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Published: September 19th 2009
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Tram 22!
This is the tram that takes us from our dorm (near the Prague Castle) to class and a lot of other places down town. They weren't lying, Czech intensive is pretty intense! Our intensive class started last monday.. it is a five our class starting at 9 and lasting until 2. We have it for two weeks (ten classes). But we have reached the half way point! We have about 15 kids in each class and we get like two twenty minute breaks... I actually think its a great way to get us into the class routine..
Every morning, we wake up at 7, get ready, eat breakfast, and leave the kolej (that's czech for dorm!) around 8:40, walk to our tram stop which is 200meters away, get off at Malastranska, and walk across the bridge to our class building. We have one more week of this, and then next week, on monday, real classes start! This is funny because that's a month later than everyone in the states! They are stuffing basically everything you would learn in Spanish I in this two week period! So far, we have learned the alphabet, the sounds of all the vowels and letters, greetings, verb conjugations, some basic verbs, numbers, and some pretty intense grammar stuff. For example, gender does not only change nouns, but verbs as
well.. Czech is one of the most difficult european languages. But, once you know one slavic language it is a lot easier to learn another. Slavic languages are more similar to one another than romantic languages like french and spanish. There is a Ukrainian girl in my suite, and she can communicate with Czechs without a problem just by speaking Ukrainian.
In Czech Intensive, they also take us on field trips. So far, we have gone to this museum nearby the academic building and Old Town Square. In old town square, our teacher just took us into bakeries, meat shops, and stores to practice our vocabulary. He told us about the history of some of the buildings in Old Town Square. He even told us "why Czechs are unfriendly people." He said that when the Czech lost its royal traditions, it became less happy. He kind of said this as a joke.. The museum we went to was a museum of valuables confiscated from the Jews during the Holocaust. They tried to return as much as possible, but kept the things that belonged to families who died or could not be found. Every object had a story with it.
Charles University
This is the Faculty of Arts building where half our classes are. This is where I have been going to Czech Intensive.. to get here, we have to walk acoss a bridge that runs parallel to the Charles Bridge. It was sad, but also pretty interesting.
The whole week, everyone was too tired to go out or do anything extra, so we all pretty much stayed in all week which is pretty pathetic, but we were all so tired! One day, I split off from everyone else to explore the city, and I ran into this Thai massage place.. It was really cool inside and I was just going to check to see the prices, but ended up getting a massage.. It was so cheap! It was an hour massage for less than thirty dollars! It was a nice relaxing reward for my Czech intensive!
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