American newspapers won't hire me, but the Czech ones seem to like my photographs

http://launch.praguemonitor.com/en/43/life_in_prague/2969/

They screwed up the photo credit, but I took that photo! NYU in Prague started a student journalism website, and I contributed a few photographs (only one of which actually made it on) and the Prague Monitor - the largest English-language daily publication, picked up a few articles. Now only if they had the right credit...

And in the morning, I'm making...latkes?

Last night, I managed to successfully turn this:



Into this:



By doing this:



Needless to say, I'm quite proud of myself.

Even if it did come out of a box.

Photos from Budapest

I've been a bit remiss in posting these, but here are some photos from this past weekend:


This is the castle we visited the first night after we walked across the Chain Bridge (the one that was in the last post.)




These are from St. Stephen's Basilica, which was easily one of the most beautiful churches I've ever seen.


The Parliament building. I would have really liked to go in.

Eating Burger King in Budapest, and other things I did this weekend (part one)

I now officially have my second and third stamps in my passport - one each for entering and leaving Hungary. We went to Budapest this weekend - my first non-NYU planned weekend excursion, and the second country I've been to in Europe. The city is absolutely gorgeous - I don't know if any picture I took can really describe the things I saw this weekend. I'll post more photos tomorrow, but here's one to start with:



This is the view from the Buda side of the Chain Bridge over the Danube river. The city is split into two parts, appropriately named Buda and Pest (pronounced "Pesht"). Our hostel was in Pest, and it was definitely the more cosmopolitan side of the city - there was far more going on there, so we spent the majority of our time there, but on the first night, we walked over the bridge and up this hill to the castle, where there was a labrynth we went through with oil lamps. It was creepy at first, but a lot of fun.

After, we wandered around the Pest side of the city for a little while, and, strangely enough, wound up at a Burger King. Granted, there were sixteen of us and no one's phones worked, so we needed a meeting place, but it was a little strange to spend part of my first night in Hungary, a city with a great culinary tradition - including far better goulash than the Czech Republic - eating french fries in an American fast food outpost.

Saturday morning, I was dragged out of my bed at our very cute hostel to go see the Parliament building and a church. I was initially against this, as I was exhausted and really didn't feel like I needed to see another church, but it turned out to be the most beautiful one I've ever seen (and by this point, I've seen quite a few chruches.) The Parliament building was great too, although we couldn't actually go see the inside. We thought we would be able to, but then we got there and found it barricaded and guarded by a bunch of cops in riot gear, owing to some riots that had taken place a few months back.

After, we went for lunch and then to a Van Gogh exhibit at a museum and then the House of Terror - a museum documenting the Nazi and Soviet occupations of Hungary. It was fascinating, in a creepy sort of way. They did a good job of being objective about the whole thing, which I'm starting to learn is importing when it comes to tackling history.

The weather was much warmer in Budapest, which was kind of surprising to me, because I didn't think it was that much farther south. Customer service was also better, which I wasn't expecting, because, like the Czech Republic, Hungary is a post-communist country. Prices were pretty comparable to Prague, if a little cheaper, and I found it kind of funny that I was converting prices to Czech crowns as opposed to U.S. dollars, like I do most of the time when I'm here in Prague, although I've started to stop doing that now.

I'm also somewhat glad that I'm not trying to learn Hungarian. It's not an Indo-European language, which made it look far more complicated than Czech already is.

Overall, this weekend was great. Next time, I would much rather travel with less peoplek which is why I'm glad that next weekend's trip to Vienna is going to be much smaller, but it was fun none the less. More pictures will be posted tomorrow.

castles and hiking and monasteries, oh my

This weekend we went on a NYU-sponsored (read: "paid for") trip to Western Bohemia, another area of the Czech Republic. We went to Karlovy Vary, a spa town, and Loket, a town with a historic castle, among other places, and in theory, this should have been a great trip, but our tour guide was a bit of a dictator. He didn't believe in sticking to the planned itinerary (a.k.a the reason I woke up at 7 a.m. on a Friday morning to sign up for this trip) so there was a lot of hiking, because this trip was clearly about what he wanted to do. One of the first things he saw was my favorite though. We hiked up this mountain to see the ruins of this old castle, and that was pretty exciting (minus the couple falls I took at the end, of course).


We hiked up the mountain to see the ruins at the top (mostly obscured by fog here)


Ruins


The view.

I'll post more photos later, but if I don't get around to it, there will definitely be an update about our upcoming trip to Budapest.

Frostbite & Bones: the Kutna Hora trip

Today we went to Kutna Hora, a town about an hour and a half outside of Prague. The town dates back to medieval times, so there was an interesting mix of baroque, neo-gothic architecture, with some communist-built buildings thrown in for good measure. It was bitterly cold, so my fingers and toes went numb pretty fast, and the first part of the tour - a visit to a gothic cathedral called St. Barbara's, and a silver mining museum (The town has a really rich history of mining - it initially prospered as the first site of currency production in the Czech Republic) - dragged on a little bit, although everything was still really interesting to see.

St. Barbara's Cathedral. This was built sometime in the 14th century.

After that, we went to lunch at a Czech-Mex restaurant. The fajitas tasted good, but the chips and guacamole consisted of...Doritos. I kid you not. It was an interesting, interpretation, to say the least. We then continued onto the Bone Church, which was the reason I signed up for this trip in the first place. Basically, the church is decorated with the bones of about 40,000 people. I think it's best to let the pictures speak for themselves. (Note: I'm not exactly sure why photobucket/blogger refuses to display the whole photo, or why that photo of the chandelier is sideways. If I can fix it, I will.)

Greetings from the new Windy City

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/18/world/europe/18cnd-europe.html?ex=1326776400&en=c5dad3a3fd3b5703&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

We didn't get a lot of the rain but the winds from this did hit the Czech Republic, and they were really intense - I kept thinking our kitchen window was going to blow in, and I almost got blown up against a building a few times when we ventured outside to go to the grocery store, but everything is a lot calmer now.

Yesterday we went on a tour of the Prague Castle area, but we didn't get to see the actual castle since it was closed, as was the cathedral that was attched to it, although that was gorgeous from the outside. The castle is up on a hill on the other side of the river, which made it even more windy and cold up in that area, although it was absolutely gorgeous, and we got a beautiful view of the other side of the city of Prague (the part where classes are, and where we live):



That view was easily one of my favorite parts of Prague so far.

After the tour, we went to a hockey game - it was our "cultural event" for the week (as opposed to going to the opera or the philharmonic) and it was a lot of fun as well. I wasn't sure what I was expecting, but the stadium was really nice - definitely nicer than where the Islanders are. Everything seemed really new. Slavia, the Prague team, lost, mostly because they didn't play well at all, but the game was still fun to watch. There was much less fighting than American hockey (I think I saw two fights total) and a lot more advertisitng. At first, I kept trying to figure out why both the icea nd the players' jerseys looked different than in the NHL, until I realized that there was a ton of advertising on both. Even the referees' jerseys and the cheerleaders had ads (both were sponsored by O2 and yes, there were cheerleaders/dancers, and they performed during the break between the first and second periods - I was shocked that they could stunt on the ice, even if it wasn't that complicated.)

Everyone wanted to go out after the game, since it was only 9:30 or so by the time we got out of there, a group of 20 or so of us headed up to Holešovice, the neighborhood where one of the other dorms is. After a brief detour in which we accidentally left one of the guys we were with on the train when we had to switch lines, we went this bar/club, Crossbar, that a lot of the kids who live there (and some people who live in our dorm) had recommended, but we were all thoroughly sketched out by it, and left about 5 minutes after we got there. It was full of all these crazy scupltures, and a lot of people who seemed much more at home there than we ever would have, and it wasn't because we were American. Emily said something about it being a place where they'd film a horror movie, and she was definitely right. It was like something I would have had a nightmare about. I'm not sure what those Osadni kids were talking about, but we couldn't get out of there fast enough.

We got back on the metro, which was thankfully right there, and headed back towards our side of town. Everyone decided to go to a club, so Emily and I just headed back to the dorm, since that's not really our kind of thing. We hung out in the suite with a few people, and I learned how to use Skype, which was really awesome, and it's free, which was cool in itself. Needless to say, if you want to talk to me, that's probably one of the best ways to do it.

We're going bowling tonight. Let's see if I'm as bad as it in Europe as I am in the U.S.

Tours and Trips

Yesterday we went on a tour of the Old Town. I've spent the last week or so walking through the area every day, because that's where our classes are located, but learning about the area from a historical perspective was fascinating. It was founded around the 1400s, during the reign of Charles IV, so there are layers and layers of history, and some really cool architecture - anyone into that would have had a field day on this tour. We also got to go onto the Charles Bridge, which I definitely want to try and walk all the way across this weekend.


Astronomical Clock


One of the Cathedrals on Old Town Square


View from the Charles Bridge. I feel like this would be really gorgeous at sunset.

We're about to leave for a tour of the Prague Castle, so there will be more pictures of that later.

Also, I skipped my last day of czech class because we had to sign up for trips, and we had to get to the NYU Center early to line up so we could get the ones they wanted, becuase they all had limited spaces. (And after that, I wanted to come back here and sleep.) After a mad dash to all the sign up lists to get what we wanted, the beginning of my travel list is:

Kutna Hora (the town with the Bone Church) - January
Western Bohemia - February
Cesky Krumlov (small town in Southern Bohemia) - March
Terezin - April

I think that's everywhere I'm traveling in the Czech Republic as of now. There's also a tentative trip to Budapest in the works for February, so I'm looking forward to that.

Jewish Prague

Today after Czech class, Emily, Rachel, and I went on a tour of Prague's Jewish quarter, which is just off Old Town Square. It was interesting to see, because Prague has a rich and storied Jewish history, which was all but wiped out during World War II (the Terezin ghetto is not far from the city) so now, aside from the surviving synagogues and the old Jewish cemetary, the area looked like 5th Avenue in Manhattan, with it's Louis Vuitton, Hugo Boss, and Lacoste shops, among others, albeit it looked like a 5th Avenue with fairy tale-like buildings. It was an interesting dichotomy.

Our tour guide was a walking encyclopedia of the Jewish history of Prague and Eastern Europe, which was kind of fascinating in itself, but the synagogues and cemetary we visited were incredible. The first one we visited, the Maisel Synagogue, was built in 1590, and was an interesting mix of Renaissance, Baroque, and somewhat Gothic architecture, from all the times int was renovated and destroyed, and there was an exhibit detailing the eary history of the Bohemian and Moravian Jewish ghettos. The Klausen Synagogue, also from the 1500s, was interesting to see as well, as was the Pinkas Synagogue, which was turned into a Holocaust memorial, with all of the names of Czech Holocaust victims written on the walls. There were at least 80,000 names, and they covered the walls of the synagogue. It was extremely moving, and it reminded me of back when Dad and I did the readings in the middle of the night for the Yom Ha'Shoah ceremonies at the temple.

The most fascinating part of the tour, and one of the spookiest, was the Old Jewish Cemetary, which was built in the 15th century. There are at least 12 layers of people buried there from the 1400s-1700s, one right on top of the other, and there are at least 12,000 tombstones, and that's not even one from everyone there. It was a little spooky to be there, just thinking about how many people had been buried there, including some prominent Jewish figures from that time period.





This last one isn't in the cemetary, but it's a picture of the Old Jewish Town Hall. You can't really see it here, but on the other side of that clock is a Hebrew one, which moves in a counter-clockwise direction to follow the Hebrew letters.