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There are cer­tain par­tic­u­lar things I find inter­est­ing about Prague. Firstly, there are no fat peo­ple, the extent of fat stops at a gut, and with beer at two dol­lars a pint, its hard to blame them. Sec­ondly, see­ing a black per­son is rare, the only ones I’ve met so far have been try­ing to bring me to some kind of red light dis­tract, lit­er­ally every sin­gle one so far. Thirdly, this city is absolutely amaz­ing, every­thing from the cob­ble stone streets to the cheap food, so far I haven’t had much to com­plain about.

Walk­ing around, almost every­thing feels older then any­thing built in Van­cou­ver. In the main areas of Prague, almost every build­ing you run into looks like it was build hun­dreds of years ago. Its funny because while most places look amaz­ing, we didn’t get so lucky, it doesn’t get more com­mu­nist then Kolej Komen­ského, our dormitory.

Sur­pris­ingly, there is quite a bit of vari­ety in this city when it comes to food, and for those of you who know me, that is a key fac­tor when it comes to hav­ing a good time any­where. So far, the cheap­est place to eat seems to be Chi­nese, where you can get a plate of food for about 60CZ, or 4 dol­lars. They also have a lot of Ital­ian restau­rants, but they seem to be sit­u­ated more towards down­town then they are in our neigh­bor­hood (about 20 min away from the down­town core of Old/New Town Prague). My favorite so far has def­i­nitely been Czech Cui­sine, where I had Chicken topped with cheese and pep­per­oni, with a side of fried pota­toes, although it was a bit pricey, so I in the end my wal­let will save me from heart clog­ging awesomeness.

Now, there are a cou­ple things that do bother me, but they are so minor that its not that big a deal, but I’ll share any­ways. So far, the worst thing about the Czech Repub­lic is that if you ask for water in a restau­rant, its not free, its bot­tled. I’m guess­ing its because the tap water here is less then san­i­tary, but still, I’m quite used to Van­cou­ver in this sense. Sec­ondly, so far this isn’t that big of a deal, but I’m sure it will be even­tu­ally; Room 220 is made up of about seven smaller rooms that fit up to 10 stu­dents, and it con­tains 1 bath­room. There is going to have to be some solid coor­di­na­tion going on up in this bitch. Oh, and there is no fan in the bathroom.

And finally, this is what is going to force me to go for a run every so often, unless I want to get a job a Santa when I get back, it’ll be that time of season!

Any­ways, so far we have just been set­tling in, explor­ing the city, and worst of all, get­ting adjusted to the time zone, I didn’t think jet lag would be this hard to get used to. It’ll get really crazy once all the other stu­dents move in, so until then, I’ll leave you with some pic­ture albums:

Going to Prague

Prague Day 1

Ciao!

So, my semes­ter is finally over (all the hard stuff any­ways). It was ridicu­lous. Remem­ber my post about doing too much at once? I was def­i­nitely right, I did way too much, but I’ll save that topic for another blog post.

One semes­ter is over, and a new one is finally about to start. We reg­is­tered for our courses in Charles, and they are the following:

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Lit­er­a­ture: Czech Short Stories

wed 10.00–13.00

Descrip­tion:
This short course will famil­iar­ize stu­dents with a broad range of Czech 19th and 20th Cen­tury short sto­ries by both male and female authors. All classes will be con­ducted in English.

Psy­chol­ogy of Part­ner­ship in the Time of Transition

thu 09.00–12.00

Descrip­tion:
The aim of the course will be focused on rules which gov­ern part­ner­ship inter­ac­tions in two ways a) in gen­eral and b) with regards to specifics of Cen­tral Europe from more points of view.
Typol­ogy of part­ner inter­ac­tions. Unspo­ken rules of mutual manip­u­la­tions.
Devel­op­ment of part­ner­ship with a prob­lem­atic part­ner (from courtship to break up or death). Var­i­ous sort of asym­me­try in part­ner­ship. (dom­i­nance – sub­mis­sion, guilt dis­tri­b­u­tion, depen­dency, etc.)
Gen­der dif­fer­ences in approach to the same sub­jects, e.g. jeal­ousy. Con­flict­ing part­ner as an ambiva­lent object and defen­sive reac­tion against him/her.
Men­tal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of a part­ner in mind and intrapsy­chi­cal al inter­ac­tion with this rep­re­sen­ta­tion (intro­ject, imag­i­nal oth­ers). Intrap­er­sonal vs. dyadic (inter­per­sonal) home­osta­sis in part­ner­ship. Some approaches to mar­i­tal ther­apy and diag­no­sis of part­ner­ship inter­ac­tions. Nomotetic and idio­graphic meth­ods in research of part­ner­ship.
Specifics of part­ner­ship in Czech repub­lic and com­mu­nis­tic pop­u­la­tion pol­i­tics – divorse rate and its rela­tion to reli­gion and other moral val­ues Approach to mar­riage, dat­ing, sex­ual life before mar­riage. Typ­i­cal roles of a man and a woman – inter­fer­ence of old and new ideas in our cul­tural space. Influ­ence of com­mu­nist ide­ol­ogy on fam­ily morale and val­ues.
Adop­tion and fos­ter care in Czech repub­lic in last 50 years.

Czech Lan­guage for Every­day Use level I

tue 09.00–10.30

thu 14.00–15.30

Descrip­tion: Not pro­vided, but look­ing at the name of the course, its obvious.

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Now, if you look at the sched­ule of each class, you’ll notice some­thing amaz­ing. There are no classes on Mon­day and Fri­day. That means four day week­ends. That means trips to Berlin, Vienna, Paris, and all those crazy places.