Catching up on last week...

This past weekend I stayed in Prague because I wanted to study for my Czech midterm. Molly and Kiefer had a friend in town so we did some touristy stuff, like going to Pivovarský Dům, a restaurant known for its flavored beers on tap. We tried the sour cherry beer, coffee beer, banana beer, nettle beer, and beer champagne. I thought it was all pretty gross except for the champagne beer which tasted more like a regular light beer. We also went to a club near St. Charles bridge that is five stories high with a different kind of music on each floor. Lots of people from our program came but it was mostly filled with European tourists. On Sunday we went to The Globe to study, its a book store and English coffee shop/restaurant that kind of serves as the heart of the English speaking expatriot community. It hosts events like watching the Presidential Debates at 3 am.

On Monday I have a full day of classes, one is called "Life in a Totalitarian Regime." Last week we learned about the influence of Jazz on dissidence under communism. It's interesting to learn about the relationship between my two cities-New Orleans and Prague-when there doesn't seem to be a strong connection. Music was a huge part of both promoting party ideology and protest. Yesterday we heard a version of "Say a Little Prayer for You" in Czech but with changed lyrics that was approved pop music.

On Monday night I went to a Sukkot dinner with my friend Ari at the Jerusalem Street synagogue. It is one of the few synagogues in New Town, closer to where I live. It is really beautiful and very unique from the other synagogues in that it was built relatively recently, around the turn of the century, and is done in an art nouveau/Moorish style. Now it is a conservative synagogue. After a short service we all ate dinner in the Sukkah. I was surprised at the amount of people who came, I guess about fifty altogether and there were several students there. The congregation members were all very friendly and interested in where we were from. Afterwards I got coffee with a couple girls who were there who I met earlier during high holidays.

On Tuesday in my walking tour class, we walked thr0ugh St. Charles Bridge and learned about the different statues. Many of them are of Saints and a lot have anti-Semitic and anti-Turk imagery in them. After that we walked to St. Nicholas's church. It is extremely heavily and ornamented and basically completely pink and gold on the inside. Afterwards, we made our way further out toward Prague Castle and saw the Senate building and we couldn't go inside, but the gardens were really beautiful with fountains, coy ponds and lots of flowers and greenery.

Also, I got my computer back today from the repair shop. Yay!

I got back from Amsterdam on Sunday, but I have far too much to write about to include it in this post and I have a lot to do. I'm currently choosing my courses for next year and I have a presentation for my living history class due tomorrow. Cau!

Visiting Litomerice

I went back to the same synagogue for evening Rosh Hashana services. This time the security guard asked me a bunch of questions and asked to see ID. Since they did not split up into conservative and orthodox for this service I was sitting on the women's side again. But it was much better then at Chabad because our area overlooked the synagogue and I felt more like I was a part of the service. The also let people come up to the ark and offer prayers, which they said was a Sephardic tradition. The Rabbi came up and said hello to Ariella and I and told us to come back for Sukkot Dinner and Shabbat. After the shofar was blown they had a light break the fast but we were still hungry so a bunch the students that were at services went to Bohemian Bagel.

Yesterday, we all met up for the day trip to Litomerice at school at 8:30 AM. When we got there we went on a short tour of the town. It was very beautiful and its claim to fame is that poet Karel Hynek Mácha lived there, although he is buried in the Vysehrad cemetary I visited on Wednesday. People were much friendlier there then in Prague. We visited a castle because you cannot go anywhere in the Czech Republic without visiting a castle. But it had a really beautiful garden and caves underneath and our program director Ana lived there for a while because her parents were the caretakers. We ate lunch at a restaurant that was were the execution gallows in the town used to be, so there were hand cuffs and masks on the wall. I also climbed to the top of this lookout point which was pretty terrifying because the steps were tiny and narrow and the ceilings were very low.

We then went to the winery, and looked at the barrels and the caves where the wine ages. Then we tasted four white wines and two red. After that we headed back towards Prague and Gina invited my roommates Laura and Molly and I to get dinner with her and her finance at a traditional Czech pub. Our friends Ryan and Dan and one of Dan's friends came as well. Dan and his friend are from New Zealand but they have this fascination with American hip hop culture and stong opinons about American politics. I talked to Gina's finance about how marrying into an American family. Dinner was nice, but all the wine and the long day proved to be too much for Molly who fell asleep during dinner.

I think for the rest of the weekend I will just be focusing on studying for my Czech midterm.

fasting and blogging

On Tuesday night I went to Swan Lake and it was beautiful. I don't know much about Ballet but I really enjoyed. The theater was gorgeous, too. It was the perfect backdrop to a classic ballet performance. After that we hung out at M1 and the people from South Africa were talking to me and wanted to talk all about the election and if I was going vote for Obama.

Wednesday during my living history class we visited Veserad Castle. You have to climb a bunch of stairs to get up to it but it was beautiful. The views were great but it was a little foggy. There is a park near it with statues were we were lectured. Our teacher told us a bunch of weird Czech legends about these sister and showed us a really cute play ground. The weather was perfect for sitting outside. We also saw a cemetery were important Czechs are buried. The plots were above ground and had a lot of flowers growing right out of them. I think I want to visit it again, I like going places with my class but its never enough time to really enjoy what you're seeing because you have to deal with the logistics of a large group. It was erev Rosh Hashana but I was so tired after class. I went to sleep and the later I went to a bar with a lot of people from my program called Cross Club. It was insane looking. The walls are decorated with motherboards of computors and everything is completely industrial and made of other recycled objects. The coolest thing were these light fixtures on the ceiling that glowed, spun and moved. It's kind of hard to describe but it was very cool. Most of the music was reggae and some of the people were a little scarey.

Today I went to services with four other kids from my program and they were nice but long. I would probably liken it most to a conservative service. There was a baby naming which was really cute. The rabbi explained that it is a special simcha for the community when a Jewish baby is born in Prague. For many years under Hungarian rule there could only be one Jewish child that could be married per family, then in WWII babies were not allowed to be born and until 1989 babies could be born but under Communism they were not supposed to identify with being Jewish. He said the Jewish community in Prague was slowly but surely coming back. I might go back tonight to hear the final blowing of the shofar.

I am so hungry!

Sick in the City

This weekend was really relaxed. My roommates were all on different trips and I was thinking about going to Slovenia with Molly and Keifer but I woke up on Thursday and I could barely speak. I spent most of Thursday in bed and on Friday I was still not feeling well but I ventured out and took a long walk around my neighborhood on some of the streets I had not looked at yet. I'm glad I live in Praha 2, because I get to experience Old Town and Praha 1 because my friends live there and all the historic stuff but I don't feel like I am around tourists all the time.

On Saturday I went to Old Town Square to see the Dali exhibit but there were tons of people in the square and some traditional Czech singing and dancing on a temporary stage. I watched for a while and looked around at the different booths that were set up selling food and realized it was "International Chef's Day." I made my way to the exhibit, its in a building that that just houses different traveling exhibits. The Dali exhibit was cool, intermixed were pictures of Dali in his apartment taken by Vaclav Chocola, a Czech photographer that met Dali in Paris. It also incorporated some of his scultures and drawings. I really liked the etchings and a long series of small pictures inspired by the Divine Comedy. The images he created had a lot of magic and energy.

On Sunday I bummed around some more and walked to the church yard and read and did some sketching. I finally finished Unbearable Lightness of Being. I was an uneventful weekend but I feel a lot better.

Today I visited the Pinkas Synagogue in the Jewish Quarter with one of my classes. It has the names of Jews who died in the Shoah all over the walls. Its very overwhelming to look at. I have very specific memories going there in high school. I think the most interesting part is the cometary in the back where people are buried twelve deep and the gravestones are all faded and crooked. It gives it a very eerie and romantic feel.

Afterward I went to Tesco (the Czech version of Target) and got some boring things I needed.

Tonight I'm going to the Opera House to see "Swan Lake."

L'shana Tova

This Monday was erev Rosh Hashana and I met up with my friend Ariella in Old Town to go to services at Chabad. I am not exactly used to the way they worship. The men were in a larger room and the women in the kitchen(the symbolic irony of the location was not lost on me) which was adjacent. About ten women came and about forty men. It was all in Hebrew but I recognized most of what was being said or chanted. A really nice woman introduced herself, she was from New York but had been teaching English in Prague for several years. She invited us to the dinner that was happening afterwards. The dinner was very nice and people were very friendly and everyone was using English to communicate. We sat between a family from Israel and man visiting from France. There was also a lot of students there.

The next day Zack and I went to the Spanish Synagogue. Before we went in, the security guard asked if he was Jewish and when Zack said yes, and then he asked if he could see his passport. I went to look for mine but the guard said it was okay. There were only about twenty people inside, and the service was in Czech, English and Hebrew but the Rabbi was American and had a translator. The service was done in a much more familar style but was none too inspiring. The Spanish Synagogue is large and beautiful, with gold and turquiose heavily decorated walls. The contrast was a bit depressing between the gradeur of the past Jewish heritage and the dimsal turnout of the present. I forget sometimes though that it has only been about twenty years that the Czech have been able to worship and one of my professors said that the country tends to be secular, so I suppose this may just be how it is here.