Jansepar.com

The days in Prague seem like they go much quicker then in Burn­aby, its been a month so far, and I really feel like I haven’t been here for more then two weeks. But maybe that’s because the vodka helps me for­get half of it, clearly I need to blog more so I can have the capac­ity to for­get. To sum it up, I’ve done a lot of things, met a bunch of peo­ple, and its been a blast.

Crew from Suit 220, minus me

For the last two weeks, we did a course called “Czech Inten­sive”, which is basi­cally a two week inten­sive course for five hours a week, focus­ing only on the basics of the Czech lan­guage. It was cool, our teacher was awe­some and she def­i­nitely made it really easy (easy enough for me to get an A with­out study­ing). I’ve been up to a lot of things, book­ing trips, learn­ing how to be the great­est cook ever using just a stove, and of course, drink­ing gal­lons of pivo.

When it comes to what I do after the bell rings, its whole dif­fer­ent story. The night life in Prague is pretty incred­i­ble, most clubs are open till around 6am, which is the time I reg­u­larly went to sleep when the Amer­i­can exchange stu­dents got here. Life for that week con­sisted of a week I’d like to remem­ber, but due to alco­hol, I’ll most likely for­get. So far, I’ve been to a bunch of bars and clubs, but I’ll talk about my favorites. One of my favorites, and the first club I went to, was Mecca. It has two floors, one that is strictly elec­tron­ica, and the other one is old school music from the 80s and 90s.

Upper floor of Mecca, taken in the first week of Prague

Another one that I think is pretty decent is Karlovy Lazny, its basi­cally a five story club that plays hip hop, 90s, trance, elec­tron­ica, and some­thing else that I can’t seem to remem­ber. Each floor plays pretty decent music, and I like the vari­ety, plus the best part of it is that if there are peo­ple you feel like avoid­ing, you can run away to a dif­fer­ent floor. I went to a bat­tle of bands type of event at a club called Akropo­lis, and it was a Czech filled club, it was quite dif­fer­ent from a club filled with 20 year old Amer­i­cans. Oh, and prob­a­bly my favorite club so far, is Cha­peau Rouge, it has great music, a fun dance­floor, and tons of cool peo­ple. What I love about the nightlife here is that there are always trams run­ning, there are night ones that come less fre­quently, but if I’m out club­bing, I’m gen­er­ally out past 5, which is when the day tram and Metro resume.

The wall of one of the met­ros in Prague, Hora has a ton of pics of it, click here to see his pic­tures on flickr!

One of the things that Van­cou­ver lacks is a place to go and eat after your fin­ished after a night of drink­ing, danc­ing, or just a mid­night snack. Sure, there is Den­nys, McDon­alds, or Burger King, but these places are dri­ving trips away, and I have taken many trips to these places dur­ing the night when I haven’t been drink­ing (for exam­ple, stay­ing up with friends watch­ing 24), but when I’m slightly intox­i­cated, the gen­eral con­sen­sus is that dri­ving is a bad idea, and thus, its very hard to find a mid­night snack. What Van­cou­ver needs is more night time stands:

These amaz­ing stands are open 24/7, and are always there to sat­isfy my love affair with shmazny syr (fried cheese sandwich).

So, what else have I been up to besides destroy­ing my liver? Well, one of my favorite things I’ve done here is cook. I’ve enjoyed cook­ing immensely, I get new recipes from my Mom every so often so I can try new things. Six months ago, the most I could do was make a bowl of Chef Boyardee, but since all we don’t have a microwave, or even an oven, I’ve resorted to learn­ing how to cook as many things as I can with a hot­plate. So far, its been pretty suc­cess­ful. I can make some pretty solid per­o­gies, grilled cheese, pasta (learned how to make alfredo sauce, its amaz­ing, with mush­rooms and pees as well, damn..), and eggs. Okay, so maybe that’s not a lot of things, but I can def­i­nitely live off that, that’s for sure.

Hora and I have gone to a cou­ple hockey games, one to watch the Czech National team, where they suc­cumbed to a defeat by the Fins, and another to watch AC Slavia play another team from the Czech Repub­lic, where they suf­fered a defeat of 7–1. I would like to go to a game where the team I’m cheer­ing for would win, but it was still an amaz­ing expe­ri­ence. The O2 area has fans that are twice as loud and twice as ded­i­cated then I’ve ever seen it in a reg­u­lar sea­son game in GM place, it was a sight to see.

The fan sec­tion, where every­one fol­lowed along with every chant, cheer, and there were even some drummers.

Another big fac­tor of this trip has always been to travel to var­i­ous parts of Europe, and finally after a month, Hora, I, and a cou­ple other exchange stu­dents decided to finally make it hap­pen. We’ve booked trips to Budapest, Ams­ter­dam, Vienna, Copen­hagen, and finally, Istan­bul. I want to go to Ger­many as well, but after spend­ing all this money on these trips, I hon­estly don’t know if I’ll have the money. I need to have some money saved before I start trav­el­ling in the sum­mer! If any­one has any rec­om­men­da­tions for what to do in these cities, feel free to comment!

Hora and I went to Swan Lake, which is one of the most pop­u­lar bal­lets in Prague. He read the story dur­ing the inter­mis­sion, I failed to do so and thus I had no idea what was going on the entire time, although it was pretty cool. If you want to read up on it, check out Horas blog.

Before going to the Czech Repub­lic, I always won­dered what this trip would be like, and the biggest thing I was curi­ous about is how I would han­dle myself if I had to live on my own. So far, I’ve been suc­cess­ful at eat­ing (although I miss my moms cook­ing, shes so much bet­ter then me its ridicu­lous), I have been a huge fail­ure at doing the laun­dry, because I ruined my favorite shirt, it was the jer­sey from when Italy won the World Cup in 2006, still pissed of about that. Prague is an amaz­ing city, there is always things to do, things to see, cheap food, effi­cient tram sys­tem. Van­cou­ver could def­i­nitely take a cou­ple point­ers from this city (but it could also be said the other way around).

I’m going to see the Charles Cas­tle some time soon, I plan to write about that, its the biggest cas­tle in the world, I’m pretty stoked. Until then, Nasdravi!