Wonderful news. I have now expanded my Czech vocabulary enough to seriously creep someone out. I can introduce myself, tell anybody who would like to know that I am from Farmville, VA, and that I think they are beautiful and smart (hezky, eleganti). I guess it’s actually not that creepy. It sounded creepier in my head. And it would sound creepy if I said it out loud. Anyway..
Friday, the apartment went to go see “Alice in Wonderland” (in English) at a movie theater near Wenceslas. We couldn’t see the 3-D version, because that was only playing in Czech, but we COULD get popcorn and soda (I’d been curious about how movie-going worked here)! A quick aside: this was the second time in the past month, actually, that I seen a supposedly groundbreaking 3-D movie in 2-D. First, I saw “Avatar” in 2-D at Sunchase Cinemas in Farmville. Sunchase has (thank god) recently upgraded from 3 cinema rooms to 8, but it has not yet invested in 3-D compatible technology. Then, I came to Prague, where 3-D technology is certainly available, but 3-D in English is much harder to come by. Fun times.
However, even though it was in apparently totally outdated 2-D, I really liked “Alice.” It was, I thought, more whimsical than dark, and honestly, I think the New York Times needs to give their staff more vacation time because we were not watching the same movie. Dear New York Times, your movie reviews are often useful (even if you sometimes tend to favor artsy, long, and depressing movies), but seriously “It’s just hard to know why Mr. Burton, who doesn’t seem much interested in Alice, bothered”? Nope. The movie is barely an hour and a half long. Frankly, I don’t really care the plot doesn’t live up to your standards. Not all of us want to watch "Million Dollar Baby" every time we go to see a movie. Perhaps, you would have preferred a three hour version of the same story?
However, even though it was in apparently totally outdated 2-D, I really liked “Alice.” It was, I thought, more whimsical than dark, and honestly, I think the New York Times needs to give their staff more vacation time because we were not watching the same movie. Dear New York Times, your movie reviews are often useful (even if you sometimes tend to favor artsy, long, and depressing movies), but seriously “It’s just hard to know why Mr. Burton, who doesn’t seem much interested in Alice, bothered”? Nope. The movie is barely an hour and a half long. Frankly, I don’t really care the plot doesn’t live up to your standards. Not all of us want to watch "Million Dollar Baby" every time we go to see a movie. Perhaps, you would have preferred a three hour version of the same story?
On the subject of movies, I often find myself saying that I’m not a harsh movie critic, and that I like most movies, etc. etc. This is not entirely true. I thought about it, and there are a few movie genres that I avoid like the plague, even if everybody else likes them, they're visually stunning, or, gasp, the New York Times . These include: horror/scary, tragic love stories (not to be confused with sad movies like Killing Fields/Last King of Scotland. It’s the purely fictitious sadness that gets me. Add a failed romance, and it just kills the romantic in me), and sappy animal movies (this probably is not a popular thing to say, and it’s not that I don’t LIKE them. I just don’t like watching them. I’m thinking the Free Willy, Lassie, Babe, Whale Rider, Charlotte’s Web, etc.). Anything else is pretty much fair game. Bonus points if there is some deep character development. For example, I didn’t mind the 2-D, somewhat forced, plot of Avatar because there was enough going on in the rest of the movie that the plot was sort of a secondary component, in a way. What was more important in the movie was the development of a few key characters and the presentation of an imagination In “Alice”, I think you’ve got something similar going on: Alice needs to slay the jabberwocky. Weird plot? Yes. Overly drawn out? Not really. The movie doesn’t get wound up in its plot more than necessar, and as far as fight scenes go, Alice’s is brief and to the point. This allows for some really visually interesting scenes, as well as entertaining character interaction. There’s some really insightful character development, particularly in the case of the Mad Hatter. The exception to “interesting character development” would be Anne Hathaway’s character, who had some good moments, but was for the most part very much Anne Hathaway awkwardly trying to make this role different from similar roles she has had in the past. Should have cast someone else. Oh well, these things happen. Anyway, I don’t want to dwell on movies too much, but “Alice” got me thinking about what it is that makes a movie enjoyable for me. In “Alice” conclusion, I’m going to see it again on Thursday with Rhee-Soo, her friend Greg, and the apartment, so we’ll see if I still like it the second time around, or if I was overly influenced by couple pre-movie glasses of wine..
Saturday, I went to Brno with the Charles University International Club.. ON A TRAIN! I love trains. Spending three hours riding on a train through the Czech Republic with my iPod and a window seat was perfection. Of course, I also tried to take pictures. Marginally successful. I miss trees and grass while I’m in Prague, especially right now when it’s cold enough outside that parks aren’t all that appealing, so the next best thing was attempting to photograph forested hills from a train window. I also got some lovely shots of track-side socialist architecture, which is not very lovely at all. It wouldn’t be quite so terrible if socialist architecture merely existed here and there as a reminder of communism’s legacy. However, I learned a very disturbing fact today in Walking Tour Class (yes, today is WTCD! More details in a hott second): About 40 percent of the Czech population CURRENTLY live in apartment buildings built under communism. While you’ve got to give props to whoever suggested that a few coats of brightly colored paint might make the structures a little less hard on the eyes, no amount of paint can make those buildings happy.
Ah, trees.
Some good old socialist architecture behind the trees.
Brno was pretty cool. It’s the second largest city in the Czech Republic, and it’s not all that far from Bratislava and Vienna. Our itinerary was strange, but I thought it worked quite well. We took a very brief tour of the city, and while I’m sure I saw many sites of cultural importance, not too much was explained in great detail. Then, we went to a crypt that housed a lot of very old, well-preserved bodies of what I THINK were for the most part monks (but I’m not entirely sure, because everything was written in Czech. I may be able to creep out a passerby with my Czech, but read detailed information plaques, I cannot). Then we went to a beautiful church and climbed some stairs to get to the view at the top, which was totally worth the hike. After the church, we went to the Spilberk Castle. I was quite mistaken in thinking I was in for a tour of ornate castle rooms. Au contaire! We toured the infamous castle dungeons with a tour guide who I would love to make my adoptive Czech grandfather. The original castle was built in the 13th century. Starting in, I think, the 17th century, the castle began seriously functioning as a fort/prison. Casemates were built into the castle moats, and Spielberk became known as the cruelest prison in the Austrian monarchy. On the anniversary of their crimes, inmates would be taken out and beaten, and they were fed mostly bread and water (three hot meals a week, I believe, and they sounded gross). During the reign of one ruler who did not favor the death penalty, inmates convicted of particularly heinous crimes (eg. Multiple or brutal murders) were sent to the lowest story of the casemates, where they were chained up in wooden solitary confinement cells in complete darkness. Not one person condemned to imprisonment in these cells survived a full two months. This policy only lasted about 5 years, until the next ruler came to power and abolished it. More about that, if you’re interested: http://www.spilberk.cz/?pg=zobraz&co=casemates. Later on, the Nazis built rooms in the same area to serve as bomb shelters. We saw some old Nazi telephone set-ups when we toured the casements. They have replicas of the old wooden cells in the casemates, and it was sort of spine chilling to be in the room and imagine what it must have felt like.
Cool looking statue (Europe is represented by the figure on top, and then three countries-Czechoslovakia, Greece and ?- are inside the part below) and my face.
German Restaurant advertisement fail.
A room in the crypt
The church
A view from the church tower
Another view from the church tower.
Another view from the church tower
Example of a typical room in the Spilberk Castle Prison. The wooden structure on the wall is a bed. I didn't take any pictures of the really terrible rooms, because it just didn't feel right.
Nazi telephone hook-ups
Our tour guide!
After the castle, we went to dinner at a medieval restaurant, where we got lots of food. I sat with Kate and Renee, and we met lots of fun people. On the train ride home, I met a girl from Germany and a girl from Finland. We had a great time talking about things like potential travel destinations, housing situations (I am more grateful daily for living in an apartment instead of Charles Uni dorms), and education systems in our respective countries (it’s more interesting than it sounds). Then, since it was dark outside, and I couldn’t see anything through the window, I got some quality chick-lit reading in before we got back to Prague.
Medieval restaurant
Sunday, I was very lazy. I did nothing worth mentioning until approximately 9pm, when the apartment went to a nearby brewery called Pivovarsky Dum for drinks. Kyra and I each got the beer sampler and potato pancakes, Michaela got sour cherry beer with potato pancakes, and Jeannie got the light/dark mix beer with a delicious looking mixed vegetable entrée that I am totally trying next time. The beer sampler included light, dark, sour cherry, wheat, coffee?, banana?!, nettle?!?!?!, and “Flavor of the month” beer. Coffee beer tasted.. like coffee. But I prefer coffee OR beer, I think. The banana beer tasted like someone had dropped one of those banana candies from the quarter machines outside grocery stores in it, but it wasn’t unpleasant. The nettle beer was green. I just pretended I was drinking a potion from a Harry Potter book and went with it. The beer of the month wasn’t bad, either, but I’m not entirely sure what it was.
Pivovarsky Dum
Nettle Beer
Monday was internship day! I did more emailing correspondence, and I felt accomplished. There is a large graveyard/park across the street from the hotel that houses the office that I need to visit. It’s very old, and probably very beautiful inside, so maybe I’ll make that a priority next week. My internship doesn’t start until 1pm, so there’s really no excuse for me not being able to get ready in time to go check out the park for a while beforehand. So far, though, I’ve found myself dashing out of the apartment with about 20 minutes to make a 25 minutes trip. There’s a first time for everything.
After my internship on Monday, I went with Kyra to the International Club Office in the Hollar Building, by the river, to pay our deposits for the Budapest trip. The trip is April 2-5, and we’ll get to do fun stuff like visit the Terror Museum and go to a spa. I’m excited. When we came out of Hollar, we were greeted by a freak 5-minute snow blizzard. Super fun. I sang the raindrops and gumdrops song, complete with dance moves (mostly so that I could catch snowflakes on my tongue). We went to go get Thai food with Rhee-Soo and Greg at a cute Thai restaurant that was a little hard to get to (up a staircase and across a porch.. ), then I came back and studied Czech adjectives.
Prague Castle
Kyra and the freak snow blizzard
Greg and Rhee-Soo at the Thai restaurant
Tuesday was my “busy” class day, so I was in class with Renee (we have the same Tuesday class schedule) from 8:20-6:30 with one three-hour break. I ended the day with a visit to the huge bookstore on Wenceslas, which was perfect for unwinding. I scoured the pens and pencils section, and found some (probably overpriced) Stabilo pens. I fell in love with them when I went to Frankfurt for a couple weeks after sophomore year and stayed with my friend Friedi (who had stayed with my family when she visited Farmville earlier that year as part of an exchange program between her school and mine). She sent me some in the mail following my trip to Germany, but I didn’t bring them with me to Prague. SO, I picked a multi-color 10-pack for writing postcards…and class notes and stuff. I also got a bunch of postcards. I figured that if I bought postcards, there’s a small chance I’ll actually write some in the near future. I like writing mail, but it’s one of those things that I keep not getting to here. I was going to pick up a couple books, too, but I’m pretty sure my ISIC card gets me a discount, and when books worth reading are selling for MINIMUM ten dollars a pop, then I’ll take all the discounts I can get. Tuesday night I watched all three hours of Masterpiece Theater’s Wuthering Heights. I’d never seen the movie, and I had read about half of the book freshman year before realizing that I just wasn’t in the mood for it. I haven’t tried to read it again, which I’m not proud of, but now, at least, I have seen the movie. I think I liked it, and, regardless, I appreciate the historical significance of the book’s subject matter.
Today was WTCD! There wasn’t much walking involved today though (which was fine with me, because I finally dragged my butt to the gym this morning). Instead, Pavel presented a power-point on different styles of architecture found in Prague/other random historical facts. I think we are supposed to memorize the power point for the final exam, and if that’s the case, I’m not too worried about the final exam. After the power point, we caught the 24 tram to the Florence stop and visited the museum of Prague. There is, in this museum, a complete paper replica of the Old Town of Prague and the castle side of the city that was made in the 1800s. It took the guy 11 years to construct, and it’s particularly interesting to view today because some of the buildings are no longer standing. Prague has been remarkably well preserved, so there is not that much in the Old Town that has changed, but some of the differences are striking. For example, a huge portion of the Jewish Quarter in Prague was demolished between 1893 and 1913 and remodeled to make Prague look more like Paris (WTF). Also in an attempt to make Prague look more like Paris, building were torn down between the river and Old Town Square so that a large road could be built directly connecting the two. Seems like a large sacrifice to make for a road that’s less than a half-mile long. This model survives as a timeless image of what mid-19th century Prague looked like.
Paper model of Prague
After WTC, Rhee-Soo, Greg, Gina, Pranadhi, a Spanish girl named Mercedes, and I went to a wonderful desert place near the Mustek metro station. I got a banana split that was covered in chocolate, vanilla gelato, whipped cream, and slivered almonds. Yum. I postponed going back to the apartment by exploring a little bit, and headed home when it started getting dark. I’m not sure what it was about today, but for some reason it just felt really great. Prague is starting to feel like home.
Yum.
Great blog today!
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