End of the Intensive and Prague

Pics will come soon or just look on facebook...To avoid making this post unbelievably long, I’ll do a massive editing job on the last week of our German Intensive so I can focus on the trip to Prague, because that’s way more exciting than talking about school work.  In this last week we started to cover things like modal verbs, which means we are now actually able to form somewhat normal sentences (like “I want to…” or “I can…”), or at least ones that are more complicated than the very basic Subject-Verb style.  It was generally uneventful, though Wednesday was quite the enjoyable and hysterical night.  Pretty much 4 or 5 of us from the apartment just sat around (Allison joined us as did Ashley a bit later) and hung out and watched tennis (yeah I’m still watching as much as I can).  It was a great bonding experience and produced some fantastic lines and laughs.  Just now realizing I may not have written down whom all I’m living with, I’ll at least tell their names:

A view of Prague from the top of the Castle

Evan is a music major from Denver University.  Jeremy is a music major (tenor) who sings opera and is apparently really good though he hasn’t showed us yet.  Egemen is a composition major from Turkey (though he lives in Minnesota).  Tad is not a music major nor do I know exactly where he’s from.  And then there’s David who I’ve already talked about, and Patrick and I.

The Prague Castle

Friday morning was the Intensive final.  They gave us two hours but after one I had done all I could do and still had to pack so I turned it in to the professor who gave me a wicked look even though I wasn’t even the first one done.  Anyway, I ran home and finished packing, and Pat, Tad and I met the bus for the 9-day tour at about 12:45.  At 1 it pulled out and we began our six-hour bus ride to the Czech Republic and the city of Prague.

One million little pieces in this mosaic on the outside of the castle

We arrived and checked into our hotel – the Hotel Golf.  There are 45 students (out of the 140 here) on our program and three IES staff members – Tobi, Kaja, and Katya (though she’s a student associate and therefore not actually a staff member I was told last night).  Ironically, Kent was supposed to come instead of Kaja, but he couldn’t find his passport (I felt soooooooooo vindicated).  Patrick and I are in a double, and we have a very small tv that allowed me to watch a tiny bit of the Nadal-Youzhny match.  We got about an hour to rest, and then we boarded back onto the bus to go to dinner.  For our first meal we went occupied the entire back room of of the Restaurant U Bilého Iva where we were served bread, soup, and a main course of pork chops and mashed potatoes.  It was all very good.  Afterwards our guide, Michael, led us to a club (Futurum) that was having an 80s and 90s themed night.  It was actually really fun, but it was especially cool because every song was accompanied by a video that was projected onto a large screen above the dance-floor, which added an interesting element.

View across the river from the St. Charles
bridge

Saturday we got up early to eat breakfast and start our sight seeing of the city.  We walked around a similar area to where we had been the night before, except this time we had a guided tour from another one of our guides (David) of the Prague Castle and the Old Town.  The castle was really cool and was built over many centuries so it has plenty of different styles of architecture incorporated into it.  We even did the climb up to the top and had a fantastic view of much of Prague.  There are plenty of other things to describe: coffins in the church, the throne room, the defenestration of Prague…but I have pictures of it all so I wont spend even more time writing about it here.  Before lunch we watched the changing of the guard (way to intense) and then we ate at the Malostranská Beseda where we had chicken and another type of soup.

The group split in the afternoon – about half went to a football match and the other half shopped for a while and then went to an opera.  I went to the football match – AC Sparta Praha (the home team) won on a late goal.  Most impressive, after the guy scored, he did a standing flip.  It was really fun though, even though there weren’t that many people there, though the crowd still managed to be quite loud.

AC Sparta Praha game

That night Michael again took us to a club – Music Club Lávka.  This one was pretty and we ran into some other English speakers/Americans who were also studying abroad in Prague.  After a while a few of us left to go down the street to the “5-Story Club,” which boasts itself as the biggest club in Eastern Europe.  It really does have 5 stories, and each one had a different theme (jazz, laid back hip hop, techno/modern music, oldies, and I can’t remember the last one).  We had a blast there.  Our roommate from Vienna, David, followed the trip to Prague so we knew he was in the area, and we looked for him for a while in this club.  Eventually I left to lead a group of 10 or so people back to our hotel (because no one really knew how to use the public transit system), but Patrick stayed and eventually found him.  Evidently they had a fantastic time because Patrick got back about 4:45 (at which point I was still awake because I had just been sitting on my computer on skype talking to people).

Changing of the Guard at the Palace

Patrick and I decided that we should not get up at 8 on Sunday and go on our tour the next morning.  They weren’t covering a large area and we had free time in the afternoon, so we got up about 12:30 (still only like 7 hours of sleep) and met the group for lunch at the Restaurant Potrefená husa (we weren’t the only ones who didn’t go) and then went exploring ourselves (which was far more efficient).  We saw everything they saw as well as quite a bit of other stuff, plus we were significantly more rested than most everyone else.

The river where we took our boat ride at night

:) I had to take a picture

Dinner was at the Restaurant Kamenny stul and it was delicious, especially the desert that was some kind of ice cream cake with fruit and whipped cream topping.  Afterwards IES funded a boat cruise on the Vltava River that runs through Prague.  It was pretty neat to do at night, although it was a little lame because we only went a certain distance and then turned around – a route we covered 3 or 4 times.  But still, we had a blast just hanging out on a boat.  Afterwards Michael showed us one final club.  David met us again, and this time I actually got to see him.  We hung out there until about 3:30 when we finally made our way back to our hotel.

We had to be up and boarded on the bus by 9, which wasn’t too terrible.  Unfortunately we spent most of the day on a bus, which also wasn’t terrible except I couldn’t fall asleep. So I ended up lying down on the floor and sleeping/just resting for a long time.  Alright, that’s all for now.  We made it safely to Krakow, so I’ll put up a post about it here once I’ve enjoyed my time here.  Thanks for reading all this!