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.