One Week Down

It's a little difficult to write in this because when I first go to this site, all the directions/tabs are in Czech. I'm managing.

In my Czech class we have gone to see the astronomical clock in Old Town square, gone up the tower on it (where you can see the whole city... of course I didn't bring my camera), gone to the Jewish Quarter and its cemetery, gone over the Charles Bridge, up one of its towers, to the John Lennon wall and to see a robotic David Černý fountain/sculpture of two guys peeing on the Czech Republic-shaped fountain they are standing in. They love text-messaging or "SMS" here, and there is a little thing that gives you a number to text and the robotic statues/fountains will spell out the message you write in their water pee. It's not like you can see the message, but I guess it's nice to know its doing it?

I took a long way to school this day. This is near my dorm.

Archway, Praha 1

I wasn't expecting the little rivers and dams.

From Charles Bridge looking at one of the many other bridges.

This is on Charles Bridge, which is really touristy and has caricaturists and men with little monkey toys that play the cymbals.

One of many statues on the bridge.

Prague is supposedly more touristy than other central/eastern European cities because it was virtually untouched after WWII. I keep hearing that the Czechs are (I'm clearly generalizing a ton) non-confrontational people and just decided to let whoever (Nazis, Soviets w/e) do what they will and wait it out.

View from the front steps of the main building of Charles University. That is looking towards the dorm, but the high-up thing is Prague castle.

Cemetery in the Jewish Quarter. The boys had to wear little paper yarmulkes (that I wish I got a picture of) in both this building and the cemetery. The building had walls covered in the names of the Prague Jews who died during the Holocaust. I looked for "Cantor" and only found a few. Way to survive Mikey! (Or not be Czech).

There were too many dead people and too little space so this cemetery has 12 layers of dead bodies. Other things I learned: the temple we went into is the oldest standing Jewish temple in Europe and that its Jewish tradition to put stones, not flowers on graves.

This is a terrible picture of the Summer Palace. You see it as you walk over the bridge (not the Charles but another) on the way to and from class. I was leaving my language class when I took this and it was so pretty, but my camera refuses to capture how awesome everything looks at night.

We went to dinner at a nearby pub and to a silly club on Aisling's birthday and Friday night we went to some really Euro, multi-story club as well. We spent most of our limited time there on the oldies floor and then after Aisling had an incident we left. The next day Ace and I vowed not to go to any more clubs. We have the opportunity to do much cooler things in Prague and we gave that whole scene its fair share of chances (two). I'm happy we are on the same page.

Yesterday we tried to go do laundry, but after ending up in some ugly neighborhood on what seemed to be the outskirts of the city, we decided to give up and lug our laundry back. Aisling, our friend from NY and I were going to see the Czech movie Vaclav with English subtitles, but the internet led us astray and it wasn't playing. We had a delicious lunch/dinner at Kavárna Louvre and then dessert and coffee at Kavárna Slavia where Vaclav Havel hung out. Aisling's teacher had told her it was much lamer since its renovation and I believe her, but it was still nice.

Kavárna Louvre: Franz Kafka, Albert Einstein and someone I hadn't heard of hung out here.

The end of the potato and mushroom soup I had. I also had potato gnocchi with salmon.

Aisling and Sophia on the tram back.

We came back and I went through the Czech "Cosmo" I got to use for the collage/comic strip I need to make for class and then we watched Arrested Development. I am reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being which is dorky to read IN Prague, but whatever. I really like the concept of it. I woke up early today and took advantage of the free breakfast and talked with this boy who is funny for waking up at like 8 every morning and doing all kinds of things all by himself. Not sure what I will do today...

P.S. Valentine's Day 2008 = seeing the opera Don Giovani at the Estates Theater "where it had its world premiere conducted by W.A. Mozart on Octomber 29, 1787." (Taken from the e-mail I got confirming that I got one of the few tickets they had). <3