I'm so ronrrreey

Well, the rest of my program has gone home. There are a few of us who are still hanging around waiting for our parents and various family members to come tour our "home" as we play tour guide. This last week as been a rush of final classes, final papers, final exams and final opportunities for the younger crowd to drink at bars. Most of our crew went out either every night or close to, but I just couldn't justify going out to bars until 5am with final exams at 9am. Sure, I'm a little lame, but I'm used to it. A lot of the crew is also going to be returning to the prude, overzealous alcohol laws of America where they can't drink anywhere but their dorm rooms from alcohol that has been purchased for them with cash. I am one of the few 21-year-olds here, and all of us have lost the rush to rage every night. We may not be wiser, but we're sure as hell more tired. C'est la vie. Today and tomorrow I will be writing my last paper that is due July 1. I wish that this program had been a bit more "abroad" and a little less "study", but I guess that isn't up to me. I just gotta get my paper done!

As for that so-called Thesis research that you've been hearing SO much about, it has been getting done. I spent an entire day at Terezin taking photos of everything in site (haha get it...site) and I've visited the Holocaust Memorial in Prague twice, once with official permission to take photographs. I wish I had been given a name tag or something instead of just a piece of paper to show the guard-Babushkas because the tourists gave me the dirtiest looks. My thesis has kinda morphed though. I am faced with 2 memorials here, and a museum back home that I will be comparing. I'm thinking I'm just going to cut out the museum side of USHMM and focus on it's ability to act as a memorial. I don't know. I guess that is something I'll have to discuss with my professor/advisor when I get home. I have time.

The bottom line, for this trip, is that I have decided that I belong here. I have fallen in love. I am now considering applying for a Fulbright scholarship to live/research/maybe teach in Eastern Europe. What can I say? I'm a sucker for Slavonic. I mean, how could you not love a place like this:

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Emily

So Much Barcelona!

Oh my gosh. There is so much to say about Barcelona that I don't even write it all. I'm sure I'll forget something, but I'll try to get it all in. This is going to be a looooong post.

SO. The weekend started Thursday evening when we flew to Barcelona on a very sketchy, hot pink airplane. Seeing as I speak no Spanish, when we arrived I was linguistically useless for the first time this trip. We wandered around in an attempt to find our hostel for about an hour. We finally found Sea Point, and it was right on the beach!


The hostel itself had nothing going for it besides it's location, but we made the best of it. All 7 of us piled into a hallway-like room and attempted the art of making up bunk beds when a liiiiiiiiittle tipsy. We may have found a cheap market on our way to the hostel....In Spain they stop selling alcohol in stores at 11pm! It's worse than Connecticut! That night, we found our way to a club called Shoka, which was literally right on the beach. It was all sorts of hot and sweaty and they were playing the usual 90s re-mixed rap/techno that Europeans seem to love. Since we had 4 girls and 3 guys, we made the best use of our pairing resources and danced in a giant amoeba of arms and legs. We were all having such a great time that it didn't matter who was dancing with whom. The craziest part of the night was when 2 of the guys emerged from the men's room claiming that they'd just met a WM '09 grad who was in one of their frats! We ended up hanging out with him for the next day or two as he finished up his year of teaching English in Spain. Small world, eh?

Friday morning we got up early (free breakfast ended at 10 and we're poor) and headed out to do some good old fashioned sight seeing. We walked up and down La Ramba street, which is the big main tourist avenue and took some snap shots of pretty buildings that housed who knows what. We meandered and talked and took stupid pictures, stopped and ate, meandered. We didn't have what you would call a specific goal in mind for the day, but we saw lots of things anyway. That afternoon we suited up (and I slathered Eastern European sunscreen "for the sun intolerant" alllll over) and we hit the beach. We lay there on the sand, getting sun and not worrying about the Holocaust for the first time in weeks. With all the readings, walking, tours and lectures we'd been doing, it had been on our minds, and at least for me it had started to get into my mood. I really needed this break. As we lay dosing, people kept walking around offering to sell anything from massages to coconuts to dresses. I kept having to wake up and tell them "No Gracias!" which is pretty much the extent of my Spanish. Later, we showered up and headed out for a night on the town. We went to a Spanish sea food restaurant on the water and sat outside next to the marina. It was gorgeous out, the weather could not have been better. I tried my first authentic paella. Though I'm not usually one for food that still has a face (though thanks to Kevin, mine didn't look at me for long--he ripped the heads right off mine for me) I loved it because it was so fresh and so obviously real. I can't promise that I will order something that has muscles, prawns, crawfish and squid in it ever again, but I'm glad I did then. For the record, the rice was the best part anyway! Also on the authentic menu: Sangria. It was just "DeleeCHus" as Kevin said, which became a running joke.

Saturday we rolled out of bed at a very late 9:30 (trying to get 7 people in and out of 1 shower in 25 minutes before check out--horrible) and started our day extremely....tired and sensitive to light or food...We made it to a market where we nursed ourselves with donuts, Spanish olive oil chips and giant bottles of water. Oddly enough, we saw a lot more sights that day! Our first stop was the huge Sagrada Familie. It's been under construction for over 200 years and they estimate another 40-80. WHAT. It's massive. MASSive. We're talking like 10 stories at least, with huge facades on every side. Check out my pictures on facebook to see what I'm talking about, the link will be at the end of this post. Next, we wandered (hiked) up to the Guell Gardens constructed by Antoni Gaudi. And was it gaudy! It was benches and houses and iguanas made of thousands, maybe millions, of tiny tiles to make up a huge mosaic complex. The view is gorgeous and the mosaics are just amazing. Again, check out the pictures.

After wandering around the city gardens, finding an Arc d'Triumph and a huge golden fountain, we headed for the airport. Even though what followed was a 5 hour saga of travel, 2 of which were spent trying to navigate the nighttime tram and bus system in Prague, none of us could deny that it was a weekend of a lifetime.
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Emily

P.S. Click Here for the link to my pictures of Barcelona!!

Beads and off to Barcelona!

This week has been pretty hectic. In addition to our normal classes, the World Cup has been going on, which draws us to Old Town Square every night at 8:30. This is last years, but it looks about the same- everyone comes out! Trying to balance school, site seeing, and the 2 papers and a final I have in the next week has been, and is going to be, a challenge. I'm trying to get more "abroad" into my "study", but we'll see.

Today we spent the afternoon making glass bead jewelry! Laugh if you will, but it was better than kindergarten. We used authentic Czech Glass and strung together several different strands as we saw fit. I'm no artist, but I hope they came out alright. It was a lot of fun, if nothing else. A bunch of the girls got together and did it and we enjoyed cheering each other on and making color suggestions.

Tomorrow evening I leave for Barcelona!! About 7 of us decided that we wanted to use our last weekend to travel somewhere fun, so we looked online of the cheapest tickets and Barcelona was it, so off we go. I'm really looking forward to it, I've never been to Spain before! Check that into my passport stamp collection :)

On Sunday our program is going to Terezin, so next post will be about that to. Since I'm doing some of the research for my thesis I'll have to be bright eyed and bushy tailed, but I'll hopefully be heading back there with my family later in the trip too. I don't think they know that...but I kinda have to go to get all the research I need. We'll see how this weekend goes. Seguro viajes!
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Emily

Maxi Mojitos and More

This weekend was the strangest mish mash of places to visit. We started on Saturday morning at the Shishkov Castle, which is lacking a ceiling or two, didn't house anyone important, and isn't the largest or the oldest of it's kind. Sooo...it was nice? I mean, it was a good example of a medieval castle and had some interesting preserved frescos. Since it hasn't been inhabited since about 1648, I don't really know what we were looking at a lot of the time. The tour guide didn't speak English wso we were relying on the translations of the tour guide given to us by the university, who was awful. She was a mean Czech woman with no patience for students (or intellectuals who read captions), no concept of who we were or what we already knew (or would want to know) and no great love for our professor either.

From the castle we went to a forgotten Jewish cemetery. Literally, forgotten. It was over grown and several of our shorts-and-flipflops-wearing crew were immediately fallen upon by hoards of hungry bugs. Scratchy ankles were had by all. Otherwise, the cemetery was simply that, a cemetery. In addition to dead people underground, we also were privy to several "naturally mummified" corpses on display in glass caskets in the cellar of an old Jesuit church. I think the people must have died in like 1500 but it was still awful. I don't think anyone appreciated looking at someone's Mother or sister or cousin or Great-Grandfather all dried up like an apricot. Egyptian Mummies are all wrapped up, intentionally stored for viewing the after-life and having the after-life view them. These people were buried for good and just happened to be placed in an air-tight, humidity controlled cellar for 500 years and forgotten until they were discovered during a church renovation in the 1970s. These people did not consent to being put on view and trotted out like a beaded lady at a circus for several koruna a pop. There are too many beautiful things in this world to spend your time looking at that.

We also took a tour of the second oldest Baroque Pharmacy in the world (1 of 3 surviving) from the 1500s. Not much to say about it, besides there were a lot of gross looking powders, 2 live leeches and a narwal/unicorn horn on the wall that I realllllllly wanted to own.

Really the two best things of the weekend both involved drinks. At the Mexican restaurant (or rather, Czechican-Czech/Mexican) we had dinner at we ordered a mysterious sounding "Maxi Mojito" which turned out to be a BUCKET of mojito. Glorious. We shared it between a few of us and raucous times were had by all. The evening we all stayed in the hotel and drank beerz, played cards and watched the World Cup on our microscopic tv. It was nice to all just relax together with no pressure to learn or shout over music or even look good (after you see Jesuit mummies, you're a lot less picky about wearing PJs in public).

Today we started at an old synagogue, which was beautiful. I love old holy buildings (to a certain extent, I mean, after 100 ancient celtic buildings they're all just old rocks--am I right??) so we wandered through the old, the oldest and the auxiliary to the oldest/current holocaust memorial in Pilsen.

We ended our weekend at the Pilsen brewery. WOO! We had lunch (and beer, obviously) and then went on a tour of their works and stuffs. It was pretty interesting really, I know nothing about beer. At the end we tasted un-pasterized, recently fermented beer which was actually pretty good. A lot of our group thought it was too bitter, but I actually liked it. We have a bunch of great photos so make sure to czech those out.

And now, on to stream the world cup and read about concentration camps! What a life.
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Emily

Churches of Bones and Public Futball

Today we (Christina, Megan, The Drake and I) travelled outside Prague for an hour on the sweatiest train ever. We were on a quest to see....THE BONE CHURCH. The history is all there, but basically it's a church that is decorated with the bones of about 40,000 skeletons. It's really really creepy, but it's awesome. We had a great time wandering around looking at chandeliers and pyramids made totally of bones. Totally worth the gross train ride.

Prague has been experiencing a miserable heat wave for the last week. Granted, it's only been in the 80s, but nowhere here has AC because they usually don't need it. We've been choosing between the rock of sweating through our sleep and the hard place of having bugs flying around our heads. Since our only modes of transportation here are public and feet, it's been quite a sweaty few days. Needless to say, the amount of showering and napping that has been going on is just ridiculous.

This evening the world cup began! The city (with huge help from Hyundai) set up a huge tv screen to watch the game, with stands of beer and sausages all around the edges. Some 200 people (at least!) gathered in the city center to cheer France or Uruguay on to glory. Though neither ended up scoring (booooo) it was a lot of fun just to be surrounded by the whole town. Everyone had a Budwar (the Czech version of Budweiser), a big ol' sausage and lots to say to the refs and players hundreds of miles away.

Tomorrow morning at o'dark thirty we're again boarding our bus to travel. We're going to a castle, a few Jewish synagogues and cemeteries then off to the Pilsen brewery. It will hopefully be another fab weekend. Check back in on Sunday!
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Emily

sometimes, you're just grateful

Today we were on the tram, riding home from the grocery store. Three students in my group were sitting more or less in a triangle, with an older woman we didn't know sitting between us. We've been told to be quiet on the tram by older people before, so when she started looking between us expectantly I thought she was going to shush us. Instead, in heavily accented English, she asked where we were from. Surprised, we told her we were from the US and we were here studying. She asked what. We told her we were studying the Holocaust. Calming she points herself, "I was in that." Like it was a movie we knew. We must have displayed our shock on our faces because she clarified, "Yes. I was in Auschwitz." WHAT. I GOT ON A TRAM WITH GROCERIES AND WALKED OFF HAVING CHATTED WITH A HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR.
We chatted further. She was very proud of the fact that she now is a great-grandmother. After being the liberated when she was 15, she mothered 2 sons, 4 grandchildren and 6 great-grandchildren. She talked of them proudly, as if knowing that those 12 human beings that she clearly loved so dearly were close to never being born. She glowed as she talked of her 4-year-old great-grandson who is already speaking English. Fierce pride in America lives within those liberated by the American army. Her response to a pause in the conversation was "Yes, my life has been hard" and shrugged. Hard? Psh. That makes my life look like a glowing beacon of joy and bon bons.
When we inquired about her life, she told of us her youth in Hungary, and then her later life as a scientist. She travelled all over Europe working with microscopes (that's all we could tell, as I said, it was heavily accented--though 100% better than my Czech). She inquired about our lives, and seemed as interested in us as we were in her. As we travelled through the city towards our dorm she pointed out nice parks and wanted to know what we had toured so far, how long we would be there, etc. We left the tram feeling awed and grateful.

Eastern Europe is an amazing place, you never know who you'll meet on the train, or what they've lived through.
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Emily

Österreicher Zeiten- Wien (Austrian Times - Vienna)

Well, this is going to be a long post. It was a long weekend! On Friday morning we piled into a huge red bus and travelled the 4 1/2 hours to Vienna. That's where it all began....
Friday we had a basic tour of the old city (which is not like the old city of Prague. It's just the center + some rando old things popping up in the middle) by this odd hippy with blue glasses, greasy hair and a historic sense of humor that I don't think anyone else in the group appreciated. We ate dinner as a group (and on the group budget!) at an old monastery in the Vienna Woods. I got a steak--glorious.

Saturday started early with a tour of the Belvedere Art Museum nee Prince Eugen palace. We saw Klimt's "The Kiss". Look it up on google images--it's gorgeous. There are hundreds of other beautiful paintings there, but that was the one that is heavily advertised, and is well worth it. I was supposed to head to an exhibit on controversial photographs, but I got horribly lost....So instead I wandered around Vienna for 2 hours. It wasn't all bad, I finally figured out the metro system and got home. I also spent some of that time inspecting what an Austrian ladies pharmacy looks like. I don't know why, I think I got it from my Mom, but I really like to wander through the "real life" of the people I am visiting. I especially love grocery stores. It is really so interesting to see what people need everyday, how it's packaged, how it's different and how it's so similar to my own needs in life.

That night we all went out together (a rarity in a group of 24) to the area of Vienna called the "Bermuda Triangle" and it's where all the hoppin bars are. So we bar hopped through it. We had such a good time drinking whatever we could afford on the menu, dancing in a mass, avoiding the creepy locals and other tourists and trying to corral all of us for every bar change. Though exhausted the next morning, it was totally worth it to hang out with the whole group.

Sunday, we started the morning at Maria Theresa's palace. It's huge! It reminded me so much of the palaces I saw all over the Russian countryside outside of Petersburg. We didn't get to go in because there had "just been a Russian invasion of tourists and the palace is packed. Ironic." (Ironic because the Russians had a bad habit of invading palaces and destroying them so no one else could enjoy them once they left....) So we wandered around through the gorgeous palace gardens. They had a zoo, a master garden, several green houses and a maze. We choose to get lost repeatedly in the master gardens and pop back out around the green houses. We went in and it was like a scene from Jurassic Park! There were all sorts of crazy green tropical plants and flowers. We saw all sorts of strange, exotic plants and even some giant slugs. So obviously we took the opportunity to take several dinosaur photos all over this poor green house. I pity the fool tourist who met us in the middle of this tirade. Needless to say, we had a ball.

We finished the afternoon with a visit to an art exhibit of an Auschwitz survivor run by his son. All the paintings were about his experiences in Auschwitz during the Holocaust. He was really quite talented. His paintings were abstract but haunting. His website is: http://www.artforum.judenplatz.at/index.html
After giving us the run down of his fathers life and paintings, he took us out for ice cream. An odd thing for a curator to do, but he was an eccentric gentleman, and absolutely adorable. He must be in his 70s or so (He escaped Auschwitz when his Mother told the guard that she wasn't Jewish, and she was just at the train stop to pick up her husband who wasn't either. When the guard insisted that they take her husband, she told them that she would be back for him and quickly walked off the platform with her children. They hid for the remainder of the war. Only by his mother's quick thinking and the grace of God, or the stupidity of the guard, was he saved.)
On the whole, I think I like Prague better than Vienna. I didn't dislike Vienna, I just didn't get the feeling of it's soul the way I can feel Prague's. Maybe I needed more time there. I don't know. It was very similar to so many cities--a city of people moving and churning, with some of their history just laying out to be remembered on the street. I never got the sense that they were still living their history the way the Praguers are. Maybe it's because they were on the "good" side of the Iron Curtain and developed where Prague could not. Maybe they didn't suffer the way Prague did (but don't tell them that!) I can't place it, but I have to say, my heart will always be in the Red side of the Iron Curtain. This trip has confirmed what I suspected when I was in Russia--I belong over here. Sorry Mom.
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Emily


**Pics from Austria: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2042175&id=1562730054&l=8e053822c8

Hot buttered Rollz

Today I broke off from the group for just long enough to feel like I live here. I ran off to go buy the rest of my postcards for everyone and used my sweet Czech skillz to purchase some sexy new tights (my ripped today in the rain), several postcards and some other essentials from an adorable little "Papery". It is horrible, cold and rainy here. It's more like Seattle than Prague weather here-- today it scrapped by at 11 degrees Celsius (about 55 degrees Fahrenheit).

To amend the damp, depressing weather that was starting to effect my mood, I ducked into a little bakery called the Rembrandt. And it deserves it's name-- the place is a masterpiece of hot buttered rollz of every shape, size, style and flavor. You can smell the butter coaxing you in from a block away. So now here I sit, enjoying a cup of tea and a chocolate croissant, about to snuggle down under my covers and read depressing Czech Soviet-era literature on this rainy afternoon. Cheers!

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Emily