Prague day 5

Talk is today!  Am pink explosion.  I am first in session.  People laugh in the right places.  I experience no word failure/ voice-loss/ alien abduction/ drop attack/ seizures during speech.  I finish bang on 10 min mark- miraculous, as brevity is not one of my strong suits.  Am asked question by a frightening Jabba the Hut UK woman who has frizzed greying hair, is wearing a tracksuit (to an international congress), and is probably a sequential professional scholar who has never had a real-world job in her life. And likely has 50 cats.  I am relatively able to silence her.  Some other questions follow which are more tricky, that I could have contextualised better, I feel... One forgets that people outside of SA have no real concept of what our health care system is actually like...  One question was about quality assurance of the student-run clinics.  I gave anecdotal evidence, forgetting to say that our NORMAL public healthcare system has no quality assurance!!!  Anyway, rest of day goes by in academic haze. 

That night, I am to meet my new German friends again.  I went home after congress to nap, while they went for a beer.  I was supposed to meet them at a mutually convenient tram station at 19:00.  I ask the hotel staff which tram I should take, and get the correct answer.  Or so I think.  I wait and wait for the correct tram. Eventually ask someone for help and they say that I should in fact be waiting at the stop around the corner!!!  Finally the number 7 tram comes, and I think all is well.  However, I have an unsettling feeling that I am not in Kansas anymore after one stop.  I ask a very helpful young woman for help.  She doesn’t quite know, but thinks I am going in wrong direction.  How is it that I try and tell her what her city is supposed to look like, and which direction I am sure we are going in, when in fact I am SO in the wrong direction that we are off the map!! But I do. She is very patient and guides me to get off at the next stop, shows me where to get back on etc.  By now Antonia has called to say they are going to go on to the restaurant.  Eventually get there.  Even get back on the right tram in the right direction.  Sigh.