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Published: June 16th 2008
My Birthday
Jo & me with our chocolate fondues :)After all of my recent international adventures, I thought it was about time I updated you all on how things are going in Prague. A lot has happened in the past couple of months, but I’ll start with the most important thing: my birthday! I had a wonderful, although not particularly Czech, birthday. The night before my birthday I went out for tea with a bunch of friends (all Australians, so I certainly wasn’t missing having an Australian birthday!). We went to a vegetarian restaurant in the city, which has become my favourite restaurant in Prague so far. The food there is awesome and it was especially great to be able to have a meal that actually had a variety of plants in it, not just potato! After many restaurant meals of cheese and potato, I was really starting to crave salads and vegetables. I’ve gotta say, typical Czech food is definitely not good for the waistline!
The night of my birthday, my Australian friends and I went to a witch-burning party! Sounds slightly sinister, but it was a lot of fun. On the last day of April it’s a tradition to have big bonfires and burn the witches and
My Birthday
the Aussies get rid of the evil of the winter. Another part of the tradition is that guys are meant to leave a broom on the doorstep of the girl they like… No brooms on my doorstep, unfortunately. As Czech as this witch-burning tradition is, my roommate, who is Czech, had no idea what I was talking about when I was telling her about it! So I guess not everyone celebrates it, but they don’t know what they’re missing out on!
There was a big witch-burning celebration organised in a massive park not far from my dormitory, so we walked up there to check it out. It was really big, there were hundreds of people there! A lot of the little kids were running around dressed up as witches, and there were people carrying broomsticks around… There was a big stage with bands playing and later on we got an awesome light & music show with a dance in the dark by people wearing fluorescent things on their body, to Metallica music. It was really cool, I’ve never seen anything like it before! We unfortunately didn’t get to see any witches being burnt, although there were a lot of little witches running
My Birthday
the Brisburnians - Sara, Paul & Byron around that would've done the job! There were a couple of small bonfires there that everyone gathered around, to cook their sausages and sing traditional Czech songs. The night ended when the police turned up and killed the party by turning the fire hose on the bonfires…
The beginning of spring and the warmer weather in Prague has really started to change the atmosphere of the place. It's become really green and beautiful and people have started to venture outdoors and just hang around in parks and squares all day. Much more stuff has been happening in the city and I've been lucky enough to get to go to some pretty cool stuff. A few weeks ago I went to my first proper Czech party and it was completely crazy! I went with my roommate, some of her friends and a friend from Austria. The guy who hosted the party, the boyfriend of my roommate Maja's friend, is pretty rich and had some spare money lying around, so he decided to throw an all-expenses paid boat party, you know, as you do... So, it was a boat cruise through the centre of Prague with free entertainment, drinks, food. I
My Birthday
the Melburnians - Natasha, Jo & me really enjoyed it, although you can probably imagine what a boat load of guys with access to free, unlimited alcohol would be like...
Also a few weeks ago, I went to see Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds in concert in Prague. It was amazing, and definitely one of the best concerts I've ever been to. Nick Cave's an incredible performer, he really has awesome audience interaction and he's got the ability to pull off anything he wants on stage. He totally had the whole rock star thing going, but on the other hand, he could also do the whole soft and romantic thing perfectly as well. There were thousands of people there, and most of them seemed to be die-hard Nick Cave fans. I'm really surprised how well known he is here in Europe and how popular he is! It seems to be a bit more of an underground thing though, among people who are really into music or the music scene. They're definitely a band that is better live than on CD - the concert just blew me away, it was completely fantastic and so much better than I expected it to be! It's pretty amazing what
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enjoying our Gambrinus a bunch of 50 year olds can do!!
There was an international Roma festival in Prague a couple of weeks ago and I managed to get along to one of the events. There was a street procession in the city centre with different Roma groups from many different countries. It was really wonderful, to see their culture and their different music and dances.
I actually studied a whole subject at uni this semester about the Roma in Europe. It was a really interesting but sometimes depressing subject, because they're treated really badly. One thing I did with some of my class was go to a memorial to the Roma victims of the Holocaust. It was near a small town in the south of the Czech Republic, called Lety, where a Roma concentration camp was located in World War II. The memorials have been happening there annually for the past 10 years, to remember the hundreds of thousands of Roma who were killed in WWII. It's pretty controversial though because there's now a pig farm on the site, which is a huge insult to the Roma but no-one else really cares. The inhabitants of Lety don't want to know about
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the incredible music & light show it either because many of them have relatives who were guards at the camp and helped with the Roma 'extermination', so it's a bit of a touchy topic.
About 1 & 1/2 months ago I managed to score myself a job as an English teacher! I wasn't looking for anything, it just sorta happened through a friend of a friend of a friend. You know how it is... So I was giving private lessons to a guy twice a week for about 6 weeks. I've never taught anyone anything before so I was pretty scared and stressed about it to start with cos I had no idea what I was doing, but I ended up really loving it. And all this after I've always insisted that I would never become a teacher! The guy who was my 'student' was great, and even cooler was that he's the captain of the Sparta ice hockey team, one of the Czech Republic's biggest and best ice hockey teams! So that was really cool for me and I ended up learning a hell of a lot about ice hockey! Although, it was a little strange when I went to the Nick Cave concert
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cooking dinner in the Sparta hall, to see a 10 metre high picture of my 'student' on the side of the hall!!
Now that I have holidays, the last few days of my time in the Czech Republic for a while was spent with my roommate Maja and her family. She lives in a town called Trinec in the furthest eastern part of the Czech Republic. I've gotta say, Trinec is pretty boring, I mean, the thing they're most well known for is their massive iron works. So we understandably spent very little time in Trinec! The first day there we went to the intersection of the Czech, Polish and Slovakian borders. It was the biggest novelty ever for me - I got to be in 3 countries at the same time! Then the next day I actually got to properly be in Poland because we went there for the morning. It sounds so strange, saying "oh you know, I went to Poland for the morning", but it was just so close, only about a 20 minute drive. The city we went to, Tesin, is in what I think is a pretty strange situation, because it's half in the Czech Republic
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my Australian friends and half in Poland. So I sort of cheated a bit in going to Poland because it was still basically the same place, they just spoke a different language and used different money.
Our activities for the weekend were pretty dictated by the weather though because it decided to rain every single day. Plus there were thunderstorms two of they days; one that was so loud I could feel the vibrations and it could even be heard in Australia. (Well, via a phone line...) I swear I must have some rain-bringing powers or something because every single trip I've been on since I've been here, it's rained, even my day trips! As soon as I reach somewhere it's only a matter of minutes before it starts bucketing. Maybe I should return to Australia!
My last few weeks of uni were completely crazy and stressful because I had never-ending essays, presentations and exams... Maja and I spent most of our time holed up in our room studying for those last few weeks. The only thing that got me through those weeks was the reward of holidays and travel that was looming closer and closer. Most of the other exchange
students finished all of their uni assessment as early as possible so that they could leave to travel around Europe. The last few weeks in Prague were filled with goodbyes, as all of my friends started to leave. I was the last one out of all of them to leave Prague. So, my four month European adventure has now started! It's going to be awesome and I'm really looking forward to all the new countries that I'm going to be discovering. Who knows where I'll be next time you hear from me!
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Hälsningar från Stockholm
Kimberley, Jättekul att läsa om dina eskapader och studier i Prag. Vilket otroligt långt och härligt sommarlov du får. Hör av dig när du kommer till Sverige. Må så gott och bästa hälsningar inger