Jansepar.com

So, today Hor­atiu and I finally decided to stop pro­cras­ti­nat­ing and finally fill out our forms to apply for Inter­na­tional Exchange to attend Charles Uni­ver­sity in the Czech Repub­lic. For those of you who don’t know (but I’m sure most of the peo­ple who read this blog do), Hor­atiu and I plan to go to Europe for about eight months in Jan­u­ary 2009, first to Czech for first four months, and then trav­el­ling in the lat­ter four months.

Here is a pic­ture of where we will be attend­ing class:

For those of you won­der­ing why we decided to go on inter­na­tional exchange, or more specif­i­cally, why in the Czech Repub­lic, let me explain.

This may be dif­fer­ent from why Hora wants to go, but I am going first and for­most because I feel that I never really got the full “Uni­ver­sity” expe­ri­ence. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love Simon Fraser and I have no regrets in my choice, but by liv­ing at home and attend­ing uni­ver­sity, I never had a chance to expe­ri­ence liv­ing on your own, and more impor­tantly, liv­ing on your own with thou­sands of oth­ers your own age. Liv­ing at home still def­i­nitely has its benifits, expe­cially when it comes to sav­ing money, and its not so bad as my par­ents are pretty relaxed, but liv­ing on your own and hav­ing a place to your­self is an entirely dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence. This expe­ri­ence is here to make up for all the fun I could have poten­tially missed, and con­sid­er­ing I’m going to be in a entirely new coun­try, I’m hop­ing it will make up for it and then some.

Now, why Czech? Well, the plan was def­i­nitely to go some­where in Europe, and we thought to our­selves, where would be the best place to go that would have West­ern Euro­pean liv­ing con­di­tions, but cheaper, since I am a poor uni­ver­sity stu­dent after all. We decided on Czech because its the defin­ing mid­dle ground in Europe, with the cheap­ness and fun of East­ern Europe, and the stan­dard of liv­ing in West­ern Europe. Basi­cally, the coun­try had to have cheap beer, or it wasn’t going to be an option . Also, since Czech is right in the mid­dle, we are eas­ily going to be able to take mul­ti­ple week­end trips to Berlin, Vienna,  Budapest, and other sur­round­ing cities.

So, whats the next stop after our first four months in Czech? We plan to take the sum­mer off and go trav­el­ling. So far, the path that we’ve thought up involves going down Italy all the way until we hit Bari, which is the clos­est place to Greece (and where my mom’s side of the fam­ily is from). From there we will take a ferry to Greece, go through that coun­try then head on over to Turkey. After that though the plans are a bit hazy, we aren’t sure which coun­tries to go to from there, maybe a cou­ple Baltic coun­tries like Croa­tia, but like I said, we aren’t so sure. We are def­i­nitely going to stay in Roma­nia since Hor­atiu is from there. After that, we plan to go to Poland, and my friend Izabela said we could stay at her place over there when we go, so that should be good times. If any­one has any rec­om­men­da­tions, let me know! Or if any­one plans to go to Europe that sum­mer, just give me a shout and we can meet in some coun­try =D.

Right now, Hora and I are in the process of apply­ing, so far we have to get 4 pho­tographs of our­selves, talk to the CS Advi­sor, talk to a bunch of other advis­ers to match up courses from Charles to SFU, print our tran­script, make a bud­get, and get two pro­fes­sors to rec­om­mend us. We should be able to take care of most of that pretty quickly, but for now, we have filled in a bunch of paper work, and thus com­plet­ing out first steps towards our great journey.

For those of you who want to keep updated while I’m in Europe, check back here reg­u­larly, I’m hop­ing to blog while I’m there as much as I can (and hope­fully I’ll have a decent layout/ colour scheme by then…). Hora will be tak­ing most of the sce­nary pic­tures, since his cam­era is so badass, so you guys can head on over to www.hhalmaghi.com for his updates and pic­tures. I’ll be the one tak­ing pic­tures of the drunken nights out =P