Weekend 1: Fussing Around & Zmrzlina with Friends
Saturday, September 2nd
It's embarrassing and my mom will be disappointed in me, but I slept until 1pm on Saturday. I did wake up at 10am, but still felt tired and wanted a lazy day, so I went back to sleep. I don't want to jam pack every single day to the point where I'm exhausted and check out -- that was the old me. Prague has a lot to see and do, but I don't need to see and do it all at once.
I fussed around (can't believe I just typed "fussed around," but fussing is what I did) and had breakfast-lunch.
I lazily strolled through some gardens and went grocery shopping near the sculpture of Franz Kafka's head and was going to wait for it to rotate, which it does every hour on the hour, but finished shopping too early and didn't want my refrigerated food to get weird in the sun. I'll probably stop by after Czech class one day this week. I know it's going to be underwhelming (you can see a clip of the excitement here), but it's one of Prague's must-see attractions -- second only to the pedal car museum.
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| Kafka's head |
When I got back to the dorms, I met up with Ella H. as she made dinner for the two of us; I got lucky with the amount of people that enjoy cooking. She offered to make dinner and I did the dishes. It was incredible and much better than the peanut butter and jelly I planned on having.
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| delicious din-din |
The rest of the night was spent chit-chatting with friends and trying to complete the NYT Games app's hard sudoku, which was unsuccessful.
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| Sunset from the dorms |
Sunday, September 3rd
After lollygagging around on Saturday, I was ready to attack the day. I got up at 8am and started my first load of laundry. I'd hoped to do laundry once every two weeks, but that's gone out the window now that the weather is heating up again.
I fussed around while my laundry was in the washer and then hung it up to dry. I've learned that I feel very neutral towards air-drying.
Pro: Don't need a dryer
Con: A dryer would be helpful
Pro: Doesn't matter if your dryer takes a long time to dry
Con: It would still be faster than air-drying
Pro: It's fun to organize clothes on a drying rack
Con: It's a lot of work to hang clothes on a drying rack
After I contemplated the usefulness of dryers, I met up with a group to go to the Kafka Museum. It was a lot of reading, which I should have expected from a museum about an author, and very informative. I really enjoy Franz Kafka's stories and bought his complete works to read throughout the semester, so it was interesting to learn more about him. However, there were heavy rich-kid-who's-mad-that-his-dad-won't-give-him-a-bigger-allowance vibes. Alas, we must separate the art from the artist once again.
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| Kafka Museum |
After the museum, we stopped to contemplate a fountain (you can contemplate it yourself here), appreciated the smells of a nearby gingerbread shop, and then Aislinn and I looked into purchasing a gym membership. I haven't worked out in almost two weeks and am getting antsy (which could also be due to the actual ants crawling around my room).
Most of the ECES students have ISIC cards, which get us student discounts at a variety of places. There is one gym that we get a discount to, so we went to ask about pricing, but it's still 75 USD a month and 20 minutes from the dorms -- not worth it when I'm only gonna use your 25 pound dumbbells twice a week.
We thanked the lady in Czech, because I can say "děkuju" now, and headed back to the dorms where I decided to try out their gym. It's 20 crowns (1 USD) an hour, which can only be paid in cash, and has almost no equipment. It's nice to have a space to workout that isn't my dorm room floor, but definitely not worth it. There are no dumbbells and only three machines, which I don't use anyway. I think for now I'll run and workout outside, and look into a gym when the weather gets cooler.
Sadie offered to make dinner and I appreciate her never-ending generosity -- it was delicious. I did some more fussing, and hung out in the kitchen until Christine forced a group of us to get gelato to celebrate our last day as tourists, definitely not my idea.
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| Christine also forced me to take this picture; again, something that definitely was not my idea (From left to right: Ella C., Christine, Me, Sadie, Claire, Aislinn) |
After hating every second of forced ice cream enjoyment, I went to bed somewhat early to prepare for the first day of our Czech Intensive Language course on Monday!