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Published: March 6th 2008
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3/6/08
Ahoj kamaradkas! It has been a long time since I checked in with you all. This is partly due to an increased workload in my academic studies with CIEE and FAMU, although they are hardly rigorous in the traditional sense. This week I was required to attend an Open Mike Concert featuring my professor. It was a strange evening of performances by people who were once highly subversive in the Czech Underground scene of the Communist Era (ala Plastic People of the Universe, Egon Bondy, Vaclav Havel, etc) and can’t seem to get over being strange for strangeness’ sake. For instance, there was a woman in a silver alien body suit with silver wings, who attached herself to a rope and was flailing around, meanwhile another twirled strings with fire balls at the end of them. This is just once instance of the “expanded education” I am experiencing here. I miss the level of academia at USC film school, but I am absorbing so much culture here I feel like my projects when I return will benefit greatly.
Other adventures I have been on since I last checked in:
Berlin was an exciting mix of cultural delights and confrontations. Since
the war the city is a strange place to be as an American because you can feel the simultaneous gratitude and resentment stemming from our presence at the wall and through various sectors of the city. Checkpoint Charlie was an incredible experience and I highly recommend the museum there, which has many mementos of civilian and military struggle. There are moving art pieces, which seek to describe the suffering and disconnect, in the same way that am amputee might feel about a missing limb. One can see the various ingenious ways that people devised to get across, from cars with hidden compartments and special springs to minimize the sag of their precious load, to home manufactured scuba or flying equipment. Checkpoint Charlie provides a unique experience of hope and despair for those who lost their lives in the attempt at freedom. Other highlights from Berlin include the many Museums, my favorite naturally being the film museum, which has an excellent interactive collection of German silent films, Expressionist and Golden Age memorabilia, some Leni Riefenstahl (female filmmaker who recorded the Nazi propaganda events Nuremburg Rally and Olympia), German Film stars (Marlene Dietrich, Fritz Lang and Peter Lorre). The film experience was
enriched by our presence in Berlin coinciding with the Berlin International Film Festival.
The next weekend took me to Krakow, a lovely town with a picturesque main Square that is the second largest in Europe, magnificent churches with enchanting starry ceilings, first-class kabobs, and oh ya, conveniently located just an hour and a half from Auschwitz. We made the trip to the death camp on a grey and gloomy day, just the sort I always pictured. I fasted all day not because I was pretending to understand the emptiness that consumed the horrific lives of the prisoners, but because the place infused me with so much sorrow I could not fathom hunger. Even though the Nazis destroyed much of the compound at the end of the war, there is still a strong sense of place and in the muddy footprints of the alleyways between barracks, the way the sun looked blood red from out of a dusty window, and the many photographs of unknowing children walking into the chambers of gas, the place was full of ghosts begging the visitor not to forget. I never will. At one point down in what was called the Death Block, where prisoners were
held before being executed for disobedience or inconvenience, a group of tourists started singing a Hebrew song that was absolutely haunting. By the time the bus came to take us back to Krakow we were chilled to the core and when we did get back, we walked straight to a Polish pub and had an enormous dinner of schnitzel, apple strudel, and lots of beer.
After Krakow my week did not improve. Bratislava—that name will forever be burned into my mind as synonymous with catastrophe. I had to travel there to file an application for a student visa and they did not take me the first day, so I was left on my own to find lodging for the night and try again the next day. If any of you have been to Bratislava you know there is literally nothing there. There is probably a two-block stretch of decent Old Town, but the castle is empty and only provides a view of ugly communist building development and the streets below are crumbling in decay. Fortunately, VISA is taken everywhere and so I checked into a hotel and hauled up reading the only English book I could find that I had
not already read: A Room With A View. Even if you are not going to Italy in the near future, I recommend it to anyone with the travel bug. The English prose is delightful: “Over such trivialities as these many a valuable hour may slip away, and the traveler who has gone to Italy to study the tactile values of Giotto, or the corruption of the Papacy, may return remembering nothing but the blue sky and the men and women who live under it.”
Returning to magical Prague was heaven and it is amazing that I now think of the place as home, where I can grab a Beton (Becharovka tonic) with a friend in a café where they know my name and hop on the number 16 tram to school each morning. Last night I attended an enchanting masquerade ball. I don’t know if it is the resounding spirit of the Czech people, but compared to my experience in other parts of formerly communist Europe, Prague seems like the brightest beacon of social and cultural mobility.
Thanks again to all of you who continue to show interest in my adventures abroad. While this was a somewhat chilly edition,
I am traveling to Turkey and Greece for spring break in a week and a half and promise to provide tantalizing tales of warm breezes across the Aegean.
I love you all and hope you are well!!
Kate
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