Watching C-SPAN, except live

Today, we went on a tour of the Czech Parliament for my international reporting class, to see how Czech journalists cover politics. Normally this doesn't happen when the Parliament is in session, but my reporting teacher knew someone, and here we were. It was fascinating, to say the least, because we got to talk to journalists from several different outlets - one of the big TV stations, and CTK (basically the Czech AP or Reuters), so it was cool to see the different approaches they all had.

My favorite part of the whole thing was getting to sit in the gallery and actually watch the parliament in action. I didn't understand anything, because it was all in Czech (and very fast Czech, at that) but it was interesting to observe nonetheless. I managed to see the prime minister, although we didn't get to see his mistress, since she apparently wasn't around right when we were there. I really felt like I was watching C-Span, except it was in Czech, and I was actually there. It was pretty cool.

a camera-less weekend in Vienna

Rachel, Emily, and I headed over to Vienna this past weekend for Emily's birthday. It was the first trip that we planned ourselves, and it went off without a hitch, so I was pretty happy about that.

Overall, I liked the city a lot more than I liked Budapest. I'm not quite sure why, although (among other reasons) I'm sure the fact that we weren't traveling with half of the dorm had something to do with it. The city was beautiful though, and I really liked everything we saw.

We got there Friday afternoon and, after successfully navigating Vienna's public transportation system, checked into our hostel. Considering that we picked it somewhat-randomly off of hostelworld.com, I thought we made a good choice - apparently the one that some people from our dorm went to a few weeks back was run by a prostitute, or something like that. The only thing that I was slightly sketched out about was the fact that we had to pick up our keys at the cafe next door since the hostel staff was only on duty from 9-noon because it was the off-season. The lady who ran the hostel was really nice when we met her though, which is good, because I've heard that some hostel owners can be a little on the creepy side.

After that, we went for a very late lunch/very early dinner and then walked across town to see Parliament and City Hall. However, when we got to Parliament, I went to pull out my camera and discovered that I had managed to leave my memory card in Prague (more on this later.) The building was beautiful though, as was City Hall. In the winter, they turn the area in front of City Hall into an ice skating rink, so there were tons of people around, and it had a really cool atmosphere - it almost made me wish I could skate. After hanging out there for a little while, we got on the tram and went around the Ringstrasse - the street that runs around the Old City of Vienna. We got off about halfway around the ring and spent the next few hours hanging out in a cafe - Vienna has a big coffee/cafe culture, so we had really wanted to do that, and the place we picked wasn't touristy at all, which was really nice. By the time we were done with that, it was pretty late so we just headed back to the hostel.

Saturday was busy. We started off the day with breakfast and by checking out St. Stephen's Church in the center of town, which was pretty cool, and then we stopped and got some ice cream at a place recommended by some people in our dorm. Nutella ice cream is great, and I can definitely see how they wound up there four times over the course of the weekend, because I probably would have done the same thing. After that, we checked out another church, although you couldn't go inside this one, and then we went to the Naschtmarkt, this outdoor greenmarket and flea market that they have on Saturdays. We walked around and got lunch there, and then we headed to the Schonnbrunn, the summer palace of the Hapsburg Monarchs, which was incredible. It was probably my favorite thing on the trip, and I would definitely want to go back there if I ever go back to Vienna, which I definitely want to do at some point. After that, we went to another cafe and then got dinner for Emily's birthday. Sunday we got up early and got back to Prague around 4 in the afternoon.

I think the strangest part of this weekend for me was not having my camera. I was pretty upset that I didn't have a memory card with me at first. If I go anywhere, chances are there's a camera glued to my hand for most of the time - this is what I do, and at the very least, I had wanted some kind of documentation of my weekend - something that said that I was actually in Vienna, that I had brought some sort of physical evidence of it home, but it worked out well, in the end. Rachel said something to me at the beginning about looking at things differently when you aren't looking at them through a camera lens, and by the end, I could see what she meant. It was even a little more relaxing, in a way, although next time I think I'll remember to check that I have every part of my camera before I go anywhere.

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.