We got up with the alarm at 07:00. After breakfast at the hotel, we packed our bags for checkout. I had to attend the closing plenary session of my ISO Photography Standards meeting, which was scheduled to end at 13:00. Checkout time for the hotel was midday, so I left my wife to spend the morning as she wanted and then to check out and look after our bags until my meeting was done.
The closing plenary meeting session was just a run through of administrative issues, summarising all of the work done during the week by the various working groups and ad hoc technical groups, future actions, future meetings, adopting formal resolutions, and so on. We also had a tribute for Mr Hitoshi Urabe, a working member of TC 42 for almost 30 years, who retired a couple of years ago, and who passed away recently on 18 May. Urabe-san worked on the set of standard photographic test images published by the Japanese Industrial Standards Committee, known as the ISO/JIS-SCID N series images, including the famous ISO/JIS-SCID N2 test image of the Cathedral Cafe (in some city in Belgium, I think).
Our meeting ended very early, by 10:30. They said lunch would be supplied and would arrive at 11:00, so most people stayed for that before leaving. After eating a couple of sandwiches, I said my farewells to the remaining meeting attendees and departed for the hotel. While walking back to the hotel, when I was almost there, I heard my wife calling me from behind. She was returning from some time at a shopping mall where she was sitting and doing some of her sketching.
We grabbed our luggage from our room and checked out of the hotel. Then walked over to Zoologischer Garten station and caught an S-bahn three stops to the Hauptbahnhof. Because my meeting finished early, we were in plenty of time for our train to Prague. In fact, we could easily have made the previous train, leaving two hours earlier – which I hadn’t booked when looking at the trains back home because I wanted to ensure us enough time to avoid being late. But since we were here early, I tried going into the Deutche Bahn ticket office to see if we could change our seat booking to the earlier train. But when I asked the woman at the reception desk, she just shook her head and said the train was fully booked, without looking at anything. So I don’t know how she knew, but anyway.
The station was crowded with travellers and there were precious few seats anywhere to sit down. So we found a bakery with some tables at the back and bought a pretzel to eat so we could sit there, and then a bit later a bottle of water and my wife had a sandwich for her lunch. A couple of times one of us sat and minded the bags while the other went for a bit of a walk. I went outside the station to the plaza on the southern side, where there were several food stalls and a view of the Reichstag across the river. Finally we moved from the bakery to a Vapiano cafe restaurant where my wife got a cappuccino.
Eventually it came time for us to head to the platform for our train. We were sick of sitting so we walked down early. Which was good because the train pulled in almost 15 minutes before departure time, so we had plenty of time to get on board and settle in. The carriage we were in had a corridor down one side and compartments of six seats, just like the Hogwarts Express. Ours had two men sitting by the windows, and we had the seats next to the corridor. Nobody else entered out compartment, so we had empty seats next to us, at least initially. One man was in a German military uniform, and the other was an older man whose daughter joined the train at the next stop in southern Berlin. They were friendly and suggested later we could swap seats to get views of the mountains as we entered Czechia. They left the train halfway there, at Dresden, and we had the compartment to ourselves for about half an hour, until a young man came in at one of the stations across the Czech border – by which time we’d moved to get window views. The ride was pleasant, with some interesting and scenic countryside – mostly in Czechia as the German landscape was very flat and mostly farmland, while across the border we followed the Elbe river valley as it twisted and turned through rocky hills.
We arrived at Prague about 10 minutes later than scheduled. We walked to our accommodation, which is a lovely small studio apartment in a building just off the main town square. We accessed the key and let ourselves in. It has a terrace balcony with a view of the St Nicholas Church on the Old Town Square. We couldn’t be in a better location!
Because we’d arrived late, we had to hurry straight out to our dinner booking, a good 18 minutes walk away. We got there right on time, at Restaurace Střecha, a fully vegan place that employs homeless people and ex-prisoners. It was quite big inside with plenty of tables, and we got a quiet table around the back away from the more crowded front. We tried the dumplings stuffed with soy meat, served on red cabbage:
And the not-ribs in plum sauce with onion jam and mustard dip:
Both items were really delicious and the serving sizes were very hearty. We were too full to think about dessert, despite a fantastic looking blueberry crumble cake and several other items in the dessert cabinet.
We walked back more slowly to our room, along a different route. We passed a Tesco’s supermarket and stopped to buy some muesli, milk, and yoghurt for our breakfasts here. My wife popped into a shop and bought a small notebook with a decorative Czech poster on the cover. Despite it being after 22:00, the streets were full of people, walking around, eating at restaurants, seeing sights. It seems like there are lots of tourists here!
Finally we reached our room again and had showers before doing some writing, drawing, and reading before bed.
