Euroblog Part Dva

I wonder if we can ever really predict how things are going to turn out for us in life. We hope and expect that things will go really well and we'll travel the world and find ourselves learning from other cultures and hopefully contributing something in return, but we can't really know for certain until that moment is upon us. What I've seen and experienced in these last six weeks can't really be summed up in words as much as in feelings and realizations, and while I definitely didn't expect to change my mind or convictions about certain aspects of my culture and myself, I can't say that I didn't end up surprising myself in some ways.

Well, I think that about sums up the typical expected Eurotrip college response for those of you that wanted something meaningful and boring. For the rest of you...

Having successfully made it to Prague without incident, I went about the task of retrieving my suitcase and I braced myself for the nightmare that customs was going to cause. Despite my friendly Atlanta gate agent's warning, my suitcase made it to Prague successfully and with no damages. Buoyed by this victory, I took a deep breath and pushed through the doors to baggage claim to find...a lot of expectant people standing around with flowers and signs for their debarking loved ones.

Wait. Where was customs? Did I totally blow past it? Am I going to be arrested for terrorism? I had this sudden vision of security guards racing up to me, beating me down with their painful sticks, then taking me to a secret government base to run tests on me and make sure I wasn't attempting to discreetly bring typhoid to their country. (Europe's never had typhoid, right?) I was an enemy of the state! Time to panic! I found a security guard and breathlessly explained the situation, trying my best to look as little like a terrorist as humanly possible. She reached under her jacket for her taser and...actually she was just grabbing a piece of gum as she laughingly told me there was no customs for me since I had come from Brussels and Helsinki. Welcome to the EU!

Okay. If we had been in America, I might have been thrown into a room for questioning for forgetting that I had an economy sized bottle of shampoo in my carry-on (which I would NEVER do, because that takes up a lot of room and I have way too many pairs of shoes for that shit). You're telling me I could have exotic American fruits with tarantulas on top, or that I might have come into all kinds of contact with farm animals in the last 48 hours (which they CLEARLY state is a no-no on the customs forms) and I might be bringing some terrible disease to your country that will throw it into a state of ruin, but since I went through Helsinki first it's all gravy? I'm just...that's just...well. All right. Sounds good. I'll be taking my tarantula fruit to my hostel now. (P.S. on my way back I had both come into contact with farm animals AND snuck food back in my suitcase. I like to live on the edge.)

The next order of business was changing money, which was going to be big business because I wasn't even totally sure how to pronounce the currency in this lawless land. I found a nice, friendly exchange window that made a special call to their upstairs unit when they found out I was a naïve little American girl with many travelers' checks to cash. The woman downstairs wiped the drool of anticipation off her chin before sending me upstairs to the special counter where they rob you of your money and your dignity. The girl there was almost apologetic about the amount of robbing they did (a nice, clean 15% commission, and I'd only been in Prague for less than an hour! This is impressive, I think.), and she tried to make up for it by selling me a phone card (which didn't work one fucking time I tried it, in 4 different countries and is now sitting in my wallet, mocking me months later) and looking up the address of my hostel for me so that I could at least take my highway robbing taxi to the right general area. After this exchange, she looked at me and my massive suitcase and said, with a glimmer of hope in her voice, “You're meeting up with a program or something, yes? You're not...spending six weeks here on your own?” She knew I wasn't going to last a week.

My hostel was okay, if not a little ghetto, which makes sense knowing the TA who gave me the recommendation for it after spending 5 weeks with him. I met a jolly Australian man who told me all about his tango with Absinthe the night before, and finally checked in with my mother who had been on the phone with the airline demanding that they remove my name from the sex trade list and return me to the free world at once. I passed out incredibly hard in my hostel dorm and woke up to a friendly Italian girl trying to put on her shoes without disturbing my Rip Van Winkle ass. Time to find my hostel dorm and start the first day of the rest of my five weeks in Prague.

The dorm hostel was okay, but it was definitely in a pretty hood part of Prague, and at least a twenty minute walk from anything fun. Slowly all the Avengers assembled, and we left our dorm's courtyard to our welcome group dinner at a traditional Czech restaurant. Picture, if you will, a jolly place, with two men dressed in traditional Czech garments coming out at odd intervals to play traditional Czech music on their traditional Czech tubas and accordions. All of this is taking place while you're taking shots of traditional Czech drink and eating traditional Czech food, while your traditional Czech professor teaches you how to say “Cheers!” in Czech. Welcome to Prague!

The traditional Czech food was a bit of a difficulty for me, seeing as how seven courses of meats that look like cat food don't really fit into my 16 year vegetarian diet. I mentioned this to the waiter, who gave me the choice between an asparagus dish and traditional Czech fried cheese. Having not seen a real vegetable in over 48 hours at this point, I opted for the asparagus like a good little girl. The waiter responded by telling me he would bring me the cheese. Lovely. It turned out to be pretty good, like a block of mozzarella stick, and I knew at that moment that I was doomed to die of scurvy before my trip ended. The traditional Czech drink is called Becherovka, and it tastes like anise liquor. We took a shot with our professor, then another member of the group and I agreed we needed more. We ordered another shot, at which point a friend of our professor's came up to us and informed us that since Americans had no idea how to hold their liquor, if we had another shot we would probably die.

Clearly this man had never met us. We took the second shot with all the grace of American angels, and went out as a group with our new TA.

How to describe this TA? I'll try to scratch the surface. This boy was coming into the club as most of us were leaving (around 1 AM), and I decided to stay another hour or two since I wasn't really too tired yet. Another hour or two turned into four hours, with me sitting extremely bored as the TA and two other guys on our trip played a drinking game with some toothless Englishmen. At one point one of the guys kissed me out of nowhere, and when I let him know that probably wasn't the most welcome of advances, he stormed off. My concerned TA came over to make sure everything was okay with his new students, and decided this was a great time to run his hand over my ass as horribly cheesy Czech 80's hair band music pumped through the club speakers. He eventually abandoned us to find our own way home as the sun was rising (we found out later that cops had showed up and busted a drug deal in front of him so he ran for his life, which really only makes sense if he's secretly Tony Montana), and I fell into bed for three hours of sleep before my first class. This was an excellent start. Did I mention he was wearing a battered Patagonia fleece during this entire club experience? This man was a bastion of class, ladies and gentlemen.

My flamboyant Czech professor was literally a woman of many hats. Every day saw a new fashion statement in the form of a huge, colorful hat and usually a colorful scarf to go with it. She has a tendency to show a lot of enthusiasm in the form of words like “VOWWWWW” and “VYBORNE!” which means “excellent” in Czech. She breezed through a decent amount of Czech our first day, and I knew instantly that I was going to have a lot of trouble with this language. Having grown tired already of putting their best feet forward, the men in our class quickly began devolving back into a form of caveman that I have honestly never seen in such magnitude in my entire life. Every exclamation of enthusiasm from our lovely eccentric professor was cause for a chuckle and muttered smartass comment from the cave clan, and their contribution to the class mostly consisted of talking so loudly during the lecture that no one knew what assignments we were supposed to turn in the next day until I asked them to please shut the fuck up long enough to hear what was going on, a move that made me super popular for the weeks to come. Despite their regressed states of humanity, these boys got away with pretty much everything over the weeks to come (Like the time we were headed to Austria and a couple of the guys pissed their beds and left their vomit everywhere in the hotel room, and all our professor wanted was a couple hundred crowns to pay for the damages. One of the guys actually had the audacity to say that since he'd pissed on one of the walls, and not IN a bed, he didn't have to pay anything. Also in Budapest one of the other guys got blackout and The Exorcist style projectile vomited all over some angry Hungarians then fought them so we got kicked out of the club.Yale must be so proud.).

Over the following weeks, we did a ton of traveling to various Eastern European areas, including a film festival where I met the most beautiful man the world has ever seen. I'm picturing God himself coming down from the heavens and sculpting this boy by hand. A Brazilian mother and a Venezuelan father had created this angelic creature, and he came towards me on the dance floor, opened his mouth, and spoke to me in...English. American English. Boring, San Diegoan American English. All the air in my hot man balloon went out with gusto. How did we manage to find the only Americans in this entire club without even trying? Where are all the foreign men, people? Whatever, he was nice. We also saw some films at this film festival.

Vienna is beautiful, I had the best Chinese food of my life there. Also we found an English speaking theater and saw the last Harry Potter movie, during which four of us bawled like tiny infants at least three times. Cesky Krumlov, the town of the gypsies, showed us NOT EVEN ONE GYPSY. I wanted to beg one not to shrink me and try to collect a bottle of their tears but they totally sucked and didn't even bother to show up to dinner. Irresponsible. I also managed to live an entire lifespan of a relationship, from time together to a tearful breakup and goodbye, in the span of four days, which I'm pretty sure is something only I could manage to do (don't worry, I came to my senses and am now firmly shackled in the bounds of holy collegedatingmony).

Living in Prague itself involved eating a lot of pasta, exploring in our INCREDIBLY limited free time, constantly promising to ourselves that we would, in fact, visit the Sex Machines Museum before we left (I never did, sadly), and going out to really horrifyingly sketchy nightclubs where old men circled the dance floor while leering at us. But hey, the beer was really cheap.

Our last week in Prague was an eventful one. We had a nice little awards ceremony the last night, during which we screened the films we'd made and our professor singled some of us out and gave us pretty pieces of paper for actually paying attention in class. I got the Outstanding Contribution to Literature Award, which roughly translates to the Massive Nerd Who Wants You To Stop Fucking Talking While We Talk About Kundera Award. The last day involved a boat ride and a complete blackout of one of my friends from the trip by 4 PM, which required a cab ride home. We got back to the hostel and wrestled her out of the cab, profusely apologizing to the cabbie, after which he turned to us and gently asked, “Becherovka?” Yes. Becherovka indeed.

We said our generally not at all tearful goodbyes to our classmates the next day and I headed to Paris with two others from the class, where many a good time was had, including singing Knockin' On Heaven's Door with a bum minstrel on the metro and inspiring the entire car to do the same, befriending an entirely unsmiling crepe stand man whose magical food inspires songs and poetry across all of France I'm sure, and also seeing a lot of Parisian things that make me pretty sure I need to get skinny and be a trophy wife already so I can spend all my time there.

Even though I'm back in the States, Europe isn't totally over yet. I ran into my professor a couple of times over the last two weeks, and she's still hilarious. She tried to get me to date a Yale Law student I met in Prague and had a nice conversation with, and when I told her I had a boyfriend and could no longer partake in such shenanigans, she enthusiastically replied, “That's fine...you can have TWO boyfriends!” Apparently one of my classmates bought a case of Becherovka and some kind of party is in order. Which reminds me, I should really write that required ISA report so my scholarship for the summer doesn't get revoked. They probably wouldn't want to read this, would they?

T.