Time is flying by, and I’ve been here forever

I now have two weeks under my belt in Prague. The time has flown by, but it also feels like I have been here forever. I have experienced so much in my first two weeks here, its hard to believe it has only been that long. Our first week was orientation overload on all things Prague. We sat through lectures about how to avoid getting robbed, how to find the night tram, how to use the metro system, etc. We also got to go on scavenger hunts through the city, find buildings for classes and meetings, and see some of the sites! Here are some photographic highlights from the first week:

“Awkward prom pictures” at the John Lennon wall

Charles Bridge on a cloudy day

Horká čokoláda at Choco Cafe with my lovely roommates. Its literally melted chocolate. You eat it with a spoon!

The first week was wonderfully overwhelming. After one week, I felt like I had a decent understanding of the metro system and general navigation around Prague. Even after the first week, I began to feel at home in my apartment. I have two amazing roommates: Jenny and Marianna. Jenny is an American student studying in my program with CIEE and Marianna is our Czech buddy! She is actually from Slovakia, but is going to school at Charles University here in Prague. Each apartment has a Czech student living with them to help us get immersed into Czech culture and answer all of our many questions. Marianna has been an immense help to me in finding which metro or tram to use, grocery shopping, reading cooking directions in Czech, and much more; she has been a very supportive friend as I get acquainted with the city. Our apartment is in Praha 3, on the border of the Vinhorady and Zizkov neighborhoods. It is a great location: right above a metro stop and across the street from a mall where we can do our grocery stopping and go for late night gelato!

After the first week of orientation we began our two-week long Czech intensive course. I am now halfway through the intensive! We are in class from 9:30-2 every day making terrible attempts at speaking this language. I am so thankful to be learning helpful phrases; some people speak English in stores, restaurants, etc. but the more I try to get away from touristy areas, the more I have to rely on my very limited Czech vocabulary. Even though I’m thankful for the course, I also want to stab myself in the eyes every time I try to say the number 4. The word is spelled “čtyři”… pronounced “jdeeejeh” …or something. All of us american students have been standing on the trams going to class practicing out loud for our quiz saying “čtyři.. čtyři… čtyři?… čtyři!” and getting weird looks from locals. To us it sounds like gibberish, but to them it just sounds like loud americans saying “FOUR FOUR FOUR FOUR FOUR”. My hilarious roommate, Jenny, is writing a haiku for every day she is here, and I think she sums up the feeling of learning Czech perfectly in this haiku:

czech is not a real

language. It was made up by

Russia to wreak havoc.

Besides the daily struggles of pronunciation, the Czech intensive is helping me feel more confident doing daily life. I can now go to the grocery store and recognize about 50% of what I am buying without having to sniff the mystery grocery item when I get home to see if I bought butter or cream cheese. With our Czech intensive, we also got to go on a field trip this past Saturday to Kutná Hora, a town in Bohemia that was famous for silver mining. We got to see in Italian court and coin mint, the Church of St. Barbara, and Sedlec Ossuary which is a church made of all bones. Here is a picture of the crazy bone church:

Feeling morbid smiling whilst surrounded by thousands of dead people’s chemically sanitized bones.

Because of all of the craziness of this experience, I feel like time has flown by, but again, I still feel like I’ve been here forever. I think I get that feeling when I do very normal things in a very foreign country; I feel somewhat like a local more than a tourist at times. One moment I’ll be doing my site-sighing with my map and camera, but then later that same day I’m singing NSYNC’s Dirty Pop with my roommate in the living room, cooking dinner, or brushing my teeth. When I’m doing such normal non-glamourous things I really feel like I’m living life here. I have weird moments, like in the midst taking out the trash today, where I realize I’m living daily life on the other side of the ocean. It’s kind of a confusing mix of feelings that I am still trying to process.

Through everything that is changing in my life, through all of the mixed emotions and in the midst of all the unfamiliar, I am comforted to know that God is constant. He will never change, and neither will His love for me, and that is all the familiar I need. “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” -Hebrews 13:8

Thanks for reading,

Katie