A Trip to the EAST: Prague

One of my favorite pictures (communist blocks), particularly with the brewing storm above
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My trip to Prague signified one of perhaps--gasp--my last.  In some ways I can tell this is good, because the church and castle-awe is starting to wear off.  I do hope to spend some days in smaller Spanish towns in the coming weekends, replacing monuments with hopefully a sense of the people and some winning conversations :-).

The weekend skimmed on being unconventional (I missed a clock that was voted Europe's worst tourist attraction) and began with a public transportation adventure that led Steve and I to the former Communist Blocks that surround the city.  I've added pictures of them, which half do them justice, but in essence they are just miles and miles of the worst suburb imaginable.  By that I mean they plopped a bunch of cement appartments, left large oasis of open space (that I'm imagining was communally farmed like I used read about in Russian Lit), and then if you catch a bus, you might be able to get to a grocery store or McDonalds in 10 minutes.  Getting there was nearly too eventful when Steve despite there being mud decided we should walk through a field up to the Blocks.  On the way we ran into a small gypsy camp by a muddy river where a middle-aged, upper-class couple were walking with a stroller.  It all reminded me of Tolstoy.  Lastly for literary references, the Communists apparently decided to build a TV tower that would be innovative enough architecturally to serve as a tourist attraction and ended up looking like a very tall robotic tower with a giant eye that could watch the goings-on of everyone in the city.  WE come to life.  The only thing missing was a flying cat, or was it a pig?--oh, and that it wasn't Russia.

A massive blob of Communist housing--repainted
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On the note of not being Russia, or any large country at all, I was continually astounded to hear people communicating in Czech.  I do know that many languages exist that are only spoken regionally, but seeing/hearing that realized in Europe went against my developing concept of the European Union (which the Czech Republic has been a part of since 2004) as a place that is growing together in terms of communication, policies and trade.  This isn't really fair since I'm sure Dutch isn't spoken by many either, but at least it's very close to German, and Germany is very central to the EU.  And when was the last time a political summit was held in Prague?  (I'm sure Steve will have something to say to this.)  Maybe this is all related to the relative difficulty of expanding the EU east, which I am supposed to be reading about in Spanish these days....dios mio.

Central planning meets public space and 'housing'
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I was thoroughly a tourist the next day with Brenna, Rebecca Brown and Anya.  We saw 2 churches, tried to figure out why you would have statues of a man in a Pope-hat killing someone with a lightning rod, went to the castle, and exploited the Czech Crown.  It turns out when you spend the equivalent of 3 euros on a cappuccino in Prague (a common price here, not to mention London where the other girls are studying), they bring it to you on a silver platter.  Also, Prague claims to be the 'Paris of the East', complete with a mini-replica of the Eiffel Tower (mon dieu, what would the French say??), so we sought out the praguian-crepe as much as possible and ended up with a very thorough comparison.  I think the conclusion is, it's hard to go wrong with crepes. As for a Spain update, things here are going well.  Today I felt like perhaps I am doing a good job with the language.  I regularly conjugate verbs wrong and am aware (which is an improvement) of how awkward my vocabulary is at times, but perserverance pays off.  I had a lunch conversation today with an Italian--in Spanish--and after discussing the future of renewable energy in the US, whether Spain was his last choice for places to study abroad (not quite was the answer) and his post-graduate job possibilities/lack of--I realized there was nothing I had tried to say that I couldn't.  In terms of general communication, I couldn't remember a way that the language had impeded the conversation, except to make it a little slower, and I was very happy.  I have also succeeded in making fun of some guys in my econ class, catching the phrases they didn't think I'd hear, and getting twice their score on our last test.  I knew there was a reason I chose boring-as-hell-with-lots-of-graphs finance classes rather than literature ones here.  I hope you all are well, and I'm off to pretend to read Cervantes at the cafe next door.

The TV tower I imagine as the enormous Communist Eye
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Con amor,

Libby