The Angel Station

The Anděl station is a metro stop on the outskirts of Prague. Anděl means Angel, and eager to have an English tram stop name, the students have affectionately renamed it “The Angel Station.”

Several days earlier, Zdeněk had jokingly warned us that when getting off the metro at the Anděl stop, “you go zis vay or else you end up on wrong side and you vill cry.”

But which way did we go when he was with us? Left? Right? Then where? Helen did not remember and Dimple had never been to this grocery store before. Will and I agreed that the right seemed correct. The four of us ascended on the escalator to a dark platform illuminated by white light streaming in from the outside. There was no grocery store in sight. But was it close? We did remember a short walk. “Promiňte, mluvíte anglicky?” one of us asked a man selling newspapers like Britain’s The Guardian. “Little bit,” he replied. Unfortunately, he meant it; “grocery” and “big food store” were clearly foreign to him. We then walked to a cellular booth, without any luck. I began thinking we should turn back and traverse the entire Angel station, hoping to find what we were looking for on the other side.

I turned around and saw Helen, and I broke down laughing. She was talking to the man selling papers as if they were old friends! Obviously the man knew his Russian, and Helen had gathered the nerve to try her native language on someone other than Zdeněk. It was a godsend, and we soon arrived at our destination.