RAISE YOUR HOPEFUL VOICE

WOW, that is a gorgeous dress.

2011-04-29T08:57:00.002-04:00

Didn't expect to wake up for the Royal Wedding, but I did. Here are the best pictures I've seen floating around of Kate's dress. It's just gorgeous. More about the dress.

Arriving at Westminster Abbey, CNN

Outside Westminster Abbey, en route to Buckingham Palace, CNN

William and Catherine leaving the Abbey, Time

Signing off from Duke

2011-04-26T23:16:00.000-04:00

To anyone who has ever taken the time to read my blog and talk to me about it, in its current reincarnation, or in one of its prior forms, thank you—Helen, Sandeep, David come to mind, and my crazy roommate and my good friends. Here’s a last (kind of) hurrah.

Sometime in late 2006, I sat in the middle of the violin section of the Juilliard Orchestra, on stage in Lincoln Center playing some grand piece or other. As the orchestra performed, the notes crescendo’d and de-crescendo’d, music coming out of every instrument, coming from every which direction, but all fitting together perfectly like a glove. Many of the most talented young classical musicians who were at Juilliard attempting to make names for themselves sat in the orchestra, just a cog—one part of the puzzle, re-creating and interpreting a masterpiece of music.

The music rose and the piece reached a peak of volume and intensity, as everything built to a resolution. Bows whipped around me. The wind section to my left seemed as if it was doing its best to blow out my ears. Everyone was so in tune with everyone else, completely absorbed in the shared goal of performing this piece of music to the best of our ability… and that ability was the best in the world. It was ungodly. And in that moment, for just a split second, some part of me regretted making a decision to go my separate way from music. In that moment, I told myself to memorize the feeling. I thought I would never be part of something like that again.

I was so very wrong.

I came to Duke the next fall, having already followed Duke Basketball for a couple of seasons. But watching Duke games on television is nothing at all like being in the student section in Cameron Indoor Stadium. When the Crazies were on, you couldn’t hear the person next to you speak. You couldn’t hear yourself speak. You couldn’t even hear yourself think.

It was at some point in my freshman year—it could have been the Wisconsin game, I don’t know—where I realized I hadn’t really left anything behind at all. As a student cheering on the team in Cameron, I was one of the Crazies, sometimes 1200 strong or more, albeit usually not a painted one. Before I arrived here, it would have been difficult for me to understand the extent to which the Crazies contribute, but they do... on every single possession. Cheering on offense, making noise on defense. Heckling opposing players and being generally obnoxious. Inviting recruits to sit with them (us?). And going truly crazy when the game got truly crazy.

Duke is, in so many ways, divided. Divided into factions, into ethnicities, socioeconomic statuses, and divided between Greeks and independents. I would be flat-out lying if I said I didn’t have my complaints about divisions, inequities, and social scenes during my time here. To me, though, Duke Basketball was the uniting aspect of my college career. In Cameron, everyone is the same. In Krzyzewskiville, out in the tents in 30 degree weather, everyone is the same. All the students are there for the same reason, in support of the basketball team, part of Duke Basketball, part of something bigger than any one person.

I’ve had people question me as to why anyone would stand outside in the cold just to watch a game (that may or may not have been my parents). People have scoffed that we as students would spend inordinate amounts of time and energy working toward something apart from our studies. But I personally believe that basketball at Duke brought all the students together, and that is something truly special.

My junior year, I went abroad. I had very specific reasons for choosing Prague—I wanted to be in Europe, but didn’t want to be in Western Europe. I wanted off the beaten path. I wanted to throw myself into the deep end in a country whose language I did not speak, and whose residents did not all speak my language. I figured it would be good test, a good way for me to find out more about myself.

Boy, was it ever. Somehow, beyond my highest expectations, I kept a blog of my 111 days abroad, posting at least once every day. There are slightly more than 111 posts from that semester, all tagged under the label Prague. Posting on this blog forced me to reflect on things I didn’t care to remember. It taught me humility, but also to strike out without fear. It showed me that there was a vast world outside of America. It gave me a place to publish my travel writing—probably the most careful pieces of writing I have ever created.

I was lucky enough to be in Prague on November 17, 2009. That day marked the 20th anniversary of the start of the Velvet Revolution, which overthrew Communism in Czechoslovakia. That night, the government reenacted the marches which signaled the beginning of the Revolution, culminating with a walk down Narodni street, where the violent and infamous beatings by the police had taken place. In a small alcove on Narodni, there is a plaque on the wall which is partially shaped to look like hands. On any given day, Czech residents and tourists alike walk by it briskly, perhaps not even realizing it is there. It’s so hidden that it actually took me weeks and weeks to find it, even though I was searching specifically for it. On November 17, though, there were hundreds and hundreds of Czech people surging into and past the alcove, all paying their tribute to the plaque, leaving candles all around, one by one, until the alcove became a shimmering pool of light and the heat emanating from it became almost unbearable.

The raw, unbridled emotion of the Czech people that night was incredible. Communism was less than 20 years removed—there are buildings in Prague whose architecture still reflect those times—and nearly every person in Prague at least a generation older than me lived part (or most) of their lives under that regime. It is one of those experiences that I appreciate more and more as I look back. How many people get to witness that kind of monumental celebration of the fall of Communism?

In Prague, one of the first classes I walked into was a journalism class taught by Dinah Spritzer, a blogger for the New York Times. When asked whether I had any previous newspaper journalism experience, I responded something along the lines of “No, I just cover sports.” At that point, I remember Dinah giving me a very strange look. Sports is some of the best journalism there is, she told me, because sports articles are ultimately stories about people, and those are the stories that draw readers in the most. Those stories are some of the most powerful ones written.

It wasn’t until much later that I understood what she meant. The journalism that strike chords, that resonates with readers is most often the kind that tells someone’s story. In the context of Duke sports, I can think of a few stories and storylines which are relatively recent: Duke’s Nolan Smith returning Indianapolis, where his late father won a national championship 30 years earlier, and winning a championship of his own. The Sports Illustrated piece in March, which retold that National Championship game. Fellow Chronicle Sports alum Alex Fanaroff’s massive piece on Duke national player of the year J.J. Redick.

See, I never really intended to join the sports staff of The Chronicle. I arrived on campus as a freshman all set to join some part of the newspaper, went to an information session, and then promptly decided I had no idea where to start. But in the summer after that year, I went to DukeEngage in New Orleans with a friend who was part of the Chronicle, and when the school year rolled around, she brought me to the newspaper office, trying to get me to join.

Somehow, I had gotten it into my head that I should join the sports department. And for anyone who doesn’t really know me, I’ll put this in context. I’m a 4-foot-11 Asian girl who, at that point, had devoted four-fifths of her life to playing the violin. I had no business knowing a goddamn thing about sports.

My first story featured two women’s soccer players from Long Island. My second story previewed the women’s soccer game against North Carolina that year. I’ve always been somewhat of a dramatic writer, and in my strange and convoluted mind, all my stories are accompanied by photos of the featured person or people in dramatic poses, framed with shadows. My story on Gerald Henderson’s return from a wrist injury was one such piece. So was the story on Mallory Cecil playing in the WTA tournament where she was a ballgirl seven years earlier. The one on Reid Carleton’s stellar senior season—that was one, too.

In the time I wrote for The Chronicle, I wrote lots of these feature stories, but I never penned a single column. I told other people’s stories, preferring not to voice my own opinions. I would also guess that the majority of my articles were written on sports other than men’s basketball. During 2009, I was one of two beat writers for the women’s tennis team. I covered the majority of their spring season, including their run to a National Championship, the first for the program. The other beat writer covered a grand total of around one of their matches. Since then, I have become friends with one of the girls on that team, but I doubt she has any idea she has spoken to me on the phone in the past, telling me about her epic match in which she clinched the ACC tournament title for Duke.

I am proud of many of my stories—but few of them have been men’s basketball. By virtue of how intense the scrutiny is around the Duke basketball, there is very little room left for creativity. That’s not to say covering the team wasn’t a privilege. Sometimes as a sports writer for the student newspaper, it is easy to forget how much access we have to the program—much of it goes to our editors, but still, our writers sit on the same press row in Cameron as the Associated Press and ESPN. We have the ability to ask questions of Mike Krzyzewski if we so choose. We can talk to Brian Zoubek and hear the annoyance in his voice at being incessantly criticized, doubted, and vilified throughout his injury-riddled career, and then see his satisfaction at getting retribution at the end, when the senior was left laughing at all his critics. We can joke with Jon Scheyer after intense NCAA Tournament games during which he made crazy passes and/or lobs to win the game. (I have since lost the recorder on which those jokes were preserved—sad day—having dropped it in to the bowels of Madison Square Garden earlier this year.)

But the truth is, when Shane Ryan of Seth Curry Saves Duke! wrote a long and vitriolic rant about the downsides in sportswriting, I largely agreed (he afterwards posted an apology). In covering a sport as commercial as men’s basketball, it’s difficult to find a new angle to write about and consequently get the type of access and time you need to fully flesh out a story—not to mention, the media has a snarky relationship with coaches and players. Most stories written about Duke sound exactly the same.

On top of it all, I wanted to go back to my freshman year, where I could cheer, analyze, and argue about the game in peace. Being a sports writer changed the way I watched not only basketball, but all sorts of games. Watch me watching a tennis match, and you’ll hardly ever see me cheer. Mostly, I look neutral, just like you’re supposed to if you’re covering a game or a match. It’s no fun, and by some point my senior year, I was all reporter’d and written out. I used the loss of my recording device as rationalization for failing to write much of anything for much of the year.

My intention isn’t to sound ungrateful. Clearly, being a part of The Chronicle has been one of the cornerstones—if not the cornerstone—of my time here at Duke. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time in this already long post detailing the pros and cons of an activity I never in a million years could have imagined I would pick up in college. So even if I had no business knowing a goddamn thing about sports, but I’m incredibly thankful for the opportunities I’ve had and the people I’ve met along the way.

The first time I saw the Duke Chapel was at around 12:30a.m., on a warm night in April. I had just taken the bus over from East Campus with my freshman host, on my way to get my first Loop ever. After stepping off the bus, my feet were drawn to the left, toward a large tree near a building made of slate-gray stone. Standing on the roots of the tree, peering up at the Duke Chapel lit by two spotlights from the residential and academic quads against a pitch-black sky, I snapped a shot. Picture perfect.

Four years later, almost to the day, I stepped off a bus again, on my way to Jazz at the Mary Lou. It was the first time I had been on West at night in a while, and I slowed down as I walked toward West Union. I was drawn again to the same spot. The image was the same, the gothic chapel lit from the front by spotlights.

It was a difficult moment for me. Sure, there are plenty of faults with this school, this campus. You could probably argue that there were other colleges I could have attended that would have worked out just as well. But Duke represents home for me as no place really was before. I was one of those kids who moved around a lot. I didn't stay in the same place long enough to feel as though I was really from anywhere—until my freshman year here, where I bonded with a tight-knit group of second- (and other-) floor Aycock residents. Until Duke.

As I stood there, I thought about Drew, who I didn't know all that well, but whose passing affected me strongly nonetheless. I thought about how much I had changed since arriving at Duke. I have discovered that there exists a world beyond America, and different worlds even within this country. I have grown from student into teacher, from wide-eyed freshman into mentor. I have found true interests here; I have found lifelong friends, a major I enjoyed, a job that I like, maturity, independence, confidence, and strength.

I don't know about you, but I think that's pretty good.

Signing off from Duke,

Felicia

In 2007

I'm swearing off tumblr.

2011-04-24T10:38:00.002-04:00

This is not the most optimal way of aggregating my tumblr content, I know. But since there are things I would like to have saved, here are the most insightful, funny, or memorable bits from my tumblr. Which, as of right now, has been sworn off.

Email from April 6, 2011:

Dear students,
I am writing to let you know that in-room cable television service will no longer be available in campus residences, as of the end of the Spring 2011 semester.
The current cable system is aging, and substantial upgrades that would cost in the neighborhood of $1 million would be required to continue offering the service. Installation of any system to replace in-room cable services would incur similar costs.
Meanwhile, statistics show that 85 percent of you are getting your television online, and that this number is growing steadily each year. As online offerings continue to increase, we expect even less interest in cable subscriptions.
Instead of spending money on a technology that is clearly on its way out, OIT and RLHS have invested in bandwidth upgrades to handle your growing demand for online viewing. Further, we will install HD IPTV in common rooms across campus, beginning in June. IPTV will offer significant improvement in channel selection over the existing cable offering, as you have requested.
Conversations with student leaders from DSG are on-going to explore all possibilities. If you have any questions, an open forum will be held in the next few weeks to discuss the details of these changes. Questions can also be sent to me atJoe.Gonzalez@duke.edu.
Sincerely,
Joe GonzalezAssociate Dean for Residential Life

More hating on Comic Sans, From ILoveCharts

Bucket list.

Just for Margie.

Leaning Tower of Pisa: tourists DO ruin everything....

That sounds about right...

March 15, 2011
"Thoughts on the Day"

realized that I am connected to too many sites. Almost posted this on my Blogger. When I have something to say now, do I post it on facebook, twitter, tumblr, or blogger? Do I text it to someone? Gchat someone? Usually I end up posting it in multiple places, but then feel bad about anyone who follows me on more than one of those outlets
KYRIEEEE IS GOING TO PLAY ON FRIDAY!!
this is not a new thought, but I think Coach K has done probably the best job I have ever seen at keeping the essence of every step of kyrie’s injury recovery under wraps and tempering expectations on his return. Very impressed. next time a key duke player ever gets injured, no one is going to believe K. very few leakages of information from inside the program. i’ll go back to january 30 when sabreena met with marv albert at msg (and a couple of us tagged along). One of his questions about duke: whats the status on kyrie? Tysiac and a couple others basically say there’s no way in hell kyrie would come back, while the 3 of us sit there awkwardly twiddling our thumbs and (hopefully) contradicting in our heads, because who are we to argue with the mainstream media
on the kyrie front this season, campus rumor has proven to be 100% better as a barometer on kyrie than mainstream media. which somehow comes as surprising to me, not sure why
chronicle sports has done a really good job today. see: seth davis, jay bilas twitters linking to chron coverage (congrats guys), i’ve seen links on facebook from people unrelated to the chron.
the Fab Five documentary is really absorbing. (full length video. Even though it’s an unlisted link, there are already tens of thousands of hits)
The SI piece on the Duke-Butler championship game last year is more absorbing.
Shane, the ‘seth curry saves duke’ guy, recently posted on the sad state of sports journalism which I largely agreed with, and today posted an apology for the original, which I was largely sad about. so now I may write a long email, not long after watching the fab five documentary instead of doing my accounting homework. right now sipping the rockstar-sprite deal, taking me back to freshman days. times are good.
and because my tumblr is (aptly) titled shit my roommate says, here’s a closing quote. gem text from morning. “Do you ever get paranoid that you wear the same outfit every Tuesday?”

Yes, really.

I tend to do this a lot.

As you can probably tell.

Last one... Really!

Yes, it is a Christmas tree in our apartment.

That's about it, folks. Next post will hopefully be reverting to writing.

Ebates... hits self on the head

2011-03-11T08:28:00.001-05:00

I'm not sure how it's possible that I just found out about Ebates a week ago, considering I've bought stuff from a bunch of the retailers that participate in the program enough to earn me back some money in the last year (Banana Republic, Ann Taylor/LOFT, GAP, Madewell, 6pm.com, Sephora, BLERGHHH). Basically how it works is you get to the retailer's site by clicking through Ebates. They create a tracking ticket. And if you wind up making a purchase, they credit you for the 1-5% cash back (or whatever it is).

If you're a frequent online shopper, you should probably sign up and save yourself some angst in the future. Wish I had learned about this about 2 years ago. The logo below takes you through as well.

Sorry about the promotional post. Maybe I'll go back to posting about cool things in my life in the future. Or maybe not, we'll see.

How To Fold a Longchamp Bag...

2011-01-28T10:59:00.004-05:00

...the typical ones you see everyone carrying around. I believe it's called "Le pliage." (The French word means "folding.")

Basically, I spent about 10 minutes googling this, and oddly enough, I wasn't able to find easily searchable instructions. Here's the picture I finally found of the card that comes with the bag that has the folding instructions:

Longchamp, "le pliage"

to give credit: this was posted by gwenjune here

"Accurately named college mascots"

2010-10-02T13:57:00.001-04:00

Photo courtesy SportsPickle.com

Hello, Real Life

2010-09-30T15:11:00.000-04:00

Goodness it's been a long hiatus. Oh hi, blogging. Hi, people! Two bits of awesome news. You know that place I worked this summer? I've officially accepted my full-time return offer, aka I WILL BE IN NEW YORK AFTER GRADUATION!

Thought that was kind of an important life event. Now, on to what I really wanted to post about, which is.... OMG LOOK AT THIS CAR. I'm in love. If they ever decide to actually make this, I'm putting in an order.

Jaguar C-X75 Concept
Photo courtesy Autoblog

No Better Time to Blog

2010-02-28T20:59:00.005-05:00

Mayday 0.75

Here's the situation folks. I'm sitting in my room. I have Emergen-C'd water on my left. I have orange juice on my right. Basically, I'm surrounded by vitamin C. And yet, I am still sick. The good news is that I have finished all my homework for the week. Except for the stuff that hasn't been assigned yet. So, I have finished all pre-assigned homework for the week. You're probably going, "she's a loser." Maybe so. That still makes me a loser with no homework.

The worst part of all of this is that I have nothing to label this post. The empty box on the lower right hand side of the page is laughing at me. No exotic "Prague" tagging, and no sad labelling of "summer 2009." And the alarm clocks people have in Kilgo are still ringing at the quarter tone between B and C. Damn them. People should not be allowed to buy alarm clocks that ring at quarter tones. People should not be allowed to make alarm clocks that ring at quarter tones.

Add to all this the fact that there is a Duke basketball game going on right now, and because of my flu I am forced to watch it in blurry quality in my room off of Justin.tv. Duke vs. Virginia. No. 5 in the country vs. INR (is not ranked). I'm making a mild joke off of the fact that Lindsey Vonn and Bode Miller combined skiied out of their last, like, three races in the Vancouver Olympics. Resulting in DNF's--did not finish. Understandably, my mild jokes right now are not funny. Not that they're ever funny, really. Plus, nothing is really that funny to me at the moment.

I'm in a really bad mood. I'm sorry. Still, I have no homework! This is a bonus. (I can't believe an exclamation point showed its face in this post.)

Anyway, like the title says, there's no better time to blog than when you're sick, watching a Duke basketball game by yourself, and have nothing to do but bitch about the world. Oh, the game is back (it was halftime). Sorry, my thoughts will be slightly scatterbrained as I switch back and forth.

Unfortunately, I think this posted started out (went for the first half of this post) very poorly. Originally, this was meant to be VERY happy. As in, I have an internship for the summer! And actually, have had once since about two weeks ago. I will be in New York. This situation makes me supremely happy since, if you remember, it's very different from last summer. Aaaand that's all I'll say about that.

Ok, I'm officially out of things to say. So, 5/6 bitter and 1/6 semi-happy. Not too shabby. Apologies that my blogging has tailed off (died). Things just don't happen at Duke like they do during study abroad, clearly.

Oh, but I absolutely must share this video, which is a commercial for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. It is my newest obsession. Good job, ESPN. Good, good job.

Label? I THINK SO.

Telling It Through The Christmas Lights

2009-12-24T23:21:00.002-05:00

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.

Amazing Grace Techno - Computer Controlled Christmas Lights from Richard Holdman on Vimeo.

Prague through a Canon 1D

2009-12-23T12:32:00.002-05:00

Prague: Canon 1DMKIV from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.

Doing a sort of Christmas video reel. Credit to Gabe for the video tip :)

Because It's Always Cool to Embed Things

2009-12-22T20:57:00.002-05:00

Especially things about Prague! Especially, especially things on The Onion about Prague. FYI--Prague has no Franz Kafka airport. So, no worries there. Enjoy!

Prague's Franz Kafka International Named World's Most Alienating Airport

Unsung Drinking Culture

2009-12-22T20:50:00.007-05:00

(By Felicia Tan)

A red and gold shop sign hung over a few steps leading downwards to the tea house. I stood outside on the concrete sidewalk of the city and studied the entrance for a moment, then stepped down and pushed the door open.

It was darker inside. Bamboo shades toned down the light into muted gold. A few feet away, a man pored over his laptop, looking out of place sitting amidst the rugs, chairs, and lamps of the Orient. It looked like he had been there for hours, and would be there for hours more.

I settled into a corner on a slightly-faded red cushion, back against the wall, a low wooden table to my left. This room was hung with dusty sky-blue or red rugs with silver moons. Music played almost continuously, now a hum of pipes… now a Tibetan chant.

A young man appeared in the doorway, bringing my chosen Nepal black tea. It was scalding. It tasted dark, with just a curious hint of the tangy and metallic. As I sipped, I studied my surroundings with growing excitement, taking in the red, gold, and midnight blue pillow scattered around, the beads suspended from the door entrance. I was surrounded with burnished, dark colors and the sounds and smells of the Orient.

Was I really still in Prague?

^ Inside a Prague tea room in New Town

A Czech Tea Room

Waves of tea houses inspired by the Far East have taken the Czech Republic by storm. After leaving Communism behind 20 years ago, the country now boasts the highest density of tearooms in the world, with well over 300, and Prague itself has about 60 scattered throughout the city. Here in Prague, it seems Czechs frequent the tea houses morning, afternoon, and evening. In a country that has traditionally been famed for café culture and beer consumption, tea houses have become a ubiquitous Czech institution.

But I kept asking myself, why on Earth are they so popular?

“That’s the favorite question of journalists,” Aleš Juřina says, a wry smile on his face. It’s Monday morning, and the sun is streaming into the largest room in Dobrá Čajovna, a tea house that he, along with a few friends, opened 17 years ago—the first tea house in Prague. Dobrá Čajovna, literally translated, means “good tea,” and fittingly, Juřina has prepared a pot of white tea called “Shooting Needles” for us to sip as we sit, pondering the tea phenomenon.

Czech people like to meet up with each other, traditionally in pubs, Juřina tells me. Sometimes, though, the pubs are too smoky, too loud. Tea houses are a safer haven, an alternative get-together spot, and Dobrá Čajovna is non-smoking. His answers make sense. My usual café spot in the city sports round ashtrays on each table, a lingering smoky scent in the air, and a constant clattering and clanging of customers and waiters.

Looking around here, it’s easy to spot the differences. The orange-peach shade of the walls melds down into bamboo mats. Lamps drop low to the round, glass-topped tables, past ledges where dozens of teapots rest—a bronzed, hodgepodge collection from around the world. I can imagine businessmen drifting in to decompress during their lunch breaks. At the recommendation of my friend Eva, I myself had brought reading here to study the week before. It was a wonderful change of pace, I thought, not least because of the tea house’s contrasting environment from the tourist magnet of Wenceslas Square just outside.

Strangely enough, at first Dobrá Čajovna was not a tea house at all. It began as a simple loose-leaf tea shop, but when customers came and bought 100 grams of tea for 50 crowns—an expensive sum then—they had no idea how to prepare it. “Come,” Juřina recalls saying. “I’ll show you.” Still, though, they wanted to drink the tea on the spot, and 17 years later, drinking areas have nearly taken over the shop. Somewhere along the way, Czechs became very skilled in tea, says Juřina. He hands me a 60-page booklet, the menu of teas. I stare at the 80 or so varieties, including white, gold, and oolong teas from China, Japan, Vietnam, and Taiwan, and I am again impressed at the incredible variety of Oriental teas that have found their way to Prague.

When I mention that Oriental feel, Juřina counters that Dobrá Čajovna “is a Czech tea room.” He and his friends drew inspiration for the tea house from their travels in the Orient—he nods at the tea pot, which is from China, and points to the Sri Lanka-inspired chairs—but its eclectic nature brands it a Czech tea house. Besides, Juřina comments, the few attempts to open an English-style tea room in Prague have failed miserably. “I think Czech people are skilled in teas, too much to enjoy the low-quality teas.” His mouth quirks in a tiny smile. “Sorry.”

I finish my bowl of white tea. Its taste is calm and clean, and it’s possibly the best pot of tea I’ve ever had.

Pour, Wait, Pour, Wait

Each tearoom in Prague has its own dash of uniqueness and its own sacred rules. Čajovna ve věži rests on the top floor of a mystical tower in Prague 7. The tower seems to have risen straight out of Arthur’s Camelot, as unexpected among the surrounding buildings as a full-blown Oriental tea culture was to me here in Central Europe.

I’ve brought my friend on this Friday night, and we climb the tower’s spiraling stairs, leveling off on the fourth floor. As the door opens, a wave of warmth washes over us, and one deep breath later, I feel as though I have stepped into another world, a distant place where time passes by, lazy and unhurried. We leave our shoes at the door at the attendant’s faint admonishment. My friend is off-put, but inside a tea house, you follow the tea house’s rules.

Here, it’s dark and dreamy. Scattered wall lamps light the rooms dimly, and strong incense fills the air. A narrow staircase of dark wood leads to a loft where people sit on cushions. One table over, a young man gazes into his girlfriend’s eyes, intently listening to her speak. He’s not alone. The couples are here in full force to take advantage of the romantic atmosphere.

After our brief scramble to choose a tea from the deluge of options, our Taiwanese half-green tea arrives in a plump, clay-brown pot. The attendant, Jan, sets a canister of boiling water down on our table, and inquires whether we know how to prepare the tea once our first pot has run out. He seems dubious, and at our questioning looks, he begins to outline the process.

“First, pour the hot water into your bowls,” he says, pointing at the olive-green bowls that rest on the silver tray. “Wait two minutes. Then, pour it into the pot. Wait again one-and-a-half to two minutes. Then, pour the tea.” After a pause, Jan mentions that we will know from tasting it how to adjust our preparation process the next time around, and then leaves. I get the feeling he has given us the benefit of the doubt.

Slightly lost, we look at each other, pondering his directions. With a shrug, I pour the tea—the only round in which I won’t have to somehow detangle that complex process Jan has just described. Juřina had touched on it, but Jan’s reaction, and the extent of his knowledge, shows just how familiar Czech tea-goers have become with this tea culture.

On our way out, I ask Jan if he can tell me more, posing the same question I had presented Juřina: Why are tea houses so very popular? “It was something totally new, which came together with all this alternative culture,” Jan says later by email. Alternative culture—tea from China, spices from India, yoga, meditation, and the popularity of Tibetan Buddhism—arrived and intermixed in the Czech Republic. Tea houses, in his opinion, managed to include this whole group of interests into their persona. Jan offers me a final word of advice, reminding me not to overlook one more thing that has become tightly connected with tea houses.

“Don’t forget the waterpipes,” he says, and I make a mental note to search them out.

^ "Tea room in the tower." Photo from www.dojo.cz

Where The Young Guns Are

“Well,” I think as I look through a glass door several days later. “I’ve certainly found them.” On the other side, a shelf running along the walls of a small shop is lined with waterpipes. Bright red and blue adorn the undulating bodies alongside the usual silver and brass. Although the door separates the shop from the tea rooms, I can already see this place is a little different.

The scent of spicy masala chai envelops me, daring me not to stop and breathe deeply. This is Siva, an Arabic-inspired tea house in Prague 1. Faded rugs adorn the walls, while loose tea leaves are kept in a long row of glass jars behind the counter. After a few moments, I continue to the basement, making tight circling turns down a stone-encased stairwell.

Then, I gape when the staircase opens up into a remarkable, round-roofed room, enclosed in the same gray stone. Everywhere, teenagers and 20-somethings are grouped together, laughing and talking. The air is hazier, courtesy of the waterpipes on almost every table. Every few moments, someone exhales a dense stream of smoke in measured puffs. I can feel that the atmosphere is younger and edgier.

Loud music plays as I settle down into a faded, olive-green couch and pick up the menu. The music is insistent and heavy on the drums, and the American in me smiles as it changes abruptly into “Rehab,” the Amy Winehouse hit of a couple years ago. While there were some Arabic food offerings in the books upstairs, here, the selection is limited to tea, as well as the obligatory waterpipes.

My gaze settles on three teenagers clustered around a waterpipe in the corner. One boy’s green bandanna pops in the faint light, and the girl sitting across from him sports a blue and purple striped cotton shirt. She unravels the smoking tube that curls, snake-like, around the waterpipe’s body. Watching her, I think back to a conversation I had with a Czech acquaintance, Anna, a 20-year-old Hlinsko resident I know through one of my friends. The very first time I asked Anna about tea houses, she had brought up the waterpipes. For the younger generation, it seems the smoking devices are one of the biggest draws of the tea house. For although I have noticed that many tea-goers are under 30, even by those standards, the people in Siva are young.

My thoughts are interrupted by the arrival of my masala tea—one deep breath upstairs had been enough persuasion to order it—and by the bubbling of a water pipe nearby. It’s the same sound my seven-year-old self made when I blew rebelliously into soda through the straw. Smiling, I sip the tea, enjoying both the milky, flavorful liquid and the warmth of the bowl radiating through my hands. “If you want to ‘switch off’,” Anna had said of tea houses, “it’s one of the best places what I know.” With the heady air and spicy drink lulling me into sleepy contentment, I couldn’t agree more. Czech people of all ages could appreciate these tea houses, these small pockets of otherworldly enchantment. No matter their own particular reasons for going—and I will never know them all—the tea house is a place where everyone can ‘switch off.’

A half hour later, my tea is gone, and I must return to the world of impatient motorists and final exams. Two dozen steps up, and the room encased in stone is left behind. One last glance at the stash of water pipes, and I’m through the double doors, back in Prague.

Time seems to have slowed in the tea house, making for a startling return to the noises and the pace of the outside. The door closes behind me, and I stand for a moment, unwilling to lose the feeling of tranquility just yet. The rain and wind whirl playfully in my face, and as I turn and begin to walk, I am swept along, unfailingly, back into the pulse of the city.

Čajovna U Kostela – located in a half-basement, you can choose cushions or chairs in this Oriental retreat. Strossmayerovo náměstí 9, Prague 7

Dobrá Čajovna – the first tea house to open in Prague, it has served as a model for many others. Reading lights above each table in the left-hand room make it a perfect spot for quiet study. Václavské Náměstí 14, Prague 1, New Town

Čajovna ve věži – its location alone, at the top of a tower, makes this dreamy tea house perfect for deep conversations or romantic dates. Na výšinách 1 / Korunovační, Prague 7

Siva – with its large selection of waterpipes (hookahs), it is a favorite for young tea-goers or those looking for an energetic hideaway. Masná 8, Prague 1, Old Town

Amana – in a basement not far off the Vltava, it has a vast tea selection, lively atmosphere, and an enticing place to curl up for a few hours. Záhořanského 6, Prague 2

U Zeleného čaje – this cozy, but updated, spot not far from the castle offers its own tea creations as well as light snacks. Nerudova 19, Prague 1, Malá Strana

There Is A World Outside America

2009-12-22T20:36:00.001-05:00

(111 Days In, 0 Days Out)

To be honest, I don't have that much to say right about now, but I felt it was necessary to have a 111th post given the title of my blog for the past semester. Either I screwed up when counting the days in the semester, or I screwed up somewhere along the way keeping track of the numbers, or I didn't screw up at all, but subconsciously decided at the beginning that 111 sounded better than 110. Whatever the case, the 111th day consisted of me, going to the airport. Exciting, I know.

The shuttle to the Prague-Ruzyne airport was the cheapest paid transportation to the airport of the semester (Cedaz Praha, 399 crowns split between three people, +420 221 111 111). Had I known about it earlier, I wouldn't have splurged for the nearly 500-crown cabs.

Funny thing, though, on the way to the airport. We drove up, left, and back down to avoid that train tracks. (It was where they put Prague Jews onto trains and sent them off to Terezin and other places. You still can't drive across those tracks.) After veering off and passing the Sparta soccer stadium I never made it to, we drove right by the tea tower that led me off on such wonderful tea adventures in this city. I must have driven right by it a hundred (maybe two or three) times and never realized.

On my layover in Munich, I had absolutely no issues with the bathroom. Maybe I've come a long way since August 29. Or maybe Munich is much more modernized than Dusseldorf. Anyhow, I sat in the airport and thought about how much I've learned and how much I've seen this semester. Truth be told, I didn't even visit that many countries in Europe (see map). But being in Prague for the twentieth anniversary of the Velvet Revolution has showed me how not-at-all far removed the Czech Republic is from when Communism ruled the country. For that matter, being in Europe for the twentieth anniversary of the fall of Communism has showed me how important a milestone that was.

I'm so glad that I studied in Prague. I could have studied in China, and I nearly did... would have been a safer bet. Would I have learnt as much? Doubtful. My Chinese would have improved. I would have seen funny things, gotten into awkward situations, and laughed about it. I'm not saying if you're Chinese, you shouldn't study abroad in China--not at all. I guess I'm just trying to express, in one way or another, that throwing 'safe' out the window and putting myself into a situation where I had no Plan B at any point in time whatsoever, I learned a helluva lot more than I ever thought I would.

I feel as though living in America has narrowed my view of the world. It's so self-centric. America-centric. Without even realizing it, we think our way, our views are the only ways and the only views, and I'm not referring to driving on the right side of the street or anything. I'm talking about what people eat, why people eat what they eat, how they interact and why, customs of serving in restaurants and serving in general and why, why why why why. Really, there's a world outside of the U.S.

Although.... someone should tell this to online services like Hulu and Justin.tv. As one of my friend's friends calls it, the No-streaming-video Republic was difficult to live in during those times when I was trying to stream Duke basketball games. Umm.... maybe you've read enough that you can pick out my seriousness from my humor. If not, well... oh, well. One last list, because I just can't resist.

Things I've Learned About Myself:

I am a chill traveler.
I'm a slow sightseer. I'm usually the last one done with anything we're at. Hey, I like to take it all in.
I wish I had a better camera, one that didn't warp edges so frickin' badly.
I can cook to save my life, but wish I didn't have to.
When it comes to traveling and vacationing, I'd rather be on the ocean. (Poseidon... look at me.... o-o-o-o-ohhh)
My favorite Starbucks drink is a caramel macchiato.
Uh... that's about it. Maybe you have more. Shoot me a note, I'd love to hear it.

And that's a wrap. Couple more random Prague-tagged posts coming this way, but otherwise, it's been a great time blogging about Prague. Hope you enjoyed in some way, at some point.

Ahoj! Čao!

Flash Mob... Pillow Fight?

2009-12-17T17:32:00.002-05:00

110 Days In, 1 Day Out

Last night in Prague. What to do? Well, earlier in the semester someone from upstairs had stumbled upon videos of a flash mob pillow fight in front of the astronomical clock in Old Town Square. Yes, Flash Mob Pillow Fight. As in, a whistle blows and KABAAM, people whip out pillows and start whapping each other with them. Baller, right? See accompanying video for visual detail. Fight starts at about the 1 minute mark. If you're so inclined, you can youtube it and see a video taken from above (someone had climbed the clock tower)....

Last year, it happened on December 18, and this year, it happened/would happen on December 17 (tonight). I'm not exactly sure how long this pillow fight thing has been happening--maybe two years or something. Anyhow, for tonight we planned a last-night-in-prague dinner right off Old Town in the hopes of making it across the square by 7:55 p.m., when the fight was supposed to happen.

I know you're hoping I'll tell you I was there and have an awesome video to show you. Such is not the case. We ate dinner and dawdled too long paying our check, and by the time we got out (only a few minutes after 8 p.m., really) the fight was, well, over. It was so over, that I had even forgotten about it. We went about our freezing business getting holiday treats from the Old Town Square Christmas market, rounded the corner, and spotted tufts, balls, and drifts of feathers resting solemnly on the ground.

Oh... yeah. Oops. Therefore, all I really have for you is a picture of the following Wonderful Sight. Pillowremains bearing witness to yet another minute of flash mob pillow fight, 2009.

Message In A Piss

2009-12-16T17:37:00.000-05:00

109 Days In, 2 Days Out

Oh, Černy.

Right outside the Kafka museum (which is on Cihelna in Mala Strana), in the courtyard, is another humorous sculpture by David Černy. This one is of, in case you can't tell, two men peeing into a Czech Republic-shaped pool of water. A Czech tour came by as I was standing there, and the guide was saying Praha, Brno, Praha, Brno. I deduced from this that the two spots where the pee hits the water are meant to be the two cities of Prague and Brno.

To be honest, I'm wasn't sure what this one was satirizing. Turns out, the sculptures are pissing spelling out quotes from famous Prague residents. Right. As if I would have known that. These quotes are electronically controlled, and you can interrupt and have them spell out your own message by texting to +420 724 370 770. Supposedly this number is there by the sculptures. I didn't see it. Better to have it with you already. Find out more about this by looking through Černy's site. The photos of this particular installation show the men, bronze. Yeah... not so bronze anymore.

Note of warning, it's a little difficult to figure out when they have started spelling out your message versus their own. Or, maybe it was just difficult for me. You decide. Two points to whoever figures out what I texted to them. It's the guy on the left, and he starts at about 0:28.

Kafkaesque

2009-12-15T10:55:00.016-05:00

108 Days In, 3 Days Out

Prague was Franz Kafka's city--he lived there from his childhood and is buried in one of the Jewish cemeteries here. Oddly enough, I don't think I have mentioned Kafka in the last, what, 107 days? Today, I went to the Kafka Museum in Mala Strana, so here goes.

Before going to the museum, I don't think I understood how messed up it was going to be inside. Franz Kafka, author from which the adjective Kafkaesque came.. awesome. wonderful. strange. creepy. CREEPS. Yikes, get me out of here. The museum starts out just fine, going through Kafka's childhood, mentioning how his father was an indomitable, inescapable force on his life. Here's the house Kafka lived in for three years early on during his schooling years--oh, cool, it's one we walk by all the time on our way to Old Town Square. Kafka, too, made a daily trek to school through Old Town Square, in the alley to the left of Tyn Cathedral, back to Masna to a boy's school.

Then, we get into the good stuff. Kafka had a law degree. Profession-wise, he was a lawyer, but first and foremost, he considered literature his life's work. There are some diary entries that show how torn Kafka was by this dual life. He wished he could get rid of the six or so hours a day that he had to spend practicing law, because undertaking both activities was eating him up. We dive into his romances, four of them in total. Felice, Milena, Doris, and one woman I can't remember. Milena in particular, the exhibit says, Kafka adored, but for none of the women could he commit himself fully, because literature was the penultimate endeavor for him.

He wrote a book about a starving artist, at the same time he himself was starving. He had tuberculosis, and his esophagus or whatever had deteriorated so that he couldn't really eat. Even more twisted is the World of K--eerie music plays throughout the whole first floor, after you descend a staircase that's red-lit and creepy. (photo courtesy Prague-life.com) Yeah, I don't really remember what the last part was about. I was too busy going getmeouttahere getmeouttahere getmeouttahere getmeouttahere.

My conclusion is, Kafka was nuts. Ok, maybe half nuts. Reading one of his books (The Trial) is enough for me.

"Where are you from?" said the Asian man

2009-12-14T17:06:00.016-05:00

107 Days In, 4 Days Out

Snowing out. 27 degrees. Isn't it funny how, on our last week in Prague, it decides to suddenly turn cold (normal) and freeze all our extremities off?

One frequent phenomenon--that I certainly will not miss when I leave Friday--is how the Asian restaurant or shop owners ask Helen and I where we are from. In a friendly sort of way, you know. As in, we walk up, we begin browsing. Perhaps we say a word or two to each other... in English. Shopkeeper comes over (or in the case of the restaurant, the waiter). Shopkeeper hovers awkwardly for a moment, sporting some kind of weird smile or leer. He then pounces. Sometimes, shyly, sometimes less shyly.

"Where are you from?"

This happened today at the Holesovice market, where we had ventured to get our hands on some Shin Ramen. The market's on the southern side of Holesovice, and they have some groceries (I think. I didn't get them), stands of shoes, clothes, socks, scarves, soccer shirts and scarfs--kind of like a little SAPA, actually, since many of the stands were run by Vietnamese people. Unfortunately no Liverpool in the soccer scarf stand. I looked. Although with the way Liverpool is playing this season, it'd be a lost cause anyway.

When they direct said question to me, my answer is always America or the U.S. What else am I supposed to say? "My dad's from Singapore and my Mom is from Taiwan"? Umm... no. And I'm from the U.S. "Oh.." they say. They then look a little confused. I know that's not the answer they were expecting, but what can I do?

When they direct their question to Helen, things work out slightly better. "Originally from Taiwan," she says. "But then moved to the U.S." The Shin Ramen vendor thought this was amusing or something. He referenced BBC somehow--made me intensely confused--and Helen responded with something in the vein of, "yeah we don't sound like that."

The Vietnamese vendors are creeps when they think you're interesting. Yikes. Also would like to point out that I got a new scarf for about $5 (woo Fifth Avenue street pashminas!), and it's deep jeweled jade/green. Two points in outfit diversification. Although someone claims it is not outfit diversification because I wear only cool colors. This is false. I wear red, thanks.

Hanukkah a la Prague

2009-12-13T05:03:00.034-05:00

106 Days In, 5 Days Out

Ok, don't mind me while I figure this out in my head. Today was NOT the first day of Hanukkah. The first day of Hanukkahwas Friday. However, Friday and Saturday were Shabbat. Which is why the menora wasn't lit on Friday and Saturday... and it was lit for the first time today. Sunday. At which time three candles were lit.

Margie, Helen, and I went into Old Town to the Rudolfinum, for the occasion. The menora's huuuuge, and it's just sitting in the middle of the square-type area in front of Charles University. For once, we didn't transfer trams and took one all the way into Prague 1. As we're walking across the bridge, we hear loud, techno-like music echoing across halfway across the river. The Jews know how to throw a party ;)

DOX

2009-12-12T17:03:00.109-05:00

105 Days In, 6 Days Out

In Holesovice is my dorm. Also in Holesovice is the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art. In fact, the two are quite close to each other. Two blocks, really. DOX opened seven years ago, so it's really, really new. Its mission is to "present contemporary art in the context of issues that shape and are shaped by today's world." And before today, I had never been there? That would be correct.

My intense avoidance of art museums of all kinds was slightly alleviated by the Radio Prague article which ran last week. It detailed two special exhibitions which are running at the gallery right now, both dealing with the Chelsea Hotel. New York, woot! I guess, starting in the 1950's, for fifty years rooms in the Chelsea Hotel were rented out to striving and accomplished artists, those that represent "Bohemia" in the artistic sense. Right. Because right now, I'm in "Bohemia" in the geographical sense. Har har. Ahh... sorry. I'm starting to go a little nuts, but we have less than a week left to go. I'm allowed. (Sidenote: students studying in Prague in the future, subscribe to Radio Prague feeds... they provide wonderful coverage of current going-ons which are really interesting)

So I went.

The exhibit on the lower level follows three main artists: Harry Smith, Andy Warhol, and Robert Mapplethorpe. Upstairs, photos by photographer Julia Calfee show inside the Chelsea Hotel during that time. The story is, after 2007, the owner of the hotel was evicted (he sometimes let people stay without paying rent. not so entirely surprising, then)... and that was the end of that. Mostly.

Now, ok. I'd be lying if I said I didn't go to DOX at least 75% because I wanted to see David Černy's Entropa. David Černy I have mentioned before. He's supposed to be this fantastically charismatic person. Entropa is was a sculpture (sculpture? I would call it more of a creation than a sculpture, but anyways...) that he designed to mark the occasion of the Czech Republic having the EU Presidency. It looks like blue piping, surrounding little depictions of each of the 27 countries. Technically, 26 actual depictions, but we'll get to that. Wikipedia tells me that Entropa is on display in Brussels, but I... don't think so. I think it's here in Prague. But don't sue me if I'm wrong.

Like (most of?) his other work, Entropa satirizes.. well, everything. It satirizes the Czech Republic by scrolling controversial quotes from the current Czech President (Vaclav Klaus). It satirizes Malta by putting one elephant on a tiny island, with a huge magnifying glass in front. It satirizes the U.K. by not putting it there at all--they don't want to be part of Europe, anyway.

Of course, it caused this huge uproar. I believe Černy actually wound up tweaking a little things so it would offend people slightly less. But take a look at the pictures.. I've included a photo of the descriptions, so you can figure out all the satire for yourself (maybe you're more versed in European affairs than I am). There were some I didn't completely understand...

Characters in the Klementinum

2009-12-11T19:05:00.003-05:00

104 Days In, 7 Days Out

Today marks Day 1 of my re-commitment to exploring Prague. It also marks T-minus 7 days until my departure from this city. It's been awfully rainy over the last week, so as I was walking by the Klementinum, I spontaneously scrapped my other plans in favor of seeing the exhibition inside. Key word: inside

I paid my 40 crowns ("student, prosim. Studentka! Studentka." Gosh, you forget an ending in Czech, and you're referring to yourself as a male) Very quickly, I decide I've spent 40 crowns solely to depress myself. This exhibit highlights Albatros, a Czech publisher of children's books, which is celebrating 60 years of... publishing children's' books, I guess. Ok, that in itself is not at all depressing.

But first, it's all in Czech. Do foreigners not come here, or anything? No wonder the guy at the desk seemed so dubious when I assured him that, yes, I only wanted the ticket to the gallery, and not the guided tour. Note to self: pay more attention to those subtleties next time. Secondly, there are tons of these children's books propped or laid open inside some cases. While this would normally have been a source of wild excitement (it was! at first.)... it quickly became a depressant. Even after a semester of Czech, I could barely read a full sentence.

"Dobrý Den," the title of one book, was a momentary respite, and also this wonderful cover from the Krtek series (on the left). But Czech isn't called the second-most difficult language in the world for no reason (did I make that up? It's definitely up there). The best I could do was to identify when a sentence was in the past tense. I'm pretty good at that. Also... contextual clues. For example, one long plaque on the wall was titled "Dobrodružství...something..."

Yeah, drawing a blank there. But the very next slide mentioned Mark Twain and his Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. "Dobrodružství Huckleberryho Finna." (Blink. blink.) Progress.

Finally, I spot further down the single reason I actually came into this exhibit: Krtek. A month ago ago, Kurt in my journalism class wrote a piece on Krtek, the little Czech cartoon mole that is one of their most beloved cartoon characters. He's in the photo above. Then, as a side bonus, I see a display of Harry Potter books. Not much more you could ask for.

A Czech Tea Experience

2009-12-10T16:22:00.020-05:00

103 Days In, 8 Days Out

I'm hesitant to put this tea piece up because I don't really like it. I had to really trim it down from the original (which sucked, too) because of the short length of it. Well. Anyway. You can tell me what you think.

A Czech Tea Experience

I turned my map this way and that. “It’s around here somewhere,” I muttered to my friend as we turned a corner. We were searching for a tea room in a tower recommended by my friend Eva Sterecová, who had scoffed at my mention of the café culture and launched into an eager description of the tea rooms in Prague.

A few steps past the building on our left, we stopped cold in our tracks. My hand holding the map dropped to my side, forgotten. Ahead, a mystical, medieval-style tower loomed in front of us, mischievously defying the surrounding buildings. In the fading light, a top-floor platform overhung with arches made the tower look as if it had risen straight out of Arthur’s Camelot. It embodied flawlessly all the images of mystical Prague I had pieced together in my mind.

Up the circling stairs to the third floor we climbed. Just inside, we were greeted by a smattering of shoes left by the door. “Do we have to take off our shoes?” we asked the attendant, a college student named Jan. “Yes,” he replied kindly but unapologetically. It’s the way things are done there.

We settled down at a table, wiggling our toes delightedly, in a room lit dimly with scattered wall lamps. Around us, tatami bamboo mats lined the lower part of the faded, rose-colored walls, and a Buddha hung serenely on the opposite wall. A narrow staircase made of dark, burnished wood led to a loft where couples sat on cushions on the floor. It was a far cry from traditional images of prim English tearooms. Here, there were no sandwiches or cakes, only small cookies, pistachios, and halva kept in jars on the ledge. Here, I felt as though I had been transported to a distant corner of the Orient, a corner where time could pass by, lazy and unhurried.

The menus set in front of us were dark, earthy brown and loosely bound, with soft pages worn down from being repeatedly turned. Čína, Japonsko, Taiwan, they listed, all in Czech. Green tea, white tea, half-green tea, fruit tea, masala tea…

By the time Jan came to ask for our choice, our heads were spinning with the wondrous deluge of tea options presented by the deceptively unruffled menus. Laughing, Jan described several teas to us, until we settled on a Taiwanese half-green tea. My friend and I both have Taiwanese roots, and when all else fails we grasp at the familiar.

On this night, being alone in the tea room would have been an anomaly. Groups of friends filtered in. Couples held hands over a table. The door to a back room occasionally swung open and closed as a group prepared for a private party. I counted only a few people over 30. Jan told me that the tea room was a haven for the enthusiasts of alternative culture from the Orient, but I felt certain, as I watched a couple intermittently whispering and kissing at the next table, that at least on the evenings, the tea room provided a tranquil date alternative for the young crowd.

Our Taiwanese tea came in a plump, clay-brown pot, accompanied by olive bowls and a canister of boiling water. Jan left us with convoluted instructions on how to prepare the tea, and then left us to find our own way. We looked at each other, amused, pondering his directions. With a shrug, I went ahead and poured the tea. We weren’t tea experts, anyhow.

Out of the pot, it was a stunning, pale green-gold shade. I cupped my bowl and sipped the scalding tea slowly, enjoying the heat rising to my face and warming my hands. The comforting, fresh scent of the tea mixed with the incense burning nearby, creating an exotic blend of the foreign and the familiar. Music played continuously, flowing smoothly from throaty violins into African pipes. Even my wonder dissolved into dreamy relaxation at the top of this tower in Prague.

I was brought out of my reverie by the abrupt noises of the 20-somethings bustling noisily around getting ready for their party and interrupting the fluid song of the didgeridoo pipes. It was ironic that the noise was noticeable, I mused to myself, still too completely content to be bothered much by it.

Anywhere else in Prague, and I wouldn’t even have noticed.

Kolya/Kolja

2009-12-09T15:58:00.049-05:00

102 Days In, 9 Days Out

People, we're in single digits!

Finally, I was able to find time to watch the Czech film, Kolya (Kolja), which won the Academy Award for best foreign language film. The movie was wonderful, just wonderful, and quite funny and quirky, too.... which makes me wonder how much funnier it would have been had I understood Czech. Czechs have a very funny sense of humor (it's quite dark), and my feeling is there was a lot of it in this film.

Couple other things...

Are the warning screens always this funny? I haven't watched that many movies on my laptop, so I haven't had the chance to pause and actually read them (I can't hear you laughing, stop.). But I feel as if they might be covering one too many bases here. Or else I've just been living with my head in a fishbowl and never realized all the different places they play movies.

Secondly, there is both Czech and Russian in this movie (it takes place in Prague, but the five-year-old boy, Kolya, is Russian). It was a nice way to see what many people have been referring to throughout this program--how very similar the Russian language is to Czech.

And lastly.... you know how I learned of the movie through my first article in travel writing? In that article about Jara Cimrman, I had written, "Created in the 1960’s by Academy Award-winning scriptwriter Zdeněk Svěrák..." Well, at the conclusion of Kolya, of course the credits come up on-screen, and who else would the main character Louka be, but Zdeněk Svěrák? Of course. Unknowingly, I had watched an entire movie where the main character was portrayed by one of my dear Jara Cimrman's creators.

Yay!

Things In Prague/Europe I Will Miss

2009-12-08T15:27:00.000-05:00

101 Days In, 10 Days Out

Tea houses
Discretionary tipping
Vegetarian restaurants -- I know, weird, right?
Lion Bars
Castles
The ability to hop on a train Thurs afternoon and visit another country
Blogging (maybe)
Comforter covers
....

Drinks. Life. Emotion.

2009-12-07T19:13:00.031-05:00

100 Days In, 11 Days Out

Here comes a really Czech post. One of my group projects for class is on a company called Kofola (drinks. life. emotion), which produces the soft drink, also called Kofola. It was created during Communism (1960's) as a cheap alternative to Coke slash Pepsi. Also, as a way for the Communists to use up surplus caffeine. (You know, because they always had surplus, because central planning was a fail. Own two cents.)

Kofola has an interest almost-licorice taste that takes getting used to. Compared to Coca-Cola and Pepsi, it's less sweet. It also contains some herbal things. As well as the above-mentioned licorice flavor. When Communism ended in 1989, though, Coke and Pepsi moved in full time, and Kofola pretty much didn't stand a chance. Who wanted to remember communism? (Except for the tiny mom-and-pop-feel Museum of Communism which has located itself right above the McDonalds on Wenceslas Square!) So... Kofola died out for 10 years.

It's now made a resurgent comeback in the Czech Republic, though! Because of wonderful rebranding techniques and tremendous advertising campaigns. It seems that Czech people are very proud of Kofola, because it's Czech. Award-winning advertisement from said advertising campaigns is below. Warning: nudity.

Old Saint Nicholas/Mikuláš

2009-12-06T12:09:00.043-05:00

99 Days In, 12 Days Out

Technically, today (December 6) is St. Nicholas Day--that's St. Mikuláš in Czech--but the strange celebrations fall on the evening of the 5th, yesterday. On that evening, in Prague, parents gather up their children, go outside, and walk around until they meet the Saint Mikuláš'es, angels, and devils also wandering about--other dressed-up grown-ups.

When they all meet, the characters ask the children whether they've been good. If they say yes, they are given a small gift or candy (question: why would you ever say no?) If they say no, they are stuffed into the devil's sack and taken to hell. Not really. But that is what we had been told by our Czech friends/teachers. On several websites, I've read that they are given coal or a sack of potatoes, instead, which is slightly more believable.

But seriously, the bit about being stuffed into the devil's sack is a lot to scare children with...

Coming back from Berlin saturday evening, I stopped outside my dorm to observe this tradition in action. (I was across the street, though, so I can't recount words. Not that I could have if I had been close by, but that's beside the point) A family, walking about leisurely, met an angel, and after said question, I heard the little boy singing a short song. He sounded slightly terrified. Then, of course, the angel gave him something. Don't know what. And all continued on their merry way.

Happy St. Nicholas/Mikuláš Day!

FAVORITE STREET FOOD

2009-12-05T07:11:00.001-05:00

98 Days In, 13 Days Out

I completely forgot to describe the doner kebap I had on Friday! Terrible oversight on my part. Jenn looked up the best vegetarian doner stand in Berlin, which happened to be super close to the best currywurst stand in Berlin. Don't you love when things work out like that? Yes. Most "vegetarian" doners you can get contain only those salad vegetables I was talking about yesterday, or maybe a slab of some cheese like feta. Not particularly appetizing. However, this stand had heavy vegetables like potatoes, onions, eggplant, and such, spiced much the same way as the usual meat in doners. Add garlic sauce and chili sauce, and it was the best street food I've ever had.

So yeah, my stories in Berlin are really all about food. We found at the Alexanderplatz christmas market near Jenn's house these dessert things called Schneeballs. Ok, that's probably not how you spell it, but I don't know German, so. If you were writing it in Czech, it'd be šníbalz. Completely unrelated. Mine was with coconut cream filling--Kokoscreme in German. Not going to lie, I got a little stuck on the word while ordering. In my defense, I was so focused on saying kokos rather than koskos, that I forgot the second part of the world, which makes it a memory issue rather than a pronunciation issue. Delicious. Dericious!

Then, after seeing the Pizza Hut in the train station, how could I resist? I only get pizza hut about twice a year (dreaming wistfully here). this margherita pizza was epic. Pretty sure they don't ever call them margherita pizzas in the U.S. They're just cheese.

Berlin: A City of Favorites

2009-12-04T06:23:00.093-05:00

97 Days In, 14 Days Out

It was a day for the Favorites. We got out of the house later than expected (courtesy of generally amazing pumpkin bread a la Jenn's baking experimentations), and the first stop on the must-see-in-one-day tour was the East Side Gallery. It's the longest stretch of the Berlin Wall still standing.

In 1989 and 1990, after the fall of the (larger) wall, artists used this stretch as a canvas, painting their own messages in the form of murals. As you can imagine, many of these original paintings were painted over by graffiti and such in the last 15-20 years. Just recently, maybe in the last year, Berlin began restoring original artworks, inviting the artists back to repaint. Some repainted their original murals, and you can see in the signature that it says 1990/2009). Some painted a new mural. There are provoking ones... this Bruderkiss one comes to mind... and simpler ones. This may be the Bruderkiss mural as it looked before the recent restorations.

Now that I'm looking it up on the web, it seems as though the artist of the Bruderkiss (Vrubel) was pretty pissed off at the way the Berlin officials went about "restoring the wall." Namely, they erased the original mural completely and invited the artist back to create it anew. Vrubel fumed that it wasn't a restoration, it was a completely new painting.

Favorite #2: Checkpoint Charlie. At what had been the border crossings in the Berlin Wall, there were checkpoints which were labelled with letters/names. Checkpoint Alpha, Checkpoint Bravo, and Checkpoint Charlie, etc. Checkpoint Charlie was a crossing between the American section of West Berlin and the Soviet East Berlin. I'm not exactly sure why this one is the most famous (maybe it's not supposed to be, and it only is because the copy of the guardhouse standing at that site makes it an instant tourist attraction).

What made the site for me, though, was a sign just to the North of the guardhouse. On the American side, if you're looking toward East Berlin, you read: "You are leaving the American sector". The same sign is hanging at the back of the Masaryk classroom at NYU in Prague, where I have my economics class. I'm not even sure if the sign at Checkpoint Charlie is original (I would imagine not), but seeing it was really significant for me because it tied parts of the semester together.

The first time I saw it, I thought it was hilarious. You're leaving the American sector? Haha. Underneath the English, the same message is written in several more languages--German, French, and Russian. (makes sense) It's kind of like in the Princess Diaries when Mia walks on her grandmother's front lawn at the embassy and the security starts yelling at her to get off the grass in about five different languages.

Then, I saw the sign in Italy during the montage commemorating the fall of the wall. ("......ohh...."), and finally, saw the sign in Berlin.

Yeah, "oh."

Jenn mentioned that Germans are open about confronting their history. They're not afraid to talk about it, preferring to face it head on. That's what the Holocaust memorial in Berlin is doing. The architect, Peter Eisenman, wanted it to be in the middle of the city where people would be able to just stumble upon it. it's made of 2,711 concrete blocks which are all of the same length and width dimensions, but of different heights. Not only that, but the ground underneath the blocks undulates. The point, I think, is for the visitor to be unsettled by what would normally be very not-unsettling things--similarly-shaped slabs of concrete. When you get out to the middle, where the blocks are taller than the person, you can barely even hear the sounds of the city.

Favorite favorite favorite #3: the Reichstag. I'm not the best one to recite the history, but the Reichstag is the building which houses the Bundestag (German parliament). It retains most of the outer walls of the original building, mixed in with modern sections which were integrated in where the building was burned down by fire or bombed. On top is a glass-domed cupola which is open--and free--to the public. It makes for a strange blend (though I like it!) of glass, steel, and old stone.

The building's amazing. You can ascent to the top of the dome and basically look down into the main hall of parliament, with its blue chairs and visitor seating sections. From the top, it's a 360 degree view of the city--probably the best aside from, potentially, the TV tower, which we didn't go to.

The Reichstag also boasts the honor of being at the top of my "places to get an audio guide" list. Their audio guide is sensor-driven, triggered by where you walk on the ramp up to the top. I suppose the reason they could design it like that is because you really can go only one place, and that's up. In circles. But it's still really cool, and they tell you the history of the building, as well as describing everything you're seeing as you look out over the city.

Brief stop at the Brandenburger Tor to gape for a bit at the pretty lights. Then, after a 10-15 minute walk along the street running perpendicular to the Tor, we made it to... my favorite Christmas market yet! Berlin is supposedly the second-rated city in the world for Christmas markets, with Prague coming right after it. In my opinion, Berlin blasts Prague straight out of the water. The markets there are colossal and contain aisles upon aisles upon aisles of squeal--inducing items. I spent a few minutes scouring the cookie cutter stand for a giraffe-shaped one for a friend. Alas. They did not have it (channeling my inner Dumbledore there). Don't laugh. I mean, I guess giraffes aren't Christmasy enough, but they had lizards and camels. I don't see why looking for giraffes should be out of the ordinary. Thanks.

It's not just the Christmas markets that are festive in Berlin, it's everything. From the second we stepped off the train in Hauptbahnhof, we were accosted by tinsel, Christmas lights, Christmas trees, red bows, on and on. Hauptbahnhof itself was lit up on the outside by gigantic stars all over the front face. What I love about Christmas in Europe is that it feels so secular. Czechs are the most atheist people, percentagewise, in the world, and Jenn tells me they're not particularly religious in Germany, either, but everyone loves Christmas. It's more inclusive, rather than religious, which I as a non-Christian appreciate immensely. It doesn't feel corny.. it feels genuine, and everyone's invited.

And then we went to a jazz club, where the performing saxophone quartet was not particularly good, but whatever whatever.

Hercules, and a Centaur

2009-12-03T05:54:00.030-05:00

96 Days In, 15 Days Out

Nothing better to do in Berlin on the first night than get a Doner Kebap! Well, at least, for Helen. This doner kebap business is kind of built on meat, and this particular stand outside the main train station didn't have a "vegetarisch" one... darn.

Fortunately, at least one of us could sample what Jenn had called her best doner in Berlin, in her three+ months. After she picked us up from the train station, we walked outside and across the street to a line of four street food stands. Bratwurst. Fish and Chips. Doner Kebaps. And ... something else. It might have been curry wurst. As Jenn put it, pretty much your complete lineup of German street food. But more importantly, about doner kebaps! They're basically a pocket of pita bread with a specially-spiced meat stuffed inside.. along with your preferred mix of some salad vegetables, cheese, garlic sauce, chili sauce, and.. I'm probably forgetting something. It's ok, though, because even if that was all doners had on them, it'd be a wonderful thing.

After said doner kebap, we made our way out to the Bode Museum, which houses an amazing sculpture collection, along with other things that didn't interest me so much. My favorites were the bronze casts on the second floor, in particular this one bronze of Hercules (my man!) wrestling a centaur. I would have had a better picture for you than this one (seriously, I had it all lined up), but the security guard lady right at that moment started yelling at me, "no point! no point!" What does that mean? We thought she might have assumed my flash was about to go off--it wasn't-- or that my camera's red guide light was pissing her off. Other than those bronzes, I don't remember much. See, when I go into art museums, I usually wind up looking at the museum's architecture rather than the art itself.

Incidentally, the Bode Museum is one of five museums on Berlin's "Museum Island," which is bordered partially by the river Spree. It's a (haha) UNESCO world heritage site, which increases its visibility and attractiveness 3.7 times. Not really. Clearly I've been to too many UNESCO world heritage sites in Europe, someone pinch me.

Hold On to One Thing

2009-12-02T03:05:00.065-05:00

95 Days In, 16 Days Out

The guest speakers we've had invited to speak in our NYU classes have been, for the most part, really fantastic. Yesterday, we had Igor Blaževič for travel writing. He's the director of the One World film festival (cool.), which recently chosen the documentary film The Reporter, with Nicholas Kristof, for the eleventh annual festival.

I never did get to watch the film, which was a slight disappointment, but I gathered from the class discussion it was about a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof, following him as he attempts to put the conflict in Congo on the international news radar. For some people, it was really difficult to watch Kristof report on something he clearly feels very strongly about, while maintaining a detached demeanor from the events which were happening. I guess war and humanitarian crises reporters can't really hold on to every single horrible act they witness, or they'll wind up being weighed down and held back--and then won't be able to do their work.

Igor asked us, in closing, that if we ever decided to go into either humanitarian crisis reporting or any humanitarian work, to not become so detached that you purposefully let everything roll off of you--to hold on to one thing. I thought this was one of the better pieces of advice I'd ever been told, and not just in relation to humanitarian reporting/work. The traditional parent approach, 'reach for the sky, you can do anything you put your mind to' is fine and good. Motivational... but empty.

On the other hand, using atrocities you have witnessed (or in more general cases, criticism) to fuel you... for me, that's one of the strongest motivators you can have. It's not just motivation, it's active motivation. Driving motivation. You can hold on to it and keep it with you. I don't know if that makes any sense to you, but it makes sense to me.

It's a little bit like doing a Michael Jordan, remembering every time you were passed over for something you felt you should have had. Not that I could do that anyway, given my unfortunately terrible memory for those sorts of things.

Underneath Your Feet

2009-12-01T19:12:00.038-05:00

94 Days In, 17 Days Out

"Deep beneath the city of Prague is another city altogether, one that most people are completely unaware of, and that they’ll hopefully never see."

They're bomb shelters--about 800 of them, actually. There's enough room to hold 40 percent of Prague's population for up to 72 hours in case of an air raid. Several dozen workers work to keep the bunkers in acceptable condition, in case the day comes when people need to go underground. It's a depressing thought. These bomb shelters are one of the reason Prague's metro system had to built so far underground. Because seriously, if you take one of the escalators down into the metro, sometimes you have to ride it for, like, three minutes, standing. That could be an exaggeration. Then again, it might not be.

The Radio Prague article notes that one of the biggest bunkers is underneath Vitkov Hill, where Helen and I went recently.. but on a foray to the top, not the bottom. There's a pedestrian tunnel I avoided on my first attempt to climb the hill on account of it looking extremely sketchy, but it's inside that tunnel, somewhere along the middle, at a nondescript door, where you can enter those bunkers.

I may have mentioned this before, but there is a bunker you can get into from the National Memorial on top of the hill. It's essentially in the basement of the monument, and not way under the hill as I suppose these bomb shelters would be, but still.

The metro tunnels are part of the underground shelter system, and "the metro can be closed off every two stations. You can see it when you enter the stations: big, heavy parts of the door that would seal the station off. Or at least I see them because I’m in the business, everyday citizens probably don’t notice them."

Uh, yeah, I hadn't noticed them. That story is worth a read for anyone in Prague.

Find A Tea House To Kill Time

2009-11-30T03:03:00.029-05:00

93 Days In, 18 Days Out

I realize I'm always talking about interviews and tea rooms... trust me. I'm still gonna do it. Here goes.

Violeta and I had a lot of time to kill before heading to the NYU in Prague jazz concert, so we went to check out a tea house I had found online--Siva. Although it was a sister house of one I'd been to previously, Siva was set up more as an Arabic-style tea house. Dark, dark colors wrapped the rooms in attempted mystery. Three rugs from the Near East hung on the right wall.

As soon as we stepped inside, the scent of spicy masala brewing swirled around us, daring us not to stop and breathe in deeply. Of course, after that, a pot of Masala tea was a must. Siva's completely different from other tea rooms I've visited. Violeta went down the spiraling staircase to check out the lower level (the attendant had told us we might not find any empty seats down there, so of course, we had to look), and came back up reporting excitedly that the setup was really, really cool downstairs. My own exploration revealed a comfy lounging space, hazy with smoke, stuffed with plouffy couches and laid-back chairs olive green and brown, and groups of teenagers chatting around hookah pipes. Personally, I think the incredibly diverse set of tea houses that can be found in Prague are fascinating (and the fact that they all recall the Near East or the Orient). It'll be my final article for class.

Incidentally, I didn't figure out until last week that what they call waterpipes are the same as what I know as hookahs.

Things I Can't Wait To Get Back

2009-11-29T03:30:00.002-05:00

92 Days In, 19 Days Out

ESPN 360
Streaming video in general
Kashi
Cell phone with Querty
Dillo. Loop. REFECTORY CHILI.
Not having to ride with the homeless on the trams
A non-commute to class
People who smile in public
The Duke Chapel
Duke in general.

CNN Travel Snaphot: Czech Republic

2009-11-28T11:43:00.003-05:00

91 Days In, 20 Days Out

This CNN page singlehandedly renewed my enthusiasm for being here in Prague.
Check (Czech) it out.

Concentration Camp, not Extermination Camp

2009-11-27T15:07:00.063-05:00

90 Days In, 21 Days Out

Terezín. It's a concentration camp about half-an-hour by bus north of Prague, where the Duke Thanksgiving in Prague took us. The label of concentration camp is fairly significant--it really was a concentration, rather than an extermination, camp. That's not to say people weren't killed here. They were. But, it wasn't the kind of mass gas chamber deal like Auschwitz was.

Rather, Terezín was kind of like a mid-way point. Many Jews from Prague were shipped here in the early part of the 1940's, where they were eventually transported again to concentration/extermination camps further east. Auschwitz, Treblinka, etc. The Nazis used Terezín as a "show camp," so to speak. When the International Red Cross Committee (IRCC) came calling, they were showed Terezín as a model of all concentration camps. Terezín was played off as a place where Jews had got together, living happily.

Clearly, this was not the case. Now, if you go, you can see the rooms that were part of the Nazis' "beautification" process. We saw what was dubbed the "shaving room," a room lined with sinks on two walls and mirrors above them. The water in this room never worked. It was designed only as a facade to fool the IRCC. Another characteristic of Terezín was its utter overcrowding. At one point, it held almost 60,000 people. As another step in the beautification process, tons of Jews were sent in mass transports to extermination camps.

Because Terezín was not an extermination camp, the effect on visitors is, I'm sure, not anywhere near as powerful as those who see Auschwitz, which many people on this NYU in Prague program have gone to do. The closest thing to leaving that kind of effect, at Terezín, is probably the 500-meter long passageway we walked through. It takes about 10 minutes to walk from entrance to exit, and the entire way through it's a claustrophobia-inducing mass of wall pressing down. I say this from the viewpoint of someone who's bigger and taller than me. Someone six feet tall or above would not be able to walk upright in the tunnel.

The passage is the last thing Jews walked through, as the exit opens up onto a small clearing with a grassy knoll against the wall. The knoll acted as barrier that would absorb/bounce back bullets, and that was the extermination ground in the camp.

Terezín may not have been an extermination camp, per se, which makes it all the more terrifying to think about what happened further east.

A November Night in Old Town Square

2009-11-26T23:57:00.002-05:00

Stupid Foreigner

2009-11-26T11:51:00.089-05:00

89 Days In, 22 Days Out

Task of the Day: renew public transportation pass.

Note: If you're in Prague and didn't delay getting your pass at the beginning, it has now expired. You need to go again. There.... Doing my part in the world. :)

I had gone over this in my head earlier, even memorizing the little sign they gave us at the beginning that says, "I don't speak Czech. I would like such-and-such a pass." The sign that essentially labels you as stupid and ignorant. Anyway, you figure that between asking "Do you speak English?" and having the damn sign memorized, it'll be enough to get you through the encounter, right?

I'm in line. The woman ahead of me is explaining in broken English that she wants a pass. Lady at the window seems to understand her. Now, I'm up, and I ask for a 30-day pass in English (because that's what my "stupid" sign says), 'cause I think she does speak English. She does not, apparently, so I switch to Czech. The problem I hadn't foreseen was that in my attempt to say "tricet" (30), she heard "tri" (3) and assumed I wanted a 3-month pass. In her defense, that's what most people want when they renew their current 3-month pass.

She starts printing a 3-month pass, but when I try to pay, she starts down the oh-my-god-stupid-foreigner road. Not enough, she glares at me. She types a number onto the calculator and shows me. It's the number for the 3-month pass. "No. Ne, ne," I try to explain. "30-day." She starts complaining to the other woman standing next to her, blasting words in Czech and shrugging her shoulders. Stupid foreigner.

Luckily, the man next to me speaks wonderful English, and helps me smooth things over. "They don't speak English," he tells me. "She thought you said three."

A fifty-crown coin slams down in front of me, my change. Stupid foreigner.

This is actually a great situation to sum up things I've learned about Czech people in the three+ months of my stay in Prague:

Czechs are indifferent service-givers. The feel of their lines is still (should I say it?) Communist, and what I mean by that is there's usually only one person manning any line, and the service is very brusque. What do you want? Here. Here's your change. Next person. It's not friendly, but fine nonetheless, even towards foreigners.
Right up until the point where not speaking Czech results in a misunderstanding, and then the shit hits the fan, so to speak. I'm used to it, though, so no big deal.
The Czech people I've met who speak English are, in general, some of the nicest people I've ever known, willing to go way out of their way to help me, and I really, really appreciate it. It has made the stressful work of reporting and interviewing in a foreign country a memorable, and enjoyable, experience.

Anyhow, I now have a pass that's valid 'til my departure (22 days!).

I should also mention that I went to dinner with Duke Thanksgiving in Prague, organized by Jewish Life at Duke. It was at what is supposedly one of the best kosher restaurants in the world, King Solomon restaurant.

Dear Friends, I Have Google Wave Invites

2009-11-25T16:22:00.000-05:00

88 Days In, 23 Days Out

An open letter to all my friends and family:

Ok people. Finally got a Google Wave invite. And be warned, because of the way it works, I was able to see all the people who already had it who did not, in fact, respond to my previous s.o.s. call to be invited. Just kidding.

Anyway, it's a letdown being on Wave when your friends aren't. And my invitation count got upped this morning (most people's did, I think), so let me know if you want in.

Much love,

From Zen Palate to Lehka Hlava

2009-11-25T11:41:00.013-05:00

Bringing Vegetarian Food to Prague

By Felicia Tan

(image from restaurace-maitrea.cz)

“You’re crazy,” Martin Dobeš heard when he told people he and his friend Vaclav Stanislav planned to open a non-smoking, vegetarian restaurant in Prague. “It’s never going to work.” In a city where cigarette smoke lingers in restaurants and pork rules supreme, the criticism and laughter rolled in.

As a strict vegetarian for five years, Martin often found only fried cheese, or even fish, in “meatless” sections of menus. The vegetarian restaurants that existed in Prague five or ten years ago were often more specialized or health-oriented. Martin and Vaclav wanted their own restaurant to be built upon an open concept that accepted all people and all styles of food. In fact, Martin guesses now, from what he can tell of his patrons, the majority of them aren’t vegetarian.

“We don’t want to force anybody,” Martin tells me several times. If people try the food and like it, he hopes a door begins to open in their minds. “How is it possible I never tried this before?” he hopes they might say. “I thought it wouldn’t taste good, but it does.”

And maybe, just maybe, they will start to explore other meatless options. Martin strongly believes that eating less meat is beneficial for the body and state of mind—that people will harbor less anxiety in their daily lives. His hope, then, is to encourage the concept of vegetarianism, not through public speaking or insistent promoting, but purely through the taste of the restaurant’s food.

Nonetheless, even Martin’s friends scoffed at the idea of barring smoking at first. You’re killing yourself, they warned. But Martin points to his experience stopping for only a few minutes at a pub on the way home, and coming out covered in smoke. That wasn’t how he wanted to go home to his wife and two children—and when Lehka Hlava, or Clear Head, opened in October 2005, others agreed. Even people who smoked gave the non-smoking environment a thumbs-up. The previous existence of vegetarian restaurants in Prague had suggested this new restaurant would fare decently, but this level of success was quite unexpected—Lehka Hlava’s popularity now oftentimes necessitates reservations for dinner. At present, Martin devotes most of his time to a second venture, Maitrea, which opened earlier this year.

Currently co-running two restaurants, Martin, 35, is a long way from where he started. Fresh out of the University of Economics in Prague, he took a two-month trip through Asia, a graduation present to himself. On that trip, Martin spent a month at a Thai monastery, learning to meditate with Buddhist monks.

“For a month?” I repeat incredulously.

“At the beginning, I was planning to stay there only a week or two,” Martin concedes. “It was quite intensive for a beginner. Many things changed in my head and my attitude.”

Martin returned home to work at Bank Austria Creditanstalt, all the while thinking about what he wanted to really do with his life. However, it wasn’t until he met Vaclav, already the owner of the restaurant Klub Architektu, at a meditation gathering that a new opportunity presented itself. Subsequent gatherings took Martin all over the world, and it was during one such gathering, over dinner at Zen Palate in New York, that the idea of opening a vegetarian restaurant was born. The vegetarian concept had always seemed better in other parts of the world, Martin mused. They should really do something about it in the Czech Republic.

“People don’t have this opportunity to travel and experience the food. They don’t know what they are missing,” he explains. “That was the impulse.”

And an impulse it was. Vaclav called the whole thing at first just an idea between friends—nothing too serious. But when Martin traveled for spiritual retreats—through countries such as Greece, Egypt, Morocco, and India—he drew ideas from vegetarian dishes and interesting combinations of tastes he encountered. He imagined the restaurant offering a fusion of tastes from around the world.

Then, back in Prague in 2005, Martin and Vaclav tried to visit a tea house—Dobra Cajovna, an old favorite—when they found it closed and learned it was available for rent. Going directly to the owner, they seized the opportunity to start their restaurant. Nine months later, Lehka Hlava opened in that little house on the shortest street in Prague, under the newly-minted company they had named Sattva, s.r.o.

Sattva. The word, from Sanskrit, describes one of the three energies from which the world is created. There is no one-word English translation, but sattva encompasses cleanliness, healthiness, joy, inner peace, purity—everything Martin and Vaclav want to represent in their business. Their cooks use non-spiced, pure ingredients, as well as organic food whenever feasible. The menus reflect the owners’ travels, although exotic food must be adapted into a version Czechs will accept—Martin mentions one instance where he tried Indian food so spicy he thought his tongue would fall off. They also take excruciating care in planning the ambience of each restaurant so it exudes calmness. In Maitrea, peach-toned walls create a soothing, earthy feel which is complemented by real plants and the sound of water flowing over the fountain.

They spend hours meeting with each potential worker, making sure he or she will work in harmony with the existing staff. Sometimes, they close the restaurant and take the workers on a trip to nature, forging bonds that they bring back to work. The staff at Lehka Hlava has been together for four years, but Maitrea is only five months old, and Martin’s main responsibility now entails managing his new staff’s relationships there.

He tells me it will take many more months to achieve the right rapport, and it’s easy to see how important it is to Martin to do everything, and not just the food, the right way. For two years after Lehka Hlava opened, Martin even worked his consulting job with Deloitte simultaneously in order to support his family, just so that he would not have to push too much, too fast, for the restaurant to make money. It was two years filled with exhaustion and limited sleeping hours, two years of not having enough time to spend with his wife and kids.

So, despite many offers to open a second restaurant, Martin wasn’t really tempted until he crossed paths with Antonín Koláček, a former businessman. In 2006, Koláček founded Maitrea, a house of personal development, and not long after, encouraged by their similar attitudes and values, offered Martin and Vaclav the opportunity to run the associated vegetarian restaurant.

“They know very well that the strength is in cooperation, not in competition,” Koláček said in an email, echoing Martin’s own sentiments.

Martin works exclusively at the restaurants now—Maitrea opened May 13, and it’s there we are chatting today. As I savor my chickpea soup—it’s deliciously thick, and Martin would be glad to know I’m wondering about the interesting mix of ingredients while I sip—he tells me it’s a good time to open a vegetarian restaurant. Czech people are eating in restaurants more, and the concept of vegetarianism is gaining ground. Ten or fifteen years ago, Martin would have been afraid to open a vegetarian restaurant, but a few years ago, he started to feel that such a restaurant could really be successful.

Casually, Martin waves at a woman who has just been seated. She is Lucie Rubesová, his former colleague from Bank Austria Creditanstalt. Ten years have passed, and she still works there, although the bank has undergone some name changes. She learned of Maitrea through a friend without knowing of Martin’s involvement, and eats there almost every day, enjoying the atmosphere, excellent food, and the feeling that there is some connection between the people who eat in the restaurant.

“Now we are meeting in a different context,” Martin says, looking out over the tables on this floor. “Even though she is not vegetarian, she appreciates what we do here.

“It’s always the best compliment for me.”

Christmas Is A-Coming

2009-11-24T19:46:00.058-05:00

87 Days In, 24 Days Out

The first hints of Christmas have begun to spring up in Old Town Square! (Completely ignoring the hot wine that took the place of the gelato stand between NYU and the astronomical clock, but whatever.) I'm talking about the tree that went up near the Jan Hus statue, tethered by some none-to-secure looking cables. It looks quite pitiful right now, sad and bare as it is, but I'm sure it has potential. They had to put a limit on what size this tree could be, because in 2003, a 25-meter tree fell over (excessive wind) and injured five people. Yikes.

And no, don't worry, the tree is not leaning superbly, it's just my camera, doing it's usual crazy-warping.

This was on my way to Maitrea (Tynska ulicka 6), a vegetarian restaurant that hides in the maze of streets just behind and to the left of that Disney-looking cathedral. One of my articles written for class was about one of the guys who runs the place, and plus I'd just read Molly's article going more into depth about the traditional Czech vegetarian dishes served up there. I had been a little too nervous and distracted to look fully at the menu when I was here interviewing.

Edit: My article on Martin, afore-mentioned restaurant operator, is also posted. Check it here.

Imagine my surprise when I arrive, about 10-15 minutes before the lunch rush (and it seriously WAS a rush--no seats available, yo), and what do I see on the menu? GOULASH. For those of you who aren't studying here in Prague, this is amazing. Goulash is a kind of a soup/stew, made with beef or whatever kind of meat they feel like putting in it. It's traditionally a Hungarian dish, but it's migrated over into the Czech Republic, and it's usually eaten with the Czech bread dumplings. The key part here is that it's a meat dish. And so we usually do not get along.

Yet, here it was. Vegetarian. These words are not conveying how intensely happy I was that I was finally trying a version of this Czech dish. All my friends rave about getting goulash in Czech restaurants and pubs, while I content myself with smazeny syr and potatoes, usually the only czech dish I can routinely order. I have included a photo so you can share in my joy. Even though I know it looks like a bunch of brown sauce.

Tea Escape Off Wenceslas Square

2009-11-23T19:19:00.083-05:00

86 Days In, 25 Days Out

Ever since I started going to tearooms in Prague, I've been meaning to go to one of the original pioneers in bringing tea to the Czech Republic. I'm talking, of course, about Dobrá Čajovna. How could I write about tea without even going there? It's preposterous.

Dobrá Čajovna, which literally means "good tea room," is located right on Wenceslas Square. 14 Wenceslas Square. There's a small sign hanging above the passageway, and walking through it, you can see the tearoom's history on the left. It's written in Czech, but you can tell they're proud of it, anyway. A little further in, you reach a courtyard with seating on the left, tables shaded by massive straw umbrellas, and if you look back, a buddha on the wall presides serenely over the scene. Now, though, it's cold. There's no one sitting outside. On to the shop.

As always, I enter the tearoom and stand in the entranceroom as a newcomer who doesn't know the ways of the establishment. Three cheers for awkwardness. A minute or two later, the attendant (I'm still loathe to call them waiters) takes pity on me and approaches me. "Dobry den," he calls. One thing I love about tearooms and vegetarian restaurants is they almost always greet me in Czech. Even though I think it's fairly obvious I'm foreign (black hair, Asian), they give me a chance. Alas. Immediate fail.

"Dobry den," I say. Such a promising start... "Do I order here, or should I sit down?" He directs me to sit down. Brings me an English menu along with a small brass bell. I'm to ring the bell when I've chosen my tea.

Today, I'm alone, and so are most of the other people in this particular room. There's another room on the other side of the entrance, I believe, but I'm too lazy to look in it. It's about noon, so I see a couple men who could be here on their lunch break, and a young guy in his early 20's who's reading a newspaper. There are little reading lights above each table, which is seated for two. Behind the table I've chosen, there's a little area, more dimly-lit than the rest of the room, which has cushions on the floor. A couple is sprawled out over the cushions.

This is the best place I've seen to come by yourself for a quiet environment to read. The drink and snack menu shows clear signs of being one of the leaders in bringing tea to the country. It's extremely detailed, complete with descriptions of the categories of tea (green, white, red, etc.) as well as in-depth descriptions of each particular tea and some mood which would be conducive to drinking it. Underneath each description is a cute, icon drawing of the type of pot/kettle it will come in, as well as how much tea can be expected to come from it.

It's a distinctive characteristic of all these tea rooms that every time you leave, it's jarring to step back into the noise and movement of the city. Dobrá Čajovna is 20 meters from one of the busiest places in all of Prague, but when I'm swept back into the flow of things, it's strange. I feel as if the world should stay still again for just a little longer.

The “Greatest Czech of All Time”… Almost

2009-11-22T23:58:00.017-05:00

I promised this Jara Cimrman article a long time ago, so here it is. It might be up on the Prague Wanderer site as well. As a sidenote, I was considering expanding on the Cimrman phenomenon for my travel writing final piece, and while researching I came across his Facebook fangroup and "his" LinkedIn profile. You'll understand more after reading this.

Without further ado...

~~~~~~~~

(by Felicia Tan)

Climbing to the top of Petrin Tower may offer some of the best views of Prague, but descending below its ground floor offers a true glimpse into Czech history. Beneath, a small exhibition stands tribute to Jára Cimrman, a man who never existed, but who nevertheless captured the hearts of the Czech people while remaining unknown to the rest of the world.

Created in the 1960’s by Academy Award-winning scriptwriter Zdeněk Svěrák and his friend Jiří Šebánek, Cimrman is known to Czechs as one of the greatest inventors, explorers, and playwrights of all time. He served originally as a caricature of Czech people and as two friends’ way of aiming veiled sarcastic humor toward the Communist powers. As his followers added more and more details to the character’s life, however, Cimrman became something of a national hero.

Opened in 2002, the exhibition—entitled “Genius, Who Has Not Become Famous”—remains an oft-overlooked gem. A Prague Information Service worker, who declined to be named, estimates that of the tower’s 2,000 visitors each weekday (4,000 on Saturdays and Sundays), perhaps 20 percent view the museum below.

“Not many foreigners know about [Cimrman’s] existence,” she says. “And if they go to see the exhibit, they don’t know who he is.”

A rhythmic pounding of footsteps on the wooden staircase indicates a constant stream of tourists descending to find the bathroom, but few venture into the exhibit. Mia, from New York, has stumbled upon it while sightseeing with her Czech friend. She stands in front of a glass case, studying the inscription that accompanies a faded, powder-blue dress once worn by the boy Cimrman.

“I’m so confused,” she laughs.

Not one sentence in the museum reveals that Cimrman is an invented character, which reveals a stubbornness among his followers that has further shaped his characterization. Not one word describes his creators or place in Czech culture, and only a small plaque mentions his disputed existence.

“They make it seem like he’s a real person,” Mia says when her friend informs her of Cimrman’s fictional nature. “It’s kind of weird. Why would you go to the trouble to make up his entire family?”

A three-headed hammer, a lung-power tester for opera singers, and other whimsical Cimrman inventions adorn shelves and walls around the exhibit. Another glass case holds a small-scale model of the “original” Eiffel Tower as it looked before Cimrman recommended Gustave Eiffel pull the legs further apart. He advised other brilliant minds of his time as well—including Albert Einstein on his theory of relativity and Thomas Edison on his light bulb—but, as the story goes, always arrived a few minutes too late at the patent office, and never received recognition for his “contributions.” According to the exhibition, Cimrman filed applications for 237 inventions of his own, including yogurt and the CD (Cimrman’s Disk). All were denied.

In a 2005 television poll, Czechs nearly voted Cimrman the “Greatest Czech of All Time” before he was disqualified by Czech Television on the grounds of never having existed. Cimrman’s inability to achieve international fame encapsulates the Czechs’ desire for their country to receive more credit than it has in the past, Svěrák later told Radio Prague.

Mia has no way of knowing any of that. Neither do any of the foreigners who poke their heads into the exhibit, peeking curiously into glass displays. After a few more minutes of examining the cases, Mia climbs the steps back to the ground floor.

She is still laughing.

Czech I Learned From Facebook

2009-11-22T16:18:00.002-05:00

85 Days In, 26 Days Out

Today, Facebook taught me that bříško means belly. I got excited because I could read the rest of the sentence.

Chceš mít krásné bříško? Want to have a beautiful belly?

SAPA Would Be In The Middle Of Nowhere

2009-11-21T07:03:00.056-05:00

84 Days In, 27 Days Out

Jess had set us all onto the trail of the Vietnamese market one day in Travel Writing. The market area is called SAPA, and it's all the way on the southern outskirts of Prague, which makes sense. The Vietnamese aren't the Czechs' favorite people in the world.

So after a long metro ride (on the red line) and another long bus ride (on the 113) south, south, south (it probably took us an hour to get there), we followed the Peruvians off towards the market. Stop: Sidliste Pisnice. I'll have to say, it didn't impress me much at first. Some scrappy warehouse-looking buildings, a closed restaurant. It got quickly better as soon as we reached the potraviny (grocery story) aisle. Persimmons! White pears! Long string beans! Sesame seed snacks! Not that I would necessarily buy any of those things except for the sesame seed snacks, which I would buy all day for all eternity, but it was incredibly nice to see all these things of Asian culture.

Seeing as we were starving, we continued down, following our noses in search of food. ("It smells like food. Food has to be around here somewhere.") Soon, we hit the food area. Turns out our Peruvian friends knew where they were going--they were already inside one of the restaurants, eating away. Passing up the pizza stand (it was tough.. hah), we stood at the end of the row, looking at this place which was entirely full. Wait, the waitress is motioning us in? Oh no, she's making people get up and move so we can sit down?

By then, we couldn't really leave. I was slightly worried about the fact that I can't eat everything (most things) in Vietnamese cuisine, but decided to play it by ear. Not a good choice. Violeta called it right--one Vietnamese man barked something that sounded somewhat like a question, took our blank stares and hesitant nod for a yes, and proceeded to bring us soup and leafy things and noodles. And meat. Three portions for the three of us.

I'm thinking I need to be slightly less chill when it comes to playing it by ear.

After picking at some stuff I could eat for a bit, I gave up. I hopped two stores over to the Chinese place, sighed in relief when I was greeted with "你好!" and ordered a tofu dish. With rice. No extra charge. 79 crowns. That's GOOD for Chinese food in Prague. It's good for GOOD Chinese food in Prague. In case you're still not getting it, Chinese food in Prague is expensive, as well as shitty. Oh and by the way, I'm glorying in how I can type Chinese on my computer now. Thanks for the tip, Helen!

Walking around with my food which I had accidentally asked for to-go (I did not realize it would take them less than two minutes to cook up this dish for me...), I spotted a socks stand. Lo and behold! I have been searching and searching for socks that are long, thick, and will prevent my legs from chafing when I wear my Ugg boots. (Don't want to talk about how I have Ugg boots, thanks)

Three pairs. 100 crowns ($5.75)

Solid gold.

Žižka, Žižkov, Vitkov.... Whatever.

2009-11-20T07:10:00.194-05:00

83 Days In, 28 Days Out

The fantastic thing about having an ever-present count of days is that I can tell you exactly how long it took me to do something. So for example, it took me 83 days to visit Vitkov Hill, which I've been trying to get to almost since the first week of class. The not-so-good thing is that I always know exactly how many days are left, which only worsens my (lack of) motivation to finish out the semester. I've already mentally checked out of study abroad. Let's go home!

To be fair, I had tried to get to Vitkov Hill before. Remember this utter and complete fail? I decided to try again. After all, the national memorial building is up there, as well as the statue of Jan Zizka that the czechs market as the biggest equestrian statue in the world. Although, it's not really. That honor goes to the newly-built statue of Genghis Khan in Mongolia, circa 2009. I don't think Zizka was even the largest equestrian statue before that. But anyway....

The museum on Vitkov had recently reopened after a two-year hiatus under renovation (So probably a good thing I didn't make it there the first time I tried). This time, Helen and I did some better research as to how to properly get there. We still managed to flub it up. At the Florenc bus station, we were technically supposed to catch a bus. We saw the buses. We could not for the life of us figure out where the stop was to get on one. Then, we spotted the hill itself we were trying to reach.

Screw it, we thought. It's close enough. Let's just walk. Oh, yeah, and that would lead us up the side of the hill the official website had marked as "difficult terrain."

A bunch of steps and some inclines later (difficult terrain, ha!), we were met with this view. And this view. It's a very different one from the view I've mostly seen over the city, which is to say, from the other side of the river. Mostly, from Petrin Tower, or from the Metronome in Letna park. Personally, I like those better, but this one did give a wonderfully straight-shot view of the Žižkov TV Tower, a little further south.

The permanent exhibition inside the National Memorial building up there holds some interesting things worth seeing. You can go down into what I think was a bunker on the hill. Not sure. There's history of the inter-war period (between the world wars), of Masaryk's time. Tomas Garrigue Masaryk is this heroic figure in Czech culture--it seems like they really adore him. What I personally remember of him is that he married an American woman (which didn't go over too well with the Czechs), and either loved her so much or believed her to be an equal, so that he took her last name (Garrigue) to be his middle name. Several quotes on the wall were attributed to TGM. I think he's a bit like our FDR in that sense.

Also exhibited are some articles owned by Jan Palach, who set himself on fire in the middle of Wenceslas Square in 1969 (I think) in protest of the impending "normalization" of the society. We hear about Jan Palach all the time. All the time. One of my pictures from November 17 is of the memorial plaque dedicated to him in Wenceslas Square, laid over with flowers. It was a bit startling for me to realize, while looking at his things now, that he was 21 when he set himself ablaze. I'm 21.

And on top of the building is a viewing platform. They only allow about 25 people or so up to the platform at a time, for reasons which will be obvious when you get up there. The platform isn't that big--it would be super easy for it to get very crowded, very fast. And potentially for the metal-grate floor to give in. Though I'm sure it's very strong.

My rationalization for making this outing when I should have been doing project work was the chance to go to another tearoom, this one also recommended by Eva, which we headed to now.

Čajovna Ve věži. Tearoom in the tower. As we walked around the corner, searching for the "tower," it suddenly loomed in front, reminiscent of something that might have been in Arthur's Camelot. Up, up, and up the circling stairs, to the third and highest floor. Perhaps it's just the tearooms I've been to so far, but it's not just the interiors of the tea rooms which are dedicated with excruciating care. Each one seems to have its own personality... something that defines it--its own special space, whether that's a basement or at the top of a tower.

This time, I brought friends to share tea with. At noon on a weekday, it might have be a draw between going with a friend and going for some solitude, but on a Friday night, there was no question. Everyone came with a friend, a significant other, and the couples continued to flow in and out as the evening went on, with maybe one or two groups over 30. A generational phenomenon?

This tearoom was also asian-themed, with a Buddha on the wall in our room. But in keeping with each teahouse having its own personality (the first teahouse had served my tea in a pre-prepared pot and little china cup), Čajovna Ve věži served tea in small bowls rather than cups, and our first pot of Taiwanese green tea came was accompanied by a canister of boiling water.

Our attendant, Jan, left us with instructions on how to pour the tea after the first "flush," after we had finished our first bowls. "Pour the water into your bowls, wait for two or three minutes so until it is not so hot, and then pour it into the pot. Then, wait another two or three minutes and pour the tea." We would know from tasting the tea how to adjust our preparation process for the next flush, he said. He may have vastly overestimated our degree of tea knowledge (none).

If the water was too hot when it went into the pot, it would destroy the tea leaves, Jan explained when we queried further. Hence, the warning not to pour boiling water straight into the pot, a procedure which had first seemed terribly counterproductive to us. On the other hand, f it was too cold, the taste wouldn't permeate fully. If we wanted our tea stronger, we should use water at a higher temperature.

I never knew tea could be such an art.

November Sunset in Prague

2009-11-19T23:00:00.001-05:00

Water Pipe, Take Two

2009-11-19T05:45:00.062-05:00

82 Days In, 29 Days Out

I didn't actually get to the water pipe business in my last, so-named post, so here it goes again.

Čajovna U Kostelu. The music stopped momentarily, and in the pause between what in my meandering imagination might have been a change of cd's, I heard the chiming of bells marking the hour, coming from the church outside. Then, layered over the bells, came another sound, which at first I mistook for excess bangs and rattles from the boiler room. It was like a cross between a water boiler, those quick kitchen ones, and the sound of a child (or anyone) blowing happily through their straw into a drink.

I peeked cautiously out the door. To my right, in the room where I had entered the teahouse, the laptop man was busy with a water pipe. Oh.

I wondered what he was smoking.

In my hour and a half on those cushions and doing some reading, I finished only about three-quarters of my pot of tea. I was alone, and so was the man in the next room, but it was a Wednesday afternoon, and so I wondered whether it was unusual for patrons to arrive without a group of friends to chat with while sipping tea.

What Is This Water Pipe Business?

2009-11-18T15:38:00.177-05:00

81 Days In, 30 Days Out

Here I was, standing in Strossmayerovo namesti, pondering a colorful shop sign hanging over a few steps leading downwards to a door.

125 hours to my deadline. The assignment: 700 words on food or drink. I had thought about my culinary adventures in Belgium and Rome (mostly gelato adventures in Rome), but all of my potential topics were either too broad, too simple, or didn't interest me. I had no topic. It was a problem.

And then, I had the greatest idea. While at dinner in Lehka Hlava earlier in the month, I fallen headlong into a state of blissful relaxation while nursing a gigantic, clear and plump, open-topped pot-mug of steaming, fresh mint-leafed tea. All the while, my friend Eva had been telling me about the tea houses in Prague, where you could go sit on cushions on the floor and just drink tea. What a cool idea!

The only problem was, I hadn't been to any of them. Which brings me back to the current situation.

I studied the swirling red sign. Čajovna U Kostelu, it proclaimed. Teahouse by the church. The entrance looked more like it could have moonlighted for the front door of Frog and Toad's burrow, but Eva had recommended it, so I stepped down and pushed the door open.

It was darker inside. The light had been shining brightly outside, but in here, bamboo shades filtered the light, turning it the right shade of dark to complement the Oriental-inspired interior. Hunched over, feet from the door, a man pored over his computer. It looked like he had been there for hours, and would be there for hours more.

A woman appeared from the back room to greet me--she had heard the door disturb the bell hung from the ceiling for the very purpose. "Mluvíte anglicky?" I query as usual. Her smile fades slightly. "Wait," she tells me in English.

Within moments, a young guy appears from where she has vanished. He looks scruffy but not unkempt, strands of brown hair escaping loose from the tie holding the rest of it back. It's the kind of messy that's not unaware, and his speech has the same flippant, anything-flies kilter as his appearance. He shows me six or seven new teas lined up on the counter. As a first-time teahouse-goer, I opt for the exotic Tibetan black tea--may as well go all out--but I also note the Taiwanese Oolong tea resting next to it, a tidbit my Taiwanese friend will enjoy.

Doing my best imitation of a cat padding down the hallway (the floor continues to creek cheerfully), I peek into rooms as I pass them. At the end of the hallway, at the back of the farthest room, I catch a momentary glimpse of a young girl and boy sharing a little more than tea before ducking hastily back out. That room on the right! That looks good.

I settle into a corner on a slightly faded, burnt-red cushion, back against the wall, a low wooden table flanking me to the left. This room is hung on each wall with blue rugs and red rugs--dusky sky blue and burnt-red, with moons. Music plays almost continuously, flowing smoothly from African pipes to throaty violins.

The Tibetan tea is scalding when it arrives. It tastes interesting when it first hits my tongue. No.. when it second hits my tongue. Too hot to taste anything the first, careless time. It's dark, with just the faintest hint of the tangy and metallic. I'm pleased. This tea meshes well with the teahouse it's in, with its straw and red-shades and gold and midnight blue pillows scattered around the room. With the lampshade hung with heavy tapestry material and olive-green-and-gold tassels, with the rich colors, burnished and dark, with the beads hanging over the door entrance, with the--

Momentary pause. I'm not getting too mentally excited with this whole teahouse thing, or anything.

The Revolution's 20th Anniversary

2009-11-17T03:24:00.129-05:00

80 Days In, 31 Days Out

So. 20 years ago as of Tuesday, students began protests in Prague that felled the Communist Regime. Supposedly, the rumor that sparked these protests--that a student had been killed by the communist police--was a lie. That's true, says Jan Urban, who incidentally is also an NYU in Prague professor here. It's pretty amazing how some of the professors this program has can claim such important roles in what has happened in the last 25 years. Jan Urban, Monika Pajerova, for example. Pajerova was among the core group of students who led the charge against the regime.

November 17, 1989. The students began a march at Albertov in Prague, made their way south to Vysehrad (which I've described before), back up the river, and eastward on Narodni street. There, they met resistance from the police, and the march became a violent encounter with communist law enforcement. And the Velvet Revolution was on its way.

2009. For the twentieth anniversary of the Revolution, the city organized a reenactment of the march (sans violent beatings), inviting back some of those students who had originally participated in the march 20 years before. They retraced their Vysehrad route, and a few other friends and I stationed ourselves on Narodni Trida, almost to the river, to wait for the "parade." We never did quite figure out what was the official parade and what wasn't.

As soon as we began to see and hear signs of the march approaching (drumming, music), masses of people who were waiting along the sides of the street, just as we were, jumped out and walked in front of the march itself. Which is completely symbolic, actually. That's what happened in 1989, after all. The students began the demonstration, and they were joined by thousands of people along their route.

There was definitely an organized section of this reenacted march which consisted of a chinese new year-like large animal, some giant keys, etc. There were also tons of signs and other odd items being held up, and it's likely these were onlooker-made. I'll never know where the official ended and the non-official started. We ourselves joined the stream of walkers, who all seemed to be carrying/shaking their keys. I don't know this for sure, but the keys are their symbol of freedom, just like their "v" for victory.

As we got closer to the stage for the concert, the stream became a jammed crowd/mob. My friend and I decided for some reason that it would be a great idea to go with the flow of people, see what they saw. And this flow of people was heading towards the arches under which the plaque commemorating November 17, 1989 hangs on the wall. We had both visited it earlier in the semester, but this was insane. Everyone was headed that way, understandably, including a spread-out group of students who were holding high a black, maybe brown, um... long, cloth-covered contraption that I didn't really understand. It said... T-u-n-(something). In any case, these young people were carving a better path than we were, and so we piggybacked (more like ducked under an unoccupied place under the contraption) for some distance forward.

It was getting hotter the further we went underneath the arches. There were some lit candles along the left side, but that didn't explain the temperature rise. It was so crowded that we were right on top of the memorial almost before we even saw it. Hundreds of candles had been placed in front of the plaque, which was wreathed with flowers. It was intensely hot, standing in directly in front of the bronze plaque. People who had braved the crush of the mob to reach this point were still lighting their own candles and adding to the collection of flickering light on the floor.

Then, we were out, facing a small wall of people who were attempting to enter the arches against traffic that was constantly streaming through from the other side.

It got still increasingly difficult to navigate towards the stage which had been set up for the concert and for Vaclav Havel, first president of the Czech Republic, to say his brief words. While we were moving (being pushed) along, what would I hear but one of my favorite songs of all time--Hey, Jude? Given that John Lennon played a significant role here in Prague (see: Lennon Wall). Once we untangled ourselves from everyone else, we decided it was time for some decompressing, which meant a stop at Hajek for my favorite ice cream in Prague before heading home.

'Cause we can't have a celebration for the fall of Communism without some ice cream.

...You Don't Know How To Ride A Bike?

2009-11-15T07:20:00.090-05:00

78 Days In, 33 Days Out

Past the Spanish Steps again this morning, we reached the much anticipated Villa Borghese gardens and park. It's the second-largest public park in Rome, and was also "featured" in Respighi's Pines of Rome musical piece. I say featured because that's what Wikipedia said, but I don't know what that means. Inspired by, maybe?

Helen had the greatest idea to rent a peddlebike near the entrance to the park. We had already seen some other kids and some families peddling around looking very amused or panicky or both, so obviously we had to follow suit. After some debating as to whether we should rent the two-seater or the four-seater, we settled on a two-seater and a regular ol' bike. I took the bike.

I haven't ridden in a bike in ages, seriously, ever since that time I rode a bike at Deepa's house maybe three years ago--also after not having ridden a bike in years. Still, I fared about as well as my peddlebike friends, who had some issues figuring out the brake (that there was one) as well as peddling the heavily-motorized contraption up a decent incline. In the end, we saw way more of the park--its colors were incredibly vibrant!--in an hour than we would have by walking. Good call, Helen.

Somehow, we missed getting up to the spot in Villa Borghese park which is supposed to give one of the best views of Rome. We did, I think, pass it on our way to Piazza del Popolo, though. That piazza was also not designed by Michelangelo, just like Piazza Navona wasn't designed my Michelangelo. Disregarding the fact that I'm excited about all things Michelangelo at this point, I had been told some of the piazzas in Rome were designed by him. Which?

Photo Credit: Margie Truwit/The Chronicle. Hahahah.

Also, I've been spelling Michelangelo wrong. I'm too lazy to go back and fix it in my last post.

Post-lunch at a wine bar (Il Brillo, close to Piazza del Popolo, and the biggest portions for first courses we've had in this entire trip), we traversed down the now-familiar Via Del Corso, routed to the synagogue, mosied over the bridge onto the island, and got gelato on the island. In Rome, "gelaterias" are literally on every street corner. I came into this trip thinking it would be italian restaurants we wouldn't be able to escape, but it's the gelato. And I'm not complaining. Gelato places in Italy are very generous with portions--I'm comparing this to Prague where a $1 cone of ice cream means a tiiiiny little scoop on top. Then again, in Italy they're charging about $2-$3. But two or three large scoops, whipped cream on top (free of charge! I need to find out why they do that there), and the most incredible flavors you've ever seen.

For example, at the stand on the island, I selected coconut and Ferrero Rocher. Also common there is Nutella. I've never had the originally, actually, and come to think of it, the ice cream could have been a good introduction. Or it could have been disastrous.

To complete the day's route, we circled down south to visit the Circus Maximus, the remains of Rome's largest and oldest chariot-racing stadium. Previously, I had read that there wasn't much left of the stadium, but I was still itching to go. Byproduct of seeing a photo of the imagined reconstruction of the stadium. I should have listened more to the warning that--really, really--there's nothing left except a large open space where the stadium used to be.

So, we get to the Circus Maximus, and Helen goes, ".... this is it? I saw this when we were at Palatine Hill!" Uh, yeah. This is it. So, there's just a semi-recessed area of land, sort of in the shape of a track, with a median of grass and, like, one tree in the middle. It's full of stones and sand, and Romans run on it now. Funny. Romans run on their historical landmarks. And for them, historical means 2nd century BC. It was still really nice to walk a loop around the circle, though, considering after dinner we would dive headlong into a panic-filled few hours trying to catch our plane back to Prague.

Michaelangelo Was A Genius

2009-11-14T07:18:00.136-05:00

77 Days In, 34 Days Out

Someone had told me: avoid ridiculously long lines at the Vatican on Sunday at all costs. Had no idea whether that was true, and still have no idea, but I wasn't looking forward to finding out. So we boarded the Rome metro and headed out, along with half the subway, to Vatican City on Saturday.

Now, I've mentioned the Prague public transportation honor code system many a time. Surely, you have heard me say that getting onto a tram or metro is completely barrier-free, but if you get caught by the on-again-off-again transportation police. In Rome, we bought our tickets and swiped them no problem. When we got OFF at the Vatican stop, however, the transportation police were waiting for the entire hoard of disembarkers at the exit turnstiles, asking for valid tickets before allowing us through.

I'm unsure whether they were only waiting at the Vatican stop (and other such tourist-laden stops) because it would be the most time efficient, or whether they station them at all stops. I'm leaning towards the first. Personally, I think it's a better system than Prague's.

Sun affects my ability to enjoy tourist sites immensely. Immensely. It was a bit foggy/hazy this day at the Vatican, and maybe as a result, I was somewhat underwhelmed. Whether it's because of Dan Brown or because I just have perpetually grand images of things like the Vatican or the Colosseum, it just wasn't as impressive as I had expected. Or hoped. Couple things I really did enjoy..

- the Michaelangelo sculpture of the Mary and Jesus in St. Peter's Basilica, on your right after walking in. It was pretty much amazing. After this trip, I've pretty much decided Michaelangelo was amazing, period. My audio guide told me this sculpture was the only one he signed his name to.

- Most of the statues in St. Peter's Basilica. One good thing about the audio guide (out of so many not-so-phenomenal things) was that it gave great descriptions of whatever scenarios the statues were supposed to be in. One giant statue of a woman carved into one of the Basilica's four huge pylons was waving a cloth into which Jesus's face had been imprinted. Another statue (of some pope or other?) was flanked by two angles--one of history and one of justice.

- The Sistine Chapel. The Sistine Chapel. The Sistine Chapel. The Sistine Chapel. Hand-painted Michaelangelo ceiling. The Last Judgment.

- The ceilings of the Vatican museums. Someone--Helen's mom, I think--described the museums and the Sistine Chapel as the bus station because everyone's always looking up. They have good reason.. I'm biased, and always attracted to architectural and wall details rather than actual paintings themselves (*cough* Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna *cough*), but these were drop-dead gorgeous.

Things I wish I had known:

- Who painted all that stuff on the ceilings in the Vatican Museums.

- What exactly all the frescos/paintings/tapestries in the Sistine Chapel are picturing. I'm reading some of it on Wikipedia now, and would really love to go back and match up the descriptions.

- When websites tell you to get there at midday (12, 12:30-ish) to avoid the lines, THEY MEAN IT. Everyone thinks there will be mad lines, so they get there crazy early. And as a result, there are mad lines in the morning. When we left the Vatican museums and Sistine at 12:30, the line was non-existent. So, DON'T go early.

Following a recommendation of Helen's friends, who were about a day ahead of us in the normal tourist itinerary, we searched out a gelato place next to the Vatican. It's pretty easy--it's on the right as you walk from the metro stop to the Vatican Museums--Old Bridge Gelateria. In their words, it looks like a "hole in the wall." That hole in the wall is a damn good deal. 1.30 Euros will get you up to three flavors, if I'm not mistaken. They have a silly guy working there who first asked me if I wanted whipped cream on mine (no, grazie!), and then commented that I wanted it "on the rocks." Ok... I'll go with it.

Back to the river, around Castel Sant'Angelo (couldn't tell you what's in it, other than what I read online. It used to be a prison, was at one point also a fortress, and now houses a museum), across the river, up Helen's favorite charming street called Via Giulia, through Campo di Fiori (unimpressive), past Area Sacro, tons and tons and tons of walking, until Helen hit upon the best idea of the day.

Let's go to the Spanish Steps!

We weren't due to hit it until Sunday, but what the heck. As we walked over, we imagined we might even catch some of the last rays of sun before sunset. This, I would say we thought at around 3:30. We caught a lot more than a few rays, we caught unreal golden light as the sun was going down. The Spanish Steps are cool not only for the architecture (the longest and widest steps in Europe), but because everyone sits there. Tourists for the most part, I guess. Just sit, hang out, enjoy the sunset. It's worth enjoying.

Besides what was normally at the steps, we also stumbled on a tribute to the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Why it was in Italy, I don't know. They weren't ever under Communist rule, were they? Just Fascist, I thought. Seriously, though, if there's one thing I've learned being in Europe, it's that Europe's version of important events in history can be completely different than the American one--and maybe more interesting. All of Europe is celebrating/commemorating 20 years of no communism. (Americans: what? things exist outside the U.S.?)

As the sun went down, we prepared to leave. By a stroke of good luck, someone had proposed climbing the steps one last time and taking the road from the top rather than the bottom. Right before we passed by the attempted fake reconstruction of the Berlin Wall, the video started going. It was the most amazing montage of pictures/video/3D-imaging/accompanying music that I have ever seen. Tons of people watched along with us while helicopters were a constant buzz overhead, capturing live footage of this commemoration, I imagine.

Like I said, it's a big deal here.

The Colosseum? It's not Domus Aurea?

2009-11-13T06:20:00.107-05:00

76 Days In, 35 Days Out

We had several plans for our time in Rome, one of which included not seeing the Colosseum until Sunday. We couldn't have that. Friday morning, we set off on our now-familiar long walks around cities, heading for the Colosseum. Giovanni had drawn for us the most direct route to the Colosseum, so we were fairly confident. Our map, and the map that every single tourist carries around because it's free and I think printed by the city of Rome, clearly shows miniature drawings of major tourist sites. Margie proposed that the drawings were to scale.

Ok, I thought. So, Domus Aurea, a big hulking section of ruins on the map, should be obvious when we pass by. Maybe this is Domus Aurea, I mused as we walked next to small brown statues ten minutes later. Or this? Or, wait, there's a big thing up ahead at the end of this tree-lined path. Domus Aurea? Psych! It's the Colosseum! (Wow, bringing back the old days...) Apparently we missed Domus Aurea altogether. Which we think is the case is Rome because there are so many random ruins around. Forget to pay attention, and you've just missed the house where Nero gave the best parties ever.

I don't know what I was expecting to see in the Colosseum. Actually, I lie. I was expecting something out of Gladiator, I guess. Big round stadium, Sand in the middle. Ability for visitors to walk out into middle and imagine self as a gladiator. Such was not the case. Visitors can only walk around the edges, on the first and second floors, and the entire structure was smaller than I had imagined. Still, it was pretty cool to see the network of underground tunnels in the center which would have been used to raise animals and performers (slaves?) into the arena. But not nearly as cool as sand.

Next, we visited Palatine Hill, the hill where the Roman Empire was supposedly founded. Romulus and Remus were kept alive by a wolf, and later on Romulus killed Remus and Rome was named after him. The Hill is one of Rome's seven hills, and 40 meters down on one side is the Roman Forum. On the other side is the Circus Maximus--or where the Circus Maximus would have been. I didn't see the remains of the Circus Maximus, or else I would have been far less excited to visit it two days later, trust me.

Then, I had a slight mix-up with a couple of arches. So, there's an arch (of Constantine) directly next to the Colosseum, and two arches in the Roman Forum, the arch of Titus and the arch of something severus. Somehow, I read my map wrong and thought I was at Titus when in fact I was at severus, and in doing so had unknowingly walked the entire length of the Roman Forum. The arches are phenomenal, though. They are mainly ceremonial and tributary (is that the word I'm looking for?) monuments, designed to commemorate the bravery or success of a certain person. It would have been really nice to join a tour to learn about the arches. They're beautifully carved throughout with scenes, words, symbols, all of which I wish I knew the meaning of. I could probably sit at an arch all day studying it, wondering about the significance of this picture or that one.

The rest of the day was typically tourist. Italian lunch, the building with the horse-drawn chariots, Trevi Fountain (glad it's not high tourist season. Guy next to us intoned to his friend, "last time I was here, we couldn't get anywhere near the fountain..), the Pantheon, Piazza Navona and my favorite fountain in Rome. Churches. Maybe the only other thing worth mentioning was our escapade at Piazza Colonna.

I have a picture of the Piazza Colonna from before we even went to the Trevi Fountain. I had thought it was funny that a pigeon was washing itself in this little fountain. And for some odd reason, I had rationalized to myself that the pigeon in the fountain was the reason a bunch of people were gathered around the edge of the square, all looking in one direction. At the pigeon! It makes sense. Kind of. I'm laughing as I look back at that, though. A half hour after pigeon incident, we were walking by the Piazza again on our way to the Piazza Navona. Suddenly we were ushered along by governmental guys, straight into a crowd of excited people all holding cameras and looking towards a certain building.

We looked in the same direction. In front of this building, blockaded off and teeming with government guys (all wearing black, most wearing sunglasses, and nearly all on their phones with scowls on their faces), was a dozen or more black cars and camera crews. This has got to be important, we thought, seeing as there are snipers on the roof.

We had a guess as to what was going on. The week before, we had come across an article, in the Prague Post or somewhere, mentioning that the prime minister of the Czech Republic, Jan Fisher, was bringing the signed Lisbon Treaty to Rome to deposit it in wherever they usually keep documents of this importance. And that should be a pretty big deal. The Czech Republic was, of course, the last nation holding out on signing the treaty, making for a constant stream of headlines about the Czech Republic in the Times, Wall Street Journal, etc. that it has seen in many years. Klaus must feel important.

What is this all about? Margie asked the French woman next to her, also holding a camera, staring eagerly at the building.

Je ne sais pas! she replies happily, and is so happy someone understands her she starts rattling off sentences at Margie, and then successively at Helen and I (no french!) until she left maybe 15 or 30 minutes later, shaking her head. I don't know what this is. I'm just going to watch it on television....

Ah yes, here's the article about Jan Fisher and the Lisbon Treaty. So we weren't completely mental. Ah-hem, an hour and a half later, and after deciding we had already put in so much time that we weren't willing to leave without seeing SOMETHING, they finally got going. You would think the government guys would be nice enough to tell spectators that nothing was going to happen for an hour and a half. Jerks. I bet they're all laughing at us. There were two waves of important-looking people from the building's exit. The first wave contained someone carrying a big box which was consequently stowed into the trunk of one of the black cars and driven away (Lisbon treaty? Lisbon treaty?). The second wave was much bigger, and we believe contained Silvio Berlusconi, prime minister of Italy, and also Vasco Errani, president of the Rome region of Italy, who I'm pretty sure is in my blurry picture, waving at the crowd.

After the fact, the most likely scenario for what we saw was the signing of Serbian-Italian agreements. Which would explain the 20-black-cars-long motorcade out of the Piazza at the end. No Lisbon treaty? Darn.

Roman Bus Production

2009-11-12T05:57:00.001-05:00

75 Days In, 36 Days Out

There's a reason Wizz Air is a budget airline...

In my personal experience (aka these past two weekends), it doesn't have much to do with what actually happens on the flight. See, my usual airline is Southwest, which is billed as a budget airline and comes up in every single case study we look at in management class. At least, it feels like it. At Southwest, there are no seat assignments. They turn planes around quickly at the gate. Ok, so there are small (or not so small) differences with European budget airlines. They serve free drinks and allow free checked baggage, for example.

Wizz Air, and many other European budget airlines, fly to secondary airports on the outskirts of the cities. They are often much further than the city's main airport. Or, in Rome's case, not further at all. Just less accessible.

For example..

It took us an hour and 15 minutes on the plane to fly from Prague to Rome Ciampino. We then waiting at least an hour and 15 minutes on the ground at Ciampino to get on a bus into central Rome. It was, as we all though, a serious production. The most direct way to get from the airport into the city is by bus. There might be about four bus companies that run these shuttle buses into Rome's main train station. However, as all flights seemed to come into Ciampino at precisely the same time, there were long lines to get on the bus. Add to that the fact that when you buy a ticket, it's actually fairly difficult to tell which company you just bought from. After getting screwed twice, after more than an hour of waiting, we sat down to play cards with newly-met friends from NYU also traveling to Italy for the weekend. Two minutes later, we were able to board a bus.

Clearly we should have started playing cards earlier.

An Intro to David Černy

2009-11-11T15:50:00.003-05:00

74 Days In, 37 Days Out

My resolution to continue seeing as much of Prague as possible is falling to the wayside, little by little. The way I set up my semester, most of my international traveling falls in November, coincidentally also when most of my project work falls. Rome's looming for this weekend (my level of excitement is not coming through, I tell you). And during the week, I coop up frantically doing all of the work I can't do while traveling. The little side trips I made all throughout the first half of the semester aren't happening right now. And I'm really sad about it. Going away every weekend has made me feel out of touch with Prague. I'll start doing some of them again after this weekend--promise. And then you will have stories.

Sandeep was awesome enough to send me an NPR story about David Černy--quirky Czech sculptor extraordinaire--and his newest work. Černy is infamous in Prague for doing quirky statues and sculptures. Close by my dorm, his interpretation of Europe hangs in the DOX gallery (Entropy, I think it's called). His "babies" crawl up and down Zizkov TV tower. I've been meaning to do a Černy tour for a while. There's plenty to visit.

Finally got a picture of his work in the Lucerna passageway between Stepanska and Ve Smeckach--and no scaffolding this time. It's a man on an upside-down horse, hanging precariously by ropes tying the horse's feet together. The thing actually swings. I believe (I could be totally wrong) that it's a parody of the horse statue at the top of Wenceslas Square. The one of St. Wenceslas, where I have been told Prague-ers love to meet--under the horse's tail.

On another note, all (most) of the news circulating Prague right now is about the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, which is coming up next Tuesday, November 17th, 2009. Dissident stories. David Černy. Vaclav Havel. Etc, etc, etc. Germany had their 20th anniversary celebrations for the fall of the Berlin Wall on Monday.

Now it's Prague's turn. Get ready. Mick Jagger's coming. Although I will be in Rome... gosh darn.

TOMS

2009-11-10T08:44:00.037-05:00

73 Days In, 38 Days Out

Mashable leads me to all sorts of awesome things on the internet. Not frequenting Youtube a whole lot, I love Top lists such as 7 of the Most Inspiring Videos on the Web. Which mentions none other than TOMS shoes.

I'm not sure whether TOMS has come up here before. I first learned of it through the ever-fashion-saavy (haha...) NYU students, who brought it up in my Management class. They're these apparently-very-comfortable shoes from a not-too-old company.... and the idea behind it is that, whenever someone buys a pair of shoes, they give a pair to a child who doesn't have any. You may have seen them on this AT&T commercial.

Blake Mycoski talks about starting up TOMS, his encounter with a loyal customer, and other bits and pieces in this video.

Walking Tour: Comic-Style

2009-11-08T11:40:00.022-05:00

71 Days In, 40 Days Out

Sunday morning. Had last amazing breakfast at Albert Inn. Lugged all our shit out onto the streets of Brussels. And when I say lugged our shit, I mean including a computer. Needless to say, I'm not bringing a computer to Italy next weekend. Anyway, what could we do that wouldn't cost money (chocolate is expensive, yo) but would be unique to Brussels? We know--the comic strip tour!

The comic strip trail comprises 31 walls in or near the city center which are adorned with larger than life comics. Brussels started doing the comic strip murals in 1993, and since it's the home of the comic strip, it's a fitting way to decorate and beautify the city. Yes, I'm paraphrasing internet sources right now.

Favorite: Lucky Luke. Scroll through the slideshow below to see every comic strip mural we hit on our walking tour.

Bruges and Its Weather Polarity

2009-11-07T17:14:00.131-05:00

70 Days In, 41 Days Out

Well, good news. The train strike is over. Bruges is a go!

The bad news... it's raining. Still optimistic as our train was leaving Brussels, the optimism drained very quickly as we reached Ghent, and rain started streaming down the windows. Bruges is incredibly cute, even in the rain. Truthfully, I think all cities suck in the rain (...PRAGUE and--I'm using the term 'cities' loosely--Duke aka one large sinkhole during rainstorms). Bruges was better than most, though. Partly this is due to the way some of the houses lining its streets look like they could be home central for that huge gingerbread man from Shrek 2. (Shrek 3? I'm not sure I ever watched Shrek 3, actually. I don't see the appeal of three movies about a talking ogre.)

Highlights include me debating whether the Belfry in the main square is leaning (I'm still really concerned--you judge for yourself in the picture, although I warn you in advance that my camera super warps many things), funny food advertising (probably the best pita in town!), and getting way too excited to spot the boats for the canal tour (be excited to take a picture! dunk the front half of your left foot in three inches of freezing cold water! with a mesh running sneaker on!).

Not.

Right around that time, the sun started to break through some of the clouds. This is going to be a recurring theme for the next couple of weeks--I can feel it. I'm also convinced that when weather underground, the site I've been told works way better for Europe than weather.com, projects a 30% chance of rain, what it should really say is that it will be raining 30% of the time. There have not been many days I've experience so far this semester when this approach wouldn't have worked. Now, when there's any percentage chance of rain, I take my umbrella. Which is broken, by the way. But not as much as Seema's, so we're still ok. Anyway, the mood among the three of us was, Let's take advantage of the weather and board a boat for the canal tour!

About a quarter of the way into this tour, the man sitting in the front right corner of the boat (what is that, starboard and port? bow?) goes, "uh-oh..."

"Uh-oh..." repeats our guide on his microphone. He had been doing the tour in two, maybe three languages (French, Flemish, English? I was busy taking pictures and wasn't really listening). I would not have been surprised if he had repeated the "uh-oh" in three different accents.

Downpour. Had this boat had a collapsible canopy or something similar which we could whip out and put up above everyone, we would have been completely fine. As it was, everyone puts up their own umbrella, which you can imagine makes for a ridiculous patchwork of umbrellas above a tiny boat (and clearly the umbrellas take up more horizontal real estate than a butt and a body. It was not working well).

The end result was that everyone head stayed relatively dry. The same could not be said for jeans, butts, and jackets, which were taking the brunt of the torturous dripping off other people's umbrellas. Me being the jeans (knees and below got a nice dark rinse I think I'm going to try to find when I get back to the states). Helen being the butt. Margie being her leggings, but because you couldn't tell, I'm not counting it. Bah.

And remember my soaked and freezing left foot? Bruges insisted on equality of left and right. Now, both my socks were wet and cold. To remedy this unfortunate situation, we popped into a (warm) cafe. It was pretty full, as were all the cafes around--everyone had kind of the same idea. We took turns using the one-room bathroom, trying not too take too long with the hand dryer since we were creating lines out the door (only somewhat!) whilst also illegitimately drying our socks slash jeans. I say illegitimately because there was not much drying involved. At least, it seemed that way when we left the cafe.

Then, of course, the sun came out. Jeans dried a bit. No hope at all for the socks. Bruges is beautiful in the sun. It's cutesy in the rain, but absolutely beautiful in the sun. Its little canals have earned it the nickname "Little Venice," but I can't ever imagine Venice as this little, this intimate, this quaint. It's probably not. I'm sure Venice is a gigantic tourist trap... compared with the small tourist trap that is Bruges.

As the day was winding down, we hit the chocolate museum for three or four stories of chocolate history and fun. Don't remember too too much of the history (see: major) beyond the fact that Jean Neuhaus (of Neuhaus Belgian chocolate, and creator of the praline) was involved and so were Mayans and their cocoa beans. Also that there are three types of cocoa beans, and one results in more bitter chocolate than the others. What I DID remember, though, was that Belgian chocolate is supposed to be supreme because in the process of making it, the cocoa powder is ground down to particles which are much finer than they are elsewhere. Something like 30 microns? I could be making that up. And that means that the chocolate won't taste grainy on your tongue.

So now, every time I've eating chocolate since, all I think about is whether it tastes grainy, and how many microns the powder was ground down to. Delicious, I know.

It reminds me of my issue (oh boy, I just typed issuu. You know what that means. Chronicle, be glad.) with analyzing books. I used to be a much more prolific reader than I am now, and I would just read and read for fun. It ruined the experience for me a bit when I, gasp, actually had to think critically about what was happening in these books. I may never have thought as much as you about a book, but I may have enjoyed it a whole lot more.

And now chocolate.

Sigh.

Brother and Sister Pis

2009-11-06T17:43:00.004-05:00

69 Days In, 42 Days Out

Saturday dawned bright and rainy. Being with a couple of political science majors and history geeks (in a good way!), the first stop was the European Union area. Brussels in the headquarters, and there are a bunch of cool buildings over to the east of the city center. Huge courtyard area encircled by an elevated, glass-and-chrome walkway. Glass and chrome buildings. Little tiny booklets printed with the European Parliament constitution printed in multitudes of languages other than the obviously-desired English and French. Steps along the back end which are wheelchair-friendly and designed to be awesome to look at. Seriously, the steps might have been my favorite part of the whole complex, and my friends missed them completely.

Then, it was a walk through the Royal Palace neighborhood (Belgian flag flying over the palace--monarch in the house!) and a sneak peak--not!--at blue skies..... to the Magritte Museum. Expanding my horizons, everyone. Take note. René Magritte was a Belgian surrealist artist. You've probably seen his painting with the man in the bowler hat with an apple over his face? He also, as I learned, likes to paint naked women transitioning into different colors or shapes, aka mermaids. Also, he just likes to paint something transitioning into something else. Like, leaves transitioning into birds. Those were my favorites. Stuff like this.

Then, five steps outside the Magritte Museum, was our very first waffle stand. Actually, waffle van. There are these bright yellow vans that scream "GLACE" or "GAUFFRES" which park mainly near tourist sites. Before our trip, I had read up on waffles, learning that there are two kinds.

the kind we normally have in the US: lighter and airier.
Liege: heavier, often found without whipped cream or toppings, caramelized around the edges

If I'm not mistaken, the gauffres vans sold the second kind. At least, there were no toppings. Alas, as I turned away from the second gauffres van (I had resisted temptation at the first one, but to no avail) I was accosted by strange asian ladies holding petition-looking sheets, asking me to sign for the starving children in... actually, I don't even know where. Because of some combination of tolerance, pity, kindness, etc. that I need to get rid of ASAP, I gave up 5 euros towards what I'm sure is not starving children in whatever. I drew the line when she told me the minimum was 10 euros. It's a good thing she gave it up when I started to really chafe. When I get mad, I get mad.

On the walk down to the Grand Place, Helen and Margie took the liberty of buying frites from a corner stand. I did not partake. I had been forewarned that they fry these frites in meat oil or something similar. I was also not particularly enticed by their combination of mayonnaise, ketchup, and onions. Piled high. No stomachache for me, thank you very much. Chocolate, though... chocolate, I will do. Splurged for some Neuhaus chocolate, which you can ironically buy from the Prague airport.

Of course, walked down to see the Manneken Pis (some confusion ensued, as the tourist maps make it very unclear how the grand place is oriented). The Manneken Pis, and here I'm reading directly off my "Legends of Manneken-Pis" postcard, is a legendary Brussels figure. One legend says some rich guy lost his son, and after five days, found him at the corner of Etuve street, pissing. Another legend says that a little boy saved the city from being burnt down by a conflagration by putting out the wick. How gallant. (Jar Jar Binks-style)

You know you're there when you walk down a random cute street, and up ahead you see a pack of tourists all looking at one corner and pointing cameras at it. Not to be outdone, the chocolate shops next to the Manneken Pis--always ready to make money off the wave of tourists--all boast larger-than-life statues and figurines of Manneken. Multi-colored, too.

The day wouldn't have been complete without a walk down the Petit Rue de Bouchers (during which Helen was informed that the waiter would like to be married tonight. To her.)... to the Rue de Bouchers, tourist trap that it is.... to the little passageway off the middle of Rue de Bouchers that leads to Manneken's sister (maybe?), Jeannette Pis. Is she sitting? Kind of. Squatting, more like. End of awkward passage.

As the light was fading, we hit the Grand Sablon (not much to see in the dreadful rain we had to walk in on-and-off all day) and the Petit Sablon. I don't know what Sablon means, but it might be something like Prague's Old Town Square and its smaller counterpart, Male namesti.

The Petit Sablon was super interesting for me because, of all places we went to during the day, I had read and remembered the most about this one. The border is lined with statues, each of which depicts an industry or trade which contributed to Belgium's growth in a significant way. There are ten statues along the back framing the biggest statue/monument in the middle. While there, I couldn't remember what the ten statues represented, but they're scholars.

For dinner? Vietnamese restaurant in St. Gilles neighborhood near our B&B. Belgium's official languages are French and Flemish. At this restaurant, Helen and I spoke neither French, nor Flemish, nor English (we tried), but Chinese. Clearly, the restaurant is not real and authentic Vietnamese. Either that, or the owner is extremely well-versed in languages.

Slideshow for Brussels follows..

"Welcome to Prague." (I mean, Brussels!)

2009-11-05T16:48:00.064-05:00

68 Days In, 43 Days Out

What do you do the weekend after Fall Break? Go away again, of course. The biggest difference between Brussels and previous destinations is, Brussels is the west. As in, the West. For real. More on this to come.

Started the trip off right by grabbing a Subway cookie (white chocolate macadamia nut, loud cheer!) from the Prague airport. Took off from Prague, landed in Brussels. Or, so we thought. The flight attendant, upon landing, announced on the intercom, "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Prague." *click*

Right about then, I imagine she was going, "oh, crap..."

Our plan had been to get a bus transfer to the Charleroi South train station (our airline, Wizz Air, flies to the non-high traffic airports, kind of like Southwest actually) and take a train into Brussels. Plan foiled. The ticket machine had a sign pasted on the front warning us that we could buy tickets if we wanted, but the train employees are on strike until 10 pm. Ok....

Encountered much traffic on the bus to Brussels, possibly as a result of everyone driving because the trains were on strike. After a bit of confusion as to whether public transportation was also on strike (they weren't), we made our way to our bed and breakfast outside the city center. The Brussels trams are crazy good. Way nicer than Prague trams. (the West!)

The b&b was on a cute, quaint street outside of the center of town. When we got in, Xavier recommended a few restaurants, and we opted for the Belgian one with the wonderful atmosphere. It was an amazing time. I was semi-sick with a cold, couldn't smell or taste jack squat, ordered Penne al-Arrabiata, and couldn't tell if it was spicy (it's supposed to be) until the end of the meal when I started to feel a dull burning sensation on my tongue. But no matter, because the waiters and waitresses were welcoming, considerate, and entertained our attempts at French. Helen gallantly tried "Je voudrais..." and was answered in French--"They would answer you in English in Paris."

The biggest question of the night is: Will the trains be running to Bruges on Saturday? The phrasing of the strike notice implies that they will, but doesn't it kind of defeat the purpose--or the bargaining effectiveness--of a strike if you announce the end time?

Budapest in Pictures

2009-11-01T22:59:00.001-05:00

Mass Postings II: Budapest

2009-11-01T18:36:00.162-05:00

60 Days In, 51 Days Out

Budapest at night looks strangely similar to Prague at night. There's the corollary to Prague Castle (Buda Castle, pictured). There's the Liberty statue, all lit up, to replace the Petrin Tower. There's cool buildings along the opposite side of the river, like the Gresham Palace, or the Parlament, akin to Prague's Rudolfinum, or Narodni Divadlo. Our Budapest apartment might even have been the same distance from the city center as we live in Prague. Except, of course, we take the tram in Prague, whereas there was none of that tram stuff going on for us in Budapest.

On the way to Budapest, I read some of F.A. Hayek's Road to Serfdom. Have I talked about Hayek in the past? (not Salma, thank you.) Well, after my Econ guest lecturer mentioned his milestone article in one of my classes, I went and looked it up. It's called the Use of Knowledge in Society. The article's all about why central planning can never work. I'm still a little confused on whether there's an actual distinction between that and Adam Smith's invisible hand. It seemed like he was drawing from the invisible hand concept for all his conclusions. But then again, I've never read whatever text the invisible hand idea is from, so maybe not.

61 Days In, 50 Days Out

Food observations I have made here in the Buda and Pest:

Paprika is the thing to have. On our first morning, we went to the Central Market Hall to seek out breakfast, which reminds me A LOT of the Singapore markets, stalls sitting side-by-side, row-on-row. At this market, though, half the stalls were peddling (maybe peddling isn't the right word, but 'selling' seemed bland) multiple forms of paprika. Dried peppers for do-it-yourself folk. Paprika powder, in both sweet and hot versions. Supposedly they load up the paprika into every real Hungarian specialty dish.
Cottage/curd cheese is big. Does "curd cheese" give anyone else a really negative feeling every time they hear it? It's in the strudel. It's in the dessert. It's in, really, anything you can put stuff inside. (See: curd cheese strudel. Strawberry and cottage cheese crepes.)
It's interesting how 'dumplings' can mean completely different things in separate cultures. In Asian food, dumplings refer to some thin, dough-like outer covering for some filling on the inside. I think that's what it means in the U.S., too. In the Czech Republic, dumplings are a kind of doughy, sliced bread. They make a roll, boil it, and slice it up. When Czechs make blueberry dumplings, it means the blueberries were baked into the bread before the slicing. In Hungary, dumplings are roughly oddly-shaped, but kind of roundish, doughy bits of pasta. Doughy being somewhat of a common thread here...

Later on, we walked up Andrassy Avenue, which is a longish (2.5 km--fine. long to walk.) avenue on the Pest side of the river. It's very famous, 'cause it boasts cool buildings along its length and the oldest subground metro in continental Europe underneath. So, does that mean the U.K. built one earlier, or something? But Andrassy's metro is barely underground. Literally. Like, two steps. I exaggerate, but I don't even know how the earth above the metro tunnels stays intact. Twice, I was walking over a section of the park, when I felt the grass shaking under my feet as the metro rumbled past..

In that same park, we ran into the Vajdahunyad Castle, which looks just like how you imagine a castle should look. None of this Prague Castle Complex business. Turns out, this is because Vajdahunyad is actually a replica of some castle in Transylvania--now Romania--where Dracula was filmed. The rest of the buildings in that complex are also replicas, so essentially, none of it is real. Which is ironic. It was designed so the area would hold examples of all the different types of architecture. Gothic, Baroque, Renaissance. Don't ask me what any of those things look like--I don't have a clue.

Total walking distance for the day: 9.6 miles

62 Days In, 49 Days Out

We saved the Buda side of Budapest for the day with a clear forecast, and boy was that a good call. After walking up the hill (why is it that in both Prague and Budapest, one side of the river is completely flat and the other is marked by massive hills rising almost right from the riverbank? Is it a geographical thing I just don't know about?), we were greeted by a nice surprise. An old man interrupted our photo op abruptly, informing us that the changing of the guard was happening.

"10 minutes!" he crowed. "Changing of the guard! Go see, immediately! Immediately!"

So we went. (Immediately) Mid-photo. It was in truth not all that cool. Five guys marched kind of slowly, waving swords around here and there, raising them and lowering them, and looking overall amused that people stand, watch, and take pictures of them waving their swords.

From there, it was only a short walk to the Fishermen's Bastion, which SADLY! was... under construction. Just like seemingly every other tourist sight we go to these days. I'm beginning to think Europe instituted a Year Of The Renovation Of Tourist Sites. Originally I thought the Fishermen's Bastion was sort of like a beacon for the fishermen, like a gathering place. I mean, I'm not wrong to think that would make sense, right? Umm.. not so. It's named as such 'cause a bunch of fishermen were assigned to guard this stretch of the city walls during the Middle Ages.

Now, it's a viewing terrace for tourists--and a fantastic, panoramic view it is. Up on the terrace, some sketch, large-ish man had pulled out a little table and was challenging people to Cups and Balls. (Thank you, Nora Roberts) He didn't seem very good, people were managing to guess the correct cup the ball was under. Not often, but fairly consistently every fifth or sixth time.

Eventually, we made our way over to Gellert Hill. One memorial, near the foot of the hill, is made up of a roman-looking semicircle involving columns. Sidenote: I think every city must have something akin to Roman Ruins, even if they identify them as fake *cough Schonbrunn cough*. It's an automatic tourist magnet and moneymaker. Anyhow, this Romanish semicircle looks fine and good, but the real secret is the cool-ass sound magnification in there. If you stand on one side of it, and talk at the wall, you can easily hear it from the other end. We were there for a while, talking at the wall, being giggly, and taking awkward videos trying to capture the utter coolness of this place. By the way, you can do this somewhere else famous, right? I'm blanking on exactly where right now.

At the top, a woman representing Liberty holds a great big feather over her head. As well as I can remember, she was erected on the place where St. Gerard was stuffed into a barrel and pushed off the hill to his death. I know, great story. I'm not at all surprised it was in the guidebook. Who doesn't like stories about being pushed to your death? Especially ones that involve barrels?

63 Days In, 48 Days Out

It's going to be a sad thing when I can no longer go to the Central Market Hall and get $1 strudel for breakfast every day. This morning, I hit up the customary strudel stand and got an apple cinnamon strudel and pumpkin poppy-seed strudel. In honor of Halloween. It was damn good. I might have to learn to make that when I get home. Someday. Like, when I'm 60. Ate them both while walking along the Danube (because I agree with Mandy Moore in that movie where she's the President's daughter and runs away with one of the security guards. Who wants to swim naked in the Vltava? The Danube is so much cooler-sounding. Although I was only walking along it with two strudels. I can hear you judging me, stop! It's filmed in large part in Prague. Shh, I don't want to hear it).

At this point, we might need to talk about how much we walked this fall break. Each full day in Budapest, it was about 10 miles. If you're living where we lived, which is way near the south side of the city, it's 2 miles to the famed Chain Bridge, and everything is further, distance-wise, than it looks on the map. Or, maybe I'm just spoiled by Prague, where a block is a 10-second hop and step. Total walking distance for Budapest: about 35 miles. To use one of Margie's comparisons, that's like walking from Duke to UNC to Duke to UNC, and halfway back to Duke.

Destination Parlament. They don't spell it Parliament in Hungarian.. which threw me for a loop for bout five minutes. Trying to get into Parlament was a huge affair in and of itself. I imagine there are probably good reasons for this (ha). The signs around the building, man I should have taken a picture... anyway, the signs tell you what time your particular language's tour will go in, and that, in order to get tickets, you must ask the guard for permission to enter the ticket office from Gate X. There was maybe a 20-deep line waiting at the afore-mentioned guard to walk across a wide expanse of concrete into the ticketing office, where it seriously looked like they might gun you down if you made any sudden moves. 20-deep is not bad, right? Unless they're only letting about 6 people in at a time.

Our plan was to self-guide through Parlament (foiled), but I guess it makes sense you can't do that. They can't have random people wandering unaccounted for inside there. Our tour was led by this brilliantly sarcastic lady with a thick, Hungarian accent. She explains that we will have to go through a security check before we're allowed to enter. She talking with this air of nonchalant efficiency, as if we could all just fall through the floor, and she would just keep talking. Cameras are allowed, she said. Flashes are also allowed, except in the crown room, where it is "forbidden to use flash." She made an exaggerated motion, like she was placing a crown on her head. She shot a brief glance at Helen and I--we're both Asian--and continues on in a deadpan.

"I'm miming. You know, for non-native speakers." I'm looking around, and there are several other small groups of people on this tour, from which I hear French and (Helen says) Portuguese emanating. We're the only ones laughing, all the way through security.

64 Days In, 47 Days Out

Somewhere in the 8 hour train trip back to Prague, I decided that if I happen to want to get from Prague to Budapest ever again, I would fly.

Pagemaster

2009-10-29T00:01:00.002-04:00

That movie I couldn't identify from the last post? Pagemaster. McCauley Culkin. Credit to Scott for the identification help!

Austria in Pictures

2009-10-28T18:56:00.000-04:00

Fall Break: Melk

2009-10-28T12:34:00.003-04:00

59 Days In, 52 Days Out

Fantastic Story. Let's call it, "Annoying American Tourists."

The town of Melk is located about an hour, hour and a half outside Vienna. It boasts a huge abbey (one of the world's "most famous monastic sites") which managed to escape being destroyed/seized? several times while many other abbeys were subjected to that fate. Isn't it great to be famous and to have academic stature?

On the train there, the four of us had sat down on the four-seater set-up, two seats facing two seats. There were only a couple of these four-seaters in each carriage. A little later on, two American women alight, see us sitting facing each other, and resolve to do the same. Loudly. In English. First of all, as one of my friends said, everyone speaks english. Austria is the west. Secondly, I adore Austrian boys. They win over the Czech guys. The Austrian ones are hilariously funny without intending to be.

The Austrian boy who these women asked how to switch the arrangement of the seats didn't just tell them the seats can't do that. In defense of their question, the NJ Transit trains actually do, so it wasn't entirely out of the blue.

But in his words,

(short pause) "I think that's impossible."

Before I sign off, I have to mention the library in the abbey. It might now be my favorite library room ever. It looks like that movie, (we'll see if anyone knows what I'm talking about) where you have the blond boy who has to go on an adventure to get out of a make-believe world. It's a cartoon. He is accompanied by flying books or something. And there's this one scene shot in a library.

Anyone? Anyone? This Melk library is JUST LIKE THAT. Well, if we were all about 150 times smaller.

Mass Postings: Vienna

2009-10-27T17:59:00.000-04:00

55 Days In, 56 Days Out

Sorry I didn't mention I was going on Fall Break! The lack of time and semi-Duke-like sleep schedule sort of preempted the writing of any blogs.....

So. Friday. Catherine headed out to the airport, and I headed out to Vienna. This was the first train we had boarded during our time in Prague that was decently nice. A seating area for four? Check. Little flip-out tables in between us? Check. A Harry Potter-like snack cart rolling down the aisle? YES. Minus the chocolate frogs, every flavor beans, and generally awesome magical treats.

(Jumpety jump jump! Click on the link below)

The fact that we don't have to take a plane, combined with how we're staying in apartments all break, means that in essence, I could bring as much of my shit as I wanted to and not worry about it. Amazing. Oh, and our apartment manager's name is Rudolf. It doesn't get better than than. Except maybe how our Brussels bed and breakfast owner is named Xavier Daveaux. With an "x" at both ends. (I'm not having a real hostel experience. Ever. Sorry.)

Rudolf called me when we were in the Vienna train station, and maybe an hour later, we were in this cute and cozy orange-accented apartment. Wireless? You bet. Cable with 70 channels? Yup. And.... the apartment was maybe a 10-minute walk from the Ringstrasse. Simply amazing.

I forgot to mention how much being in Vienna makes me appreciate the Prague public transportation system. It's incredibly easy to navigate in Prague on the metro--just look at the posted map and you can tell which side of the tracks you need to be on. Not so in Vienna, at least the Sudbahnhof we came in at. Trying to get to Landstrasse from the Sudbahnhof on the S-Bahn (oh my god so many foreign words), we were stumped as soon as we reached the S-Bahn platform. And got even more confused when we saw the trains go both ways on the same track. *??!*

Eventually we randomly boarded a Weasel tram (no, it's not a specific type, it's just what it was labelled), and by a stroke of good luck, happened to be going the correct way. Phew.

56 Days In, 55 Days Out

One of my friends in the NYU program told us before we all left for break that if you didn't know what else to do in Vienna, you should just walk around the "Ring." He's very right. Today, we even had a destination in mind, walked along the Ringstrasse towards it, and wound up wandering off it, twice, towards cool-looking monuments and buildings.

The first wander was for Stadtpark, which is really freaking famous for its memorial of Strauss. The second detour was for a cool, Greek/Roman-looking memorial (I can never tell the difference between the two) and fountain. It turned out to be a monument to Russian victory, commemorating the Red Army. Or, something like that. That led us then to the Karlskirche Church, which I had previously read was the most pompous church in Vienna. Much agreed. It looks like the Taj Mahal, except with two tower things sticking up on either side, which makes it difficult to do the optical illusion thing where you're pinching the spire.

Arriving at the Nasch Markt (original destination), the most famous open-air market in Vienna, we were confronted by an abundance of... Asian restaurants? Vietnamese, Thai, Mr. Lee. Tried some dried kiwi (it was brilliant, wish they had it more in the States). Tried some wasabi nuts (didn't turn out too well).

A few hours and an art museum later (Woo! Culture!), we managed to find the grand cafe Tirolerhof, although we failed miserably at getting a table in Cafe Sperle, where Hitler supposedly ranted about race and ethnicity. I know, great claim to fame. We walked into the cafe, out, in one more time, out, in when we saw an empty table... and out again when the grumpy-ass waitress told us it was reserved.

I've realized that all my stories are about fails, because fails are funnier to read than successes.

On the topic of successes, Cafe Tirolerhof trip yielded an introduction to Mohr Im Hemd, a glorious Austrian desert. Whipped cream, moist chocolate cake, and just dripping with melted chocolate.

57 Days In, 54 Days Out

Palace, Take 1

In our attempt to reach the Upper Belvedere Palace, we somehow wound up in the University of Vienna gardens (ok, it was my fault, but no need to linger on that), unsure whether we had any potential opening in the very tall, impenetrable wall separating us from the Belvedere by which we could hop over to the next property.

The good thing is, pretty much everyone in Vienna speaks English. I picked a couple with a stroller to query (they were somewhat helpful), skipped over a freaky old man with a hollowed-out face, and stopped two middle-aged women powerwalking with clicky walking sticks (I felt bad). One little encounter with cacti and another with bamboo forests later, we made it into Belvedere. Those University of Vienna people. Very worldly.

Beat a Japanese tour group in the front gate (foreshadowing!), and gaped at the much larger, quite impressive (and original) Belvedere Palace. The royal summer palace in Prague is somewhat inspired by this one, but everything in Vienna is about grand size. The architecture and buildings might as well say, Bigger is Better! So many of my pictures are of large equestrian statues and long grandiose hallways. Vienna might have Prague beat on the hallways, but Prague still has the largest equestrian statue in the world. Hah.

Walking up towards the Belvedere just ahead of the Japanese group, we stop. Muse. How to get a picture of all three of us? The Japanese people start to trickle around us and ahead while we consider. Helen goes all in. She:

*Motions to get the attention of a Japanese lady who has stopped a few feet from us*
*Realizes that the lady herself is getting ready to pose for a picture*
*Waves a hurried apology*
*Gets the camera hustled from her by the nice lady who insists on taking our picture*
*Bows--kind of*
"Arigato!"
*Is bowed back to by the lady*
*Points between her and the lady, nonverbally asking if we can take her picture for her*
*Much slight bowing still going on*

Palace, Take 2

Money spent on Belvedere Palace: $0. Money spent on Schönbrunn Palace: $20. Worth it? Completely. Schönbrunn, as we learned while touring the palace with our good (and non-corporeal) friend the Handheld Audio Guide, was originally built as a hunting lodge. ....Say again? Hunting lodge? This might be the epitome of Bigger is Better, if a hunting lodge is this size. Also on our audio tour, which we could rewind but not fast forward [where is the logic in this place?], we were informed that Maria Theresa, who was some important Empress or something in the Hapsburg Era, was the mother of Marie Antoinette.

Long story short, when I'm old and have money, I will buy myself some palace or castle. It can even be a replica. (see future post about Budapest) Or build one. Commission someone to build one. They still do that nowadays, right?

Slideshow or link to follow. Sorry about the progressively poor quality of framing the photos... my camera battery started to fail at around the fake Roman Ruins, and I took the rest of the pictures with my digital display off. It lasted, actually, maybe 20 more pictures (Champ.) and didn't splutter and die until we were leaving. I tried to take a photo of the sunset, but since my camera performs super poorly with sunset colors, I tried to switch to manual, which failed, and then switched to scene select to search for a sunset setting--turns out there isn't one--aaand then my camera died.

At least, I thought it had poor sunset capturing abilities, until I saw this picture:

58 Days In, 53 Days Out

It's National Day in Austria!

Austrian National Day celebrates the day Austria gained their freedom. From the Russians, I think. or, I might have made that up. We wanted to visit the Parliament building, which was free today, but no one works, goes to school, or does anything involving opening grocery stores (yeah we had a slight problem with that) on National Day. Instead, they all go to visit the Parliament. Figures. One quick look at the easily 45-minute long line to enter Parliament, and we headed off in a different direction, towards some music we heard blaring from somewhere in the direction of the Hofburg grounds.

Genius choice. Margie had read about the tanks which were supposed to be mulling around, so we followed the loud noises, music, and hoards of people to a full-blown-freaking carnival/fair on the front lawn of the Hofburg Palace. A sight to see. Pretzels, food stands, Indian vegetarian food with the best samosas I've ever had, onion ring and fries stands.... and tanks, fighter planes, helicopters! And loads and loads of really attractive Austrian army boys in uniform and funny hats. I'm told they're called berets.

Later on, while wandering around the Vienna center, a "free entrance" (for National Day, of course, what else?) sign lured us into the Globes Museum. The Globes Museum is the shit. My favorites were the relief globes and the celestial globes (relief globes show elevation, and made me really sad that I've never snowboarded anywhere but the puny Poconos in Pennsylvania. Oh, and North Carolina, which isn't any better). The celestial ones were cool but super confusing, as you obviously view them from the outside, but are supposed to imagine yourself as in the very center of the globe, looking outward.

Actually, I lie. My favorite was YESO! Yeso is a hypothetical continent they made up in the 17th century and placed between Asia and North America the Pacific in their globes. I guess in their case they thought it existed because they had such poor geographical knowledge and had to rely on word of mouth from returning explorers ("Hey, I came back from sailing for 50 days and I think there's a squiggly edge of a continent somewhere approximately 10 days of good sailing weather from here!").

I was so amped up trying to find Yeso on the globes that I whacked my head into the glass. Solid. This is the situation in which your friend tells you, "... Did you just do what I think you did?"

Yes. No. Of course not.

Catherine's here!

2009-10-21T17:55:00.010-04:00

53 Days In, 58 Days Out

By the time this goes up, actually, she'll have been gone for two weeks. But she came to Prague on her fall break, forgot to tell me, realized on her way over, hung out at Chapeau Rouge (typical hangout for Americans/tourists, or so I gather), and met Henry there. Who then told Helen. Who then told Margie. Who then told--and thoroughly confused--me... before I got the whole thing straightened out.

The end.

Chopin Was Polish?

2009-10-20T15:24:00.047-04:00

52 Days In, 59 Days Out

Saturday, I had another chance to hear the Requiem in a beautiful cathedral (beautiful visually, can't speak for acoustically), and yet again, I passed it up. I always say I'll go. They do it at Duke every year, several times.

Saturday's occasion was to mark the start of the UNESCO year of Chopin, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the composer's birthday. Sidenote: 2010 is the year of Chopin, so I don't really know why they're kicking it off in 2009. Anyway, it's a big deal they're starting it in Prague, seeing as Chopin wasn't Czech... he was Polish. (I know! Polish? I didn't think so either) He spent some time in the CZ, though.... either a lot of time, or, not that much time but at a significant moment in his career/life.

To mark the occasion, Chopin's death (funeral) mask was brought to Prague, going outside Poland for the very first time. It's not the original death mask, though. Chopin had some kind of ailment at the end of his life which deformed his face--I've read something like "it became very terrible"--and some people who thought the first death mask made for him was too grotesque commissioned a second, less drastic one. That's the one they're displaying here, at St. Vitus cathedral during the memorial concert with the Requiem. The Requiem, because Chopin had a high regard for Mozart and the Requiem.

After the concert, the mask was moved to the Polish Institute in Prague to be displayed for the rest of the week. The revelation of the day: The Polish Institute? At Male namesti 1. Ok, that was less dramatic than I had hoped, but it is exactly zero streets and 1 door number away from the NYU center, which is Male namesti 2.

Today, my small (and in this case, near) adventure was to see this mask. I stood in front of the NYU building, peering up at the adjacent one. "Polish Institute," it said, but with no apparent way in, unless the entrance was snuggled into the back of the Swarovski store on the ground floor. I may have alarmed their employees slightly by continuously peering in to see if there was any way into the Polish Institute.

But no fear! Walking around to the side/back, in the very back corner, I found a little stand of flyers next to an unimposing door. I picked one flyer up and unfolded it. A gigantic blown-up photo of Chopin's death mask greeted me. Ok, so I was in the right place. I followed someone who buzzed up into the building, asked three employees where I could find Chopin--and by that I mean, I pointed to the huge picture and asked in a hopeful voice, "Chopin?"--and was pointed to a little room in the center of the building next to a courtyard. It was emanating soft, (probably Chopin) music.

The mask was set on a pedestal inside a glass case at the center of the room. It's actually really cool to see, much cooler than I thought it would be. It's almost like you can see his face as it would have looked at his death. Except, not, obviously, for reasons I already went into.

And that was my day.

Jelení příkop, the Stag Moat, and Related Issues

2009-10-19T15:06:00.086-04:00

51 Days In, 60 Days Out

It finally stopped raining yesterday, and this morning dawned fairly bright and sunny. This would happen during the start of midterm week. Because there are far too many good-weather excursions remaining on my list of to-see, and far too few good-weather days left before it actually turns bitter cold, I was not about to waste the day.

Today's adventure: The Capek exhibit at the Prague Riding School, and Jelení příkop, the Stag Moat. Except, just the stag moat, because when I went to buy my ticket for Capek, it was (if I read it right) 110 crowns for the student entry. Are you kidding? Not cool.

One of my friends in travel writing, Jessica (yay connections!), wrote about the stag moat for her first article. And our professor is right--one of the biggest compliments for articles like this is when someone, after reading your piece, wants to visit the place so badly that they actually do it.

The stag moat doesn't actually seemed to be labelled anywhere, which I think is a mistake, on the part of the Prague tourism bureau, or whatever the equivalent is.... and the problem isn't just for this particular attraction. It's just a, well, moat, which no longer holds (much) water, but it's covered along its entire length during this time of year by lush grass, fallen leaves of brown, yellow, and red varieties, and evergreens. In the past, like waaay in the past, it held deer until the castle folk decided they wanted to kill/eat the deer. Now, though, you just walk down on whatever path you can find leading down. It's strikingly easy to get into the moat--all the paths will eventually lead to the bottom, it seems. Not so on the way back out of the moat. But we'll get to that later.

I wound my way down the hill on a lazily curving kind-of-muddy-and-strewn-with-leaves path (remember I said it just stopped raining yesterday?). Once at the bottom, the sheer size of the glorious moat made me feel insignificant, content to just stroll/shuffle along the bottom of it. Between me and another part of the moat, however, stood a long-ish tunnel with a freakily Lord-of-the-Rings-looking gaping entrance. I'm not going to lie--I hesitated. Luckily, an old woman had walked out of there not a minute earlier, so all in all, I was sure it couldn't be that dangerous.

On the other side, there's a gorgeous green clearing and castle buildings looming behind a web of trees. A couple of statues later, I came across a tourist's map stuck at the intersection of a few paths. Hm... Masaryk Terrace, I thought. That looks cool. I'll go there.

Usually my stories are about inabilities to find attractions. Good thing we're changing things up here. It was a non-issue to find the Masaryk Terrace, besides the part where I had to walk up a hill towards two tall, broad men in army type clothes and green Russia-mafia-style hats. The green is accurate. The Russia-mafia style is just the kind of hats I imagine russia mafia would wear. All the while, I was terrified they were going to use their advantageous miliary position to shoot me down, a la Saving Private Ryan. That is, until I started smiling goofily at them, and one of them started hesitantly smiling goofily back. Then I motioned to go past, and they stepped aside, and all was well.

Anyway, the terrace is white and reminds me of Santorini pictures a little bit. Nice view of the cathedral from there. I walked toward the end of the terrace, sure there had to be some kind of exit at this end... and ran straight into a dead end at the bottom of a narrow set of steps. All right. I turned back, picked a different path going upwards, followed it to the end.... and hit an iron gate. WTF? Good thing I didn't go to the Capek exhibit.

Tired of all this not being able to get out of the moat, I took a shortcut down the hill so I wouldn't have to retrace my previous very-non-direct path, wound up by the Masaryk statue, and decided to take my chances one more time on one last path that led upwards. This one panned out. Success! Off to class!

Study with Starbucks

2009-10-18T14:57:00.001-04:00

50 Days In, 61 Days Out

(In honor of Ryan Kelly...)

Ok, today we're doing bullet points, 'cause I'm not feeling the creativity.

"Who's we?" you ask.

Me.

Passed 1,000 visits to my blog today. Small beans, but it makes me happy.
50th day in Prague.
Sunday before midterm week. Only one of two weeks in the semester (at least, it seems) that will actually be a study week. The second will be the week before finals.
Due to the studying, nothing interesting happened today.
Except for the fact that Helen and I spotted a rotating arsenal of American boys who apparently also had the same idea as us (studying at Starbucks). We noted a shirt from Indiana University.
As well a Harvard shirt. On what looked like a Harvard kid.
Starbucks was holding a coffee seminar today. You had to reserve your spot for it. Do they do that in the U.S., too?
Neither of the grocery stores near our dorm had my brand of cottage cheese in stock. Since I bought and tried the 14 crown cottage cheese (and liked it), I refuse to buy the 22 crown cottage cheese. But I might have to succumb to cottage cheese cravings if they don't have it back in inventory the next time.
Duke BluePlanet used one of my favorite songs--Kashmir--in the final countdown video for Countdown2Craziness.

Oh, Libraries... I Missed You

2009-10-17T16:40:00.044-04:00

49 Days In, 62 Days Out

Over two months have passed, but today for the first time, we brunched at Radost FX, despite the fact nearly everyone I asked for recommendations said, Radost for brunch. The restaurant is also vegetarian (not vegan, though, so omelettes still all over the menu. The only place I've been with a good vegetarian brunch sans eggs is Kaya's Kitchen in Bel Mar, NJ.

Still, it's American-style brunch, and the waffles were delicious. After one moment where the waitress tried to convince both me and Seema to order waffles with the more expensive Real Maple Syrup, I ordered them with blueberry sauce. Mmmm. Reminded me of marketplace waffles with as many blueberries as you could sneak from under the staff's noses (they yelled at you if you started filling up a cup with blueberries--I mean, come on) and as much whipped cream as you could scrape from the container (sometimes there wasn't much). Good times.

Soccer's going on again a block over, and I'm reminded that still I have not seen a soccer match here, despite the fact that I own a soccer scarf. Curse the sudden onset of cold.

I had planned to settle down in the municipal library in the Prague center for the afternoon, but on the way there, (I was traveling green line) I decided on a whim that it would be a great day to visit the National Technical Library, which is at the end of the green line. The National Technical Library, Národní technická knihovna, or NTK, opened last month on 09/09/09. This date is plastered in giant, white numbers on the exterior of the ground floor. It was designed to be an energy-saving marvel, and not just a library but a place of congregation, sort of like a student center, a high-tech living room for students--I forgot to mention that it's on the campus of Czech Technical University.

So. I went a few stops further down the green line than I had expected. Can I just say that, if you don't know exactly where you're going, coming out of a decently big Prague metro station can be very confusing? Often, there's two directions you can exit the platform, along with two or three (or four) exits from each end. So really, I had no idea which exit to take, which meant I ended up at the wrong one. Which took me way far down a street with a semi-barrier in the middle. Long story short. Many consultations with my map later, I finally see the library. Somehow, I've wound up behind it. So much for the direct route. But seeing it in person is not at all like seeing it in pictures.

Today, I couldn't actually go into the library part of the building itself (you need to bring a passport to get registered if you're foreign), but I studied in the ground floor cafe until 5 p.m. The workers, I think, were college students, and it was nice to be on a college campus again--I miss it. The NYU students all seem used to the city setting, but I love grass, and university libraries. Especially university libraries. High-tech university libraries (ah-hem, link). And cool chairs. I'll be coming back, but it's too bad it's not a straight shot from my dorm.

Legitimate Interview, #1

2009-10-16T16:54:00.001-04:00

48 Days In, 63 Days Out

Half the interesting things that happen to me here happen as a result of trying to write articles for Travel Writing (TW). My task today was interviewing Martin, co-owner of Lehka Hlava and co-operator of Maitrea. Both of those are vegetarian restaurants.

Understand that Czech cuisine, generally, doesn't recognize the concept of vegetarianism. About 95% of their diet is pork (I'm paraphrasing something an RA said). Often, the best--only--vegetarian item on the menu is smazeny syr, fried cheese. And that's if it's not fried cheese with some kind of meat, which also appears often in the bezmasem, without meat, section.

I'm not going to say much now about Martin, but he's one of the friendliest guys I've ever met. We talked over lunch for an hour and a half, a lunch which I later was not able (allowed) to pay for. Not my first experience with free food as a journalist (ah-hem, basketball games), but for sure the nicest, and the most unexpected.

In other news, three midterms and a midterm article due next week. Commence the studying. Maybe I'll go visit the National Technical Library tomorrow.

Cubism, Then and Now

2009-10-15T22:00:00.007-04:00

October 15: Snow

2009-10-15T16:38:00.076-04:00

47 Days In, 64 Days Out

35 degrees and snowing.

And then, a tram broke down.

On our merry way to class this morning, our tram inexplicably stops in between stations. The tram driver gets out, to check out the situation, I guess. He comes back, warbles out a bunch of Czech, opens the doors, and a good number of Czechs start filing out. Huh? We follow, and once outside, we can see that there are a number of trams which are stopped in front of us. One of them must have broken down. Except that now, the tram in front has started moving... oops. We scurry onto the 17 tram just ahead of the one we just disembarked (what a stroke of luck).

Tram jam, and disgruntled ex-passengers

Except that two stops and two minutes later, it stops. Again. There are lot more people on it now, and the windows are fogging up so it's hard to see outside. Clearly, there are trams ahead of us, and there are at least two or three behind us. It's about ten minutes to class at this point. We're going to have to walk. Helen puts it succinctly: It's only the first day of snow. I think we need to start doubting the inclement-weather efficiency of above-ground public transportation right about now.

On a positive note, friendly Duke faces arrived from Berlin late last night! Kate and I lunched with Jenn and Rosie in a cozy Czech restaurant two blocks from the center (with thankfully not two-blocks-from-the-center price) that I was recommended to me ten minutes earlier by a helpful staff member. Later, Jenn and I sloshed our way to the Cubism Museum, part of the National Gallery, at the House of the Black Madonna.

I've walked past this house a gazillion times and not really paid any attention to it--what a shame. It's really a beautiful, interesting house where the Cubism Museum is located, and the house itself is Cubist as well. I have no picture of the outside (snow! wintry mix!), so the best I can do is a photo of one exhibit inside the museum that's a paper recreation of the House of the Black Madonna. Apparently the museum is free some days. I've heard "on wednesdays," and also, "on the first wednesday of the month". When not free, it's a 50 crown entrance, for students, presumably. And an entertaining interaction with the lady at the front desk who speaks very little English, but signs with her hands so much that you can't misunderstand anything she's saying anyway.

Forgive me for lack of art history knowledge. From the posted information, I gathered that Cubism was/is (a) characterized by funny angles, (b) used by Picasso -- used is not the right word here but I dunno what is, and (c) only practiced extensively in the Czech Republic. Or, I guess, Czechoslovakia.

But far more interesting was the fact that this woman is basically getting molested in this painting. (Kidding. kidding.)

Profiling Attempts

2009-10-14T15:40:00.000-04:00

45 Days In, 66 Days Out
46 Days In, 65 Days Out

Summary: stress.

Mostly travel writing related.

See, we have to write a profile for class, 1000-1200. Which is shorter than the longest story I've ever written--the Mallory Cecil gargantuan piece about the Family Circle Cup--which came in at 1,371 including headings. Yeah, I checked on that. And I officially hate looking at anything I've previously written. Anyway, I'll briefly chronicle my very feeble, futile (but not for lack of trying) fails over the past half-week or so.

Decide that since I've already drawn an idea from Katka, writing about her might not be the best idea.
Brainstorm up several people that include the founder of Country Life (an organic vegetarian restaurant and food store with several locations in Prague); owners of a couple vegetarian restaurants in Prague (what? I'm vegetarian. This is, therefore, interesting); a violin teacher who returned to the Czech Republic in 1996; another violin teacher who taught basically all the Czech violinists I ever met at Meadowmount.
Contact the manager of the chamber orchestra the first violin teacher directs.
Wait.
Wait, and
Hear back from the manager that, unfortunately, desired subject for profile has passed away last year. Sorry we didn't update the website. That would happen to me.
Send an email to the secretary director for Country Life. Translate my English message to Czech, just in case.
Groan. Secretary has replied in Czech. Begin exchange, in Czech, trying to procure an earlier interview time than the one they have given me, which is on the day of the deadline.
Stumble across Gmail Labs' new in-email translation of text tool.
Annoy RA's and NYU center staff by continually asking for translations. I'm pretty sure Vendula thinks I'm nuts. And perpetually on the edge of madness.
Admit, Thursday, that from what Country Life secretary has told me, it's not likely the founder will be available to speak with me until far too late.
Visit Lehka Hlava, where the waitresses are super nice and apologize that the owners aren't on the premises at the current moment to talk to me.
Am glad that the owners aren't on the premises at the current moment, because I have no questions on the spot
Receive phone number for one of the owners (Me: "Do both of them speak English?" Her: Long Pause. "Uh... maybe this one speaks more.")
Call said owner. Breathe sigh of relief that he speaks very good English. And that he is very much living. Wooo! Set up interview.
Receive email from Country Life secretary saying that I can meet with the founder tomorrow.
Sigh.
Ask secretary at the NYU center, automatically, for a translation, before realizing that this particular reply was in English. They couldn't give me the English-speaking one earlier??
Lament.
Laugh at the Northern Irish people in Old Town Square who are here for the Czech Republic vs. Northern Ireland World Cup qualifier match. Which is really kind of pointless because not only does the CZ have to win its match, some other crappy team has to beat some other really good team for the CZ to advance. But then again, maybe not so pointless--see U.S. success in the last Confederations Cup in South Africa.
Wish I could watch Spain play a qualifier. Because of Torres. Clearly.