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.

Second Entry This Week

In addition to updating this more frequently, I am also putting my pictures up more.  For those of you who don't know where to find them or didn't know I do that or whatever, you can find my photos at http://davidritch.smugmug.com/Becki-1

In my last entry, I forgot to mention going to see the astronomical clock on it's anniversary.  Last year, the clock was 600 years old, so they did this whole huge video projection on the clock which told the history of it and all that fun stuff.  Since it was so popular, they decided to redo the video projection again this year.  It was mostly the same video as last year, but it was amazing to be able to see it in person.  This is the official video from the show last year, what I saw was pretty similar to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4LVEAiZJyg&feature=related

Since my last entry, two days ago, I haven't done too much.  Yesterday, I was planning on visiting Josefov.  When I got there, it cost money to get to see most of the stuff that I was interested in, so I ended up just wandering around the city.  The interesting thing that I found was an interesting Catholic church.  In the church, they had a statue of the baby Jesus and people had made him clothes and different people would send in their outfit for him.  It seemed really weird to me, the whole idea of playing dress up with a baby Jesus.  But I guess to each their own.

Today, I went to the huge Metronome that's above the above the city.  Back in the days of the Communist era, there was a statue of Stalin there, seemingly watching the city.  When the statue was torn down, they replaced it with a huge metronome.  I don't know the meaning behind the metronome, but it's pretty awesome looking.  From there, you can see the whole city of Prague and there's a nice little park area.  When I was up there, I was able to relax and spend some time doing readings for my classes and just enjoy the beautiful weather.

Laundry Day

I know that's it been forever since I actually did an update on this thing, but I'm going to work on getting better about that.  Right now, I'm sitting in the laundry mat and I'm going to be here for a few hours, so I might as well write something here.  For the past month, I have really been getting used to everyday life in Prague.  It no longer seems weird to me that I see a castle whenever I leave my building for classes.  Cobblestone everywhere seems like the way everything's always been.

Since my last update, so much has happened.  I had two full weeks of Czech intensive.  One day, after class, we went to the Cubism Museum, which was pretty cool.  During those weeks, most of the time, I would wake up at some late morning time and then go wander the city for a while.  It was so cool to see the different parts of the city and get to know the areas near the school.  After classes, some of the days, we went to see interesting things around the city.  One day after class, we went on a walk to a cafe and on the way, we stopped by the Kafka Museum.  We didn't go inside, but we looked at the statues outside, which are done by this very offensive artist who has controversial statues all over Prague.  They are so interesting to see his different statues.

One morning, a couple of my friends and I woke up super early to see the sunrise on Charles Bridge.  We were so excited to see how amazing it was going to be, but we forgot that Prague doesn't have pretty sunrises yet.  It was still too cold and gross out for the sun to be pretty.  We waited and all we saw was the sky going from dark to somewhat lighter grays.  When we gave up on it being pretty, we went to take the metro to some place to explore, but the metro was not working.  Apparently, two of the cars had disconnected while they were driving.  I don't know if anyone got hurt or anything, but the whole metro closed, all three lines.  It was so weird to see.  The nice thing about that was that it forced us to actually figure out how to use the trams in order to get back home to the dorm.

The other big thing that I have done recently is going to the Prague Zoo.  According to Forbes Magazine when they ranked the zoos in the world, Prague Zoo was in the top 10 best zoos.  It was an amazing zoo with animals that I had never seen before, but I couldn't read what they were because all the signs were just in Czech.  There was a part where they had bats that could fly out at people, which freaked some people out a lot.  There weren't any signs or anything, so no one knew that the bats could fly out until they were just a few inches away from your face in the dark room.

After Czech class ended, it was time for the normal semester classes to start up.  This semester, I'm taking four classes.  On Mondays, I have Alternative Culture: Literature, Music, and Lifestyles.  This class is pretty awesome, we're learning about the history of the Underground movement in the Czech Republic and how it's political influence helped bring down the communist regime.  Most Monday mornings, I have also been going up to this local high school to volunteer.  They have us going to the English classes so that the students can get better at their English by talking to a native speaker.  On Tuesdays, I have to wake up super early for my class starting at 9:00 am.  My days start off with Language, Culture, and Social Cognition.  The class is a mixture of anthropology, linguistics, and psychology and there are Czech students and other international students from the United States, Canada, and from all over Europe.  From that class, I have a nice long break, so I wander around for a while and get lunch somewhere.  In the afternoon, I have Recent Economic Developments, which is a class about the economic developments of the Czech Republic and the transition from communism to the current system.  On Wednesdays, I have Utopia East and West: the Sixties to the present, which is kind of an interesting class.  Personally, I don't think I really like most of the stuff that we have been reading, but hopefully I'll start liking more of the stuff as the semester goes on.  And there's the whole issue that most of the earlier Utopian readings we're doing from the East are basically Soviet propaganda, which I just find annoying.  I don't agree with communism, I don't believe it's ever a good idea, and no amount of literature is going to change that.  After that class ends, which is around noon, my weekend starts.  Every week, I have a four day weekend, so I can spend lots of time exploring the city and traveling.

The one thing that I have started getting involved with is this program called Tandem.  It's a language exchange program.  I put my name and email address up on this board and have been getting emails from a bunch of local Czech people who want to talk to a native English speaker to improve their English and in return, they help me learn a little more Czech.  Most of the time, the people I meet with have been in Prague longer than I have, so they show me interesting places that I wouldn't have probably found on my own during my time here.

I'm sure that there are other things that I should be writing about, but at the moment, this is all I can think about to write.  Since it's lent, I'm going to make myself update this at least every other day, at least for the times that I can.  When I go away on weekend trips, I'm probably not going to be bringing my computer, so I can't update then.  Next weekend, I'm going to be on a trip to Istanbul, which I am super excited about and then I have trips every other week for the next few weeks.

Czech Lessons Day 1

Today was my first lesson in Czech language.  Since my class is in the afternoon, today was the first time in a long while that I was actually able to sleep in, which was really nice.  I had a nice relaxing morning and made some soup for lunch that I got a little while ago and still wasn't able to read the instructions, but somehow I managed to make it work out in the end.  I finally headed out to class around 1:30 and we got there a little early, so a group of us went to go get some water before class, but when we got back the rest of the group had gone.  Apparently, they went on a tour of the building that our classroom was in, but I'm not too worried about missing it.  Then we headed to class, which was the longest class that I have ever sat through.  According to the schedule they gave us, we would be in class from 2:00-6:45, but luckily for us, we end up getting two fifteen minute breaks, so we don't go completely insane.  Today we just worked on learning how to pronounce the different letters in the alphabet, which is going to take some getting used to on my part.  For the last part of class, we went on a bit of a field trip.  We walked from the classroom to the John Lennon wall.  On the way there, we crossed over the Charles Bridge, which has some of the most beautiful views of the city that I have seen yet.  From there, we walked over this little bridge, just over a stream, that was covered with probably thousands of locks.  What we were told is that, couples come to this bridge with a lock.  As a symbol of their love, they attach the lock to the bridge and throw the keys into the little stream under the bridge.  That way, there will always be a memory of their love in the city.  From there, we went to the John Lennon wall.  The wall doesn't have John Lennon on it or anything, but for the people of Prague, this wall was a symbol of freedom during the oppression of the Communist rule.  At one point, John Lennon was a symbol for the free Western world, outside of the Communist rule, which is kind of ironic to me.  The song lyrics and everything that I have always heard John Lennon credited with saying has always sounded pretty Communist to me, but I guess it's still vastly different from the Communism of the Soviet Union.  As soon as they could, the local government would paint the wall completely white, but every night new protest graffiti would be painted onto the wall.  It was used as an outlet for any form of protest and still is to this day.  It was completely covered with all kinds of sayings, in Czech and other languages, and all sorts of images.  After that, we went to a little student cafe and just chilled out there for a while.  Overall, it was a pretty good day.

Just Back From Moravia

This weekend there was an optional AIFS trip to the Moravian city of Brno, which is basically in Czech wine country.  We left on Friday morning, around 10:30 and stopped by a town called Tisnov on our way to the hotel.  While we were there, we saw a church with the most amazing archway for an entrance, it's called the "Porta Coeli" or the "Gate to Heaven".  When we got there, I saw the first cats I've seen in all of Europe from this trip, but they looked a little wild, so I didn't go play with them.  The church was beautiful inside, but yet again, it was a place where they wouldn't allow people to take pictures inside.  I guess in this area, it's considered disrespectful to take photos of the inside of a church, which seems so weird to me.  From there, we drove to our hotel, which was a really nice hotel that made our dorms look tiny and uncomfortable.  A group of us just wandered into the town to get ice cream, because we were craving it for some reason, and just wanted to relax for a little while before meeting for dinner and a wine tasting that evening.  When we got to the wine tasting and dinner, first we went down this flight of stairs, into the dining area.  The walls were arched over our heads and it felt like we were really in a cellar eating our food.  On the table, there were pitchers of red and white wine, bottles of sparkling water, and some appetizers that tasted kind of like a hummus with peppers and some pickles in it.  We were all enjoying those things when the meal came out, it was some of the best chicken I've ever had.  It was falling off the bone and we were all picking as much of the meat off those bones as we could.  While I was eating, I noticed something brush up against my leg and looked down to find a cat running around the table, running against people.  It was so cute.  After we all finished, we went to the room where they process the grapes for making the wine.  While in there, we tried three different kinds of white wine and then two types of red, all of which tasted wonderful.  We then headed back to the dining area to finish off the wine from the table and just talk for a while.

The next day, we started off with a trip to Gregor Mendel's Garden and Museum.  The museum is right outside of the monastery where Mendel lived and grew those peas, which helped him learn the basics of genetics.  It was really cool to see where something that has effected us so much started out.  After that, we boarded the bus again and headed to fields near Austerlitz, where Napoleon battled in 1805 in a fight which would later be known as the Battle of Three Emperors.  We saw the whole battle field from the spot where Napoleon was standing, so that he could see all that was happening.  From there, we went to the Memorial of Peace, which was built to commemorate this battle.  The thing that made this memorial so interesting is that, unlike most, it was not for one side or another, it was in memory of all people who lost their lives to this battle.  At the sight of the memorial, there is also a really weird museum.  We went to it, and it felt like we were being herded from room to room.  As we entered each room, the door would close behind us and we would have to stay and watch some repetitive presentation about the war.  After each weird presentation, a door would open up, and we would have to move onto the next one.  It was a very weird place and I felt like I didn't learn a lot of what they were trying to teach us there.  After that, we went on a walking tour of the city of Brno, which is a fascinating city.  Everything was so beautiful and each building seemed to have an interesting story to it.

The next day, we woke up and checked out of the hotel to start seeing the sights for the day.  The first place we visited was a baroque church nicknamed the "Pearl of Moravia", but it was kind of awkward when we visited.  We didn't know that they were going to be in the middle of their mass when we got there, so we walked into the room and just stood silently looking around.  We ended up leaving that rather quickly, so we didn't bother people too much and headed to the second church we were going to visit in a town called Adamov.  The cool thing about this church was the elaborate wooden alter carved in the 16th century.  The alter was divided into three main areas, the bottom, the middle, and the top.  On the bottom, there was a scene depicting the apostles gathering to watch the the Virgin Mary ascend to heaven.  In the middle, the Virgin Mary is gathering with the angels on her way to heaven.  On the top, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are gathered to crown her as a queen of heaven.  Along the sides, there are statues of saints and lots of elaborate carvings.  From there, we headed to the coolest part of the day, a system of underground caves called the Moravian Karst.  In the caves, there is a river that flows and we took a boat ride down that river.  It was the most beautiful cave system that I have ever seen and I can't even figure out the words to describe it.  For this one, honestly, it'd be better to just look at my pictures of the trip there.

Today, I'm starting my first class in a little over an hour.  I'm going to be taking an intensive two week course in Czech language, which I'm hoping will be very useful and that I'll learn a lot.

Day Two of Mandatory ECES Trips

Today, we went to our second, and last, round of mandatory trips through ECES.  I picked the trip to Cesky Sternberk and Kunta Hora, which probably don’t mean anything to people who don’t know much about the Czech Republic.  The first place we went was the Cesky Sternberk castle, which is a beautiful Gothic castle about an hour and a half outside of Prague.  It's kind of up a mountain to get to it, but it is a beautiful structure.  The high outer walls are somewhere between two and three meters thick all throughout the castle, so it would take a lot of energy and money to heat the whole building, so they just don't bother.  Inside, there were wonderful stucco artwork all over the walls everywhere.  The furniture was from all different areas in time and it was so cool to see all the thing that they had collected there over the time.  One of the ladies who had lived there in the past collected silver miniatures which were so intricate it was amazing.  Her husband, after realizing that he had nothing to collect, decided that he should collect pipes, which was weird since he never smoked.  Some of the pipes were so long that none of us could understand how anyone would be able to light them.  The bad part about that place was that they didn't allow pictures to be taken from inside unless you got some over priced stickers, which I didn't see where to get, so I didn't get any pictures.  But that turned out to be alright, since I was low on battery life and there were lots of things that wanted to get pictures of today.  The really unique thing that they had there, and have a lot of places over here, was hot wine.  It tasted like hot cider almost, but just more of a grape kind of taste.  They had it in a black pot that was suspended over a fire.  It was seemed like we were just back in the past with all that.

From there, we went down to the city of Kutna Hora, a historical Czech city.  It was full of beautiful architecture and cute little shops.  I ended up taking a lot of pictures while I was walking around the city, which I'm going to end up posting at some time on the smugmug account.  We ended up getting a tradition Czech lunch, which was really good.  I got garlic soup, which tasted amazing, but was really strong.  From there, we went to a cute little wooden toys shop that looked like it was filled with handmade toys.  There was an older couple working the shop and they didn't speak English, so I'm not sure if they made them, but they were so pretty.  Most of the toys were child friendly, but as we were looking at them, the man working there brought over one of the toys that he thought we would like.  It was a wooden toy that had a button on the bottom that you could press to make the couple on the top of thing have sex.  It was the funniest thing I had ever seen, especially surrounded by all the innocent toys in the rest of the shop.

We then met up with the whole group and went to St. Barbara's cathedral, a Gothic cathedral in the city of Kunta Hora.  When it was being built, according to legend, the architect was worried that the building would collapse from the weight of the building on thin walls.  When the building was finished, they were collapsing the scaffolding and, thinking that he heard the whole building falling, he jumped off the cliff next to the cathedral to save himself the embarrassment of such a huge failure.  Inside, the church was covered in wonderful stained glass works and elaborate alters to various saints.  There was also the most beautiful organ I think I've ever seen.  On the top of the pipes, there were statues of different angels forming a band, including an angel playing a set of timpani.

Then we loaded back onto the bus to see the Sedlec Charnel House, the highlight of the day.  This was a church that has become famous for two very different reasons.  The first is that a priest once visited the hill where Jesus was crucified and took some of the sand from that hill and spread it around the base of this church.  Because of that, many people wanted to be burried there, which caused a massive buildup of bodies laying around.  One day, someone decided that, if they're gonna have all these bodies around, they might as well put them to use.  They took the bones from some 40,000 people to use for artwork inside the building.  Everywhere I looked, there were different bones being used in the most interesting ways I've ever seen.  The one thing that seemed the most out of place in my mind was the baby angel playing a horn while holding a human skull in the other hand.  It was also really interesting to see how they used the bones to write out words on the wall.  Personally, I would love something that to happen with my bones when I die, it just seems so interesting.  It's like these people have been given immortality by becoming something more than they could have ever become without with.  Before this artwork, they were just rotting, nameless corpses, but now they are part of a, exhibit which will be marveled at for hundreds of years.  After we left there, we headed back to the dorm for the night.

First Mandatory Trip

Today, all of the ECES (Eastern and Central European Studies) students had to go on one of three mandatory trips, but we got to pick which one to go on.  For the one today, I ended up going to the called "Pribram and Communist Working Camp Vojna."  To start the day off, we all met in the lobby of my dorm at 8:30 in the morning to get in our groups.  For some reason, my group was the smallest of the groups, but we headed on the bus and were on our way.  Our first stop was at the Mons Sacer Basilica Minor, also known as the Holy Mountain.  It was such a beautiful church near the town of Pribram.  We walked up the snowy mountain to get to it and it was so cold that we were all wondering if it was even worth being outside.  When we got to it, it looked almost like a castle standing out on the otherwise lifeless landscape.  As we walked up, a good number of us pulled out our cameras to take some photos of the sight.  As we got closer, the art was more intricate and more interesting, but right as I was about to take a picture of one statue beheading another one, some angry woman came over yelling about how we can't take pictures here.  At this point, we are still in the outside part of the basicalla, so I don't see any reason why I shouldn't take pictures.  There isn't any damage that a flash would do that the elements that is in wouldn't do much worse, but I figured that it was just an attempt to make us buy their postcards, which I didn't really care to do after that.  We were then told that, since we were a group of tourists and not pilgrims or locals worshiping, we would have to pay in order to enter the inside part and be led by one of their tour guides.  I think that it is outrageous to do something like that in a church, especially one that offers housing to the pilgrims that come visit.  And they didn't have a tour guide who spoke anything except Czech, so the woman guiding us around had to be a translator for the group.  It was a beautiful church inside and out.  The interesting thing to me was that the alters were made of locally mined silver.  There were also cameras set up so that, if we were interested, we could watch the service somewhere online.  I think that the link is www.svata-hora.cz for anyone who is interested in that.

As we left that, we walked down a baroque flight of stairs, which I was a little skeptical about at first.  The idea of walking down some really old stairs covered in snow while wearing my walking shoes, because I didn't know that there was snow since there's not much in Prague, just seemed like a bad idea to me.  But as we walked up, I saw this giant tunnel above the ground where we were heading.  That was the stairs.  They were covered, so there was no snow and it was a lot warmer than the freezing outside parts of the church.  That staircase seemed to go on forever, but when we got to the end, we were in the town of Pribram.

Our first stop in this town was a small, cheaply put together, museum.  I don't mean cheaply put together in a bad way, what I mean is that there was no government funding, so they were low on funds, so they did the best with the budget they had.  It was a museum of the Third Resistance.  Everything written was in Czech, with no other language translations and all the employees spoke only Czech, but that was alright because we had our translator.  She told us that the man who was going to be explaining everything for us was actually a part of the Third Resistance and would be telling us about his story in relation to the communist take-over of Czechoslovakia.  When he was 18, he fought against Hitler's army coming into the Czech lands and remembers rejoicing when Hitler's army was forced to leave the city, but he said that no one thought that, in just a few years' time, there would be another oppressive leader ruling them.  He talked about how he was one of the people who would help smuggle people out of the country through the border mountains.  One time, he was able to get in contact with some Americans, I believe, and they asked him if he could get some documents for them.  He said yes, and got them the documents successfully, but the government was able to trace the missing documents back to him.  He refused to give the source of the documents, taking the full blame of the crime which gave him a sentence of 20 years in a forced labour camp, but I'll save the rest of that story for when I get to the part about going to the camp.  He showed us the documents which the government decreed that every year there would be 300,000 (I might be wrong about that number...) citizens each year sent off to labour camps without any trial.  That meant that the government could create made up charges and just throw people into the labour camps for no reason, which created a life of fear for each citizen.  There was a listing of the percentage make up of the camps, which he thought was an ironic list of facts.  The highest percentage of the people forced into the camps were from the working class, they made up 30-something percent.  The next highest group was the housewives, who made up 20-something percent.  He didn't mention the exact other groups, but there was a list with somewhere around twenty-five to thirty different groupings of people.  Then we walked into a room with a bunch of intricate and interesting handmade crafts.  He told us that these were things made by people who went in the camp.  The thing that stuck out in my mind the most was the handmade deck of cards, with only four cards shown.  The suits that were used in the deck were: spades, hearts, circles, and acorns.  There were also a bunch of dolls and little outfits that the housewives would make to give to their children when they could come visit them.  The last exhibit that really stood out to me was the part about the church at that time.  When the communists took over, they decided that religion was a bad idea, so they had to get rid of it.  Part of that meant that needed to get rid of the religious officials, like priests and nuns.  Many of these people were sent into the labour camps and forced to work for their "crimes" of being a leader in the church.

After that museum, we went to get some tradition Czech food for lunch in a local restaurant.  I just got the goloush (probably spelled all kinds of wrong) with potato or bread dumplings, I don't remember.  The meat was the interesting part, I think it was deer, but the woman was just saying that it was game, which could be deer, hare, rabbit, pheasant, partridge, or even wild boar according to my Czech guidebook.  Whatever it was, it tasted good, so it doesn't bother me.  The man who had given us the tour came with us to lunch and, once we had finished, we headed out to Vojna.

When I first walked up to the camp, it looks very similar to the images that I have seen of the German concentration camps.  There was even a sign over the gate to the camp that said something about working for your freedom, which is very close to the sign that concentration camps have.  There were the scary looking guard towers all around the barbed wire fence trapping the people inside.  We walked in the open gate and there still had dogs in the guard dog area, which I thought was really cool.  We climbed up the stairs in the new building, so that we could get an  overview of the entire camp and we learned more about our guide's experiences in the camp.  When he first got to the camp, his job was to pluck the feathers from geese to make pillows and stuff like that.  Because of years doing that, both of his index fingers have become permanently curved from the action.  After his time doing that, he worked in a uranium processing portion of the camp.  Oh, I forgot to mention that above, the camps were originally built by the German political prisoners, to force them to work the uranium mines underground.  At the museum, they had a piece of uranium still in the raw for us to see what they were mining and he used the radiation detector to show us the levels that the one piece was just letting into the room.  So the main point of the labor in the camps was for the Uranium mining.  In this camp, they had three mines which the prisoners were forced to work in and there was only about 10% of the Uranium mined, so there is a chance that at some point, if we need Uranium, that people will have to use these mines again.  As a prisoner in the camp, the workers had to work one of the three shifts: 6:00-14:00, 14:00-22:00, or 22:00-6:00.  While working, they were given one meal every 24 hours and it was black coffee and 30 grams of bread, so everyone there was becoming malnourished.  When he told us that the shift started at a given time, what that means is that the workers needed to be at their stations at that time, which took hours.  One of the mines was far enough away from the camp that they would have to march for an hour just to get to work.  From the high up view, we went to see the barracks for the people in solidarity confinement.  These were the people who were being punished for some action they did while in the camps or people who they viewed were dangerous to be around the other prisoners, like political activists.  Our guide told us that he was once locked there for 20 days because he had asked for a reduction in his sentence, but the official charge states that he was there for refusing to report others in an attempt to escape.  While people were in this barrack, they only got food every three days, instead of the normal daily amount.  The next stop was the regular barracks, which showed the small rooms that they would pile lots of people into for sleeping.  It was terrible living conditions, but we didn't have time in our tour to see the rest of the camp.  We had to hurry through that part and then started walking back towards our bus, but as we were walking, our guide pointed out a building.  He told us that it was the Center for Cultural Enlightenment, or something like that.  This was the building that they would force them to dance in and it was where their band preformed on holidays.  During the holidays where the band played, the band would be in this building and all the other prisoners were forced to stand outside, completely still and listen to the music.  The last place that we were able to walk into was a bomb shelter, I think.  It was a tiny, underground concrete room that was unlit and very scary inside.  Before the nicer barracks were build for the prisoners being punished, the guards would just throw them into this room as punishment.  That meant that the walls were covered in marking from all the different prisoners who had been there in the past, but it also sometimes housed dead bodies for days at a time, if not more.  Of the rooms and buildings that we visited, this was the one that definitely gave me the most uncomfortable feeling.  But as soon as we finished seeing that room, it was back to a nice warm bus to go back to the dorm.

Tomorrow I'm going on my other mandatory trip from ECES, which I'm hoping is as interesting as this one, but hopefully not as depressing.

Finally updating.

For people who have been trying to remind me not to forget about my blog, I have not forgotten about this.  I just have not had much free time, so I haven’t been able to figure out how to word things to post them, but I’m finally getting to it all now that I’m moved into my dorm in Prague. 

London!

So, I landed at about 8:30am in London, I think.  I was a little disoriented because of the whole time difference thing and just getting off a plane that I had been on for somewhere around seven hours.  After getting through customs and getting my luggage, I walked out through the arrivals gate and there was a guy holding a sign saying “Rebecca Ritch”.  It was kind of cool to see that.  He was the guy whose job it was to collect me and take me to the hotel.  At the hotel, I met up with the two representatives from AIFS, who led me to a room to put my bags until check in.  I wandered around the area around my hotel for a little while alone, since I hadn’t flown with anyone and there was no one at the hotel when I got there.   When it finally got to be around 2 pm, I got back to the hotel to get my room and find my roommate.  Some of the rooms weren’t ready yet, so most of us ended up sitting in the lobby of the hotel waiting for a while, but we all got our rooms before too late.   That afternoon, we all got together for drinks in the hotel bar, to get to know each other a little better.  Most of us ended up going out after that, but I didn’t stay out too late, since I was so jetlagged. 

Our next day started with a wakeup call at 7:00am so we had time to get a good breakfast before our tour of the city.  We all got our full English breakfast and the piled onto the bus.  The tour took us through the whole city, so we could see all the sights and plan the rest of our day.  After the tour, I went with a group of people who went out to a pub for lunch and then to the National Gallery.  It had some cool pictures, but there were two of them that I really loved.  First off, there was the Van Gough painting of the daisies, which is always fun.  Not only was it cool to see one of Van Gough’s wonderful paintings, but it was kind of funny to see the one from the Doctor Who episode in a museum in the United Kingdom.  The other picture I loved was one by Monet, my favorite painter.  It was one of his older pieces, but I don’t remember its real name.  It was of the water lilies at sunset in his garden.  There were lots of reds and purples in the painting, which really made it stand out next to the other Monet pieces around it, which were mostly greens and blues.  From there, we walked outside and I saw an interesting image.  The two water fountains outside were quatrefoil shaped and there were four giant lion statues standing around a statue in the middle of the square.  I was really happy to see two of my sorority’s symbols together like that.  After that, some of us headed out to Kings Cross, to see Platform 9 ¾ from Harry Potter.  Since they were doing some construction, we couldn’t make it to the real spot that they have it, but they had one set up for the tourist to pose with.  It was a terrible set up, but it was better than nothing.  After we finished posing with it, we headed back to the hotel to get ready to go out for the night.  Most of our group ended up going out to this place called Zoo Bar, which was a lot of fun.  By the time we got back, there was about 45 minutes until our wakeup call at 3:15am, so I didn’t bother going to sleep.  We got checked out and then it was off to Germany!

Munich!

I’m a little fuzzy on all of the details of my time in Munich because of a combination of residual jetlag and sleep deprivation.  We got checked into the hotel and had some free time to get lunch, but I ended up just taking a small nap instead.  When I woke up, we had a tour of Munich.  The first hour or so of the tour was a bus tour around the city, where we saw the major sites and learned a little about the history of the city.  After the driving part, we had a walking tour.  They took us through all these side streets and through alleys, so I had no idea how to navigate my way from one spot to another.  After that, we went back to the hotel for just a little bit before most of the group got together to explore the city and get dinner.  We went to the closest beer hall to our hotel for dinner and it was a cute little place with an awesome sausage specialty on the dinner menu, so I got that and, of course, a beer for dinner.  First, I would like to say that, in general, I don’t like beer, but after the trip to Germany, I was willing to try beers and I learned that there is good beer out there; you just have to look for it.  After that, we spent what seemed like hours trying to find the famous Hofbräuhaus.  We spent basically the whole night just having a good time there and then somehow were able to find our way back to the hotel for the night.  The next morning was another early morning to catch the plan to Prague.

Prague!

It seems like I’ve been in Prague for a while now, which seems weird.  It is such a wonderful city, and I’m so happy that I get to call it my home for the next few months.  Most of our time here has been going on tours of the city, which don’t seem to help me find my way around very well, and a lot of meetings where they give us all the same information all over again.  I’m really looking forward to getting on a schedule that doesn’t involve waking up every day for meetings or some planned activity where I have to meet somewhere at 8:30 in the morning or earlier.  Yesterday was the first day that we really had a lot of time to do whatever we wanted, so I got some of the important stuff.  Megan, this awesome girl in my program, took me to the mall which has everything that you would ever need in life.  I got my cell phone, which isn’t that unusual for a mall, but I also went grocery shopping there.  It was three stories high and almost every store looked like a great place to shop, even though some were a little too expensive for my tastes. 

This morning, we had another meeting, this time with all the American students studying in the Eastern and Central Europe (ECES) program, which is what I’m in.  They told us about the various stuff that there is to do around the city, different trips that we can take with them, and just some basic information.  One of the things that they told us about that I really found interesting is volunteering at a local high school as an assistant for the English classes.  I think I’m going to try to get involved with that because it seems like a great opportunity, and it would probably end up helping me understand the whole Czech language better.  It just seems like a fantastic opportunity to help out while really understanding so much about the culture from a very different view than most foreigners get to see.  Also, I figure it might help out if I still want to teach high school at some point in my life to have helped out in a classroom setting.  

Probably the Last Post Before I Leave...

So I guess that whole updating this once a week did not end up happening.  It’s weird to think that in less than two weeks I’m going to be flying to London for my semester abroad.  In order to help myself prepare for my time in Prague, I ended up getting one of those city guidebooks.  In the beginning, as an introduction to the Czech Republic, it has some history of the country in it, which I have been reading lately.  Normally, I find history boring and can’t really stand it.  It’s probably because I’ve never been good at remembering names or dates, so I just avoid anything where you have to know those things in order to understand what’s going on.  The bits of history that I’ve been learning about are really interesting.  In the Czech Republic, historically it’s considered relatively normal for political debates to be solved by defenestration, or throwing people out of windows.  One guy actually survived by landing in a pile of manure and later he was knighted “Sir Phillip of High Fall.”  I think I could handle more history if it was all like this and fun to learn about.  There is also a really interesting man named Tycho Brahe, or “Tin-nosed Tycho” who has a very interesting story.  He lost his nose in a duel one day, so he made himself one out of tin, thus earning his name.  Then he worked for Emperor Rudolf II as a mathematician and astronomer, where he helped plot the courses of the planets.  He eventually died in 1601 because he didn’t want to go to be rude and leave the dinner table to go to the bathroom.  During the meal, his bladder burst, which eventually killed him five days later.  If you’re more interested in him, here’s his Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tycho_Brahe

A few weeks ago, I got an email from Charles University, where I’m going to be studying this semester, about a few books that they suggested I read before I get to the Czech Republic.  I read the one that had the most interesting title, The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera.  When I got the book, I was still excited, at first.  The cover of my copy has a floating bowler hat over a deserted city street, but I should have known not to judge the book by the cover.  The plot is boring at best, and the writing is pretentious.  The whole time, I felt like the author was trying to sound smart while talking about nothing really.  Well, that’s not exactly true, there’s a lot of sex in the book, but that’s about it.  The main guy is a man names Tomas who is doctor that has a bunch of “erotic friendships” and, at the same time is married to a woman who is completely faithful, for the most part.  The other part of the book is following one of Tomas’s mistresses and another one of her lovers.  When they aren’t talking about their sex lives, the author spends too much time trying to sound philosophical, which gets really old.  The plot isn’t introduced until the third chapter, but that’s not as bad as it seems.  The chapters are at most 3 pages long, which makes it seem like the book goes by faster.  I know that some people really love this book, but personally it just wasn’t my thing.

In other news, tomorrow is my last day of work for this break.  It’s been great being back at Turkshish Kebap House.  I really love working there a lot.  They have amazing food, a pretty chill environment, and most of the customers are pretty awesome.  Every day working there is an adventure and I always come home with some of the most interesting stories, although this past month, there has been a lot of stuff that happens that I don’t have any idea what’s going on.  Two of my coworkers tend to speak to each other in Turkish most of the time, so I get really confused.   Then customers who speak Turkish come in, and they all speak Turkish together, leaving Marbel, my Hispanic coworker, and I completely confused.  For a while, I was really confused about how to work the computer for putting in orders, but now I feel basically comfortable with how the computer works.  It’s going to be nice though to not have to work five days a week. 

In the next week, I’m planning on going to travel to Boone, which I’m really excited about.  I miss all the people I love in Boone and I can’t wait to see them.  It’s going to be so hard for me to not get to hang out with them for another whole semester. 

At the moment, I can’t think of anything else to say, so I’ll close with an interesting Czech phrase, like I did before.

Vrhl na ni dlouhy pohled

That means "he checked her out," but it is literally translated to "he vomited a long postcard on her," which is the more amusing way to translate it.