Pilzen!

 This weekend, my roommates and I had the pleasure of hosting the entire North Shore of Chicago to our humble home.  Okay, so not all of the North Shore was here (although it certainly felt like it), and only two of them stayed here.  My roommate Brian is from Deerfield (if you guessed North Shore, you're right), and two of my other roommates Blake and David knew many of these same kids from Indiana.  Needless to say, Ian and I, the cast aways of this Midwestern themed weekend adventure, were left in many awkward situations as everyone reminisced over good times in suburban Chicago high school and/ or Indiana.  The two friends who stayed with us were both really interesting and nice, and despite only two rooms and one real bathroom, 7 people in the apartment not only felt fine, but rather comfy.

Church inside castle grounds

Our neighborhood (in the distance) from the castle 

View of Charles Bridge from the castle

On the positive side of people visiting is always showing them around and eating at your favorite places, which most visitors usually demand.  While I have tried to tour much of Prague in previous engagements, a visit to the castle, which probably should have been the first thing I did upon arrival, had eluded me.  Friday morning, we woke up, met a group of 30 plus people at Bohemia Bagels and went on a self guided tour of Prague.  The group started walking aimlessly as a giddy Ian and I decided to just follow them and see where we ended up.  They blocked the street, openly argued with each other on the appropriate direction, and also conflicted on where they wanted to go.  A lovely group, they really were.  After roughly 20 minutes of galloping around, the wide-eyed, the clan promptly turned to Ian and I, and asked us where we were, and where we were going.  Trying to contain our laughter, we told them casually how we had just been following them.  With a renewed sense of purpose, we set out to the castle. Luckily, Prague is a very walkable city, and despite a couple more minor setbacks, we eventually strolled through the castle gates.  The castle, the largest standing in the world, was absolutely magnificent, and provided me with some of the best views I have ever seen.  Hopefully the pictures can capture the breathtaking views for you, but unfortunately, this is something you probably need to see with your own eyes.

Entrance to Pilsner factory!

P

After a tiring first half of the weekend ( ya my weekends are that long), it was time to do some light traveling on Sunday.  So through my program various trips are provided through your tuition.  Yesterday was the first such trip as we visited Pilzen, home to the famous Pilsner-Urquell Brewery and the last city liberated by the American army in WWII.  Conveniently, all four of my roommates who had been previously been signed up to go bailed either the night before the excursion, or in Ian's case, the morning of.  In their defense, it had been a late night, but c'mon Ian, don't let sleep deprivation control your life!  We met at 9:30 (where nearly everyone had to control urges to puke), and made our way to Pilzen. Pilzen is obviously famous for it's beer, and the world owes the town to a certain model of beer called the Pilsener (how do they come up with these things!?) Breweries all over the world now produce their own Pilsner, none worse of course than our own Miller Light.  Only an hour away, Pilzen is prime for a nice day trip for Prague travelers.  The Pilsner-Urquell factory reminded me of the Willy Wonka factory with it's many charming buildings and wildly shaped buildings.  The company, now owned by a South African company (boo!), employs over 200 breweries, including over 20 American beers, but to this day has Pilsner-Urquell as the flagship beer.

My beer being poured!

Fresh

We toured the old brewery and the new brewery, the old pasteurization room filled with GIANT barrels of freshly brewed beer, before being directly served the freshest beer I have ever tasted (this includes the Heineken tour I took last summer).  Obviously so far the title of the blog has been a little misleading, but now I finally want to dissect this beer.  It was an amber brown color, with a little more foam than normal.  The foam is actually a good thing, because it protects the beer from invading air bubbles. They gave us unfiltered beer, which you can only taste at breweries around the world.  The beer was absolutely positively amazing.  Upon triumphantly finishing the beer, we made our way through the parking lot, to Na Spilce, the Czech restaurant owned/hosted by the brewery.  There, I had my first Czech goulash dish, and you guessed, 2 more free beers.  Everyone was great until they brought dessert. At first glance, this pancake looking dish, looked and smelt amazing.  It had what appeared to be whipped cream, chocolate sauce, and fruit on top of two fluffy warm pancakes.  Turns out, however, that the cream wasn't in fact whipped cream, but sour cream.  Somewhere, my Dad is cringing as he reads this.  I ate nearly half the dish before giving up, and nearly everyone around me did the same.  One of the few times I refused to finish dessert. Hopefully, the managers at the restaurant caught note and decided against uses such a awkward substance on a perfectly okay dessert.

The Great Synogague

America street/way

St. Bartholomew's Church

After lunch, and several stops to the restroom, we went on a brief city tour.  First, we visited the St. Bartholomew Church, which has the second highest spire in the entire country and what was the 3rd tallest building in the Czech Republic until 1981!  The gothic-style building is found in the main square of Pilzen, which also happens to be the largest perfectly mathematically even square in all of Europe.  Next on our list was the Great Synagogue just beyond the main square.  It is the second largest synagogue after Budapest in Europe.  Unfortunately the small Jewish population of Pilzen cannot currently afford to maintain the temple, so it remains there as a museum of sorts and a tourist attraction.  You may be wondering how the synagogue remained intact when the Nazis occupied the Czech Republic from 1939-1945?  It's actually an interesting story.  The building directly left of the synagogue (the yellow building in the picture) was the Pilzen SS headquarters for the Nazis during WWII.  They could not demolish the synagogue without also damaging their own building, and thus both buildings remain intact today.  Inside, you can clearly tell how beautiful the building could be in all it's glory, but without the proper work, the building is not currently suitable for prayer.  Hopefully one day, that will change.  Our last stop before heading home to Prague was the American Liberation monument.  As I said before, Pilzen was the last city the American troops liberated in Europe in WWII.  Our program director, who was born in Pilzen and still has family there, told us stories of tremendous jubilation over the victory over the Nazis on the second to last day of the war.  There were so many hugs and kisses going around that not all of the American troops could make it through the city to the main square.  The monument remains, and a on the one street was renamed "America way" in honor of those troops who forever changed the lives of those Czechs who were freed.

Well that's it for this edition of the blog.  Hope you enjoyed the sites from the castle, and some stories from the truly charming town of Pilzen.  I go to Barcelona this weekend, which is sure to provide many more exciting stories!


Best,
Sam

No dryers and a trip to Berlin

Of view of Old Town from our balcony

Ok so now that I've started to settle in a little (I've been here three weeks on wednesday!), a few negative things have started to come out.  Namely, there are no freakin dryers here!  So yes, the already mundane task of washing your clothes becomes that much harder.  We have one washer for 5 guys, and two giant drying racks.  The washer takes about an hour, then you need to manually take the clothes piece by piece to the drying rack to dry (we have no laundry basket of course).  After roughly 6-8 hours, the clothes are dry and you can fold them.  It seriously takes all day long or parts of two days...annoying.  I admire the Europeans for their energy saving ways, but don't they know they are now greener more energy efficient dryers on the market?

Also, as promised a few pictures from our first couple weeks in Prague:

Old Town Square!

On a positive note.  We all traveled to Berlin this weekend, well everyone except Ian.  

Berlin was an absolutely fascinating city.  So much history, and literally every type of political ideals have been in Berlin over the past century.  The city has seen it all, and it's still there, strong as ever.  

Berlin has very humble beginnings when it was settled in 1273 as a sleepy fishing village.  It grew slowly until the late 19th century when Otto Von Bismarck unified the Germans and created Berlin the new republic's capital city.  In the next half-century, the city grew exponentially with all kinds of Germans and especially Jews flocking to the city in search of new opportunities.  

The famous Brandenberg Gate

Seen on the right is the Brandenberg Gate, which used to separate the Royal Palace from the Tiergarten (Berlin's Central Park), which used to be the Royal hunting ground.  The Berlin Wall used to be just on the other side of gate.  

We took an awesome free walking tour which showed us much of the city on Friday.   The pictures you see are just some of the things we saw on that tour.  Our excellent tour guide who shares my name took us through the heart where we saw the American embassy, the Reichstag (German parliament) where Hitler's supporters started a fire in the 30's in order to gain national support, the Holocaust memorial, Museum Island and Checkpoint Charlie.

The US embassy, completed in 2008

 The Nazis started the fire and blamed a communist.  Hitler then approached the President (he was Chancellor in those days) about a power in which he could control everything for four years in case of emergency.  The President signed off on it, and the rest is emblazoned in an unfortunate chapter of Germany's history.

Germany does a very good job of educating their youth regarding the Holocaust.  The swastika is outlawed and the community shuns anyone with any sort of anarchist feelings.  They keep up many of the Nazi buildings as a reminder, but Hitler's former bunker they are clearly trying to forget.  Where the building once stood is now a very forgetful parking lot in the shadow of two apartment buildings.  The only source of remembrance is a plaque which shows the structure and some history of it, and even that was only placed there in 2006 for the World Cup.

All of us inside the memorial

The Holocaust memorial, more aptly named, the memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was incredibly eery and moving.  The memorial, designed by celebrated Jewish American architect Peter Eisenman, is meant to be abstract and confusing.  It is roughly 2700 grey concrete rectangles that could represent a number of different things, but I took it as gravestones.  A reminder to the German people how many innocent lives were taken.  It is right in the middle of the city and was meant to be a daily reminder to the German people of a grim part of their history.  One interesting tidbit is that a company was brought it to apply an anti-graffiti substance to the memorial.  No big deal right?  Wrong.  This was the same company that had supplied gas to the Nazis that was then used in concentration camps to murder Jews.  Obviously this outraged the Jewish community, and to subside the anger, the company decided to apply the substance for free.  It cost them 2.43 million euros.  A excellent gesture in my opinion that while mistakes can never be fully corrected, the next generation can always do more.

Checkpoint Charlie

Checkpoint Charlie and the Berlin Wall were other amazing exhibits.  Really hard to believe that a wall separated a city for 28 years. The Wall was actually in place to keep East Berliners out of West Berlin, where they could escape to their freedom and not meant to enclose West Berlin as a prison (west berliners could actually leave if they wanted to). And it was even more amazing to discover that the wall was erected overnight.  Families and friends were split, and East Berliners were subjugated to a life of oppression until the wall's celebrated demolition in 1989.  

Hitler's speech steps

The 3.5 hour tour seemed to drag on a little, but after a coffee break we were back on the trail.  We walked around Museum island (yes mom and dad we did visit two museums in Berlin).  And saw several of the older historical buildings in Berlin, they were gorgeous!  Probably the most surreal moment in Berlin came when we saw the steps where Hitler delivered most of his propaganda speeches from.  I went up to the spot he most likely stood and soaked it in.  While the space below looks calm and peaceful now, it is crazy to think that only 65-70 years earlier, this was a square filled with so much hate and deception.  Really was wild.

What Hitler saw

We finished our tour and after a few beers at an awesome restaurant, we went to the Germany History museum and back to our hostel to rest.  

Saturday was a little more low key.  We walked through the Tiergarten and did the Jewish History museum, the biggest in europe. 

The nightlife was great. Friday night was a relative bust, but Saturday night we did the biggest pub crawl ever (over 200 people) and ended up at Club Matrix, which was a lot of fun.

 Brian, Dblock, and Blake left early Sunday morning, but Paige and I had a bus that left at 3 p.m. so we were able to walk around the city Sunday.  I promised to take Paige shopping then but everything was closed haha.  She took it in stride and I promised to go shopping with her next time we travel together.

When we finally boarded the bus, I was exhausted and ready to go home to Prague.  But it was a fantastic trip, and I highly recommend Berlin to any traveler who finds themselves in Europe.

Ok so this was the longest post ever and I thank you all for reading it all.  I had some catching up to do, especially on the pictures, and I hope now to more regularly update the blog as to not make posts that take 20 minute to sift through.

Until next time,

Sam

Super Bowl, classes, and birthdays

First I wanna apologize for having such a large absence of posts, been roughly 2 weeks since my first post. Unfortunately CEA placed us in our own apartment building on the other side of town from where over 50 percent of the group lives.  Thus the program cares very little about us and our problems.  The internet didn't work for a solid week, with very little effort put forth by them to fix the problem despite our best attempts (we contacted them multiple times a day for the week). But we finally have internet now, so I can do the basics such as call my parents and check basketball scores on ESPN.

Prague is an amazingly beautiful city with a tremendous history. Although most of the history is rather dreary, especially in the last century.  This probably translates to the Czech people's mentality.  They don't speak on trams, they rarely smile, and often you see them give Americans or anyone who looks like they're having a remotely good time dirty looks.  It's certainly an adjustment, one which I don't think anyone I know has fully accomplished.

The public transportation here is the best I have ever seen.  And that includes cities like New York, Chicago, Paris, and London.  The Soviets built the unmatched system to transport themselves around and Czechs maintain it's the best thing the Kremlin did for them during their 41 year occupation.  They have a wonderful metro system that takes about 2 minutes to learn, and then a slightly harder tram system that literally gets you anywhere you need to go.  While the metro and day trams do shut down at around 12:30 a.m., night travel is still relatively reliable although much less consistent.  There are night trams that run the same routes just at a far less frequency.  Nevertheless, I've had little to no problem transported myself around, and I'll leave wasting money on cabs to my friends.

What did I do for the Super Bowl?  Well obviously I watched, I will never miss watching a Super Bowl in my life.  We first went to this bar near the river called Belushi's but it was too crowded and filled with too many people not really interested in watching the game as we had hoped (girls, guys who *gasp* don't actually like football).  My roommates Brian Blake and I left to find something a little more accommodating.  We ended up at the Hard Rock Cafe near Old Town Square which promised us an "authentic American experience" on their advertisement.  While food was a little pricey, the atmosphere was actually pretty good, and I won 15 bucks and a meal on various bets I took the Packers in (the 10th time in 14 years I have correctly picked the Super Bowl winner).

As the game dragged on in the 3rd quarter, it donned on us we had class registration in the morning which opened at 9 a.m.  They would really do that to you Sam?  Well this is another one of those head scratcher moves by CEA.  They only gave me 3 classes out of the required 4, and only gave Brian 2!  We have a finite list of classes which transfer back to UW, so this was quite the concerning matter.  Thus we made the decision after we got home from the Super Bowl (about 5 a.m.) to just stay up and go to school early.  Being first in line felt astonishingly great, but exhaustion began to creep up and Ian fell asleep on some stairs outside the office (no surprise there however).  After the internet went out for another hour, we finally registered at roughly 10.  The morning was abysmal, but my schedule is anything but.  CLASSES ON TUESDAY AND WEDNESDAY ONLY!  That's right, I have successfully swapped my normal 2 day weekend and 5 day work week to the much more appropriate 2 day work week and 5 day weekend.  The classes are 3 hours each, so it is actually somewhat comparable to the classtime in Madison but just much more compact.  I went to 3 of my 4 classes last week, and they seem pretty interesting and significantly easier than anything taken at UW.

Last thing I want to talk about right now is my birthday which fell this past Wednesday.  Going out Tuesday night was a lot of fun at Chapeau Rouge and Wednesday was a good day as well.  Really didn't get the birthday feeling at all which I'm not sure if I'm happy or sad about, but still overall a good day.  Paige took me out for a nice dinner, and we went out to Club Mecca which was fun as well.  In between we got in trouble for being too loud (very tame noise levels compared to any pregame back in the States).  There is a Czech law which mandates quiet hours between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. which several people have already been in trouble for.  The landlord, who unfortunately lives on our floor knocked on our door as we were about to leave, and promised to evict us the next morning if it happened again.  Haha okay Mr. Czech landlord, not sure the legality of that but either way we will have to curtail our habits.  It's weird to be 21, and it's even weirder to have the day come and go without much jubilation.  Obviously a 21st birthday here means nothing, but it still came and went much quicker than I expected.

Paige and I booked a trip to Berlin next weekend and some of our friends may join us.  Looking forward to my first travel experience.

Hope you all enjoyed reading this and I will try to make the next post sooner and filled with pictures.

Sam