Spring Break in Prague

And don't forget to take a look at my pictures!

Day 1 - Saturday

Just arrived in Celákovice in the Czech Republic. Going to be here for a week for a Global Studies in IT course. One of the course requirements is to keep a journal, so that means lots of LJ postings from me.

The flight to Frankfurt wasn't that bad - just over 8 hours and I ended up with a window seat. In accordance with Murphy's Airplane Law, there was a screaming baby nearby though. After that it was a short 45 minute hop to Prague, and then an excruciatingly long 1.5 hour wait in line to go through customs. Ugh.

After that, the group took a half hour bus trip to Celákovice where we are staying, about 25km outside of Prague. The rooms are huge, but the furninshings are spartan to say the least. We do get free Internet though!

Now off to get some crowns (no ATMs found at the airport) and some much needed food.

Day 2 - Sunday

Day 2 in the Czech Republic has almost come to and end. Today we had breakfast in Celákovice then headed for the train into Praha (Prague). Once there, we went on a walking tour of the city. I didn't realize it until towards the end, but it was almost the exact same walking tour we went on the last time I was in Prague in 2001. We started out by heading towards Wenceslas Square, then headed into Old Town to see the Astronomical Clock. I remember that as been somewhat disappointing, and when the clock struck twelve and it did its thing, it was again. After that, we headed across the Charles Bridge and took a break for lunch. Unfortunately, the more authentic Czech places we looked at were either too expensive or didn't have room for our subgroup, so we ended up at a place called Jo's that claimed to have American food. The service was slow, but the food was decent. It's always interesting to see other country's takes on American cuisine...

After lunch, we headed up to Prazský Hrad, the castle, and that's when I really started to remember the city. We didn't really go into the castle, but we checked out one room that was open to the public and were able to enter St. Vitus cathedral, which was once again completely breathtaking. I think this is the most beautiful cathedral I've ever been in... it's too bad there's all those Jesuses and crosses to take away from what is otherwise a wonderful sight. Why can't people ever build stuff like that without getting our Lord and Savior involved?

After the cathedral, we walked down the Golden Lane, a street of tiny houses where the castle workers used to work (it's called the Golden Lane since they were paid so poorly, they had to take second jobs such as goldsmithing. From there, we walked across the other main bridge towards Old Town Square, when our professor just happened to take us by a Cuban bar that we just had to stop into. The group had mojitos, I had spiced wine (hot red wine with a cinnamon stick and an orange in it).

After drinks, it was off to dinner in Old Town Square, and we ended up at the very same restaurant I dined in when I was there in 2001. I resisted the Czech feast, and ordered goulash soup followed by roast duck with dumplings. Mmmmmmm...

After dinner, we took a nighttime walk across the St. Charles bridge, then hit Karlovy Lázne, a huge local club on 5 floors that advertises to tourists. It was pretty dead when we got there, at 9 on a Sunday night, but we had a few drinks, enjoyed the music (mostly techno remixes of American music from the 80's and 90's... ah how foreigners love that stuff) and then caught the last train back to Celákovice at 11:17.

I'm a bit disappointed we didn't have a chance to make it over to the Jewish Quarter - that was my favorite part of my last visit, but there's still a week left so maybe I'll get a chance to see it again. We have a lot of nights in Prague, but not a lot of days, though, so it could be tough.

Tomorrow, class starts, so I'm guessing there will be less fun to be had. We'll see!

Day 3 - Monday

Today was our first day of class. It started out with an informal lecture from our professor in the morning, followed by a lecture by a professor from Prague University of Economics. I think he was supposed to give us an overview of the IT industry in the Czech Republic, but instead, he spent most of the time talking about economics acronyms such as ERP, MRP, JIT, TOC, and the ever-popular MRP II. Not my area of expertise, so it went way over my head and most of the rest of the class’s as well. Once the lecture wrapped up, we were on the next train to Prague, getting there at around 4ish. I hooked up with a small group and we went to buy opera tickets for Wednesday night, then walked down Wenceslas Square. There, we checked out the Moser Crystal shop, known for being the best quality Bohemian Crystal around here. The showroom was like a museum and the crystal was very, very expensive - over $100 for a colored wine glass. Even the cheap stuff they sell in all the souvenir shops is only half that. Later we walked around the Jewish Quarter, although most its sites were closed, and then ended up at a tasty French restaurant for dinner. It was quite pricey, even by Chicago standards, but the food was top notch... I had fish soup and lamp chops. After dinner, we went to a bar for a few drinks and I had my first sampling of absinthe. Despite what I’ve heard, it didn’t hit me that hard. Sadly, this would not be the case on Tuesday, but more on that later.

Day 4 - Tuesday

Day 2 of class today and it started out early, leaving Celákovice at 7:30 in the morning. The first company visit was CzechInvest, a government office that tries to solicit foreign investment in the Czech Republic. It was an interesting presentation and I learned that IT workers here make about 1/5 of what they make back in the States. Oh well... guess I won’t be getting a job in Prague any time soon.

Lunch was at a local pub/brewery and we had - take a guess - meat and potatoes. In this case, pork, potato pancakes, and cabbage.

After lunch, it was off to the Barrandov film studios, one of the biggest film studios in Europe where quite a few American movies are now filmed - including the Bourne movies, Phantom of the Opera, XXX, and recently Doom starring The Rock. We got a tour of the post-processing building and saw where they make all the dailies, do the color correction, sound editing, etc. It was interesting, but unfortunately I don’t know enough about making movies to have really appreciated it. The place was also pretty empty - not much going on - although they are currently shooting the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in and around Prague.

For dinner, we met some commerce students from DePaul at U Fleku pub (founded 1499) and brewery in Prague. One the way over, I went back to the Moser store and caved and bought four colored aperitif glasses. It was a set of six, but they were very, very expensive, so I think the four will have to do. At U Fleku, the beer and Becherovka were flowing freely and the food was quite tasty - I had the goulash with bacon dumplings. After dinner, we headed to a bar around the corner for some more drunken revelry and absinthe before catching the last train home. And my cell phone is now sitting in the cab we took from U Fleku back to Masarakova train station.

A quick note on Czech cuisine

Having been here close to a week now, I can safely say the entirety of Czech cusine consists of 4 main food groups:

1) Big hunks of meat covered in gravy (in beef, pork, and occaisionally duck and sausage/weiner forms) 2) Starch (in potato pankake, french fries, fried potato bread dumplings, potato dumplings, bacon dumplings, and rice forms) 3) Cabbage (in white and red forms) 4) Alcohol (primarily in beer, mulled wine, absinthe, and Becherovka forms) - and a lot of it. The Czechs have the highest alcohol consumption per capita of any country.

Any meal will contain a random sampling of foods from these groups. For example, here are the last few Czech meals I've eaten:

Lunch today: Hunk of beef covered in gravy with mashed potatoes and rice Lunch yesterday: Hunks of pork covered in gravy with potato pancakes and white cabbage Dinner yesterday: Goulash (hunks of beef covered in gravy) with bread dumplings and bacon dumplings

Day 5 - Wednesday

Rough night’s sleep last night. It’s no fair for your professor to outdrink the entire class and egg you on, then force you to go to class at 9 in the morning. We had a class discussion on globalization all morning, followed by the unusual lunch of meat in gravy with potatoes and rice. Who would’ve guessed? After lunch, we had a company visit of the IT department of the office of Central Bohemia. Think of it as a county-level office. The presentation was interesting, although none of the government officials spoke English, so a translator was needed. As we toured the building, it was evident that there’s some serious money flowing into the office of Central Bohemia. They had state-of-the-art Dell servers and networking hardware, along with a classroom setting that cost $125K+ to build. And their server room was secured by a door that required a keycard, code, and key to open, followed by a metal gate. The windows also had metal gates and glass that was purportedly grenade proof. They even demonstrated how fast security would come if the door was opened without keying in the proper code. About 5-6 minutes passed, then an old guy meandered down the hallway. The head of the IT department had some choice words with him after that. I hope we didn't get him fired!

After the meeting, a group of us found a Columbian restaurant and stopped in for some coffee. That led to ordering some appetizers, and they were so good, we just decided to stay for an early dinner. After diner, it was off to the State Opera House for La Boheme, presented in the original Italian with Czech supertitles. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would, though.. the story, from what I could make out, reminds me of Rent. After the musical, we headed to a restaurant for a snack, then caught the last (11:17) train back to Celákovice.

Day 6 - Thursday

Class again this morning... this time we spent most of the morning discussing distance learning, both at DePaul and in general. DePaul is one of the few universities out there that offers master’s degrees entirely through distance learning - degrees that look exactly the same as the ones the in-class Chicago students get. Then it was time for another tasty lunch. Lunch consisted of meat in gravy with potatoes or - are we in the twilight zone or something - spaghetti with mixed vegetables! What a delightful change. After lunch, we rode to Prague for a meeting at LCS, one of the if not the top IT firm in the Czech republic. The presentation was extremely interesting, as the company has been working hard and fast to expand their business outside the Czech Republic and to update all their applications using .NET code. Also they seem to be having a hell of a time finding people with .NET experience... and purportedly they’ll pay up to $50K per year for someone from the US to come do that here. That’s a fortune ‘round these parts - the average IT worker makes around 15K per year (actually PayScale.com has a higher average, but I'm not so sure how accurate their information is). It’s very, very tempting to do that for a year or two... I think I even have the exact skill set they’d want. Unfortunately, I don’t think things in Chicago are at a point right now where I can just leave for an extended period of time, but as I said, it’s quite tempting.

After the meeting, it was a 20-minute walk to the Metro and then a short ride to Wenceslas Square. I did a little shopping, picking up a trio of Czech CDs, the star of which is by a barbershop-like group featuring such classics as Lion Sleeps Tonight and Puttin’ on the Ritz in their original Czech. I also picked up a wallet, some lewd t-shirts for the bros, and a really nice colored pencil drawing off the Charles Bridge. We also ran into a truly excellent one-man band on the bridge, who played more-or-less simultaneously the banjo, kazoo, bicycle bell, high hat, washboard, whistle, and a few other things I’m leaving out. Short videos coming whence I return to the home of the free and land of the brave. I also ran into the old zither player who passed out free informational sheets about the zither in over 80 languages. The very same man I ran into on that very same bridge 4.5 years ago. Good to see he’s still at it.

From the Charles Bridge, we wandered a bit trying to find the restaurant the group had dinner reservations at Ambiente - the restaurant I remembered neither the name nor location of. Oops. We found it though and once we walked through the doors, thus began an "orgy of meat". It’s a Brazilian place where for $25, you get all the meat you can eat, along with salad bar and heavenly fried bananas. Chicagoans can think of it as Fogo de Chăo, except less than half the price with more of a selection - including beef, pork, chicken, trout, salmon, shrimp, lamb, veal, and pineapple. Mmmm... Also tonight we were introced by our professor - the very same professor who introduced us to mojitos a few days prior and drank us under the table on Tuesday night - to the Brazilian national drink: the Caipirinha. It’s rum, crushed limes, and sugar - note no water is involved. I had three, which seemed to get progressively stronger, after which somehow a shot of absinthe ended up in front of me that just couldn’t go to waste. That turned out to be a mistake, but just barely the "orgy of meat" did remain within me... All told, our group of 26 ran up a bill of 26,707 crowns, including 64 caipirinhas and roughly a dozen absinthe shots. I think we’re almost starting to catch up to the Czechs. Tomorrow, it's another 7am start. Ugh.

Day 7 - Friday

Today was another long day. We got started at 7:30 am with a 2.5 hour bus ride to Ceské Budejjovice, home of the world famous Budweiser Brewing company. Actually, not true. Anheuser-Busch pissed in a can and decided to name their beer after the beer from the Czech brewing company many decades ago. And they stole the logo too. Somehow, their US trademark holds up, though. In Europe, you can’t get American Budweiser - they have to sell it as Bud. And in the US, Budweiser Budvar sells their beer as Czechvar. At any rate, there’s now a huge global trademark war and to make matters even more amusing, Budweiser has poured millions of dollars into the Budvar region of Czechia to try to get in their good graces, and hopefully eventually buy the brand and kill it. There’s actually not that small a possibility of that, as the Czech government has sold off every national brewery to the Big 3 brewers, with the exception of Budweiser Budvar.

After the tour, we ate lunch at the pub attached to the brewery. I’ll leave what we ate as an exercise to the reader, but if you’ve been reading all week, I’m sure you can guess. After lunch, we took a bus to Ceské Krumlov, and old city from hundreds of years ago that has never been damaged by war and thus has remained almost completely in tact. We were only there for a brief one hour walking tour, which was nice, but I think the town really needs an entire day to do it justice. The castle was closed, but we walked through the courtyards and also went inside an absolutely gorgeous gothic cathedral.

After Ceské Krumlov, it was back to Prague, for dinner. We didn’t arrive in Prague until about 8:30, so we just grabbed a quick bite to eat and wandered Wenceslas Square for a little while, which was fun. There’s a ton of young folk there and it generally seems much less touristy than Stare Mesto (Old Town) and the Charles Bridge.

Day 8 - Saturday

Saturday was our last day and Prague and it was another fun-filled day or touring. We started out by heading east of Prague to Kutná Hora in the morning. We started out with the ossuary in Sedlec, a small Christian chapel decorated using thousands of human bones. It is truly a sight to see. I initially thought this must have been built by some barbarian tribe hundreds of years ago, but as it turns out, the cemetery at the sight was a popular burial place for nobility back in the 12th century and beyond. The bones just kept piling up, and finally in the late 1800s, the town hired a renowned architect to "do something creative" with them, and the ossuary was born.

After Sedlec, we had continued on to Kutná Hora, where we toured St. Barbara’s Cathedral, a truly awe-inspiring gothic cathedral that puts even Praha's cathedral to shame (although Prague’s does have better stained glass). It definitely goes on my Top 5 Cathedrals list, along with the cathedrals in Prague, Kohn (Cologne), Milan, and a fifth to be named later.

Next it was lunch in Kutná Hora. A big hunk of meat was involved, but in a shocking turn of events, it wasn’t pork or beef, but chicken, with a piece of ham and cheese on top. It was, of course, covered in gravy. Their attempt at chicken cordon bleu. Accompanying the chicken were little fried spheres of dumpling which were quite tasty. And some cabbage, which wasn’t. After lunch, we continued touring the town, taking a look at the Italian Court and a little museum for the treasury.

After that, it was back on the bus to Melník (pronounced myelneek), where they had a castle. Part of the group toured the castle, but I and a bunch of other students ducked out and found a pub where we could watch the Czech football team destroy Finland in the World Cup qualifying match. It was a good game and much alcohol was had. After that, we walked up to the castle for our farewell dinner with the entire group. Much more alcohol, along with meat, gravy, and potatoes, were had.

After dinner, we drove back to Celákovice, arriving there at around 11pm. Sane people would have gone to bed then, but since we had to leave for the airport at 4:30 am the next day (which was in fact 3:30 am since it was daylight savings day), most of us stayed up and hung out at one or two of the local pubs. The flights home were long, and the 5 and half hour layover in Frankfort on almost no sleep seemed even longer, but I made it and it was great to be back in my bed last night.

Home!

Ahhh, it was so nice to finally sleep in my own bed last night, after 50+ hours of no sleep or short catnaps on the plane trips. Props to Boeing and their 777, with it's cruising altitude of 38,000 feet. Both flights we almost entirely turbulence free!

Don't forget to take a look at my pictures!

©2005 Jordan McClure