Dobry den! That’s hello in Czech. Greetings go a long way for people here. But, maybe don’t smile when you greet them, and definitely don’t ask someone how they are. Rude. Why does she care how I am? She doesn’t even know me. Suspicious American. I haven’t been offending tons of people or anything, this is just what I’ve learned from program advisors and an elementary Czech professor. Well, I have offended a few people on accident— once when I tried to translate “french roast” into Czech at the grocery store (the woman became extremely stand-offish and told me to go to the meat section) and once when I tried to tip a bartender for waiving the charge of my order. Tipping is customary here, I checked! He pushed the money back and said, “You have now offended me.” It’s probably because I smiled at him when I put the coins down. Czechs are a very serious bunch. A few of my roommates and I ended up befriending him hours later, however, so redemption is possible. As for the grocery store mix-up, perhaps she thought I wanted a pot roast. Still unsure why she was irked by this.
Slavic language in general is just a whole new ball game. It's not like I can pick up any words based on cognates, as nothing is derived from Latin. I thought the word for “please” was the word for “thank you” for an entire day, and when I learned the real “thank you,” I mispronounced it for a few hours. I’m blaming this on the jet lag, but the truth is, these words were very hard to remember on the first day. My brain was fried, and I kept cracking under the pressure of simple interactions. Once the nerves about human contact subsided, I got a little more confident in my responses— except, my new problem was, I kept saying Gracias. I confidently thanked waiters in Spanish, in the Czech Republic— followed by me burying my forehead in my hands, wondering where my logic had wandered off to in that moment. Today, after being served a meal, I said danke schön, as if German has ever been a language that I’ve studied. Who even am I? Despite the slight embarrassment and confusion, (which I assume is only natural at first), experiencing this new culture has been exactly the exhilarating knowledge avalanche that I’ve been awaiting. Prague is fantastically gorgeous, and there is so much history engrained into the city that you can only truly immerse yourself in if you’re weaving your way through it all. Everything is colorful and absolutely ancient. Almost all of the city’s oldest architecture, in every district including Jewish Prague, was preserved during WWII, as it was meant to be a museum-like city of the “lost race” according to the Final Solution. Every turn of each cobblestone corner is bursting with statues, whether they’re of Kafka, or Charles IV, or patron saints of Prague, or two men peeing towards each other surrounded by an outline of the Czech Republic. There is a map on the Astronomical Clock in Old Town Square, which excludes America, as it had yet to be charted or even discovered when the clock was established. My roommates and I have plans to go to the Estates theater to listen to Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which is where the opera debuted. There’s so much in Prague alone, and there are so many other cities and countries to visit! The best part of all the traveling to come is the company. I have five amazing roommates, and the six of us are split up between four different bedrooms in the most adorably Czech apartment I’ve ever seen. First of all, there are pictures of former president (and hero, so it seems) Havel, everywhere. There are three in my bedroom, and so many strewn on the walls of the hallway and the other bedrooms that there are literally duplicates. I see his face everywhere I go, and I’m kind of into it. It’s like he’s watching over us and and making sure our stay in his country is hospitable. Besides the 12 Havels, my living breathing roommates and I are a mixture of all different, yet wildly fun personalities, and we have been absolutely living. Most of what happens in our group make for stories best told verbally, but it’s also only day 3, so more written ones to come :)
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I became friends with Katie Jung during my sophomore year of high school, when we were both stuck doing a ridiculous Christmas play for Laguna Creek’s less than impressive theater department. She and I bonded effortlessly in the midst of our offstage sulking, jokes, and stories that we shared. Then, at the beginning of our junior year, our lives were at an uncanny parallel, and we had the same lunch period— a recipe for instant partnership. We had the same dilemmas and endgames, and the paths we drew up to connect them was the foundation of our affinity. We served more roles than just “friend.” To each other, we were instigators, teachers, detectives, and the hype we each needed to go after what we wanted. We assumed all of those statuses because we were some low-key adrenaline junkies, and thrived off of marking as many days of high school into the books as possible.
Katie knows how to get shit done. She kind of put my go-getter tactics to shame when we were seventeen, and I had to advance my ways to keep up with the master. The fact that our lives were in similar places at the beginning of the year would have been just a coincidence, but the reality that we attuned them for as long as we did was not at all. We were making moves together like we were goddamn Thelma and Louise (the ride or die part, not the other stuff), and we had the nerve and commitment to match. We were daring, and a tad reckless, and each new adventure felt like we were in the middle of an unscripted sitcom (for better or for worse), and it was the best. We careened around each hairpin of high school in such synchrony because we were learning from each other’s mistakes and achievements, on top of our own. It put our lives into a better perspective; we were able to call each other out when we weren’t following our own advice. This is not to say that we weren’t the blind leading the blind, because that is absolutely what was happening. But at least we were blind together, ya know? Our high flying adventures led to some classic stories, some of which I’ll get to in later blogs* (the bottle incident, the drive-in fiasco, the senior ball date polyhedral), and forging those moments gave our high school existences quite the dramatic flare that we loved. But, thankfully, we have both gained enough insight from college that we can bestow much better wisdom unto each other nowadays. (I’m not sure yet if I’m being sarcastic, it’s too soon to tell). Regardless, our advice has definitely matured, as have we, and even though we have reigned in a little bit of our high school recklessness, we still push each other to go get what we want, and to realize what we've already got. *but probably not Any Grey's fans? I have a superpower. It’s called The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, and if you’re reading this, there’s a high chance I’ve already preached to you about it. I recognize this book as a superpower because it has helped me understand life a little better, in undeniably countless moments since I first opened it. It’s a key that opens so many doors to the culture and knowledge encapsulating the world, to the things everyone should ideally know, or strive to learn in a lifetime. It’s a reference guide; an anthology, an encyclopedia, a glossary, a google search; all bound into a 700 page hardback. There are over twenty sections, all of which contain the words, events, historical figures, and stories, that you could ever possibly need to know about that broad subject. Some of my favorites to flip through are World History, Mythology and Folklore, Fine Arts, and Idioms. The whole book spans an even more expansive spectrum though, from The Bible, to Physics, to Medicine and Technology. (Those are the subjects where I used to crash and burn, but now I just crash and sustain only slight first-degrees, so… progress!)
Flipping through this book gives you almost an exponential craving for more information. After reading one blurb, you might see the bolded words in it, which means that they are also defined somewhere in the book, and then read each one on their respective pages, until you have mastered the history and significance of, let’s say Passover for example (ask me anything about it). It’s incredible how much you can piece together by doing this. One moment you can be reading the brief of an idiom, and then you find yourself wondering who the ancient ruler was that the idiom originated from, and what years he reigned, and wasn’t that during Jesus’ time? And how many different frickin' Caesar’s ruled the Roman Empire, and weren’t Cleopatra and Mark Antony’s deaths basically the final scene of Romeo and Juliet, so how did Shakespeare get away with writing two tragedies with the same ending? And suddenly, you’re knee deep in detailing a timeline of the greatest artists of the Renaissance era. It’s a powerful and mind boggling path, and I really recommend traversing it. I also recommend hitting up the mythology section after a few hits— it is wild. Either way, once you retain the names and stories, it feels as though allusions to them come hailing in from all sectors of your life. This goes for literature, and history, and all the others too, of course— and it’s exciting to catch and make sense of them. Cultural literacy is so important in understanding the past, recognizing the present, and preparing for the future, that each little nugget of information starts to feel like puzzle pieces to an enormous jigsaw board; there are parts fitting together in all different corners of the picture, and gradually, they're all making their way towards each other to reveal their unified entity. As more of each category of life is learned, they all begin to correlate and apply to each other more smoothly, and the picture becomes clearer. My favorite part of this book is exploring it with other people. I showed it to my roommates back at the beginning of the Spring semester, and the superpower expanded throughout the whole house and was practically ricocheting off the walls. It was beautiful— we quizzed each other, made games out of it, posed questions, kept score, and cultured ourselves together. If I was reading it and Kelsey came to join me on the couch, she would tell me to read it out loud as she ate dinner or watched TV, so that we could learn the stuff we found most interesting together. Over the course of the semester, I showed it to at least 25 people, and on God, 100 percent of them wanted to buy their own once they took a look at it. About 75 percent of them actually did, and now have their own copies. And then there’s my aunt, who ordered it on her phone literally as I was telling her about it for the first time. It has become quite the hot commodity, and I, its loyal prophet. So, to top things off, make sure you have one of these bad boys on your shelf at home, so we can all drum up a team for the next trivia bar night and absolutely dominate. |
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