BLOG POST 2

"Ahoj" from Prague, everyone! I apologize for not updating this blog yet, I haven't had access to internet over the past couple of days as I've been traveling through London and Munich en route to Prague. I'm officially settled in the dorm, and I'll be transcribing my travel journal little by little, so bear with me. I promise it'll be up to date soon :). For now, here's entry #1!



Wednesday, January 26, 2010.
7:30pm, Chicago.

Well, America, it’s time I bid you farewell – for a little while, at least. I’m off to the land of loo’s, queues, and dashing blokes. That’s right, I’m off to merry ol’ England, my first stop on a roundabout trip to my new home in the Czech Republic. I’m sitting by the British Airways gate in O’Hare Airport, watching the snow pummel down outside as the GateGourmet food (wait -- food?! on a plane?! they’re gonna feed us!!) is loaded onto the plane. One gate over, Swiss Airlines is boarding for Zurich; on the other side, flight attendants are making the “final call” for Abu Dhabi.

I’m hunkered down at gate M 11, people-watching and practicing my cursive mirror-writing (thank you, al-trig sophomore year of high school) to waste time before boarding. At first I was puttering around staring aimlessly into space, but then I caught the attention of this tiny baby. He started staring at me, not blinking, monitoring my every move until I got so creeped out that I quit meandering and moved to my own little corner, in my own little chair, where I could be whatever I wanted to be.

Enough blabbering. Perhaps by my next post, I’ll actually have something interesting to report. Cheerio, chaps!


3am (Chicago time), 10am London time.

Bloody hell, that was NOT enough sleep. I’d say more, but we’re about to land. So bugger off, you.





Friday, January 28, 2010.
It has been an absolutely amazing 2 days in London. When I left off last, I hadn’t even landed yet. But here I am, alive and well, a master at navigation (or rather, a stud at choosing friends who can navigate while I scratch my head in wonder), and a seasoned Londoner.

When the plane touched down yesterday morning at 10am, I was jetlagged and grumpy, running on 2 hours of sleep and not even a sip of Mountain Dew to save me. I stumbled through an eerily empty customs and baggage claim and found the AIFS rep almost immediately. Within minutes, students from three separate flights had gathered and we were off to the hotel.

Before long we were all checked in. I plopped my bags in my room and headed out with 5 other ladies to explore. First, our group walked down the street to grab some lunch at a traditional British pub. Fish and chips + British beer = a perfect “welcome to London” meal! J My favorite part might’ve been ordering a beer and NOT getting carded. I love that I’m not underage here!
Just across from the pub was the entrance to Hyde Park, so we decided to walk over there next – the hard part, though, was crossing the street to get there. Thank goodness the Brits have idiot-proof directions painted on the ground (“look left” / “look right”) because I was utterly discombobulated by the whole driving-on-the-other-side-of-the-road thing. Plus, because the streets are so narrow, when the double-decker buses pass one another, they come within inches of touching. Seriously, from the top of one bus, I could high-five a person on a neighboring bus – they’re THAT close!

Hype Park was… well… a park. I was cold and jetlagged and super NOT into walking around aimlessly, so after a bit I broke from the group and headed back to the hotel by myself. BAD IDEA. We were only a couple of blocks away from the hotel, yet somehow I managed to get completely lost walking back to the hotel. I ended up in a residential area and what should have been a 10-minute walk turned into a 40-minute escapade but – thank god! – I eventually stumbled upon the hotel. Alleluia!

I got back to the room and even though I felt naughty after all the “don’t nap! You’ll only make the jetlag worse!” warnings, I konked out almost immediately and slept straight through until my alarm went off, waking me for the 6pm cocktail reception in the lobby. I got all purty-ed up and headed down to meet the 71 other AIFS-ers along on this semester-long adventure with me.
It was a cocktail reception and one glass of wine later, I already felt a little tipsy, so I figured it was best to sneak out a bit early and head to dinner. I met up with my friends in the lobby and we hit the town. First stop: FOOD. We hit the pub and downed some British beer – mine was a type of hard cider (surprisingly good!) – and incredible quantities of food. From there it was on to the tube station for a night on the town.

Before I continue, let me introduce a couple key characters you’ll be meeting in the next scene. First: Kate, a dramaturgy major (HOW COOL IS THAT?!) from Carnegie Mellon, super sweet and perhaps the most theatrically-knowledgeable person I’ve ever met. Nest: Adrian, charmer extraordinaire and the king of navigation. And finally: Ryan, the spitting image of BDavs (poofy hair and all).

Somehow the boys navigated the group through the tube system all the way to Trafalgar Square where we hit up Club Metra, a flashy dance club packed to the brim with Brits and foreigners alike. After a couple drinks, Kate and I hit the dance floor and found ourselves swarmed by boys from Denmark and Spain – and holy crap, could they dance! The Spanish boys especially, they were doing spins and dips, salsa-ing like it was their job, and even whipping out a couple dorky
disco moves from time to time. INCREDIBLE.

We stayed til about 12:50 am, and when we exited the club, the real adventure started. It was then that we learned that the tube closed at 1am (!!). We took off sprinting to the nearest station, but the gates were down by the time we got there – we were too late. We spotted another underground sign down the road and took off there, but nope, that was gated too. By this time, it was just Kate, Adrian, and me, and we ladies shared a bit of a freak-out moment. Thank god for Adrian – the man took control. He found an open pasty shop and got us directions to the bus stop, but of course we didn’t have the right change to buy tickets from the machine. Again it was Adrian to the rescue, asking randos to exchange coins, give us directions, etc. Seriously, that dude was on a roll.

Pretty quickly we realized that the people at the bus stop had no idea about the bus system, so we approached a man we thought was a police officer for directions. Turns out it was just a dude in a funny reflector jacket, but he was helpful enough and soon we found ourselves at a bus stop awaiting bus #6. When it arrived, we went to board but the driver said “no no – you want the bus behind me!” so we ran to that one. And THAT bus driver told us what we wanted was bus #6 – the one that had just sent us to THIS one! Well, screw it, we were staying on that bus. A little old lady (why she was out so late, I’ll never know) straightened us out – what we really wanted was an entirely different bus altogether, #94. One man who was the exiting the bus directed us to follow him, which seemed all well and good until he started to turn down an alley. That was mighty suspicious if you ask me, and we were all on guard – but luckily he got us to the bus stop safe and sound.

The wait here was about 20-minutes but at least we were next to a wedding cake shop so I could stay entertained oogling the cake-y creations. By this point, we were all ridiculously punch drunk just from the exhaustion and the crazy confusion, and we just couldn’t stop laughing. I’m sure the locals thought we were crazy!

Bus #94 finally arrived and soon we were back by Hyde Park, close to the hotel. I had decided by this point that my navigation skills were totally defunct, so I just followed them back to the hotel. And finally, after an evening of mayhem and navigational brilliance, we were back. BED TIME!!

On to the 28th. I woke up early enough to shower (so necessary after all that dancing last night) but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to work the shower! The handheld one, sure, but the overhead one – what in the world?! Eventually I gave up and resigned myself to showering with the handheld one. I proved utterly inept at it. After hitting myself with it for the 800th time, I threw in the towel, stuck it into its waist-high holder on the wall, and knelt in the tub, under its stream, to finish up. No wonder my roomie Sara took a bath yesterday – that shower was impossible!

By 8:45am we were on the buses ready to start the tour of London. As we drove around, our delightfully risqué middle-aged tour guide and her equally adorable partner Steve (the driver) pointed out the major sites: Big Ben, Westminster Abbey (“Wetht-minthter Abbey” for you, Mom), Trafalgar Square, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Tower Bridge, Buckingham Palace, etc. Definitely cool. We ended at Covent Garden and Adrian, Kate, and I headed over to the theatre district. Stop one was the National Theatre, which actually houses three separate theatres including the one where “His Dark Materials” premiered. We came in a side entrance and walked into a production meeting (oops!) but soon we were downstairs at the ticket office, checking out the play schedule. Our next stop was the Old Vic where we were able to buy amazing 5th row tickets for ₤12 while they were usually sold for ₤47. Our mission successful, we went down the street to the tube station, ate a delicious lunch of traditional English pasties (like turnovers, but with beef, potatoes, onions, and sauce inside the breading), and navigated back to the hotel.

I fell asleep still fully dressed and woke up just in time to get dressed up for at night at the theatre. That whole “yayyy dressy clothes” phase ended pretty quickly as Kate and I discovered that high-heels plus cobblestones is a dangerous combination. Rather than zip over to the theatre by tube, we went all London-y and boarded a double-decker bus, taking the entire back row of the upper deck. At one point, two British ladies turned around all excited to meet real live Americans, sounding JUST like they do in the movies. Who knew they liked our accents too!

The ride was pretty long, but not to worry – we got to the theatre, picked up our tickets, and arrived at a restaurant stuffed to the brim with locals with plenty of time to spare. This place was called “The Fire Station” and it was half crazy busy bar, half serene restaurant, separated by a velvet rope. Adrian worked his charm yet again and before long they had lifted the rope and ushered us to a beautiful mood-lit table with wineglasses and candles. We all ordered traditional Czech beer and the cheapest thing on the menu: home-baked break with the soup of the day, which turned out to be a spicy pumpkin-coconut concoction that was surprisingly addicting. The only thing greater than the food at dinner was our ridiculous feeling of surprise for scoring such mega-awesome seats.

Speaking of awesome seats, we had killer seats at the theatre, too. The show that evening at the Old Vic was “Six Degrees of Separation” by John Guare. Incredible, but also incredibly intense. It started off slow, almost to the point that I was nodding off, but then about 20 minutes in, the lights came up on FULL male frontal nudity! That was a “fwa-BANG! I’m awake!” moment, and sure enough I didn’t nod off even once the rest of the time. It was a real thinking-required but also spectacular play.

By the time it ended we were all fairly sombered. No crazy partying for us tonight, not with the 5:30am departure time tomorrow. So back to the hotel by tube, a quick good night, and off to bed.



January 29, 2010.
I guess I didn’t really realize quite how EARLY 4:15am was until my alarm went off at that time. I wanted nothing more than to chuck the clock across the room, but somehow I got up and got all packed and ready. By 5:30am we were on the bus on the way to the airport, and the rest of the morning passed in a half-asleep, semi-dazed blur. We must have been quite the sight: 72 American kids dragging exorbitant amounts of luggage through the airport, all of us a little lost and a lot tired. I lucked out yet again with the magical Mr. Adrian’s help. While I was checking in, he absolutely engrossed the flight attendant. He was charming, she was smitten, and before long, both my bags were tagged and loaded – without her ever charging me the ₤35 of the 2nd bag! This dude rocks!!

The adventure continued at security where they searched my bag and found 2 pairs of scissors (I forgot they were in my pencil case, I swear!) and a KNIFE in my tool kit (I knew putting that kit in my carry-on was a bad idea). I felt like quite the idiot, but they were totally nice – besides the whole “and WHY do you have these?!” faces and the confiscation.

But anyway, we plopped our bags in the main lounge and exchanged money for British pounds to buy lunch at Pret a Manger, a British sandwich shop. I went to the exchange bureau with Adrian and the dude canoodled the lady with his charm yet AGAIN! She took off the ₤3 commission fee, bringing the amount he’d saved me (just today!) up to ₤38!! That’s like $75!! Kacy and I suspected that this just a fluke, some sort of odd streak of luckiness. So we bet him that he couldn’t get the waitress’s number at Pret a Manger, and that if he COULD, we’d sing a duet in the center of the store. Thank god he failed! Just in case, we’d prepared a beautiful rendition of “Here’s the mail, it never fails” from Blue’s Clubs, but alas, his luck had run out. No show today!

The plane ride was uneventful as most people fell asleep, but after landing the excitement picked up. The bags took forever to come out and once the conveyor belt had stopped, one kid was still missing a bag (Alex, bff of my future suitemate Becca). By the time everything had been sorted out, the first two buses had left and only a handful of students plus the two AIFS directors(Marketa and “Z”) remained to take the 3rd and final bus to the Munich hotel.

By the time we arrived, we still had about an hour to spare before the bus tour of Munich. It was only at this point that it really struck me – we were in MUNICH! Germany, home of lederhosen and yodeling and Hitler… and we were actually HERE. We headed out almost immediately to walk around town and orient ourselves. We found the underground (“S-Bahn”) stop and exchanged money there, but other than that, there was nothing else to really report on this walk – we only went a couple blocks.

The bus tour that followed was hilariously awful. Our tour guide made next to no sense, saying things like “the nymphs frolic behind the castle” and “there is no water in Munich in the winter.” Actually, she pronounced it the German way: München (“moon-chen”). The tour got vastly better when we hopped off the bus because our tour guide finally changed. Now it was Z walking us around and describing the sights. First stop: the most famous Biergarten (beer garden) in all of Munich. Here was where Hitler and his cronies founded Nazism and laid out its goals, but the atmosphere today is a polar opposite of its grim history. Inside, beer wenches in full costume walked around serving beer and selling GIANT pretzels to an assortment of characters. Of course there were the usual German families and blatant tourists, but some tables were full of Germans in full-fledged traditional German costumes – funny hat, lederhosen, and all. SO COOL! They weren’t there for a costume party or a joke – this is legit what they chose to wore for a normal night out. Beyond that, the beer tankards were humongous. We later learned that the beer here was sold in only 2 sizes: 1 liter and 2 liter. That’s a LOT of beer.

From there, Z pointed out many buildings and listed their architectural merits, but the only one that really stuck out to me was this one, nonchalant looking building where the infamous Kristallnacht began. Today, the building looks so benign and peaceful – so ordinary, But then, it was home to one of the founding events of the Holocaust. Wow.

The tour ended and a lot of us ventured off to buy dinner. Adrian remembered a cheap Chinese place from last summer when he was in Munich, so we followed his lead and ventured off through the slushy streets. The place was tiny – our group of 10 pretty much filled it. By the time we arrived, I was angry-hungry, so when my sweet and sour chicken, rice, and vegetables arrived, I gobbled it up in mere minutes. Everyone else took their time, sipping their beers and chatting it up. Lots of laughter – super fun!

The walk back to the hotel was surprisingly long, maybe 25 minutes. It wasn’t too far, but the roads and sidewalks were all icy and slushy. The snow was coming down and there just weren’t enough plows to keep the streets clear, I guess. We detoured a bit to see an odd stature pair (a giant catfish and a boar – why, I’m not sure) and then we were back at the hotel.
We planned to meet up at 10:30pm to head out on the town, but by 8:30 I had passed out on my bed still fully dressed. I wanted to kick myself when I woke up a little after midnight and realized I’d missed so much of the night, but I guess that’s what going cold turkey off Mountain Dew will do to you. I was up just long enough to check the clock and take out my contacts, and then I was out til 8:30am. I didn’t even hear my roomie, Rebecca, coming back from the Biergarten at 2am.

I woke up after 12 hours of sleep and took a gloriously warm, hot shower before going to the breakfast buffet. I sat with the kids I meant to go out with last night and heard stories about their epic clubbing adventures. Apparently the old factory district has been turned into a kind of “club town,” with 18 clubs all within blocks of each other. Last night they bar-hopped from one to another, each with crazier names than the ones before. (My favorite was the one called “The Titty Twister”!!) Guess I’ll have to return to Munich someday. :)

We had been randomly assigned to one of three buses heading to Prague, so people left breakfast as their departure times arrived. I was on the 3rd and final bus so I had a leisurely morning, not even boarding the bus til 11am. I spent the ride updating this travel journal and napping (yes! I know! I blame the Mountain Dew). We took a rest break about 2 hours into the journey, while still in Germany. There was a turnstile contraption at the toilets, forcing you to insert 50cents to unlock a bathroom stall. Very odd. 2 hours after that we arrived for lunch in Plzen, a town in the south of the Czech Republic. The border passing had been oddly anticlimactic – we didn’t have to show our passports or even get off the bus. It was just like driving through the I-Pass lane on the highway, really.

In Plzen, we drove to a famous brewery/restaurant and dined on goulash and dumplings (“Brauereigulasch, Knödeivariation”). It was then that we learned that the 1st bus was now 2 hours behind ours, stuck in traffic caused by a bus accident. We had been warned in advance so we could detour around the traffic, but the poor kids on the first bus were still stuck there.
When we went back the bus to start the final leg of our journey, there was still no sign of them.

But we boarded and departed, on our way to the Masarykova Kolej, our new dorm in Prague. We arrived an uneventful 2 hours later around 6:30pm, and Rebecca and I moved into our new home, room S326. The dorm’s organization is beyond confusing. It’s laid out with no particular rhyme or reason, kind of how I imagine Hogwarts would be but minus the magical passageways. The hallways are pure white, oddly reminiscent of an old-time insane asylum, and they echo even the quietest of sounds. Kinda creepy.

Before I unpacked, I took my laptop down to the lobby where there was free wi-fi and reported home that I was alive and kicking. Luckily there were a bunch of people in the lobby from the 2nd and 3rd buses (the 1st was still far away) and we made plans to meet up in a bit to “get a lay of the land” (that’s for you, Dad :P). I then closed my laptop and embarked on the epic adventure known as finding my room by myself. I’m telling you, this place is crazy. There are elevators that lead to only certain sections, locked doors at the end of corridors that make dead ends, and the never-ceasing white walls that make every hallway look like all the others. Luckily, I made it back in one piece only having to u-turn maybe 3 or 4 times.

Before long, I met the group in the lobby and we headed down the street to the nearest metro station. Luckily the metro system here isn’t too confusing: there are only 3 lines, and all are color-coded. Some would call it idiot-proof; I would call it “learnable.” We exited 4 stops later and within minutes of walking up the stairs and entering the streets of Prague, found ourselves in the middle of Old Town Square, staring in wonder at the beauty around us. The most memorable moment of the night for me was rounding a bend and finding a castle maybe 100 meters away, the spires lit as though there were people up there (perhaps Rapunzel awaiting her Prince Charming). It was an absolutely magical moment that literally took my breath away. Over and over again, all I could say was “I can’t believe we actually live here!”