Travels! Location: Paris.

I have a tonnn of work to do, but I'll spend a couple minutes procrastinating here with a post.

Hal and I got back Tuesday early in the morning. We had a really wonderful trip but coming back to Paris was great too. Prague was beautiful. Around every corner was another gorgeous building, often not even a famous one, but just a beautiful government building or house not significant enough to be on our tourist map. The city is very small and it doesn't seem like many Czech people actually live there. Unfortunately, it was incredibly touristy, so our 48 hour stay was a good amount of time to see all the celebrated monuments and not much else. We did quite a bit of walking and gave ourselves a pretty nice tour of the city.

The Astronomical Clock and Notre Dame de Tyn in the background. 

 Old Town Square. 

The altar at the incredible and baroque Church of St. Nicolas.

Hal sitting on the river.

Czech is sooo confusing and it was a bit weird to in a place where communicating in the local langauge is impossible. Luckily most people there spoke English so we got around without any problems. Key phrases I did learn: Nejim Maso (I don't eat meat), Prosim (please/excuse me), Pivo (beer). The greatest thing there (other than the beautiful architecture of the giant clock, the beautiful cathedral, the huge castle and the countless other beautiful buildings) was how cheap it was! A pint of beer, which is 5 euros at a moderate cafe in Paris, is only 1 euro there.

Breakfast! (The traditional Czech way)

We ate really well with drinks for around 6 euros every night (or 150 koruna). I thought eating would be a problem there with how much meat they eat, but I was able to find a vegetarian risotto, pizza or potato dumplings everywhere we went. Our hostel in Prague was nice and we met a couple cool groups of people including a group of French guys.

I was really glad we did Prague first because it was fun, but everything in Berlin was fantastic. The city is amazing. The young culture and the artistic culture there make just about everything there cool; all the restaurants, cafes, and even bagel shops have great ambiance and decor. The energy there is just really vibrant and cool. Unlike in Paris where buildings (like Hal's) have squatter problems, the squatters in Berlin are amazing artists who the city supports. Another really interesting part of Berlin, of course, is how Germans are dealing with their history. The first day we were there, we went on a free walking tour of the city to see some of the historical sites (Berlin wall, museums, checkpoint Charlie, etc.) and get a refresher on what's happened there in the past century.

 Berliner Dom- The Berlin Cathedral. 

 The Berlin wall. Only about 10 km still exist as it was not a protected monument until quite recently. Before, Germans thought that protecting the wall would be somehow condoning or supporting what it represented.

 The Jewish Memorial.

From the inside of The Jewish Memorial. The abstract nature of the memorial makes it really personal and haunting. It really does feel like a place to reflect.

Checkpoint Charlie. But fake! The site is not protected so instead, the men in the picture holding the flags are actually porn stars doing their day job. No, really. You can go take pictures with them for tips...

One of the most interesting things that our guide said was that, unlike in France (where a horrendous law was nearly passed requiring an emphasis on the positive effects of French colonialism on Northern Africa in history classes), Germans are taught about all the awful things their people did. They then leave the classroom with an accute sense of needing to contribute constructively to their society. I'm sure this was another thing that added to the energy there. Both Hal and I noted near the end of our trip that neither of us have found many cities we'd like to live in and not only would we like to live in Berlin, we'd consider learning German in order to do so. Our hostel was also really awesome. Thanks to Elizabeth's recommendation, we stayed in Circus hostel, which is not only hip and modern looking, but has a cafe and a bar with cool drink specials every night. So each night we'd head into the bar to meet new people from around the world and go out with them from there to another bar or club. We met some interesting groups... plenty of Americans studying abroad, of course, but also an Australian guy who was cool. One night we went on an "alternative" pub crawl which took us to a bunch of bizarre bars in Berlin including a ping pong bar and a goth bar (I don't really recommend the crawl). There, we met a group of French people- 3 girls and a guy- who we ended up having a great time with.

At the beginning of the pub crawl with our new French friends!

 Learning to throw up the West Coast sign.

What's funny is that the whole time we were travelling, we were more like French tourists than American tourists. Everywhere we went people gave us French brochures after seeing our student ID cards, and then when we were out with the French kids, we actually got made fun of on the metro for speaking French. I'm not complaining at all. It was awesome to practice more there since the people we hung out with spoke minimal English and I loved being able to relate more to French people than to some of the obnoxious Americans we met. A couple of the French girls and the Australian are coming to Paris in the next few weeks so it'll be fun to have some lasting connections.

By far my favorite thing that I did on the trip though, was the Mauer Park Flea Market we went to on Sunday. It was a huge flea market of antiques and clothes and jewelry plus, in the afternoon, there was public karaoke! It was hilarious to see people lining up to sing horrible songs to a crowd of around 1,000 people. It was so fun to see this kind of community event and enjoy singing along with bad singers and cheering them on with the rest of the onlookers. A lot of the people who sang were young women, but one guy was older and obviously a regular. I took a super short video because I just couldn't resist sharing a few seconds of his awsome performance.

Since Tuesday I've been recovering a bit and trying to get back into the swing of things. This weekend was nice and low key. Just glad to be able to get some rest and enjoy not being a tourist again.

Okay back to work now. Gotta draft a 10 page paper about the architecture of bridges over the Seine, write a response to a movie about Muslims in France and study for a vocab quiz!

Love,
Anj