Sunday, January 30, 2011

Going Crazy in Prague

Yesterday, I discovered that I might be going crazy. I can finally empathize with Tom Hanks' character in Cast Away. I have realized how boring I am from my lack of interesting internal dialogue. And frankly at this point, I'd happily adopt a volleyball, name him Wilson, and start talking to him. Unfortunately, Prague does have a very good selection of sporting goods stores. Which is why after two weeks of travelling, I yearned so much for human interaction that I lost all sense of social cues.

Don't worry, nothing crazy happened. Just a little embarrassing. Let me explain. So I went to this chapel outside of Prague that was decorated with the bones of over 40,000 people. It was pretty awesome. I was taking tons of pictures when I overheard it: English! These two girls were chatting and taking pictures of EVERYTHING! So I walked over and broke the ice by asking, "Can you take a picture of me?" Classic tourist, right? Of course they said yes.

But let's be honest, I didn't really care about the picture. What I really wanted was to talk to them. Not creepily, just normally. So I start asking them questions, and at first they were cordially answering them: where are you from? what do you do? how long are you travelling? But as I kept asking questions and trying to initiate questioning, you could tell their answers were getting shorter. They sort of wandered around and (retrospectively) I'm embarrassed to have followed them around, continuing to ask them questions. This is about the point I would normally take the hint and bug off. But like I said, I'm actually crazy now, so I continued following them around.

At this point, we are the only three people in the chapel. All the normal tourists have left. So its almost embarrassingly evident that I would normally have left by now. But these girls liked taking pictures and I liked talking to (read:at) them. Anyways, the short of the story is that I realized today that I have had so little social interaction in the last two weeks that I crave social interactions...and I've become the creepy slash annoying guy who won't stop talking to you. Ugg.

Next stop: Vienna!!! And friends!!


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