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Published: March 27th 2007
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St. Charles Bridge at Dusk
One of Prague's most famous landmarks In case I didn’t have time to tell you, I am spending the second half of my spring semester in the Czech Republic. Thunderbird has a tiny “campus” at the Czech Management Graduate School of Business, which is located about 30 Km from Prague, in a village of about 1500 called Celakovice (pronounced Chelakoveetsiya). I’ll be here about 7 weeks. My professors are flown over and they live here with us; I’m with about 60 of my classmates and we don’t mix with other students in class, so it is the Thunderbird curriculum, only in the Czech Republic.
This is my first visit to the Czech Republic, and although I spent a day in Czechoslovakia’s poorer half (Slovakia) about two years ago, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect economically, culturally, or language-wise. I got in after midnight so I didn’t have many first impressions, though the airport was sterile but functional and didn’t look destroyed or malfunctioning like most which I grew accustomed to in my recent life as an expat in formerly Soviet places. I found my school’s van waiting for me and they whisked me off through downtown Prague, which was hard to gauge at night
Prague Castle
Prague's Castle at night but looked pleasant enough, and suddenly the lights disappeared and I may as well have been in a grassy field in central Nebraska—the night was as clear as I’ve seen in a long time, and I couldn’t see anything beyond the faint beam of light coming from my Skoda van.
Eventually we wound up at Celakovice and I checked into the hotel/conference center where most of us live (a few people choose to get flats in Prague and commute each day). The school was refurbished by USAID and is now self-sustaining and hosts people like us all year, from Thunderbird but also other US and European universities. It used to be a communist brainwashing center so I like the irony of our MBA program being here. It is spartan but clean and at least colorful, if dark. It kept a few of its communist-era quirks such as never keeping lights on in the stairway at night, when you actually need them, and the white walls have this chalky substance which gets on your clothes seemingly even if you don’t touch it. Smoking is permitted inside, this being E Europe, and a few staff give gruff looks when you-gasp-do something
Old Town Prague at night
A fun place to go at night.. radical like take the coffee from the kitchen and drink it upstairs. Order and control are still engrained I guess. But by and large the younger staff are friendly and open and more importantly, helpful and proactive. I share a two bedroom “apt” with a kitchen and bath with a fellow student, and I even have wireless internet access. The canteen does a remarkable job of making different meals out of meat, potatoes, and dill, and one day they had a carrot decoration as a garnish. Now that is progress!
This tiny village actually has more to offer than I expected—there is a Chinese restaurant staffed by Chinese from Sichuan province…and a few decent Italian joints and a place with great pepper steak for $4. But the best places are of course the local grubby version of fast food where these burly men (and women!) serve up the most unhealthy but great tasting meals washed down with a pint of cold Pilsner for $3. Luckily living in the Balkans inured me to the fact that everyone smokes furiously during lunch in E Europe.
Unlike other parts of the Eastern bloc, people seem to take an interest in nature
Downtown Prague Square
Lots of great sights & sounds here and have gardens and make an effort to keep public spaces well kept and nice. There are bored youth who walk around and spray paint what they can, but I guess that happens everywhere. There’s a little train station with hourly trains to Prague. It takes 30 minutes and about $2 each way and the trains are just like the rest in Europe.
Czech language is frustrating because I understand some things from Russian and some things from Serbian so I can read quite a bit and sometimes I just throw out sentences with combinations of both to see what happens and actually it sort of works depending on the complexity of what I am doing. So far I’ve made it as far as ordering food and buying a train ticket. But there’s a lot of finger pointing going on too. English is spoken less frequently than in W Europe and even the Balkans, more so than the former USSR.
Everything I know about the town is from walking around looking for lunch. My first week I had class from 8am to 6pm which was definitely excessive but it worked. From here on it will be a regular
Red Light District
The Red Light District really is red! schedule except that I only have 3 classes, down from 6 last semester. Because of the schedule I only made it to Prague once so far, but it lives up to its hype. The castle and river and bridges are great, and my classmates had a great time wandering around eating street food and at night drinking hot spiced wine. They have free public musical festivals, even in the cold, and the Czech beer is great. Wine, not so much. It is sometimes hard to get it that we are in the EU—it’s obvious it isn’t a disaster like Kosovo but also nothing like Vienna in terms of cleanliness and modernity. But it works, and we have all the essentials, though because of my surroundings I’ve reverted to drinking only bottled water like I did from 1999-2006. Old habits die hard.
During the past week we did a site visit to the Skoda car manufacturing facility. It wasn’t as modern as a GM plant I visited in Shanghai earlier this year, but still nothing like the state-run mess I’m sure it used to be. VW now owns most or all of it, and they have a great museum filled
Sweets on the Square
But it smells so good... with old cars.
Since this is longer than most people probably have time for already, I’ll end here. I’m attaching some photos from the first week, and will try to send updates when I can….it will be a packed 7 weeks…
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