country presentations

So every Wednesday, all of the international students (around 400 of us) congregate to watch the students from three countries present whatever it is they want about their home country. This usually involves movies, pictures, facts, dances and as always, drinking games. Most choose to summarize what one might find if searching wikipedia for the country, show a commercial from their favorite beer back at home and then scroll through pictures of the most famous topless women, born in their native land. After this, they call volunteers up on stage to participate in a drinking game. It's usually the same 10-12 people doing the same thing. Drinking beer as fast as they can.

The whole thing is wildly ammusing and the atmosphere is fun. The common language is English, so it's a nice break from not understanding a single thing that's said around you all day long. The USA presentation is a ways off (a month or so, maybe) so we've still got time to think of something a little bit more original.

The parties are held either in the pub in the basement of our dorm, or at the 'PM Bar' closer to downtown Prague. They start at 9:00 and the presentations usualy wrap up at around 11:30 or so. The dance party goes on until the early hours of the morning. Last night, we opted to leave after the presentations so that we could avoid the nightmare that is getting home after the metro closes.

P.S. We bought tickets to Vienna yesterday ($25, round trip) and are hoping to hop a bus to Budapest Saturday morning for the weekend. Four of us are going to arrive in Vienna on Nov. 10th and return on the following Tuesday evening.

an early morning

We've gotten into the swing of things here and have a pretty regular routine. This is why I haven't been updating too often. We don't have class on Mondays, so in an effort to not feel totally useless, we got up at around 6:00 yesterday and made our way down to the Charles Bridge. Getting pictures of the bridge itself is hard during the day, beacuse it's packed with thousands of people, all day long. At 7:30 in the morning though, only a few people crossing and a few others taking pictures like us. The morning light made for some great pictures.

After that, we went to what has become a staple of our Czech diet, Bohemia Bagel. Here, you can order in english and get what you want. They have bagel sandwhiches, chicken sandwhiches, etc, etc, etc. After that, it was back to the room to sleep for another 3 hours. At 2:25 we went to pick up some friends at the train station and then walked up to castle and then out for dinner.

Last weekend, we had some friends visit from florence. They got the standard walking tour/dinner treatment as well. We found a small traditional Czech restaurant near the castle to eat at and then called it a night early. Here are the girls on the Charles Bridge.

hooligans

Perfect weather this morning meant it was a good day to go take pictures around the old town. When we arrived in the square, we noticed 8 or 9 armored police vehicles and a few police officers here and there. We knew something had to be up but nobody seemed to panic. We hung around and wandered the square for a while before we realized that there was a group of Sparta soccer fans gathering near the statue in the center. Before long, this turned into a large, loud, drunken group of some of Sparta Praha's most devoted fans.

After a few rounds of yelling, singing, chanting (and of course, drinking) they began to move down toward the river. It became immediately apparent that what was a few armored vehicles and police officers turned into hundreds of men in riot gear. Sweet. We followed and as the crowd (ushered on both sides by riot police) marched through the streets it grew bigger and louder. By the time we made it to the stadium (across the river and up a few large sets of stairs through a park) there were dogs, horses and smoke grenades involved.

The crowd slowly made their way into the stadium. Without tickets, or the desire to tread through thousands of hysterical fans, we decided to head back to Dejvika (where we live) and make dinner. I'm just left wondering how much more awesome it would be to see the fans (victorious or defeated) march back into town after the game. We'll get tickets next time.

food

Well, nothing too exciting has happened recently. We've been resting and relaxing this weekend, preparing for classes to start. I thought I'd take this time to mention what we've been doing for food, since it seems to be a popular subject. Going to dinner at some of the finer places near the town square is certainly fun, but can get a little bit expensive. We've learned that things seem to get progressively cheaper as you leave the center of the town. If we're not stopping at a small cafe or bakery for a sandwhich, we'll drop by the supermarket (Billa) and get some sausages or chicken with vegetables. We eat a lot of peppers and onions, cooked in our IKEA Wok (175 crowns = around $9).

Occasionally, we'll go get traditional Czech food. Beef gulash seems to be a staple of the Czech diet. In addition to being on every menu, it's usually a safe bet. You order the gulash and you know you'll get a plate with beef stew and some dumplings. There are, of course, other options, we just haven't tried many of them yet.