Fumbling through the continent...

All-

I apologize for not posting sooner, or when I said I would yesterday. The Czech servers at Charles University had trouble recognizing the blog site. I'm at an internet cafe right now, and everything seems to be working fine.

Where to begin? The flight from Minnesota to Amsterdam was probably one of the best I've ever had. I watched movies for free, drank beer for free, and played a trivia game with Zach. All in all, a good flight.

We got to Amsterdam at around 10 a.m., which means it felt like about 2 a.m. Missoula time. We were all tired and a little dazed, but somehow we managed to find our way out of the airport and to the train terminal to get into town. Getting the right train ticket and the right train seemed to me like an act of sheer genius. Then again, thousands of people do it every day...

We had big plans for Amsterdam: visit the Van Gogh Museum, go see Anne Frank's house, maybe take a water taxi through the canals... but it didn't work out that way. First-off, Amsterdam's streets aren't in a grid like Philadelphia or New York, but rather in some weird spider-web shape that I didn't understand. None of us did, and we were all too tired to try to figure out a map. We ended up wandering around aimlessly for about two hours, just watching people be people. One thing that was interesting about the town: there are open-air urnials in some squares and on some street corners for passers-by that need to relieve themselves. Israel took a crack at it, and said he actually felt like he had a little privacy because of the side walls on the urinal. Good for him.

Following the Amsterdam excursion, we went back to the airport and passed out on these cool lounge chairs that they had at the airport. True, they were airport chairs, but at least you could lean back in them and sleep.

Slept through the flight to Prague, and made our way through customs with no problems. We were met by Vendula, one of the Czech students who we're studying with, and Jan, the professor teaching at Charles University. We had about a half-hour bus ride to the dorms, and got situated in our rooms pretty easily. The rooms are... well, dorm rooms. Zach and Israel are rooming together, Mary and Ashley are rooming together, and I've been paired with a medical student from Belarus named Alex. He speaks English pretty well, and I went out for beers with him and a couple of his friends the other night. Good people.

The dorms are co-ed. So are the bathrooms. I went into the bathroom to take a shower, and there was a woman the sink brushing her teeth. I asked her if I was in the right place (I had used the bathroom before) and she said that both sexes use the bathrooms, the showers, everything. Weird. I think a friend put it best when he joked: "I'm just going to respect the culture, and if that means I have to shower with college-age girls, so be it." It still freaks me out.

Sunday, we spent the better part of the morning trying to figure out how to use the phones. Apparently it's not as easy as we thought it'd be, and none of the payphones here take change. You have to buy a phone card, which you can only do at certain places, and those certain places are far away from our dorms. The language barrier didn't help either.

But finally, Sunday, we went to downtown Prague. I can't even explain just how amazing the city is. Many of the buildings pre-date Columbus' journey to America, and they are still in pristine condition. Unfortunately, I don't know what any of them are called yet, but more on that later.

There's a lot more I need to write here, but I've got to go to class in 20 minutes, and it's a bit of a hike from the cafe, so I'm going to jet. Hope all is well in the states, I miss you all.

S