Czech This Out!

Okay, so don't mind my horrible play on words for the title of this post...just accept the fact that I'm a nerd who would come up with such a title. Anyway, my shortened version of the trip: Prague was absolutely gorgeous, and is definitely high up on my list of most beautiful places I've ever been to. I think you definitely need to put this city on your list of places to visit sometime in your life.

Check out the pictures here:
http://williams.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2014614&l=f1c6b&id=3901306

And here's the rest of them:
http://williams.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2014616&l=ac12b&id=3901306


Okay so now for the long story. Actually I may try to keep this as quick as possible because I've been going to bed late recently and it's already 11:37pm here. Well, on Thursday night Keshia and I packed our bags and headed to the Ferrovia (the train station). We had a really yummy quick dinner at a restaurant right next to the station, and then, after clearing up the confusion as to which train we were getting on (it was labelled "Vienna" but really ended in Prague), found our little sleeper cabin. It was rather tiny, with two couch-bench things, and then two fold-down couch-bench things really high up. We were told to sleep up on the top ones and not on the bottom ones. This'll be important later. Once the train got underway, and after both of us got over our initial excitement of being in an overnight train for the first time, we decided to be good students and do our homework. So Keshia worked on a 5-7 page paper on racism for her Segregation and Apartheid class, and I laid down with a book called "A Short History of Venice", which is only 127 pages long, but you'd think it was 500 by the amount of time it took me to finish it. Actually I'm still not done with it. Anyway, the point is, I read about 20 pages and took a nice snooze. Once I decided I wasn't going to fool myself by pretending I was working anymore, I climbed the rickety metal ladder and "made my bed" with the sheet-like thing (it's actually a queen sheet sewn together to make a sort of sleeping bag) and a rather dirty fleece blanket, and a miniature square pillow (half the size of an airplane pillow). After managing to wriggle my way into my sheet sleeping bag thing (which took about 10 minutes, I kid you not), I noted that if I moved about half an inch to my right, I'd fall right off the "bed" onto the floor a good 5 and a half feet below me (to say nothing of the ladder I'd hit on my way down). Needless to say, I didn't sleep very much for the first half of the night. Around 4AM, both of us woke up from an unidentifiable bump on the tracks (suicidal cow perhaps?), and we decided that the German train lady was clearly not thinking about our physical and mental safety when she told us we couldn't sleep on the bottom couchettes that looked exactly like the top ones only closer to the floor. After dragging ourselves out of our comfy warm cocoons, we re-made our beds on the bottom bunks, and slept much more soundly until 7am when German Train Lady banged on our door and yelled "PASSPORT CONTROL!" Then all of a sudden two uniformed, unsmiling German men appeared in our bleary eyesight demanding to see our Papers. Somehow my confused morning brain translated that into passport, and after fishing around in my bag for it, I handed it to them. They scrutinized the picture, opened it to a blank page (why can't passport control people stamp in an orderly fashion?), and put a smudgy unidentifiable mark passed off as a stamp on it. Then our passports were shoved back at us, and we were just about to lie back down again when German Train Lady came back with "breakfast": two crunchy white rolls (although they had really soft middles), a little packet of hot pink "strawberry jam", and the largest pat of butter I've ever seen in my life, accompanied with burnt tea and weak coffee. I say weak because after getting used to Italian coffee, I'm pretty sure even Starbucks will taste like water. But, by this time in the morning, it had been a whole 12 hours without eating anything, so Keshia and I ate up rather quickly in the hopes of resuming our lovely nap (we weren't scheduled to arrive in Prague til 11, afterall). Unfortunately, German Train Lady appeared just as we were contemplating the best position to maximize comfort, and grabbed our sheets, blankets, and pillows. She was followed this time by the Czech passport control people, who were just as silent and unfriendly as the German ones. And they were just as bad at placing their stamp in an organized spot. You'd think they wouldn't want to have to hunt for a spot in my passport in a few trips from now, but I guess it keeps their job interesting. Anyway, we settled back into our paper/reading routine until we finally reached Prague, 14 hours after our voyage began.

When we first got to the train station, we noticed that everything in Prague is only labelled in Czech. This is very helpful since obviously Czech is a common world language and everybody who's anybody knows how to speak fluent Czech. We weren't the only Americans wandering around aimlessly, hopelessly searching for something resembling an ATM machine. When we finally found one (and it actually had an English option on the screen! shocking!), I decided to pull out 2000 Czech Koruny, which amounts to roughly $100US. The very intelligent machine spat out one 2000 Koruny bill, which more than annoyed the metro ticket man when I wanted to pay for a 300 Koruny 3-day ticket. Fortunately, the Prague metro is extremely easy to figure out, and our hostel was fairly close to a metro stop. (Random aside: I've noticed my English is turning into European English-- the English of non-native speakers. An example? Somehow I can't stop saying "metro" instead of "subway." My vocabulary has taken a beating this year, between Australia and Europe!) Okay back to my story. We checked into Hostel U Melonou (which apparently means Hostel Watermelon in Czech), dropped our bags off, washed our faces and brushed our teeth, set off in search of Prague Castle. We got off at the right metro stop, and were so excited about finding the Charles Bridge (it was built in the 1300s) that we accidentally crossed it and went the complete opposite direction. It wasn't all a hopeless situation though: we did want to go to the Old Town anyway, so we simply reversed our schedule. Oh, a word about the weather: it was FREEZING in Prague. In fact, we had snow flurries most of the first day and freezing rain the second, so I'm in full winter garb for most of the pictures. Okay back to the Charles Bridge now. We saw the Astronomical Tower, which was cool because supposedly the 12 apostles come out of the clock and do a little dance or something every hour. We kept trying to catch it all weekend, and finally were able to see it the last hour before we left on Sunday. Keshia and I decided it was just a tourist trap, because something sort of came out and blew a trumpet or something, and then went back in through the door it came out of. Actually it was so quick that while I was trying to take a picture of it, I ended up missing it altogether. Once we decided the clock was a lost cause, we moved on and saw Tyn Church and St. Nicholas Church (of which there are two, and I'm still not sure which one we saw). Both were very pretty, and we found it kind of strange that there are so many beautiful churches in a country where half of the population is atheist and the other half are (mostly) non-practicing Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Anyway, we also walked through Josefov, which is the old Jewish quarter. We found a really good dinner restaurant there, where I decided to be adventurous and try local food. I had steak (yummmm BEEF), but it was literally swimming in a goopy sauce that I have no idea what it was made of, and accompanied by cranberries, cut-out pieces of bread (called "dumplings"), and, strangest of all, whipped cream. It didn't taste as bad as it sounds, but it's not something where I'd die unhappy if I never ate it again. Dessert, however, was awesome: a crepe with fresh fruit and ice cream. It reminded me of the crepes I had in Cairns with Mel, but this one was even better. After dinner we saw a Black Light Show, which apparently is very popular there among tourists. It was called Aspects of Alice, and supposedly followed Alice after she left Wonderland. It was without a doubt the strangest show I've ever seen in my life. Most of the tricks were cool, in the sense that they had lots of props and people floating in the air without cables (they were lifted up on poles attached to the backs of their clothing, and the poles couldn't be seen because it was really dark except for the things glowing in the black light), but I didn't get much of the plot, other than right at the end Alice got married and then had a baby which I think died. All I got out of it was how weird the Czech people are, because it was filled with random nudity that was totally unnecessary. For example, in the background they had a screen that had really random projected images on it, like faces and cars etc. Sometimes it was just naked female bodies. Very strange. We decided we could've done without seeing that show, and went back to the hostel and went straight to bed.

Saturday morning we got up bright and early and actually made it to Prague Castle before 9am, when everything opens there. We walked around and took a lot of pictures, and then went into the cathedral and the interior of the castle before we had to leave to meet our tour group for the lunch cruise. The food on the cruise was pretty good, although they definitely didn't have enough meat (the dishes ran out quickly and weren't refilled), but Keshia and I managed to stuff ourselves anyway and we took some really pretty pictures of the city. Then we decided to go back to the hostel because we had to be at the opera house before the show started at 7. We saw Candide, which is an American musical by Leonard Bernstein (the man who did West Side Story), except the music was in English and the narration and most of the speaking was in Czech. They did have a subtitle machine at the top of the stage, but at one point they had Czech up there while the characters were speaking Czech and English while they were singing in English, so they weren't very helpful. Also, hearing English being sung by Czechs is extremely difficult to understand. And lo and behold, they also had random nude women!!! I'm pretty sure that Bernstein didn't write in any parts for naked women on Broadway back in the 1950s, so I think it's just a Czech oddity. Nudity aside, I found the play enjoyable, even though it was a little confusing because of the language thing.

On Sunday morning we got up bright and early, after remembering to change our clock the night before because of Daylight Savings, ate a quick breakfast, checked out, stored our bags, and headed straight for Prague Castle so that we could finish what we had paid for on our ticket the day before. We saw St. George's Church, which was pretty, and then walked through Golden Lane, which used to be where the peasants that worked in the castle lived. Later it was considered popular to live and work in these tiny houses (and by tiny I mean tiny-- I hit my head on most of the doorframes!), and Franz Kafka worked in a bright blue one in the 1930s. Most of them are shops and museums now though. Then we made our way back down the Old Royal Steps for the last time, and visited two synagogues, the first of which is a museum that has the history of the Jews in Prague, and the second is dedicated to the people who were killed during the Holocaust. Both of them were very old beautiful buildings, and it was cool to see inside a synagogue instead of more churches for a change. The Holocaust has always interested me, and I've read survivor stories since before 4th grade even, so the second synagogue was especially fascinating to me. All the walls were covered floor to ceiling with names and birth and death dates for people killed by the Nazis who were just from the Prague area. The handwriting was only as tall as my thumbs are wide, and to see that many names written, and the enormous amount of space they take up, is really sobering. It's one thing to know facts and numbers, and quite another to have a visual of them. The really interesting part of the exhibit though were the drawings made by children, ages 5-15, who lived in the Terezin ghetto before being deported to concentration camps. They were beautiful and contained such meaningful and grown-up themes, and there were more than 4000 of them. A few had pictures of the children next to them, and sadly most of them never returned. On our way out of the exhibit we had to pass through the Old Jewish Cemetery, which in some places is 12 layers deep because the Jews weren't allowed to bury their dead anywhere else in the city. I heard a guide tell a tour group that during WWII, the cemetery was very important because it was the only "playground" children could use, and it became a central meeting point for friends, families, and lovers. It's hard to picture little kids playing hide-and-go-seek between crumbly tombstones that are centuries old. After leaving Josefov (the Jewish Quarter, which was the only ghetto to not be destroyed by the Nazis-- they planned to leave it as a "museum of an extinct race"), we finally managed to catch that darn astronomical clock in time to see it, although both of us were rather disappointed. Then it was time to go to the airport, and we said goodbye to Prague. The airplane was wonderful-- I had a whole 3 seats to myself, so naturally I stretched out and fell asleep. I was only sad that it was only an hour ride. Once we reached Venice, we spent an extra 4 hours getting from the airport to San Servolo, because of full ferries and annoying timetables, but we finally got home, exhausted, and I definitely went straight to sleep.

Yesterday and today I met Carynne and Annie, girls from Williams, in Piazza San Marco and had the opportunity to show them around Venice a bit. It was good to see them, because I haven't really kept in touch much with many Williams students (well, other than the occasional facebook message). I'm trying to get more motivated and send out postcards, but I sent out a bunch last semester and only got one back (from Carynne). In Venice news, I don't have much of interest to report, other than I have a rather long list of complaints that will be written up in a formal letter and sent to both Duke and Williams at the end of the semester. I haven't added Massimo to that list, but his behavior towards me (and Margaret in his first class) could definitely be charged as sexual harrassment if he were a professor in the States. I don't know about you, but I don't like having my professor put his hands on my shoulders and his chin on the top of my head while he's staring down at what I'm working on during class. Spanish Guy also has kept picking on me lately-- although definitely in a better way. He's made mention of my papers in class several times now, and I'm the only one he's singling out. I think that's a good thing, but it also brings his attention, and I'm also the only one he calls on outright, even though I'm not the only one who doesn't participate voluntarily often (I'm not even the only American student to be quiet in those classes, so it's not like he's picking on me because I'm a native speaker). He just wants to hear my opinion on everything, but as Ofer (an Israeli student) has pointed out, I turn red, my voice gets shaky, and I stammer a lot whenever I speak in class. Ofer thinks it's funny, but I'm really thinking it's not. It makes me miss Williams classes where professors are sensitive to nervous people and graciously let you participate in other ways. I also have to pay Orla (the program director) a visit, because another student told me that Orla told her that if a professor mostly assigns A's to students in his or her class, she will go through and even out the grades so there are an even number of A's, B's, and C's. Judging from the fact that I'm taking three literature classes, and I know one of my fortes is writing good papers, if I get anything less than all A's I'm going to be incredibly angry. Actually maybe I'll e-mail her instead of talk to her in person, because if I have that answer in writing then I can prove to Duke and Williams that my grades are less than what I deserve. Genius ideas like that come to me at 1AM. That is why I don't start papers until the middle of the night the day that they're due. But I digress. That's just one in a list of many rumors I need her to clear up for me, because arbitrarily assigning grades is not okay. Especially not when this Duke transcript will be seen by graduate schools. Anyway, I'm pretty sure I've written an entire book in this entry, and you're all probably really bored or have given up on reading it. Plus I'm really tired and have yet to finish reading that darn so-called Short History of Venice book, so I'm going to go lie down on my bed and have nice happy dreams of my trip to Salzburg and Munich in two weeks!