I swear I was going to post this mid-week last week, but Blogger has been surprisingly awful. I'll just smash what I had written into the post about Prague.
This last week has been alright. I've decided Mondays are house chores days. I generally only have biology at eleven and German at two fifty, so it's pretty easy to get stuff done. I did laundry, cleaned up my room, unpacked my Berlin bag, and did some travel planning.
Speaking of travel planning, I don't know what I'm going to do about German Christmas. I don't want to spend Christmas here alone, but I want to travel so badly. There's also an issue of my bags. I would want to get rid of my suitcases and just have a backpack to gallivant around with. I wrote this a week ago, and I haven't really made any specific decision yet. :-(
Tuesday was uneventful, as I remember almost nothing of it, although I did go to the bank and my PIN didn't work. I decided to give it a day and come back on Wednesday.
Wednesday was the biggest test of my patience so far. I felt like I was running errands for hours, and I still couldn't get money out of my debit card. It was very frustrating to have a bad day somewhere you don't speak the language already. I treated myself to some TV that night and went to bed relatively early.
Thursday everything got right back on track, figured out my PIN situation (I have the memory of a 105 year old, apparently) and got money out of my bank account for Prague. We learned our lesson from waking up late last week, so we stayed in and played cards.
We left for the bus station at 6:20 on Friday and got to Prague around 9:00. I slept most of the way, the countryside was boring anyway. We rolled in and went straight to the hostel, which was nice. It's good to get rid of our stuff, I only carry a backpack but a backpack full of clothes isn't super-light. Our hostel was very nice and very quaint. On Friday we went on a bus tour of Prague and that was good. Saw a lot of historical sights. We also got out and walked around in the Prague Castle, which was very beautiful. I saw a wedding taking pictures and it was cute. We had our best weather on Friday, and I didn't appreciate it at the time. We walked around the Old Town and they had a little festival with food booths, so of course I got fried dough covered in garlic, cheese, and salt. It was delicious!
Friday night we went out to a very intense club. Five stories of fun! I stayed on the Blackmusik floor (hip-hop/dance music) and proceeded to dance the night away. Three people asked me if I was Czech...apparently I blended in with the locals? I had a great time, but Prague's public transportation system sucks. We knew when we went out that the trains shut down from 12 AM- 5 AM, so we made a conscious decision to stay out that late and got a really late dinner (or really early breakfast?) at "Nonstop" (24-hour) McDonalds near the train station at 4:30. We got home and slept.
Woke up a little later than we had planned on Saturday, about ten thirty. We had free breakfast at the hostel and went out to view the town. We ended up spending most of the day in Old Town Square and visited the rest of the Old Town again. We wanted to go to a chocolate museum, but the student price wasn't good enough. It was cold and rainy and I was glad I wore leggings under my jeans. There was a cool trophy tour for the UEFA (maybe those initials are right), the big soccer league here. The trophy was cool and it had a little exhibit with jerseys and I got really excited for the Bayern Muenchen game that we're going to in mid-October.
Saturday night Zeynep and I went to a little classical music concert (Vivaldi's four seasons, two Mozart sonatas) played by about ten people on time-period instruments. It was very cool, and the concert was in this beautiful little church. Saturday night we went to a bar near our hostel and tried Czech pivo (beer). It is the best beer I have ever tasted. Czechs invented the Pilsner, did you know that? It was delicious and very cheap, so good stuff.
Sunday we woke up late again, although we had come in at about one. We checked out of the hostel and walked along the Charles Bridge, which is from like the 1200's or something. It was very beautiful, despite the rain. We wanted to be dry and warm, so we ate lunch in a little mall and stayed until we went back to the bus station. The bust left at 6:00PM, and by that time everyone in our group was ready to go home. Which leads me to my overall comments about Prague.
Prague was beautiful when it wasn't horribly sketchy. The nice parts of town are historical and quaint, while the off-the-beaten path parts (e.g. near our hostel) are creepy and a little dirty. A girl in our group was pickpocketed on the train (someone bumped into her and stole her wallet), and I felt so terrible. She lost all her credit cards and her passport. Mackenzie is a trooper though, and handled a bad situation very well. She called her dad and had him cancel all her cards and I think she knows how to get a new passport. But :-( anyway! We got home and I did some homework, took a shower, and went to bed.
This week has been trying to juggle travel planning (the last of our flights are booked- Paris and Venice in December :) ), studying for our organic exam next Tuesday and being excited about Oktoberfest! And all the other stuff, grocery shopping, laundry, cleaning. I am super excited about Oktoberfest, but now that you know I have an organic exam you've probably figured out that I am writing this blog post to procrastinate (or have a study break, I've been in this library for four hours already today after six yesterday), so I'll say goodbye.
Tschuss!
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