I found this crumpled at the bottom of my purse today:

“My greatest fear is to inadvertently eat a package of nicotine gum and develop a sudden tobacco dependency”.

I’d better explain.

I was trying to leave Pisa, Italy. I had to leave Pisa because I had to get to Venice, in order to fly to Prague, and meet my dear friend Sarah. Sarah would be jet-lagged, having flown from San Francisco and taken a train from Berlin. It was pretty important that I be in Prague on time.

Pisa, however, has some kind of tractor beam.

Yeah, just like in Star Trek.

The first thing that happened is that my ride to the train station got me there late. This meant that instead of a six hour train to Venice, it would now take me eleven hours of intense transferring. After frantically berating the poor ticket agent (me in broken Spanish, while he used the international Purposefully Unhelpful Ticket Agent), I realized I’d have to wait two hours before the train left.

Once I got on that train, I was so tired I went to sleep.

I woke up in about an hour, just in time to pull back into Pisa. As I opened one crusty eye, four things happened.

1. I realized I was back in Pisa.

2. The engine turned entirely off.

3. The doors locked.

4. The lights went out.

There was a long, ominous pause, punctuated by the clicking of cooling metal.

There then arose a faint, but barely discernible keen, made by me:

“Let me off let me offletmeoffletmeoffletmeoff!”

As I began to realize that I was entirely alone and locked in a train, I felt the first faint stirrings of intense claustrophobia. Not generally a person worried about confined spaces, I noticed that all sorts of buried phobias arise when I’m in the dark trapped in a metal tube. As I rattled door handles and tried to exit via different cars, I began picking up speed. And volume.

“LET ME OFF LET ME OFF LETMEOFFLETMEOFF!”

My obnoxious jacket must’ve formed a kind of poisonous blur in the train windows to any passers-by. I started to seriously consider breaking a window.

Eventually, the last two passengers walked by on the platform. One of them used extremely delicate sign language to instruct me in the fine art of emergency exit levers, and I escaped.

I must have written that gum note sometime in the next thirty-six hours of sleep-deprived nausea. I have a vague memory of living off of candy machines, and trying to sleep sitting up.

I still don’t quite understand how I made it to Prague.

There is something wrong here.

I’ve been wandering the streets for three hours now, trying to figure out what feels so off about this city. The place is crammed with tourists, a phenomenon I haven’t yet encountered. And its easy to tell that we’re not local… And I don’t mean in the usual way, with our giant maps, ugly hats, and huge, ungainly cameras. Its actually a strange reversal: while the majority of tourists generally exude waves of tackiness, here, we’re clearly the wealthy minority. It’s a subtle thing, but it comes out mostly in our clothes. While both the locals and the tourists are wearing similar clothing, the quality of our clothing is obviously better than that of the Czeks’. There is a sense that the Czeks’ clothes will fall apart with just a few washings. The material is thinner, and there’s something about the workmanship that screams poverty.

At the same time, there’s a vast number of young Czech women dressed like prostitutes. They have a world-weary air about them, and they’re beautiful. The current fashion seems to be tight white, see through trousers, extremely high heels, and barely concealed breasts. They travel in groups of no more than two, and cut a swathe through the dowdy travelers, smoking profusely. They can’t be out of their twenties, but they look old and used up.

The middle-aged women, on the other hand, wear extremely cheap versions of what you might find at a discount store in the US. Again, their clothes look poorly made, like they regularly disentigrate. I get the distinct impression that they were beautiful once, and may have been prostitutes themselves.

I only notice a few local men, and that is because they are begging. They wear what must have been normal under the Communist regime. Nondescript greenish trousers, coats, and hats, even on this warm day. Their posture while begging is what draws my attention. They rest their foreheads on the ground, padded by their forearms. Their knees support the rest of their weight. They hold one hand outstretched, holding their hat or a cup out to us, the passers-by. They remain motionless for hours in this position, their faces pressed to the sidewalk. We all pretend not to see them.

I have almost no idea of the history of this place, but the owner of this Internet cafe helped me understand some of it. Apparently, the population embraced Communism, and tried to make it work until the Russian invasion of 1968. I think I can see this in the buildings… They have that fake sense of trying to appear old. But I just took a class on medieval architecture, and something is wrong. The facades, in many places, are poured concrete, made to look like stone masonry. The street cobbles are barely worn, and most of the decoration on the buildings is moulded concrete instead of carved stone. This architectural style of using massive amounts of concrete was really popular in the 1960s, and I imagine a populace, wild with enthusiasm, putting new facades on old buildings, and making their new projects look old while building cheaply.

But something is wrong here.

There is an enormous sex trade operating immediately outside this tourist district. I believe many of the young women I’ve seen are working as prostitutes. And in and among all of this is one of the greatest shopping districts I’ve ever seen. It puts San Francisco to shame. They are mostly high end chain stores, like Lacrosse and Marc Jacobs. Crammed between them are the tiny boutiques selling the inevitable nested Russian dolls and tourist junk.

The young American men roam the streets, bragging about how much beer they drank, and will drink again.

And all of us tourists are spending massive amounts of money, while just a few blocks away, the old Communist housing blocks loom. The paint is peeling, the cobbles are new, and something is wrong here.