Later that day...

So the 2nd was a Thursday. I had my second-to-last day of Czech class, went to a meeting about school-sponsored trips, and attempted to go to an internship meeting. Unfortunately, I had only blocked a half hour of time for that one. I arrived early, but they started late and even once they started they had the new student council get up to speak about sports days and clubbing events before they got down to business. I only got to see two presentations as a result. Oh well.

I did enjoy the rest of my day though. At this point, I still hadn't walked across the Charles bridge, so I met up with Sam and we set off to Minor Town (Mala Strana). The Charles bridge is beautiful, and I'm looking forward to going back sometime when there are fewer tourists so I can really look at the statues. We turned off the bridge before passing under the tower at the other end, and he led us through a few winding back roads. First we arrived at the fence of lover's locks:
and the Lenin wall (which I'm going to paint on before we leave):


Afterwords, we met up with Becca at the Cubist Cafe for some delicious lunch before heading back to the dorm.

The school organized a bowling event for tonight. A bunch of people ended up not going because they went to a bar instead, but my friends all went and we had a blast. We discovered that Czech ketchup is sweeter than American ketchup, that Byron and Brianna have great bowling form (see pictures!), that I can't bowl for beans, that Vladimir likes to dance, and that sometimes Becherovka comes in light-up glasses.

After bowling, we went to the bar everyone else was at, hoping to meet up and go dancing. It was a strange place. I'm going to say that the decor involved eyes popping out of the wall and just leave it at that. So we headed home. Of course, by that time the public transportation (which is wonderful and simple and efficient and just better than in NYC) had switched to it's "night mode" so we had to navigate the night trams. The first of many times, I'm sure. It really wasn't difficult though. The night tram numbers all start with a 5 (mine is 56) and they meet up in one spot in Old Town, so you can take any tram to that spot and then wait for the one that will get you home. Easy.


Friday was an early morning. We had to be at school to sign up for the sponsored trips fairly early. As in before 8. I won't tell you what trips I'm on just yet, but you'll hear all about them as they come up. I'm never sure whether NYU is highly efficient or just barely organized enough to get by. The sign-ups were crazy. There were two long lines leading into rooms with the day-trip and overnight-trip sign up sheets on tables. Once one got to the table at the front of the line, though, good luck. It was chaotic...with the result that I didn't get to sign up for as many wait lists as I had wanted. I went to the office later in the day to tack my name on to a few, but they were mostly full by then. Not sure if I'll have any luck.

Then came the last day of Czech class. Oh, Czech language. How I wish I could study you further this semester, but I don't think I can handle you and German at the same time. Bohužel.

Busybusybusy. After class I went on the Vysehrad tour. It turns out that the Vysehrad (a park site with some of the old walls used to fortify the city, a vineyard, a church, and a beautiful graveyard) is in my neighborhood, Nusle. As part of the tour, we got to go inside part of the wall and into a long dark tunnel. At the end was a big chamber in which are stored some of the statues that have been taken off Charles bridge to be preserved (the ones on the bridge are replicas). My pictures of that part didn't come out very well, but it was really cool to be in that space. Once outside the tunnel again, we walked through the graveyard for a bit, strolled through a really cool-looking interactive camp for kids (there was a big jungle-gym type structure with objects hanging from it and the kids were running around inside hitting the objects with spoons to make noise!), and parted from the group. We climbed onto a ledge overlooking the river and listened to the music from a concert that was drifting our direction on the wind. Admittedly, we also speculated about the physics of jumping off the ledge and into the river because our guide had told us a legend about a knight who had done just that and survived. Supposedly.

After that, we went home and strolled around for a bit. Went out for dinner wandered around. On a whim, Sam and I decided to take the tram up to the observation tower on Petrin hill. We had a great adventure. Some small Czech children played hide-and-seek with us on the tram, and then we got off a stop too early and walked the last bit of the way up the hill. We climbed all the stairs, and got to see:
On the way down, we were talking with a woman who was visiting from Turkey. She was by herself and came up to us as soon as she heard us speaking English. Which, by the way, happens a lot here. Especially in grocery stores. Anyway, I asked her about Orhan Pamuk and about Istanbul and about Turkey in general. Sam asked about her trip to Prague. And then we parted ways at the bottom of the hill.

I wonder if we'll keep having these adventures once classes officially start...