Praha!

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Hey Guys,
Firstly huge apologies for my slackness with both these journals and emails. I just can't figure out where all my time is disappearing too. Its going so quickly! On the upside it's only 4 weeks till Eamonn arrives in Paris now 😊

Just a quick catch up on my routine activities; Am playing soccer twice a week at the moment through uni which is heaps of fun. Hardly any girls, but all the guys are good about it and they have pretty awesome skills. Have a couple of french friends through soccer which is cool, and one of them Jerome came to our place for dinner a couple of weeks ago and then asked Torse out by text!! It was so funny, he's a little bit girlfriend desperate but really lovely and quite spunky....he's french but his family is italian.

Had a fun birthday, Torse made me pancakes for breakfast and I got the snoopy underwear i wanted! Went out for dinner at night with a group of friends which was lovely. Got lots of chocolate! Cat also bought me this amazing cake which we ate the next day, layers of chocolate and passionfruit mousse on a small cakeky base topped with pistascios and white choc. mmmm. expect sam to be the size of a medium to large truck when she gets back!

Cat and I went to the Dido concert on Oct 19 I think, and it was awesome. I hadn't been so sure about going, but it was totally worth it. I haven't been into Dido since her first album ages ago, but she is such a great live performer. Am in love with the second album now! We bought it for Cat for her birthday.

We've also discovered this awesome oriental tea house in Lyon, where the menu is totally teas, all flavours and types, and you sit on these little cusions on the floor around a really low table. Cool chill out place.

But on to the exciting stuff, Torse and I just spent an amazing week in Prague! It was so much fun but incredibly tiring. I think we got at most 5 hours sleep each night, and only 3 on the last night! But it was worth it. One of Torse's friends from school, Lauren, is there on a med school placement with 3 other Aussies so we crashed with them. They were great and we had many fun nights sampling the cocktails (how does a dirty white mother sound?!) at various prague bars. Oh yeah, we flew out of geneva (a 2 hour train ride from lyon), where we ate big pretzels, and on our plane (dodgy discovery company) which was delayed, there were only 5 people! It was a budget flight but they ended up giving us dinner and free champagne and drinks the whole way!

In prague we did all the touristy stuff like Charles bridge (stunningly old and atmospheric), Prague castle and the markets. We also did 2 day trips, the first to kutna hora where we saw this amazing old church, St Barbara, with these peeling frescoes all over the walls. It was enormous, with an increibly ornate exterior, but simply stunning and gorgeous interior. We also visited the Sedlec Ossuary just outside kutna hora, which is a chapel decorated entirely with the bones of around 40000 people! Quite gruesome, but amazing too.

On the saturday, Shauna, Tim (two of the aussies), Torse and I went to terezin, about an hours bus ride from prague. It is a fortified star shaped fortress town which was used as a transit camp for older jews from all over europe and children during WWII. Around 87000 people passed through Terezin during the war, and shockingly only about 3500 survived. Many died while there, due to appaling overcrowding, intense cold, epidemics of disease and lack of food. It was somewhere I really wanted to visit, having read about it in a EURO paper (the book was called Austerlitz....its an amazingly evocative history of europe). Terzin was both haunting and impressive, in the sense of history and just its architectural presence. I think it helped tha

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