Week Seven in Pictures
Day 41
Day 42
Day 43
Day 44
Week Six
Week six, seven, and eight are going to held by placeholder posts which will be expanded at a later time. For now I will just create a list of the exciting events in the week and continue posting the pictures as I did previously.
Go Kart Track
Club Elf
Weimar (pictured: the town hall)
Buchenwald
Stadtfest
Week Five
These past few weeks have raced by, and I have unfortunately not taken the time to keep up with my writing. This post is about a week and a half overdue, and it’s sad that I haven’t spent time on it recently. The worst consequence of not writing my weekly post is not taking time to reflect on what I’ve done, and reflection is a hugely important practice in my opinion. It makes me cringe that because I neglected to write, I might have forgotten a small interaction or experience, that is in essence what makes up this thing we call life. So it goes. Thankfully, the biggest reason for this drop off is the crazy amount of fun stuff that I’ve been able to do.
During week five, the class took a trip to the state government of Saxony, and I made a little side trip to a weapons and armory museum in the Altstadt. The weapons museum has all types of things that were used back when war was cool and you had horses and killed people with spears. I particularly liked seeing the intricate and intimidating armor of the former Dukes of Saxony. The class also made a trip out to Hellerau where we found some old Soviet Barracks and a quite affluent present day suburb. The garden city apparently gained the favor of Upton Sinclair (still looking for source outside of Dr. Spencer).
The real treat of week five, though, was the weekend trip to Prague. After Friday’s class, four of my classmates and I packed up and hopped on the train to the Czech Republic. One incorrect ticket purchase and two missing classmates later, we ended up in the land of a-bunch-of-consonants-followed-by-a-y (my personal favorite Czech word? Tie between Drinky and Slevy).
The first night we unpacked, and quickly settled in with the help of the extremely nice hosts at our hostel. The sun was setting on the day but we made plans for the night: the infamous Prague Pub Crawl. The land of a-bunch-of-consonants-followed-by-a-vowel is also the land of wait-how-much-does-this-really-cost? One U.S. dollar is equivalent to about 20 Crowns (Czech play money), and this complicated things a bit for my puny mind. It was only after dividing by 34.1, raising that to the third power and moving the decimal two places that I could have a vague idea about how much I was spending on any given thing. So no, it wasn’t that dumb to pay 40 Crown for a beer at a bar; in fact, that’s a steal! I met people from strange lands such as Belgium, Norway, Scotland (Paul gets the craziest-dude-of-the-night shout out), and Florida. It was a train of fun that made its last stop at a five-story dance club that is everything you could ever want in such a place.
Saturday and Sunday were filled with sight seeing and more sight seeing. We were good tourists and took lots of wonderful pictures. Saturday evening we decided to have a classy dinner at a smaller place just outside of the tourist trap section of Prague (it’s all a tourist trap), and it was delicious. Following that we spontaneously met up with some fellow classmates who also made the trek to Prague, but weren’t staying in the same hostel. The bar we checked out had an American theme, and fittingly enough, I was finally called out for my Ohio State garb. Let me clarify: I wear a lot of OSU stuff, I love my OSU shirts and always hope that someone I don’t know will strike up a conversation with me or at least give me a passing “Go Bucks!”, but it rarely ever happens. These dudes (and I do mean dudes, or bros if you prefer), were on a dude vacation from their Boston workplace. I never know what people think about Ohio State students, we’re not particularly known for our academics… so am I a hard-partying idiot? Or am I a farm boy who got lost in Europe? Anyway, they were nice guys and they shared their epic vacation plans with me. All day I was determined to stop in a cigar shop to enjoy before the nights end, but didn’t succeed. Luckily, the bar had a small cigar case and I enjoyed that on our walk home. On Sunday we did some more touristy stuff and hopped back on the train, with my school work waiting patiently to greet me upon returning.
I had an odd feeling coming back from Prague, arriving at the train station. It was a bit like I just got back home. But I thought to myself, home is half the world away. But I thought to myself, is home where my parents are waiting for me, or a 20 minute drive 315 south? What is home? Can you have more than one?
Other Notes: Tried Haxe! (Pig knuckle)
Bis bald!
