Reality Czech

I guess I can now say I've seen at least four major European cities in the rain.  We headed out on Friday for Prague from the Vienna Erdberg bus station with the foreknowledge that the weather in that city would not be "springlike," and I grabbed my umbrella on a whim.  I was  unfortunately vindicated in my decision to bring the umbrella when it rained all day Saturday during our tour.  It rained consistently for most of the day, though never with the intensity we experienced in Paris, which is a qualified blessing, I suppose.

We reached our hostel in Prague around 9:30PM after a four-and-a-half hour bus trip and a longer-than-necessary trek through the city streets, during which our program leader asked almost every Czech we passed for directions.  We then split up to find dinner and a few friends and I settled for what we have now decided is the basic late-evening arrival dinner standby, pizza.  We czeched out the famous Prague pilsner there (that's the last time I make that pun, I promise) and had a grand old time using crowns, the Czech currency, which is at about 15 to the American dollar or 25 to the euro.  Nothing like handing over a crisp 500-crown note to pay the bill.  The crown also has the effect of making the balance of your bank account look far more healthy than it actually is, which is always a nice illusion to have when you're traveling.

We then went to a nearby café/bar to have our eardrums blown out by Czech techno and have another pilsner.  After that, it was back to the hostel for an adventure in falling asleep, thanks largely to the street-lamp directly in front of our shadeless window and the ceaseless streetcars passing by the building all night.  I really shouldn't complain; some of my roommates slept for only about two hours.

The rain was already falling when we set out on our tour at eleven the next morning, the sound of which was nicely accompanied by the rustling of fifteen or so umbrellas popping open.  Our spirits weren't hindered, though, as those of us with umbrellas offered shelter to those who had forgotten them.  In this fashion we followed our Czech tour-guide all over the city, through the new and old parts of the city (by new and old, I mean before and after the 15th century).  

The precession of umbrellas.

We started near Wenceslas Square, the major shopping area in Prague, which prompted singing of a certain Christmas carol on the part of me and a few others. Then we saw the Old Town Square, which features a nifty astronomical clock that is bound to draw crowds every hour on the hour to watch the procession of twelve mechanical apostles and a mechanized skeleton ringing a bell.  I guess that's a pretty medieval way of reminding you of the countdown to your death.

The skeleton is in the right corner of the clock frame.

We also saw the gothically awesome Charles bridge with its accompaniment of baroque statues and those of us who were taken in by silly superstitious mumbo-jumbo made a wish at some spot that is lucky for some obscure historical reason.  Under the guise of having lunch, we took shelter from the rain in a restaurant on the other side of the bridge and I took the following awesome picture:

The lighting, the angle, the composition, the subject... ach, I'm a genius.

The restaurant was near the "Lennon Wall" which is dedicated to John Lennon because the communist government wouldn't allow the Czech people to put up a statue of him after his death.  The wall is covered in layers of peace-and-Beatles-related graffiti which is ever-changing.  My friend Rachel, who had been to Prague to visit friends over spring break, said that you could hardly see the stuff that was there a month ago for all the new graffiti that had been added.  It was mighty schnazzy.

Friend, Joseph, adds his mark to the wall.

After lunch we trudged through a lighter rain and up a hill to the Prague Castle, which in and of itself is nothing to write home about (I don't think I even took a picture).  The real gem was in the castle courtyard, the location of St. Vitus Cathedral.  When you include St. Vitus, the Prague Castle is apparently the largest in Europe.  What really makes the cathedral cool, though, is the fact that it's so heavily gothic and that it was built and added on to over the course of several centuries, so it's something of a patchwork of styles and materials.  Of course, it's no St. Maria del Fiore, but nobody's perfect...

Gothica à la wide-angle.

With the castle came the conclusion of our tour and a bunch of us headed back to the hostel to nap before dinner.  All 21 of us in the program had dinner at a restaurant near Wenceslas Square, which implies a lot of waiting, though it was waiting we were willing to endure because the meal was on Central College.  I had a tasty bleu cheese chicken dish, a really excellent garlic soup, and a doughnut-ball and jam Czech specialty for dessert that I probably shouldn't have eaten.

After dinner a few friends and I went out looking for a bar or a club to go to.  Thank the Lord in Heaven we didn't go to a club.  Instead, we went to a pretty upscale hotel restaurant near the astronomical clock which just so happened to be the site of not only the best mojitos I've ever had (like I have much of a basis for comparison...) but also a nightly jazz performance.  My friends and I sat at our table listening to a troupe of five Czech musicians playing really good old time jazz, the highlight of which, for me at least, was the inclusion of a jazz clarinet, which is probably my favorite jazz instrument.  And since three out of the four of us there were writing majors, we were of course obliged to pretend it was the roaring twenties and that we were all members of the Lost Generation.  I would have gone to Prague just to go to this place alone.

The Storyville Jazzband Praha, whose CD I'm listening to as I write this.

After that it was back to the hostel for another bright night of streetcar-hindered sleep, though I think everyone slept better that night.  Before I went to sleep though, I joined some other members of our program in one of the other rooms to chat with an English chap who was also staying in the hostel.  He was quite amusing and very drunk ("pissed," in his words) and I learned that it's actually harder for me to understand people from central England than it is for me to understand Austrians.  We learned several new phrases, not the least of which was "He's a chestnut, he is."  

Sunday was our free day and it was also free of rain, which was nice.  A few friends and I sort of just schlepped around Prague, only really visiting the Dalí and Mucha galleries, both of which were fascinating and inspiring.  I think I even accidentally understood Dalí's "Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening" (the tigers look like bees).  Then there was some lunch with a tasty spicy tomato soup followed by the purchase of a Kafka t-shirt and finally another four-and-a-half hour bus ride back to Vienna.

Ich hab' gerockt!

After a few weeks back in Vienna it's time to be a tourist again.  This weekend, our program is heading to Prague for some sightseeing.  We'll be touring with the group and my friends and I will be meeting up with some other Americans studying abroad in the city.  We'll also get the chance to practice a little currency exchange outside the Euro Zone.

As I was prepping and packing, I realized that I hadn't posted a blog in a while that actually informed anyone of what I've been up to.  So here it is in a nutshell...

As amusing as it may sound, the hardest thing to deal with since I've been abroad (or one of the hardest) is learning how to deal with all the spare time we have.  While American university courses, like mine back home, usually meet two or three times a week for at least three hours a week, all the classes in Vienna meet only once a week for between one and two hours.  That being the case, the workload from day to day is a lot less strenuous and leaves a lot of time open to potential boredom.  Even in Schwäbisch Hall we could count on having class for four-and-a-half hours a day five days a week to keep us busy.

That means that in Vienna it's up to us to make our own fun.  I've heard a lot of other people complaining about how much time they're spending in their rooms and I've run into the same issue.  Vienna feels dangerously close to normal and all the boredom that implies.  Of course, I've been able to keep myself busy reading, working on my country, and working with the kids at the school where I teach English; my friends and I go out a few times a week to check out different bars and cafés, but all this downtime can still get to you.

Of course, this isn't to say that there aren't things to do in Vienna or that I am bored.  I am by no means bored.  Last week my friends and I took advantage of the vast art museum complex by going to see a Matthew Barney film called Drawing Restraint 9, which was really quite weird but not abstract enough at all... I was disappointed to find that it had a plot, of all things.  Still, it was worth seeing, if only to experience the strange abstract mood that inevitably followed.

My friend, Rachel, is also a very big fan of the movie The Third Man, which takes place in Vienna.  As it turns out, there's quite a lot of things in Vienna to do related to the movie.  For starters, we went to a museum that houses the personal collection of a man who is obsessed with the film.  We saw basically every kind of memorabilia related to the movie, and even watched a minute and a half of the film on an gigantic, rattling, old film projector from the 1940's.  It was very cool.  We also took a tour of all the filming locations in Vienna and got to see a lot of the city we hadn't seen before.  Finally, we saw the movie at the Burg Kino (cinema), which plays the movie a few times every week.  It was nice to find that I could understand even more, if not most, of the untranslated German than I did the last time I watched it in February.

A few friends and I have also been checking out the music scene in Vienna.  The weekend before last, we went to the arena to see a bunch of local bands.  At first we were disappointed, when the first three bands were middle or high school age and played mostly emo music, all in English, but were vindicated when the fourth band came out with long hair and a keyboard.  The show turned out to be very good with a lot of different styles, and all of whom sang in German, which was too difficult to understand, but more authentic.  There was even a "chick rock" band that only had drums, bass, vocals, and keyboard.  They were very good.

I went back with some of those same friends this past Monday to see a rock band from back home, Coheed & Cambria.  Their opening band was excellent, with a drummer who was nothing if not fierce.  It really made me miss playing music and being in a band.  Coheed themselves were as awesome as I expected them to be... possibly more awesome than the first time I saw them.  The highlights included a cover of Iron Maiden's "The Trooper" in the middle of one of their songs and a 20-minute instrumental solo in the middle of the encore song, "Welcome Home."  The 5-minutes or so of the drum solo was just mind-blowing, making me glad Chris Pennie left Dillenger to play for Coheed.  And, of course, Claudio Sanchez, the lead singer/guitarist, played guitar with some part of his face and even played the theremin, both with his hands and with his hair (see the picture below)!

Claudio playing the theremin.  We were front and center!

I also uploaded a whole lot of pictures from spring break to Facebook.  You can see them under my photography section.  That's all for now.  A lot has been going on and I'm sure I'll think of more to write soon, but for now I'm off to Prague.  Tune in next time to see what happens!

Playing the Expatriate

Since coming to Vienna, I've been buying six eggs a week at the supermarket, saving them for the weekends, when I have the time to make myself a more elaborate breakfast, usually something between fully-loaded scrambled eggs and a messy omelet.  I look forward to this weekend meal as a bastion of Americanness in my week otherwise full of breakfasts of European cereal, bread, and espresso (I make good old American filtered coffee too).

This morning, my roommate joined me in the kitchen  to have a smoke as I was cutting green peppers .  He saw what I was making and said, "So typisch Amerikanisch," (so typically American) in reference to my eggs.  He smiled as he said it.  I told him "Das ist das einzige Frühstück" (This is the only breakfast).  This spurred what has probably been the deepest conversation that he and I have had so far, regardless of the fact that it only lasted as long as his cigarette.  Still, it felt good.  Nowhere has the language barrier been more apparent than between the two of us.  In close quarters the fact that neither of us speaks the other's native tongue too well is a large contributing factor to ongoing awkward silences.  The other factor would be that my roommate is a lot more like an American frat boy than I have ever been; we just have different lifestyles.

More important than this little conversational breakthrough was the fact that his words about being typically American stuck with me and not in a bad way.  So often used to being categorized as the norm, the un-exotic, it felt nice to be labelled culturally in a non-negative way.  For god's sake, I felt proud to be making scrambled eggs!  What a nice little epiphany.  I have culture!  My study abroad experience has been peppered with little moments like this, moments where, far from feeling ashamed for coming from the land of President Bush, I feel proud to be different and to share my differences.  I always enjoy a reversal of perspective and it's nice to be on this end of the cultural see-saw.

When I asked my tandem partner in Schwäbisch Hall, she told me that most Germans make the distinction between the people of a country and its government.  Of course, of all people, Germans do not want to be equated with their government, specifically their past government, so perhaps they as a people can better appreciate that kind of open-mindedness.  Still, I always expect the anti-American sentiment and have been pleasantly surprised again and again to meet people as open-minded as I'm trying to be.  

This week, for our German Idiomatic and Grammar class, we visited with the students from one of our professor's other classes in order to talk about cultural differences.  I sat in a circle with two of my American friends and four Austrian girls majoring in Economics and just talked about life in our various countries.  I asked them what their picture of America was (I seem to have a preoccupation) and they said, of course, that Bush hadn't made it look so good, but that they all found America interesting.  A few of them are even planning to study in Oklahoma and South Carolina.  I was yet again, pleasantly surprised.  It's nice to meet people and connect with them as human beings without the lines of nationality being drawn between us.

Of course, these moments are tempered by others that are less than uplifting.  I've said to a few people, both back home and here, that it's really nice to be abroad right now, not because the purchasing power of the dollar is crap, but because I can see the pre-election hemming and hawing from a distance.  From here I feel like an observer, like I am far enough away that I can make a more impartial judgement on what I see.  There's truth in that, but it's really an idealist and, ultimately, unrealistic sentiment.

I've been surprised to see how closely the politics in America is watched by the people of Europe.  I guess it shouldn't be that surprising, considering the amount of power America wields... Europeans - indeed, people from all over the world - have almost as much invested in the outcome of the 2008 elections as we do!  Thusly, they can't very well be impartial, at least not any more than we can.  

I say all this, I suppose, because what I'm trying to get at is this: for all the countless times I've been pleasantly surprised at the open-mindedness of Europeans who don't automatically hate me because I'm American, I still see the headlines with terms like "cultural imperialism" and "anti-Americanism."  There was a lot of anti-American graffiti on the wall outside the supermarket in Scwäbisch Hall, too ("F*ck america" and so forth... I meant to get a picture of myself pretending to pee on the wall, but I never got around to it).  This is another side I'm not used to being on... a minority.

Whenever I see something like this, or read an article like this, it makes makes me question my patriotism.  If the anti-American voices are not that numerous, why are they so loud?  Certainly some - maybe even a lot - of it is unfounded, reactionary, even radical, but there has to be something there to provoke that reaction.  It makes me feel ashamed whenever I see America portrayed as the bully, but the tough reality is that it is.  We've forced our will on too many people in to many places and we've lost friends because of it.  Sure, there's a distinct difference between Americans and the American government, but its our apathy, our complacency, our addiction to prosperity that allows that government to make such a negative image for itself.  

That's the appeal - for a lot of people and for me, personally - of Barack Obama and his campaign of "hope," but it's not that simple.  That's the reality I've been struggling to face for a long time and which has come to the foreground since I've been abroad.  Nothing is that simple.  I've always been patriotic; it's the way I was raised.  But I've had to come to terms with that patriotism, had to rationalize it and what it comes down to is that it's just not that simple.  Nothing is black and white.  It's true for any nation: there's a lot to be proud of and plenty to be ashamed of.  I haven't really found an answer and I don't know if I'm any closer to one, but these are just the things I see.  Coming to terms with the fact that sometimes there just isn't a simple straight answer is, as cliché as it sounds, part of growing up and it's something I've been staring in the face since January.

A Blog Post to Rival War and Peace

I have good news everyone!  I'm not dead.  I blame my past week-and-a-half's absence on the good ol' "need a vacation from my vacation" syndrome.  It has been quite a busy week since Michael left, what with all the important things I had to do, like putting off signing up for next semester's classes until absolutely the last second, trying to help co-edit a literary magazine across the Atlantic ocean, designing a currency for my make-believe yet totally legitimate and not at all childish online country, watching the entirety of season three of Battlestar Galactica so I could understand the season four premier on Friday, and battling the strongest case of homesickness/depression/melancholitude (to coin a term) I've experienced thus far.  Clearly, I have been taking something of a break from the all-Europe all the time channel and have been spending most of my time on the hermit channel this week.

 

But that's all boring and depressing, which is why it's in my introductory paragraph.  I still have adventures yet untold from Paris and London!  When we last left our heroes, they had been scurrying through rain-sodden Paris like drowned rats, occasionally taking refuge under a bridge on Michael's whim.  We saw the Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo at the Louvre, were awe-struck by the Notre Dame cathedral, and drank coffee in a corner café along Quai St. Michel in order to get out of the rain.

 

On our second full day in Paris, we decided to motivate ourselves to get up early and travel to Versailles.  Thankfully, the rain had abated, which made the hour-and-a-half-long waiting process a lot more pleasant.  When we finally got our tickets, we had no idea where to start, so we just picked a entryway and went in.  As it turns out, Versailles is quite well furbished.  If you like gold - or if you have an inappropriate obsession with gold - then you might want to get in contact with a real estate agent in Versailles.  Great location too.  There was seemingly no end to the rooms gilded, bedecked, encrusted, embroidered, and even slathered with gold.  Of course there's a lot of velvet, crystal, and artwork to be had if the gold isn't impressive enough.  The decadence was overwhelming, and, as Michael pointed out, after a while it actually became underwhelming.  Oh yeah?  More gold?  Been there, done that.  The whole time we were there, I just kept trying to imagine what it would be like to think that you were so great that you needed to be surrounded by such obscene opulence.  In fact, Tommy, Michael, and I were in agreement that the most pleasing part of our time at Versailles was spent in the massive gardens that, while clearly decadent and out of touch with reality, were also very peaceful and pretty, even with no leaves on the trees.

We returned to Paris and walked down the Avenue des Champs Elysees in order to round everything out with a little modern-day opulence.  It was actually quite a nice walk during which the beginning sunset made up for the previous day's rain.  But the real cherry on top was the Arc de Triomphe, which was nothing if not a testament to one's problem solving skills.  For a while, we were convinced that you had to dodge death in the form of 5 lanes of oncoming "roundabout" traffic in order to get to the arc, but as it turned out, you just had to access it through a sort of super-secret underground passage way.  

 

When we finally emerged underneath the Arc we had the opportunity to see some sort of French military memorial service featuring French soldiers from all walks of life, some of whom looked like they may have served in dubya-dubya-one.  Tommy opted not to come with Michael and I to the top of the Arc, and boy did he miss out.  The view from up there was tremendous since the Arc is already on what seems to be one of the higher points in the city.  It definitely made up for missing out on the Eiffel Tower.  I got many a lovely picture of the rooftops of Paris sitting in the haze of the setting sun.

 

The next day was a travel day that nevertheless contained a little adventure of its own.  Once we arrived at the dreaded Charles de Gaulle Airport, we were duly confused by the fact that each gate has its own security checkpoint.  Once we had that figured out, we just had to sit around munching croissants and drinking tasty Orangina in a nearby café until we were assigned a gate.  Everything was peachy until we reached the security checkpoint where my backpack was singled out and a French guard yelled at me what I thought was a French word, but what turned out to be "carabiner."  Our following conversation went a little something like this: "My, what a big carabiner you have..." "Yes, all the better to bludgeon you with, my dear."  Yeah... as it turns out, the French seem to be of the opinion that a carabiner of the kind I use to keep my water bottle attached to my backpack can be used as a sort of makeshift brass-knuckle.  I tried to explain to the guard that the carabiner had sentimental value, that my dad had given it to me out of the blue on my 17th birthday, but I'm not really sure how to convey that to a native English speaker either.  In the end, I shed a tear or two as the guard deposited my beloved carabiner in the box marked blatantly, TO BE DESTROYED.

 

With all hopes of my becoming a Francophile tossed out with the carabiner, we arrived in London after only a short puddle-jump.  In fact, the ride aboard the Underground, which lasted at least an hour, may have been longer than our total flight time.  Maybe it was because I left France on such a bad note, but something about London immediately struck me as warm and inviting.  It may have also been as simple as the fact that this was the first English-speaking country I had been to in almost three months.  Either way, I dug London as soon as we got there.

 

We checked into our hostel and promptly decided to make the most of the remaining daylight by questing for the fabled Fish and Chips!  This turned out to be a far more difficult task than we originally figured, and after at least an hour without even a whiff of vinegar, we settled for meat pies and a cold floor at a train station instead.  Of course, we did see Big Ben and Trafalgar Square along the way.

 

The next morning we got up early in order to avoid London all together.  This wasn't without good reason, of course; Michael and I had decided well in advance that since we had both wanted to go to Legoland so badly as kids, we couldn't pass up the golden opportunity to visit the one only about a half-hour's train ride away in nearby Windsor.  We arrived in Windsor only to ignore what most tourists go to Windsor to see: Windsor Castle.  No, we hopped on the bus headed for Legoland and with each passing stop, it soon became clear that we were going to be the only adults there without a child to accompany us.  That turned out to be right on the money.  We were either the youngest adults or the oldest kids in the park (I prefer to think of myself as the later, at least as far as it relates to Legos).

 

Undaunted by how blatantly creepy we felt amongst all the youngsters, Michael, Tommy, and I proceeded to wander aimlessly around what soon became clear was a theme-park aimed only at the 12-and-younger demographic.  We rode two roller-coasters that were pretty limp by Michael's standards, but which thrilled me as a newcomer to the roller-coaster scene just about as much as it did the little 6-to-10-year olds all around us.  Plus, you got to feel like you were actually sitting inside a lego, which is pretty sweet.  All was vindicated, however, when we reached "Miniland," which is what my perception of Legoland had been prior to coming to this one.  Miniland, at least at the Windsor Legoland, is just a gigantic miniature recreation of famous landmarks in England, Scottland, France, America, and a few other places in Europe.  We saw all of London... made of Legos, all of Paris... made of Legos, and even the Kennedy Space Center... made of Legos.  There was even a miniature soccer stadium made of Legos with a miniature streaker made of Legos being chased across the field by constables made of Legos.  It made my inner-ten-year-old go nuts.  I can die happy now.

We returned to London for the afternoon in just enough time to stroll through St. James' Park, make friends with the squirrels, and see Buckingham palace in the sunset.  We were disappointed to see that not only were the stern ceremonial guards not wearing gigantic silly black fuzzy hats, but they were behind a big gate, so we couldn't even test their tenacity by making silly faces or inappropriate gestures at them.  At least the average police officer in London still wears a silly helmet like the kind I remember from Mary Poppins.

Our last day in London was spent actually seeing London.  We headed first to the Tower of London and got to, amongst other things, see the Crown Jewels and marvel at some more ostentatious affluence.  After the Tower, we finally got our fish & chips at a nearby stand, but it didn't live up to Michael's particular standards of being served in a rolled up newspaper.  Maybe they just don't do that anymore and maybe Londoners just finally got sick of fish and chips.  I imagine that would be like New Yorkers getting tired of hot dogs or falafel... whatever... it's a mystery.

 

Around that time we got our London dosage of rain.  We pulled out our umbrellas to cross the Tower Bridge and then hurred on to a bus in hopes that it would keep us a little dry and deliver us to a Underground station (lord knows there's enough of them), but as it turned out we were being driven further and further into London's suburbia and had to get off the bus and back on going the other direction.  Eventually, we made it over to the National Gallery and the National Portrait gallery, the later of which I found particularly interesting, but which was cut short by Michael and Tommy being tired nincompoops.  The Tudor portraits were pretty dull, I'll agree, but the more modern paintings and photographic portraits we simply fascinating.  We ended the evening by visiting a bar in the same neighborhood as our hostel called "World's End," which looked like ye typical British pub, but which turned out to be full of death metal and the kind of people I like to call "over-the-counter counter-culture."

 

That would seemingly be the end of my Easter Break adventures, but it was not.  No.  No, it was not.  The Saga of Terminal Five actually began during our stay in London.  On our first morning we noticed in the free papers that were shoved in our faces at the Underground stations the wellspring of articles bemoaning the monstrosity that was London Heathrow's new Terminal Five.  The basic facts are as follows: T5 has been in the works for something like 20 years; it was opened for the first time the day after we arrived; it now handles all British Airways flights; it is a behemoth; tons of baggage was lost on the first few days; and it started its carrier with some catastrophic amount of canceled flights like 60 a day or something like that.  

 

Needless to say, though we woke up to catch a taxi at 4 in the morning and had an excellent conversation with a very well-traveled taxi-driver, we were soon dismayed to find that our flight had been canceled and that there were clearly not enough or well enough trained employees on staff to handle the number of people with cancelled flights with any speed or grace.  We did finally get a new flight for 10 in the morning along with a £5 meal voucher, which is pretty good if you think about it in terms of being $10 American.  Thus began our long wait in the very shiny, very commercial, very structurally interesting Terminal 5.  At least I got a few more pictures for my "Michael Can Sleep Anywhere" album.

 

That's all for now.  I have to go treat the blisters on my fingers.  There won't be any pictures with this post, but I will be posting a few new links to whole albums in the next few days.  I'll leave a small post when they're up.