Where am I going, where have I been?

First off, major points if you get the title reference.

Secondly, my apologies for updating so infrequently. There really isn't much going on here. We've been in Prague for the last few weeks, with the exception of a detour to Dresden, Germany last Saturday. The fact that I can just head over to another country for a day hasn't gotten old. Other than that, midterms have mostly been keeping me in Prague. I only had one test, but I had several papers and articles due over the last week or so, and a presentation in my Varieties of Contemporary European Cultures class. I wrote a paper on my search for gluten-free food in Prague for my Travel Writing class - I figured I may as well write about something that really affected me, and I may as well capitalize off of this somehow.

We're headed to Italy on Friday for spring break. I'm really excited about it. Emily and I will be spending a few days in Rome, and then meeting up with some friends and heading to Naples. We'll also be checking out Capri and Pompeii and Vesuvius. Should be a great week. I have a bit of a cold though, so I'm hoping that goes away. I'd rather not have the flight to Italy be the most miserable two hours of my life if I can help it.

Trying to buy cold medicine today was interesting. I was attempting to get by with cough drops, since Halls are the same in the U.S. as they are here, but I had to give in this morning and go to the pharmacy. The pharmacist spoke very little English, as most people directly outside of the city do. I realized as soon as I got there that I should have looked up the generic names for what I wanted, because the only thing I could ask for was ibuprofen, and I already had a perfectly good bottle of that sitting on my desk in the dorm. I managed to explain (somehow) that I had a cold and needed something for it, and she gave me what I'm guessing is the Czech equivalent of Tylenol Cold or Dayquil. The only thing I know is that it has pseudoephedrin in it and won't make me drowsy. I can't tell if it's working otherwise though.

Today marks two months since I left New York. It's going really fast. The program's half over already. While there's plenty I can't wait to get back to New York, there's a lot I'm going to miss about being here. A lot of people are traveling after the semester ends, but I feel like I'm going to be ready to get back to New York by the beginning of May.

On the other hand, I hear the weather's miserable in New York, and it's been in the 50s here, so maybe I'm not ready to go home just yet.

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.

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.

"Do you see the end yet?" "Maybe it's just a mirage..."

Next time I go on an 8 km hike, it's going to be my idea, and it's going to be much warmer out.

We went to Western Bohemia this weekend. There will be a real update with pictures when I'm less frustrated with the world.

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.)

Snow and other things

We got somewhere between six and eight inches of snow over the past few days. Everyone has been raving about how gorgeous Prague is in the snow, and I was inclined to agree with them for the first few hours that the snow was actually sticking to the ground. A day later, the snow has turned into half-melted New York-esque sludge, and I feel like I'm back in the city. It's a good thing my boots are waterproof.

I'm slowly adjusting to being here, although I'm starting to wonder when I'll be brave enough to eat out somewhere that isn't one of the vegetarian restaurants we found by campus. We've got a few big cooking projects in mind though (goulash, lasagna (with GF noodles!) that kind of thing...) so I'm definitely able to get by without going out, if I want.

Tomorrow we're going to Kutna Hora, which starts my next few weekends of traveling. The 3 weekends after that it's Western Bohemia, Budapest, and then (tentatively) Vienna, which should be exciting, but I'm going to be exhausted by the end of February. Budapest is definite now though, which is something else to look forward to.

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.

I got my visa today!

So, after the Czech consulate held my and Emily's passports hostage for almost two months (it was about two days short of their sixty-day timeframe) we finally got the calls yesterday that told us that our visas were actually ready. The first time they called, I thought it was a telemarketer and kind of hung up on them, but they called me back, so this morning I headed into the city and picked up both of our visas. I was a little nervous, because they had told me to bring my health insurance forms again, but apparently everything had worked out, and now I have a visa and can officially go and hang out in Prague for four months without having to abuse the loophole in the law that says you can stay in the country for more than a month (the amount of time you're allowed to be there without a visa) as long as you leave the country at one point each month and come back. I don't want to have to explain anything like that to customs officials on my way in. But I have my visa, and I'm almost set to go (I just need to get my new plane ticket,) so I'm very excited.

Also, any travel suggestions would be greatly appreciated.