident into a humerous anecdote, and reflect that it therefore wasn't a total disaster. It has to be said though, at the time, "this'll make a humerous anecdote" wasn't the thought going through my head.

A day for spending. I'm up early, as well as waking in the middle of the night again, so we've finished breakfast by just after 10.00. I've managed to develop a technique for the one-handed spreading and consumption of rolls with strawberry jam. After that, it's up to Droxi Drogerie on Latran - bizarrely, "Drogeries" don't sell any drugs or medicines (not even aspirin or lemsip - you have to go to a chemist for them), but in other respects resemble small branches of Boots. They've developed the last films from Prague (under £2/$3 for development, index card and a set of 9x13 prints!). We also pick up a new pair of shades for Milla - lacking a case, her original pair have become kind of mangled in her rucksack.
We go into a little café/tourist centre just down from the castle (they also have internet, but it's quite expensive until 16.00) and sort through the photos ("What was that building?", etc.). Back at the hostel we buy a phonecard (after checking if the post office has decent facilities for international dialling - it doesn't), and use it to contact my travel insurance company. There's no way I'm up to travelling at the moment, so it seems we're stuck in Cesky Krumlov for the foreseeable future - ideally, I feel I should be able to claim some of the accommodation cost back (and for Milla). As anticipated, the insurance company turn out to be complete bastards. They don't want to pay for any accommodation, etc. because by their logic, I would have incurred that cost anyway (ie. if I'd carried on travelling). They also don't want to pay for anyone else, unless it's medically necessary for them to be there - and even if it was, they would invoke their repatriation option (it's cheap to get me back from the Czech Rep). They will also repatriate me if the injury is serious to terminate my holiday. Amusingly, their repatriation option is just to the UK - ie. London in this case - rather than back to my port of departure. They do offer to refund any medicines (about $2 so far), and to refund any pre-booked tickets I'm holding (I have one, Budapest-Bucharest, but it's valid until some time in March). Hey-ho.
We spend the evening in the internet place by the hostel (where fellow residents are taking on locals at the pool tables), drinking small amounts of alcohol and sending out e-mails complaining about insurance companies.

The rest of the week passes without much incident. Blanka takes a few days off to attend poor Oskar - he has a metal plate in his shoulder which needs removed. The girl who takes over as receptionist and general Girl Friday is Kaca (KA'cha), or Katya - tall, dark and quite barmy. She comes complete with Lee, from California, who looks kind of post-hippy and spends most of his time stoned and/or pissed: this is his second trip to Cesky Krumlov - last time he stayed for a year. Kaca's wonderful - like a mad butterfly - but is seriously deficient in the making-coffee department.
We take gradually longer walks around Cesky Krumlov, extending the twenty-minute maximum which was my initial limit. We also revisit the Infocentrum to investigate experimental day trips: apart from the large town of Ceske Budejovice to the north, the area is peppered with little towns and villages with castles and ruins and . . . well, stuff. Our first target will be Rozmberk to the south, sometime next week, and possibly Vyssi Brod further south (both on the Vltava, which snakes from south to north all the way up the Czech Rep). After that, Ceske Budejovice (which we're calling "Chesky B", following a habit started by Helen: "Chesky K" and "Chesky B"), and then perhaps some of the towns beyond - Hluboka, Pisek, Prachatice, Telc, Trebon and so on. If we can do these successfully, then we can plot a journey of similarly-sized trips back to Budapest, for a train back to Bucharest. Our main problem then will be how to carry all the stuff, but Helen may be our saviour there - she donates to us a small wheeled suitcase, which is large enough for Milla's rucksack.

Our perambulations take us back past the divadlo (theatre) on Friday, where we discover a little café (only open from 14.00) which is the best option in town for coffee, beer and grog as a mid-afternoon stop. It's deserted during our first visit, but they have an exhibition in the back of photographic compositions by Jana Kovandova, which we look around. Basically landscape photos of Spain, stripped together in twos and threes, they're generally not that good but some of them are quite interesting.
We also take to visiting the "Tourist Centre" café by the castle, to finish off our days: after 16.00, their internet is as cheap as at Domino ($1 per hour) and it's a nice atmosphere - they have stacks of old National Geographics to browse through, and sell coffee and beer cheap during the same hours.

During our stay, work has been being carried out on one of the downstairs rooms (the Travellers' Hostel is a work in progress), and the owners hold an opening party on Saturday. The room isn't quite finished, but it's obviously finished enough for a party. Blanka (returned with a stitched Oskar), Paul and some others slip away early to attend the official opening of Jana Kovandova's exhibition at the theatre: in their place, a couple of the (uninvited) residents go down to check out the party. Among them are Lee and Milena (she's been trying to persuade me to go out drinking all week, without success: my instinct for self-preservation is belatedly keeping me away from crowds, especially drunken crowds). After a couple of hours, she returns to collect her cigarettes, happy and a little unsteady - she's got into a slivovice-drinking competition with Lee and some of the locals: real, home-made killer Slivovice, she enthuses. She's also brought me some in an old lemonade bottle - a present from the management.
Sometime after returning downstairs, she is apparently proclaimed the winner - Lee is later discovered unconscious in one of the showers.
I drift off to sleep, meanwhile, and am awakened at 02.00 by her triumphant return. A group of drinkers move onto Babylon (one of Cesky Krumlov's two popular late-night drinking venues - yep, that's it for what is apparently the Czech Rep's best nightlife outside Prague). She has returned, half-pissed, all the way along the banks of the Vltava bearing a 300ml glass (ironically, for the Czech Rep's famous glass industry, made in Indonesia) of gin-and-tonic (and lemon), which is presents to me: "A drink for my man."
She tells me all about the evening, and then goes to sleep (after carefully putting a beermat over the top of the drink). It's possible I've found the best woman in all of Eastern Europe.