-elementary czech (tues/thurs 8:20-9:50): learning czech has definitely, definitely made my experience in prague about 8120390x better. there are seven kids in my czech class so it's nice and small. we had our food/restaurant section this week (jidlo/restaurace) and i learned another phrase to add to my growing "fave phrase" bank: dobrou chut, which means bon appetit and is pronounced "do-broo hoot." on thursday we went to albert, the local grocery store, during class and our task was to find out how much different items cost. the week before that, we went to the post office to use our new vocab to buy a stamp and envelope. the only bad thing about czech is that it's so early in the morning...
-multiculturalism, ethnicity, and collective memory in central europe (tues/thurs 1:30-3): this is probably my favorite class so far. what we're learning about is basically in the course title but the class has a great set-up because we talk about theories/background info on the first day of the unit and then discuss the case studies on thursday. our class has four people and our professor is super-cool because she's from barcelona but she also speaks czech (and the class is taught in english) so that's multicultural/multilingual for you right there. we're going over a lot of cool cases like the turks in german, the split of czechoslovakia, and the yugoslavia case all in the context of ethnicity and national identity, which i think is SUPER interesting and a new spin on things i learned from rutland's nationalism class :)
-european integration (wed 10-1): after going to the first class, i realized just how little i knew about the EU or europe in general.. but after this week i am happy to report that i can probably name at least 40 of the 47 countries in europe on the sporcle test! i think this class is going to be really interesting, though a bit dry at times since we're going over a lot of facts about the EU in terms of institutions and rules. but i have already learned that:
-there are 27 countries in the EU
-denmark and sweden are not on the euro
-there are three "seats" where the EU is located (brussels, luxembourg, strasbourg)
-prague as a living history (wed 2-5:30): so this is my WALKING TOUR class. my teacher is a guy named pavel who is a ph.d student at charles but also is an excellent tour guide. for our first class, we walked across the charles bridge and talked about all the different statues around the city. then we got to go to st. nicholas church in mala strana and went to the top of the tower for a great view of prague! i can't wait until it gets warmer because walking for 2+ hours in the cold can be kind of rough on the feet/face... but it was worth it.
our fearless leader, pavel, in front of the charles iv statue
one of the statues along the charles bridge
the view from the top of st. nicholas!
-in love with power: non-democratic regimes since 1945 (thurs 10-1): this is the class i decided to take instead of "life in a totalitarian regime" (which was painfully boring), and it was... well it was interesting. the professor is quite young (and as i later found out from astute internetting skills, a ph.d. student at charles) and he is attractive.. but i can't be sure if he's attractive or sort of a potential creeper. he just gives off this type of vibe that i have yet to decode. well time will tell since i have three hours every week to ascertain this. the class is small (five students) and the professor can kind of be intimidating. i don't know, he asks us a lot of questions and we don't always know the answer. but i think i'm going to learn a LOT. during the first class, we talked about the differences between a totalitarian and authoritarian regime, and the prof said he could cater the readings/the class to the things we're most interested in, which is cool. another cool thing is that my czech language partner is also in the class! her name is denisa and she is GREAT so that's going to be fun.
so there are my classes for the next three months. the workload is very, very light and it makes me a little nervous about re-integrating myself to wesleyan academics in the fall but we'll see. since i don't have class until tuesday (!!!) i'll explain the previous picture in another post, along with how our trip to ikea goes today. i broke two bowls the other night (no, i didn't throw them against the wall out of rage but i dropped them, typical) so i'm going to replace those, and get some tupperware for my lunches. life of excitement, i know. the picture below is just another reason why i love this city. these horses were a couple meters outside the metro station on my way home, the same day the dude in the costume was there.
!!!!!!!!! (does this picture need words?)
1) Pavel is such a fearless cold-weather leader
ReplyDelete2) I have to hear about creeper professor. ???
3) You know you were throwing bowls at the wall. Don't even try to lie.
hahahaha