Let me start off by saying I’M DONE WITH MY EXAMS!!! I finished up by 10:15 this morning, so I had the whole rest of the day to spend a little more time saying goodbye to Prague. My first exam of the day was with Professor Voráček. I think that was a good decision on my part to start off with him, because it really settled my nerves. He spent the first four minutes or so asking me about where I was from and my family because I have a Slavic surname. It was kind of funny, and also really convinced [View Full Entry]

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Today was wonderful. After going to breakfast and turning in my papers I came back to my room and took a nice nap for about two hours. After that I did a bit of work downloading and organizing my pictures from this summer (which took entirely too long), then headed over for lunch. While at lunch some of us decided to play volleyball in the afternoon, but we had to wait a few hours to get the court. In the meantime a small group of people came down and played cards and just generally passed the time in my room. It [View Full Entry]

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Today was composed entirely of writing papers. I had thought they were due on Friday morning, but as it turns out they’re due tomorrow at eight in the morning. The first two papers were easy enough to write (sociology and international studies/history), but the economics paper for Boučkova was a wee bit hellish. I managed to finish that up around two this morning. Actually, since it’s past midnight I wonder if I should change this heading to Thursday… [View Full Entry]

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Today was kind of eventful… It was also the last day of our study tour, so it’s back to Prague for the next few days, then I’m going home. I’m still not sure what I think about that. But back to today! We started the day off by going to another cooperative farm and having a look around. The first unit we went to was the dairy unit. I can’t really comment on its condition since I don’t have a dairy background, but it didn’t seem to be too bad. Some of the students were saying it looked like it [View Full Entry]

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I think today I may have been closer to my “breaking” point than I have in quite a while. It’s unfortunate that I’m getting fed up with and frustrated by so many little things now, but I guess that’s a sign that it’s about time for me to go home. I suppose a bit of explanation would be helpful. To start off with, there is a hideously irritating song that one of the Czech students has been playing incessantly for the past few days. It’s absolutely maddening to me and it was played rather loudly directly behind me this morning. [View Full Entry]

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Today was our 16 mile hike. It was split up into three sections, the first one was about eight miles but I’m not sure how long each of the other two were. The first section was by far the worst (and by worst I mean most physically demanding). Really it was only maybe the first two miles that made me want to die. I can't remember exactly what Michal told us, but I think the increase in elevation was something like 2000 feet (could be wrong, don't quote me on it). I realized pretty quickly that I’m really out of shape. [View Full Entry]

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I apologize for not writing much recently, things have been getting a little busy getting ready for the study tour. Today marked the first of six days of wandering around the Czech Republic. We actually got to leave Bohemia and head into Moravia! Today we went to a network of caves and then spent the afternoon in Brno. The cave system was amazing. I’ve been to a few caves and caverns back in the States (Laurel Caverns in Pennsylvania and Smoke Hole in Canaan Valley) and I really enjoy them, so this was a lot of fun. The guide didn't speak [View Full Entry]

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I can’t remember the exact order of what all happened in Rome, but I’ll try to keep everything in as accurate a chronology as I can. Sometimes things run together for me. We left on Thursday for Rome. Our flight left at 12:30, so we took the bus down to Dejvicka and from there we needed to take another bus (Number 119) to Ruzyne. Luckily we ran into Marco as we were leaving, so he showed us where to catch the other bus (as it happened, it was at the stop when we got there, so we ran and caught it [View Full Entry]

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I feel like I might die. Not really die, but oh my goodness I’m not a happy camper. I went out last night with a decent-sized group of people…but it was a pain. We couldn’t get everyone together to leave, so a group of us left with the intention of meeting the others there. The plan was to go to a club called Mish Mash first, then head over to Mecca later on. Well, we didn’t know how to get to either club, but we wandered around a bit anyway. We finally got on the right road to Mish Mash, only [View Full Entry]

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Today we had our Czech Language exam. It wasn’t too bad, but I guess I won’t find out how I did for a while. It’s nice to have at least one exam down. We also had a lecture on Czech-Slovak relations, which I found very interesting but the weekend caught up with me and I couldn’t stay awake. I was somewhat upset about that because I really did want to hear what our lecturer had to say. Following the Czech-Slovak lecture we had an American businessman tell us about doing business in the Czech Republic, and also internet commerce. I didn’t [View Full Entry]

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