Vienna

Last Thursday, there was a trip planned to go to the Antonin Dvorak Museum.  Since it was free, I decided to go just because.  I didn't know who that guy was, but I figure a free thing like that is always a good thing, right?  So, as we walked over there, Z [one of our guides here] told us a little about Dvorak.  He was a Czech composer who actually lived in the United States for a few years and, during his time there, he had a huge impact on the musical composition of the US.  Before his work there, most of the pieces being written in the US were ignoring the local culture and just trying to mirror the music in Europe at the time.  Dvorak decided to change that.  He was a radical to some of the people around him.  While he was here, he wanted to truly discover "American" music and help it develop.  He believed that, in order for this to happen, people needed to look to the themes in the music from the American Indians and the African-Americans, both of which were more or less being completely ignored at this point.  While he was there, he was the Director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City and taught some classes.  According to Z, he taught a class with a non-white student, which caused him problems with his racist colleagues.  He lived in the US from 1892-1895, so it was very uncommon to allow students who were not white into the classes.

This past weekend, there was an AIFS trip to Vienna planned, so of course I signed up.  We left early in the morning on Friday to drive there in a bus.  The ride wasn't too bad, but apparently there's a law in the Czech Republic that says that bus drivers have to have stops every few hours, which is kind of annoying.  We had to stop two times during the five hour trip there, which is just insane to me.  I don't understand even stopping once for a five hour trip, why would we have to do it two times?  It just means that we're going to be making lots of stops on our way to Krakow in a week.  One of the stops was at a place that kind of blew my mind a little bit.  It was like the European version of South of the Border, right by the North and South Carolina borders, but instead of being Mexico themed, it was medieval themed.  They had lots of rides, which were all coin operated, including rides that I would consider pretty potentially unsafe.  They had a huge castle part that reminded me of the Enchanted Forest, which made me a homesick.  Once we got to Vienna, we unpacked and got all settled in our hotel rooms and them met back in the lobby for a quick walking tour.  We walked from our hotel to the city center and they pointed out how we can get back to the hotel from there and where they cheapest bars were.  Guess they know our priorities.  From there, we had the rest of the night to do whatever we wanted.  I ended up walking around a little bit with some people, but then going to a great local restaurant right by our hotel.  We all got weinersnitchel, which had insanely huge portions.  Two people weren't even able to finish one full portion.  After that, I was so exhausted that I just crashed for the night.  I had been sick just before I left for the weekend, so I was still working on recovering somewhat.

The next morning, we were up really early to go on a more in depth tour of the city and then spend the rest of the day exploring for ourselves.  The tour walked us through the whole city and Z would tell us all kinds of interesting facts about each and every building.  I feel like he knows the full history of everything in the world.  We walked all over, with the tour ending at the Votive Church in the middle of the city.  It's a beautiful neo-Gothic church, which I actually can notice now.  Since I've been here, I've actually learned how to tell the difference in the different types of architecture.  I wasn't able to do that back in high school when I got tested on it, but apparently spending a semester being told all about it was all I needed to learn it.  After getting to the church, we split into groups based on what everyone wanted to do.  Most people just wanted to enjoy the weather and ride bikes around the city all day, but I ended up going along with the group headed to the Mozart Museum.  Since I've been here decided that Mozart is probably my favorite composer.  I've spent so much time learning about him and experiencing the places that he's been.  His museum is actually in his former apartment, which I think is the only one still standing.  When I get home, I am planning on rewatching the movie Amadeus, since all the parts from Prague are filmed on location.  I just can't wait to see a movie showing the history of places where I've been.  After that museum, we had to get a slice of the famous Sachertorte, a chocolate cake which is very popular and started in Vienna.  The thing that makes it interesting in that, in between the cake and the chocolate icing, there's a layer of apricot jam.  It was fantastic.  From there, we decided that we needed to see the river, so we went off to find it.  Since it's not a big tourist thing to go see, it took us a little while because there weren't signs and we had to chase down a map first.  When we got over there, we found that we could walk near the edge of the river, which had walls around it, and admire the beautiful graffiti along the sides.  All of the graffiti was so beautiful, or at least most of it was.  They also had a bunch of paintings that were hung along the sides and some sculptures.  It was basically a free outdoor art museum, which was really cool to get to see.  After wandering that for a while, we were all getting a little hungry, so we decided to go check out this pub that Z told us about during our walk.  There are two things which have made this place special.  The first is it's association with some guy named Augustin.  During the time of the Plague, he would play music in the pubs to entertain all the people who were dying of the plague.  One night, after a little too much drinking at the pub, he ended up passing out in the middle of the streets.  At that time, since the death toll was so high, each night people would come out with carts to collect all the dead bodies, like in Monty Python's Holy Grail with the men yelling "Bring out your dead!".  While Augustin was passed out in the streets, the guys saw him and assumed that he was just another dead body, so they threw him onto the cart with the rest of the dead.  At the end of the night, they tossed all the bodies into a mass grave, including the one live body.  The next morning, this poor guy wakes up, probably still drunk or just feeling like crap, and finds himself surrounded by the dead and in a huge grave.  So, like anyone would do, he started freaking out and yelling for anyone to help him.  Luckily for him, some guy happened to hear him and they were able to save him.  Somehow, even though he was surrounded by the freshly dead victims, he never contracted the plague, so he became a hero.  For some reason, he is strongly associated with this pub we went to.  But the second, and more famous, reason why tourists flock to this bar is in the back room of the area.  Back in the day, this pub was the favorite of many of the great minds of Vienna.  Everyone of importance who ever stayed in the city would visit this pub, to drink and share their ideas with their peers.  At some point early on, the owners of the pub were able to convince the famous people to sign the ceiling of a room in the pub.  To this day, they still have important people come to this pub and let them add their names to ceiling, so there are names like Johnny Cash right next to Mozart, Beethoven, and Mark Twain, among many others.  After that, we wandered the city a little more until we realized how completely exhausted we were and headed back to the hotel for the night.

The next morning, a group of us woke up really early to get in line to see an interesting mass.  First off, I do not approve of churches charging admission for a mass service, but that's what this church was doing.  For those of us who are cheap college students, there was a tiny little area for standing room.  The church was apparently from the Hapsburg empire, but that's not why it was so popular.  It was the church where the Vienna Boys' Choir sings every Sunday.  The service was mostly in German, so I didn't really know what was being said, but the boys in the choir sang beautifully.  After that, we had to rush back to the hotel for checking out and going to Hunderwasser Haus.  This is a weird place because of it's architecture.  You should check out my pictures of this place.  It was built in the mid 1980s and it looks almost like a child's view on an apartment building.  It looks like something that no one would actually build, it's just so ridiculous.  The colors are bright, there are no straight lines, even the floors are not completely flat.  We didn't stay long there because we had to go to the Schonbrunn Palace.  On the grounds there, there is a huge palace, the oldest zoo in the world, a maze, gardens, and a lot of interesting history.  Most of the people who lived in the palace were very well known and important to history, but the only name that I really remember was Marie Antoinette.  She lived there as a child before she married her way over to France.  There was an audio tour of the place, but I didn't really know the history of the area well enough to really understand what was going on in the palace's history.  After we wandered through the interior of the building, Kacie and I wandered through the gardens, just looking to see what we could find.  We saw our first European squirrel.  He had big, almost bunny-like, ears and was kinda a little more red in color than the squirrels at home.  Also, it was sitting on a guy's lap.  I wish that I had noticed it about 10 seconds earlier, then I would have had time to get a picture, but I was too late.  The statues were cool and it was nice to just see green plants.  In Prague, it's a lot colder and everything still looks kind of dead compared to Vienna.  After about an hour exploring there, it was time to get back on the bus and head home to Prague.

It seems weird to me that I can say phrases like "head home to Prague" and that they don't even seem odd.  They're just natural.  Since I've been here, Prague has been feeling more and more like home, so it is going to be so weird going back to the US and readjusting to the live there.

Protest time

Today, I met up with Andrea, who I try to meet up with once a week.  She's a Czech woman who is out of college, but she's thinking about going back to school since she hates her job.  Today, we met a little earlier than planned because she had to go to a demonstration for work.  She works for the government or something, I don't really completely understand her job.  After she helped me a little bit with Czech, she asked me if I wanted to go with her to the protest thing.  It was about something to do with the forests and cutting down trees in the Czech Republic, so I said sure.  It's not an issue that I really care about either way, sure I like forests and all, but I follow politics less here than I do at home and I barely watch news at home.  So, for me, this was just a chance to see what protests are like in Prague.  Since it was mostly people who work in the forests and it's not at all an international issue, they whole thing was in Czech, so I didn't know what was going on at all.  There were maybe one hundred people there at the most, so it was a really small demonstration.  Everyone there was so calm.  It was so cool.  When I think of protests, most of the time I think about thousands of obnoxious people gathering a yelling about issues in DC.  Sure, at this one there was some yelling, but it wasn't bad.  There was only one side of the debate present, so there weren't any fights at all.  But for some reason, there were probably thirty cops there.  When we first got there, there were more cops than protesters, which I thought was kind of funny.  Three different news crews showed up, which is funny considering they were only representing two different stations that show channels.  After the demonstration in front of whatever building we were in front of, they started marching somewhere.  I walked with them for a while, but then we all passed the metro station, so Andrea and I left to catch the train.  Even though I have no idea what the protest was really about, I'm hoping that I can find some news article about it sometime soon, so I can figure out what was going on at the time.  I'm really upset that I didn't bring my camera with me today.  I didn't think that I would need it for my Czech lesson, guess I should have known.  Maybe there will be some cool pictures online from the news groups there soon.  We'll see what happens.

Dresden

Well, I did not make it on the trip to Petrin Hill.  I got mixed up about the meeting place, so I missed the meeting time, but that meant that I was able to get my paperwork done from my passport stuff.  After that, since it was a beautiful day, I went back up to the giant metronome over the city.  I sat up there reading for class and writing postcards to people until sunset.  The sunset was beautiful to see from there, it created a beautiful red glow over the city.  On my way back to the metro, I was able to take some pretty cool shots using a really long exposure over the river, which I really like.  

Yesterday was my trip to Dresden.  The whole time we were there, it was cold and rainy, which made the walking tours not as fun as they could have been.  But, despite that, it was a beautiful city.  Back in WWII, it was horribly bombed, almost completely destroying the city.  There were a few buildings that remained from then, but over all most everything was destroyed.  After the war, they decided to rebuild most of the stuff so that to looked like the originals, which was really cool to see.  Some of the buildings which were brand new, looked just as old as the few that had been standing for long periods of time.  Some of the buildings only got partly destroyed, so they fixed them.  These have obvious patches made into the building, which are also really interesting to see.  Also, one of the buildings that was there, is the Semper Opera house.  It was one of the ones that was destroyed during WWII, but it was so important historically that they rebuilt it to the same floor plan.  According to Z, our guide, this is the most important opera house in the world.  He said that all the other opera houses in this part of Europe are based off of this opera house and that if you ever get a chance to perform there, you would be able to easily perform at any other opera house in the world.  Since I don't really know much about opera, I had never seen one until I got here, I had never heard of it before the trip yesterday.  I am just going to have to talk to someone who knows something about opera and see what they say about it sometime.  Overall, it was a pretty cool trip to a city that seemed really nice from my first impression.  I wish that we had more time to spend there, so I would be able to explore the city a little more and actually get to see the sites when the weather was nice.

Opera

I figure, after that last super long entry, I'll write a shorter one to make up for it.  Here goes...

As part of the AIFS Programs, there are cultural programs that I can sign up for each week.  This week, one of them was going to the opera to see Don Giovanni at the Estates Theater.  The cool part about that, other than getting to go to the opera for free, is the history of that opera.  After writing it, Mozart first showed this opera at the Estates Theater.  According to Wikipedia, it is the only theater left standing where Mozart ever performed.  The show was kind of ridiculous and not at all as serious as I was thinking it would be.  When I think of opera, I think of something that's kind of boring and dry because that's what I've been told about it my whole life.  Don Giovanni is actually kind of funny, but there are some pretty serious elements to the story as well.

Today and tomorrow, I'm going to be doing some other cultural events with AIFS.  Today, there's a trip to Petrin Hill and tomorrow I'm going to Dresden.  Both of which I'm really looking forward to.

A Whole New World

This past weekend was one of the most interesting experiences of my whole life.  It was the craziest, most fantastic time I have had in a long time.

To start my story off, I'll begin with about midnight on Wednesday night.  I was packing for my flight to Istanbul at 11:15am on Thursday.  I had my suitcase all packed (only halfway full, of course, so I'd have room for all the stuff I was planning on buying in Turkey), when I went to grab my passport.  All of a sudden, I noticed that it was not where it should be.  I then remembered that I had left it in a package, which had been leaning on my desk, which is also right next to where the trash can is located.  What I believe happened was that the cleaning woman saw the empty looking package next to the trashcan and thought it was trash and threw it out at some point.  When I started looking for it, I literally looked in every drawer of my room, in every pocket of my suitcases, and and in between the walls and the unmovable furniture.  It was gone.  So, I thought that it might just be in the trash can down the hall, so I dug through it, found our trash and it wasn't there.  Which means that it had been missing for more than a week, but it's not like you really think about your passport unless you need it, so I hadn't thought about it in a while.  Then I realized that, realistically, I was not going to make it to Istanbul the next day.  My only chance was to go to the US Embassy in Prague as soon as it opened the next day and pray that they could help me, so that's what I did.  I went there, happened to run into one of the people who work on US passports on my way there, she gave me directions to the place and helped me with everything, and I got everything worked out.  From the embassy, I had to take a tram and then a bus to get to the airport, which was very scary.  Public transportation is never something you want to have to rely on in a hurry, and it was just going to take it's sweet time that morning.  When I finally got to the airport at 10:40, I had to find the check in at an airport that I had never been to before.  When I found it, they told me that, if I had been 3 minutes later, I wouldn't have been able to check in, so I was very lucky.  Getting onto the plane was the most wonderful experience I could have imagined.  I had been preparing myself basically for the past half a day for the fact that I wouldn't make it, but I did.  

Once we landed, we found our bus to the hotel and there was culture shock immediately.  In the airport, they were people doing construction and there were sparks flying from the tools onto the people at the ATMs below and no one seemed to mind it too much.  Of course the people at the ATM weren't happy, but no one seemed to think it was a big deal to have that uncovered.  When we were driving to the hotel, I realized how terrifying the streets of Istanbul are.  We were on a three lane highway and there were at least five lanes of traffic, and it's not like they had big traffic lanes to begin with.  Every few minutes, I thought that we were going to get hit or hit someone.  To add to that shock, the bus driver was on his cell phone for the majority of the time.  Once we got off the highway, the bus was navigating down these tiny roads with stone walls on either side.  That bus driver could take the bus places that I would be concerned about taking my car, and I drive a Honda Civic.  

After checking into the hotel, we met in the lobby to go to our first adventure in Istanbul, the Blue Mosque.  After that day, whenever we would go home at the end of the night, the Blue Mosque was our guiding landmark.  From there, it is only a few minutes walk back to our hotel, which was so nice.  In order to enter the Blue Mosque, girls have to be wearing a scarf over their heads and be wearing modest clothing.  By modest clothing, I mean that you have to have your knees and elbows covered, as well as everything in between, and loose pants.  If you did not fulfill these requirements, then they would give you these pieces of cloth to wrap around your body to make you more modest.  Everyone was also required to take their shoes off to enter the Mosque.  Once we were in the mosque, we were all astonished.  It was so beautiful inside.  Every inch was covered in hand made ceramics that were mostly blue and white, with some red accents.  In mosques, they have very low hanging lights, which seemed weird to me at first. We were told that it was because when people pray, sometimes they like to be able to read the Qur'an, so they make the lights so that it is easier for them.  Also, an interesting fact about the Blue Mosque, it is the only mosque, other than in Mecca, that has six minarets.  When it was being built, that's the number that the one in Mecca had so, in order to keep things peaceful, the sultan at the time paid for another one to be built in Mecca.  Overall, I think that it was a great first example of a mosque for me to see.  After the mosque, we went to find a good restaurant and then a bar to hang out at for the night.  We found a cute little hookah bar in the city and chilled there for a few hours.  There was a group of guys there playing traditional Turkish music and dancing.  It was a really nice way to get to know the Turkish culture.

The next day started with a tour of Hagia Sofia, which is a really interesting place.  It is about twice as old as the Blue Mosque, which means that it was first built in 360 AD.  It was so weird to stand in a building that was so full of history.  For the first part of it's history, it was an early church.  During this time, there were beautiful and amazingly intricate mosaics on the walls.  The individual pieces were only an inch or so long, so it looked like a painting, but the building was from before they had the tools to do paintings that would stand the test of time.  When the area was taken over by Muslims, they turned this church into a mosque.  To remove the church like aspects, they covered the mosaics with plaster and covered the walls with beautiful script quoting parts of the Qur'an.  After a long time as a mosque, some sultan decided that the building had too much historical significance to be used anymore as a house of worship, so he turned it into the museum that it is today.  They removed the plaster from the art and opened it up for anyone to see, as long as the pay the entrance fee.  The coolest parts were the area where the alters were located.  There is a huge mosaic of the Virgin Mary near the ceiling of the building and then, on the floor directly below it, there is the Muslim alter facing Mecca.  I thought that it was very interesting that these two things just happened to be located in the exact same place in the building.  Also, there were a lot of quatrefoil shapes used in the various decorations in the building, which is something that I always find interesting, since it's Phi Mu's symbol.  The other amazing thing to see there was the old graffiti that they had in the stone.  Back in the day, the vikings came to visit church and one guy carved his name into the stone, along with some other stuff that is now impossible to read.  The carvings have been traced back to the 9th century, which is just hard for me to imagine.  It makes me wonder if there's any way that that guy could have know that centuries would pass and someday his graffiti would someday be part of an exhibit in a museum.  

From there, we walked a few minutes and got to the Topkapi Palace.  This palace was the home of the Ottoman sultans for about 400 years.  For the majority of the trip, we didn't have to pay any entrance fees or anything like that, but here there was an optional tour we could take, but we had to pay for it.  At first, I had a little bit of a debate with myself about it, but then I realized that there probably wouldn't be many chances for me to see an Ottoman Sultan's harem in my life, so I decided to go for it.  It was fascinating.  In this area, there were hundred of women, once there were around one thousand two hundred, living without ever being able to leave.  Every day or so, the sultan would come and pick out who he wanted for the day and the rest would just have to stay there with the other women and sultan's kids.  The other really cool area of this palace was the area with the stuff from the Prophet [Mohammed].  There was a whole building devoted to religious artifacts, not only from the Muslim faith.  They had things like the staff of Moses, as well as a piece of the Prophet's beard.  It seems weird to me that people collect these things, and I don't know if I actually have any reason to believe that any of them are legitimate, but whatever.  As long as it's making some people somewhere happy and they don't get too crazy about it, who cares?  After that, we had the rest of the day to explore the area.  I wandered with some people and found food and then went back to the hotel for a little relaxation.  That evening, my friend and I wandered around the city and it was an interesting experience to say the least.  We were planning to go see the Grand Bazaar right before it closed for the day, but we missed it by about half an hour, so we were just wandering around.  One of the guys working at a local restaurant decided that he was interested in my friend, so he invited us to sit down and have some free tea.  Being college kids, we said sure, free anything is always good.  We figured that they would probably want us to buy some food, but it was close enough to dinner time that we didn't mind.  Turns out that we were wrong, they guy wasn't trying to get us to buy stuff, he just wanted to ask her out.  He kept giving us free tea and then chocolate until we agreed to think about coming back that night to go out and get a drink with him and his friend, but once we told him we'd think about it, he got really creepy really fast.  We decided that we would hide out in a kind of underground store when the restaurant closed, so he couldn't find us.  It was a nice little store, but this time it was my turn to get hit on.  The store owner, who was probably close to forty years old, decided that I was his "special sweetheart" and told us to make ourselves at home in his store.  He brought us more free tea [free tea's always a good thing, right?] and told us to sit down and relax, he wouldn't pressure us to buy anything.  We probably chilled out in that store for an hour or longer, but finally the guy was just too much for me to handle much longer.  He told us that he'd be closing up the store at eleven that night and that we should come by, so we could get drinks together.  Needless to say, we didn't come back.  We found a cute little restaurant and finally got dinner.  While we were there, every time he came over to talk to us, the old man who seemed to own the place would put his arm around me.  Never before in my life had been around so many touchy-feely strangers.  It was kind of weird to me, which is really saying something considering that I don't have a need for personal space most of the time.  I could not imagine how people who have issues with people touching would handle coming to visit Istanbul.  After dinner, we started wandering back to our hotel.  On the way, some super drunk guy came over to hit on my friend and tried to get us to go drink with him too.  After that, it was just too much for us.  We didn't think we could handle any more random guys hitting on us, so we gave up for the night and just went back to the room.  

The next morning, we started off a little earlier because we wanted to be one of the first tour groups to the Basilica Cistern.  This was a huge underground building that was created to store fresh water.  Although Istanbul is surrounded by water, none of it is freshwater, so they have to ship in water to drink.  In the area, there are a lot of them, I'm not sure the exact number, but most of them aren't open to the public and the Basilica Cistern is the most interesting one.  Not only is it cool to be in a place like that, but in the back corner, there are two Medusa heads made of stone, of course.  No one really knows when or how they got there, which makes them so much more interesting.  There was also one pillar which is covered in Nazar, or Evil Eyes, for protection or good luck.  From there, it was off to every girl's dream, the Grand Bazaar.  This is a huge indoor shopping market with hundreds of vendors.  This is going to sound silly, but it reminded me of Aladdin.  You know the opening scene where the merchant guy is trying to sell the most ridiculous things?  That's what each stand was like.  It was fabulous.  They would get girls' attention by calling out cheesy pick up lines at them and then start selling them things.  As a selling strategy, it was really interesting to watch.  For most girls, it worked the first few times that they heard it.  After hours of that, we moved onto the Spice Bazaar, a miniture version of the Grand Bazaar filled with all kinds of spices, as the name suggests.  Since none of us really cook much here, we didn't stay there too long.  Anyway, we had an important mission to complete that day.  We were going to Asia.  In case you didn't know, Istanbul is the city built on two continents.  All it takes to get to the Asia side is getting a token for the ferry, which costs less than $2, so there's no way that I would miss out on that.  When we got there, we realized that the Asia side was the completely boring.  There's a reason that we weren't going over there with any of the planned stuff.  There was nothing over there that we really wanted to see, so we didn't spend much time in Asia, just enough to say we've been there.  After that, we went back to the hotel to meet up for our walk to Taksim.  We walked through basically the ghetto of Istanbul to get there.  What I would have never known about this huge city is that there is a huge problem with poverty there.  Eva, our guide, told us to watch out in this area we were walking in.  In the city, there are something like 40% [if I remember correctly] of the population of Istanbul who live without running water or electricity in their homes.  This was so sad for me to see.  In the US, we complain about people having to live without having a new cell phone and put them on welfare, yet there are people living in cities of developed countries where they can't even afford to have running water or electricity.  Things like that really put things into perspective.  I, like all Americans, am truly blessed to be able to have the lifestyle that I lead.  People should really think about that kind of stuff before they start complaining about stupid stuff that don't really matter.  There are people in much worse situations, think about that before you cry over something stupid like minor money issues.  And I know that I shouldn't be saying something like that as an economics major, but it's true.  After walking through that area, we got back to a tourist area.  We went up to the top the the Galata Tower.  From the top of this tower, we could see the whole city.  I didn't get any pictures from up there for two main reasons.  First, it was raining and night, so the pictures wouldn't have come out well if I had tried.  Secondly and more importantly, I was kind of freaked out by the height.  Well, not the height so much as the small wet marble walkway with the very short, not stable looking guardrail and people trying to pass me.  As much as I have gotten over my fear of heights, I'm not over it completely yet as I realized from up there.  Without a doubt, I know that dad would have not been able to stand out there for more than a few minutes.  After that, we went and found a cute local bar and just chilled out there for a little while and then went back to the hotel for the night.

The next day was our final day in Istanbul.  We didn't have anything planned, so I wandered the city one last time.  I got some fresh doner for lunch and then found a cute little store to spend my last few Turkish Lira before heading back to Prague.  Since it's not exactly a common currency, it's almost impossible to exchange it here, and I needed one last souvenir and some postcards.  The one thing that I wasn't expecting, was that I had actually started missing Prague while I was gone.  It's really become like home to me, which is good for now, but is going to be hard when I get home.

Classes over for the week

At this point, I know that I'm going to have some serious trouble readjusting to a normal school week.  Right now, it's about 3:00 in the afternoon on Wednesday, and I have finished all my classes for the week.  Sure, my classes are all three hours long when I have them, but we always have a break halfway through, so it's not too painful.  But having a four day weekend every week makes the longest classes completely worth while.  Since my last update, I have had my Language, Culture, and Social Cognition class and Recent Economic Developments yesterday and then I had Utopia East and West: the Sixties to the Present class.  On Wednesdays, I have started having a meeting with a Czech guy who is teaching me more about the Czech culture and the language.

For the rest of the day, I have to start getting ready for my big weekend plans.  Tomorrow, I'm flying out of Prague for the weekend and going to Istanbul!  This is the trip that I have been the most excited for this whole time.  Ever since I got a job at a Turkish restaurant back at home, I have had people telling me how much I need to go to Turkey someday, but I had figured that wasn't very likely to happen.  Right before I left for Prague, I got an email from ECES saying that they were planning a trip to Istanbul.  Ever since I got that email, I've been looking forward to that trip.  I'm not planning on bringing my computer with me on the trip, so don't be surprised when there's not an update for a few days.  I just don't want to have to deal with worrying about leaving my laptop in my room or something while I'm out seeing all there is to see in Istanbul.  Depending on how much I'm worn out from the trip, I'll probably update this on Sunday night, when I get back to Prague.

Just a normal day in Prague

Updating every other day is going to end up being a lot of updates.  Yesterday, I had my normal Sunday, which consists of sleeping in and then going to a nice little cafe to read and do homework.  I went to this cute cafe right by the main building of the school and just sat there for a while reading.  It was nice.

Today, I had my standard Monday.  Before class, I go to a local high school to help out with an English class.  Since I'm a native speaker, talking to me helps improve their English and understand what people with an American accent sound like.  This is one of my favorite things to do while I'm here.  I love it because I feel like I've actually helping out and I love volunteering, which I know sounds really cheesy.  After that, I have less than an hour before my only class on Monday, which is Alternative Culture: Literature, Music, and Lifestyles.  This class is pretty cool most of the time.  Today, we talked about underground poetry and spent most of the class reading different poems and talking about them.  One of my favorites from the class was:

i should be able to discern
i could have learnt a lot by now
masses of people with the same question
"why"?
i have never been able to answer
this question
and why not?
echoes the answer
~Pavel Z

For some reason, this poem really speaks to me.  Since I've been here, a lot of people have asked me why I chose to come to the Czech Republic to study, and this poem seems to perfectly answer that.  I'm not quite sure why I decided so intently to come here, I know that the program sounded amazing, but since I've been here, I haven't doubted that I made the right choice.