A Short Story (in the style of Hugo)

I'm reading Les Misérables right now, and it's unlike anything I've ever read before. As the introduction by the translator says, Victor Hugo wasn't well-versed in the practice of novel writing, because he couldn't simply omit things that he had to say. Anything that came out of his and was worth describing was written down, which is why the final product is a book several inches thick, with nearly 70 pages discussing an irrelevant battle and far too many paragraphs about a character's daily lifestyle, or perhaps a rocking chair. If you've seen the musical or the movie, you know that they're long, too, and incredibly emotional. Just try to imagine how much content had to be removed from the original story to fit the script and the stage, though, and how much poetry was lost in the process of changing the words into lyrics. If you appreciate the musical, read the book. It's a decision you won't regret.

Yesterday, when I was supposed to be doing homework, this came to mind, based off of a scenario I encountered while walking to dance a few hours earlier (as a disclaimer, I didn't really witness a car accident. I just watched another car back up alarmingly close to another. I also have no idea who the people were the in the car.) You could say that this girl is a fictionalized version of me, and you could also say that the only difference is our appearance. Whatever you make of it, though, my intention was basically to just try to write like Victor Hugo, because his style is so unique. So this is me, pretending that I'm him. There might be more to come, but I won't know it until I see it, so this is all I wrote yesterday.

    October came swiftly, and it found Melena sitting in a courtroom.

    It was no matter of chance for her being there, yet she had committed no crime. It’s unclear at the present, but as the story progresses we’ll see that there is no way for our protagonist to be found on a trial of her own, at least not in any logical setting. She was far too conventional, the quiet and law abiding student in a class of crowd pleasers, whom one usually finds in a corner, reading a book. There may have been a place in her heart for romanticized rebellion, but her brain was much too dominant to let it get too out of hand. To tell the truth, in her hometown, it wouldn’t be terribly uncommon for child of sixteen to be on trial, but Melena simply wasn’t that type of person. So what was she doing in a courtroom?

    The case was simple and trifling: it had been a few weeks earlier, when fall was just starting to sneak its way into the air. Melena was walking her daily route on the side of the road after school let out one afternoon when she came across a crosswalk, blocked almost entirely by a car. Upon seeing her, the vehicle began to back up out of the crosswalk, without gauging the distance between itself and the car behind it, committing the mistake we all dread and cross our fingers against. Horns blasted, metal scraped and small bits of glass fell to the ground, while Melena stood wide-eyed on the sidewalk. Despite herself, she laughed a little, thinking of herself and how the anxiety that filled with car when she drove, because of situations like this. Then she hurried into the street to help, because there was no way she could simply walk away after witnessing that.

    Nobody was hurt in the accident, but insurance companies were disgruntled. The front car had been driven by a woman by the name of Elizabeth Fox, who worked for a bank in town and was known for always being in a rush. Being an economically savvy woman, Ms. Fox jumped to find ways to fix the back of her car that didn’t involve spending a fortune. The other driver, on the other hand, was a young mother named Lucy Button, whose toddler son had been riding with her, and whose vehicle suffered considerable damage. It was the classic case of unnecessary lawsuits: if Ms. Fox had simply agreed to pay the sum needed to fix Mrs. Button’s car, the problem would be solved and everybody would go on living happily. But she was adamantly against it, and thus a trial was born. Lucy Button, intimidated by Elizabeth Fox’s overbearing and confident demeanor, raced to find the girl who had been at the crosswalk at the time. Melena had mentioned her first name in passing as she helped the little boy out of the car, and after that it wasn’t too difficult to track her down at the school. She agreed to be a witness, if nothing else because she could see the worry in Mrs. Button’s eyes, and understood how important it was. She was the only one who had been on the street at the time, and Elizabeth Fox was a prominent figure in the community, whereas Lucy Button was young and new to the area. Also, it goes without saying that Melena was an overall well-meaning girl.

    In order for the rest of the story to go on, one must understand Melena, especially since she was commonly misunderstood. She was fair-skinned and blue-eyed with light brown hair, an average character in an average storybook. The question of her beauty was what kept her up at night staring into the mirror, what made her shy away from mirrors and duck from cameras. Her parents loved her, without a question, and were constantly telling her that she was gorgeous, but any person knows that that is simply the job of a loved one. Despite her doubts, though, the girl seldom let it get to her. She was far too preoccupied with the rest of her life, and the opportunities to glance into a mirror became less and less frequent. Vanity, after all, is a quality of the bored.

    She was in her eleventh year of schooling, and working harder than she ever had before. If she had time, she would pause occasionally and remark, “it’s as if I never stop doing everything!” Indeed, she didn’t. Her days were filled from the moment she got up to the seconds before she turned out the light for the night, and only then did she relax in the stillness of the night, praying to drift off to sleep and not be plagued with insomnia. At school, the teachers gave out more work than they ever had before, and she would spend hours throughout the day filling in the gaps of time between events to make sure everything was completed. From the moment she got up, her eyelids would feel heavy, and the sensation would last until she laid down to sleep an eternity later. In the monotonous hours of school, particularly in the afternoon, the room might begin to feel almost too peaceful, and she would lay her cheek down on her desk for a while, before jolting herself back up in order to copy down something from the board or go on the next activity.

    As only the most dedicated will know, along with the gain of discipline comes with loss of freedom. It didn’t take long for her to find that shamelessness was quickly slipping out of her fingers. When one spends all of her time working, the concept of being idle becomes more and more abstract. If she finished her work and still had time to enjoy, she would stare at her notes and exclaim, “Can it really be?” Most often, she didn’t believe herself. Even the simple act of reading a book or jotting down a story came with guilt. The clock became her constant companion, always keeping track of the seconds for her. There was never enough time in the day, she realized.

    In her allotted spare time, she might seek solitude in her bedroom, where she struggled with the concept of musicality, disagreeing with her violin over and over as she tried to coax the right sound out of it. Metronomes would tick, pencil marks would be made, notes would slide out of tune and she would eventually get so frustrated that her fingers would begin playing old pieces rather than the task at hand, just because they were more pleasing to the ear. Yet it was during this time that she was able to slip into a different sort of dimension, where the music was simply background noise for her thoughts. She encountered the same feeling during ballet class, where she would stand at the barre contemplating her life’s decisions, while raising her leg in a grand battement, the ballet mistress clapping her hands to the rhythm of the music behind her. She stumbled across it while she was cleaning the house or washing the dishes, when the job becomes mere busywork and the thoughts of the doer are the most important thing in the world right then.

    Paused, with a dripping plate in her hand, she would stare ahead and say to herself, “Is it all worth it? Is it really?”

    But the most important thing to know about Melena is that, to her, it absolutely was. More accurately, she loved it with a passion. Boredom had always been her most terrible enemy, and she could never stand the feeling of not learning anything. “I feel like I’m losing brain cells,” she would complain during the summer months, where the sunlight constantly shone in through the window and the days were completely up to her. Business was what preserved her sanity, what made her more grateful for times of quiet and peacefulness, and what she felt defined her. “I wouldn’t be happy without all of these things that make me what I am,” she told herself. “If I were to give one of them up, I would be giving up a piece of myself.”

    And behind all of that, there was so much more to the girl. She was a lover of stories, and was never without one in hand, whether it was something she was reading or something she had created herself. She sang when she thought nobody was listening (unless she was in the company of her family, to whom she subjected countless songs). She read the tales of fellow people around the world and imagined what the rest of the planet must look like. Her walls were papered with maps. She listened to politics and discussed current matters with those who would listen. Suppertime in  her family was always a lively event, with some sort of debate going on about something somehow relevant. Logic was her good friend, except for the cases where she would throw it out into the cold and completely turn her back on it. She was polite to adults, comical with the right sort of people, lively with her friends and sweet with younger children. If she were to come across herself described in a book, she wouldn’t recognize herself. Yet this was undeniably how she was.

    That is all we will say about the life of Melena, for the time being. It’s inevitable that she will become more and more apparent as the story goes on, but that is for her to show us when she feels it necessary.

How to Write Good

It's a sad day when you realize that creative writing just isn't part of your life like it used to be. Gone are the days when you would wake up early and balance cereal on your lap while you wrote out everything that you thought up after you went to bed the night before. There's no more staying up late, furiously typing by the glowing light of your superawesome PC, or randomly thinking up new ideas while in the shower and dashing upstairs with wet hair to get it all out on paper. No, those days are gone. Now you use your writing magic for essays about World War II justifications and controversial editorials for the school newspaper. You stress about deadlines for contests, and then get all nostalgic when you remember that story you wrote that one time in sixth grade about the magic attic. But what can I say, it's inevitable. Also, television has become a great way to spend your free time. 

But you still read, and you still think about writing all the time, because you hope that someday you'll be one of those people who does it for a living. You hope that someday you'll be memorable enough to write a memoir and give people a reason to read it. But for now, here's a guide on how to write, in case you forget sometime within the next two years of high school. Feel free to ignore it, or frame it and put it on your wall. (And this is coming from someone who has a spot on her wall dedicated to particularly funny Weekend Update jokes, but not the 10 Qualities of an IB Student or something else important.) Huzzah!

Sophie's Expert* Guide on How to Write

1.) Write about what you know.

There's no point in trying to use your ethos and make a claim about something if you don't understand or care about it. It usually just makes you very confused and frustrated, and vulnerability is easy to spot. Personal experience is always the best source, because it's limitless and you're the only person who understands it enough to put it into words. When you insert some truth into your fiction, it becomes so much more real and alive. Plus, it's like having an inside joke with yourself, that only you (and anyone else you want to tell) will ever know is there. However, you should also remember to...

2.) Write about what you don't know.

Ha! It's pretty trippy, I know. Basically, I've found that it's always great to take something that you're clueless about and figure it out. Learning is so incredibly important and sticks in your mind forever. If you want to write about 15th century Africa, then research it until you're an expert. It's good to know what you're talking about so that you have more freedom and courage in your writing, but there's no rule saying that you need to have known about it your whole life. Do whatever you need to do visualize it: look at a picture, read accounts, talk to people, whatever it takes. It's so much fun to write from other points of view that you don't often hear from, and try to put yourself in shoes from the other side of the world or deep in history. 

3.) Follow your insticts

This is especially important when you do things like name characters. If the name Mildred pops into your head for no reason at all, USE IT. It was probably meant to be. I've learned that overthinking character names just makes them less interesting to me, because I'm not letting them develop themselves. Last names can be trickier, but I guess you can always pull a J.K. Rowling and use names that have Latin roots corresponding to their character traits, like Draco Malfoy or Remus Lupin. It makes you look and feel really smart (rightfully so, probably), and it looks great when you do it subtly. Honestly, I don't know if I've ever done this, but it seems like a really good idea, and I love it when other people do it. Overall, listen to your brain if it tells you something, and try it out whether or not you like it. You might end up loving it, or you might change it later. Just give yourself a chance. 

4.) Don't be afraid to abandon what you have and start over. 

 I've been known to do this a lot. Face it, sometimes what you write is going to suck, and you're going to know it. There's nothing worse than hating your own writing, or dreading coming back to it. That feeling should probably be just reserved for the 10 page math IA you have to write for school (honestly, what the heck?! Sorry, Dan), because I think it's really important to want to be working on your piece. Today in English class, my teacher told us all that we need to change our topic for our upcoming paper if we're not enjoying it right now, because we're just wasting our time. I wholeheartedly agree; words should just be pouring out of your brain, like a stream of consciousness. If you think something will work better than what you're doing right now, then go for it. And never delete or recycle your first attempt, because it's worth saving and smiling at (or adding to and reviving!) later. 

5.) Let your characters explain themselves to you. 

It can be fun to profile your characters like you're doing a roleplay or something, but sometimes it just makes things worse. Characters are born and raised on paper, and sometimes they develop differently than you'd expect, with minds of their own. It's not like you'd plan our your children before they arrive, and even though you obviously have a little more control in writing, it's not as much as you'd think. One of these days, your beloved Roseanne might just decide that she's brunette rather than blonde, and (this could be completely unrelated, just so you know I don't think that personalities have to do with hair color) say something that shocks all of the other characters, and you're just going to have to go with it. This goes for writing in general; if you don't know how you stand on something, write about it until you figure it out. That's what diaries are for. Be open to changing things, even if you're completely attached and think it will ruin everything. Again, don't delete, just try it. You don't want to be left with regrets. 

6.) Write what you read. 

Emulation is both a great exercise and one of the highest forms of flattery. You might be reading funny memoirs by successful and funny people and want to know if you can sound the same. Great. Do it. It's what I'm doing right now (thank you Tina, Amy, Ellen and Rachel. Look at me, calling them by only their first names). Or maybe you're in the middle of a poetic novel thing and want to try your hand at the artful run-on sentences and no quotation marks. Excellent. I've done that, too. You're not copying them because it's still your own words and work, and it's fun to have a large range of styles under your belt. 

7.) Think about how it will look on paper. 

Words look and sound different on paper than they do when you say them out loud. You have to convey your emotion and meaning without having the built-in help of your voice, expressions and actions (reason number one why it's harder to be a writer than an actor. My apologies to all my actor friends). And, with all due respect to the English vocabulary, some words are just prettier than others. You would describe a garden with words like blooming and charming, not porous* or something like that. However, if you WANT to convey an ugly and icky feeling, then go ahead! Just remember the social hierarchy of adjectives. If you're trying to be sarcastic, remember that things sound different on paper than in real life, so you should be consistent with it, or use the sarcmark (Google it). Actually, this could probably prevent 60% of conflicts on the Internet or other forms of social media. Overall, just try to define yourself. Which leads me to...

8.) Find your voice. 

This goes along with the last one, but only sort of. Just remember who the narrator is, and who the audience is. You should probably also establish how the narrator feels about certain things, so you can find your tone. How old are you? Are you writing, speaking or just seeing? Do you know what the characters are thinking? Harry Potter is an example of a third-person narrative with insider information on only one character; it's unbiased in general, but only has Harry's perspective. Mink River (the aforementioned poetic book with the run-ons) is an example of a pair of eyes just seeing and describing every single character equally, which is cool but also kind of unsettling. An example of a young, naive child would be almost every story I've ever written. Whatever your voice is, keep it consistent, and if you want to switch narrators, make it very, very clear. That's always really cool. 

I'd like to stop writing for a second and just mention that it is 11:22 pm and it's hailing so hard outside that I think my roof is going to break. Gotta love Oregon. I really hope my bedroom window isn't open. Instead of going up to check, I'm just going to finish writing this. Priorities!

 9.) Keep everything simple.

Simple writing is better than verbose writing, in my opinion.  I hate it when I get lost in a whirlwind of words I don't understand. The meaning gets lost somewhere along the way, and it's like you're trying to walk in sinking mud. Beautiful words are wonderful, and I've been known to actually write down quotes and sentences that I particularly love. I think I used to the line "their greatest asset is their greatest curse" (from Doctor Who, of course!) approximately fourteen times in eighth grade, in various pieces of writing. Some metaphors are just gorgeous and powerful, and having a large vocabulary is important. It's what separates good writing from second grade writing assignments. But I also think that less is more, and I'd much rather read something that's simple but powerful. You don't want to be drowning in big words so much that you lose the story's purpose. 

10.) Edit what you do. 

I'm going to go ahead and ignore this one, because it's 11:30 now and it's Monday night and I really don't feel like reading this whole thing again. That's actually the problem, and why I think that this tip is important. We spend so much time in Journalism editing and rereading our paper before it goes to press, and there are always typos that get through. It's especially horrible to find a mistake on the page that you designed or the piece that you wrote, because it shows that you personally let it get through. A lot of errors are just dumb mistakes, but they still could be avoided with just simple editing. You don't want to say something you didn't mean by complete accident.

One last tip: Listen to music. This obviously doesn't work for everyone, but being a musician, I love it, especially when I'm writing something creative. If you want inspiration, my Pandora channels include Sibelius, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Mozart, Broadway Showstoppers, Wicked, The Sound of Music, Lord of the Rings, Today's Hits, Glee Cast, Taylor Swift, 80's Pop and High School Musical. I'm not at all ashamed.

And there you have it. Thank you very much.

*I am not an expert on writing.

* Never use the word "porous" for describing a garden. Not only is it an ugly word, but it doesn't even make sense. Gardens are not porous. You get the point, though (I hope).

Words from the Future

I was working on a debate for US History about suffrage last night, and looking over a passage that Elizabeth Cady Stanton  and Lucretia Mott wrote; the Declaration of Sentiments. To us, the idea of women being so inferior is so foreign and old-fashioned. I, for one, really can't imagine living in that time period. It's just so different from what we have today. That got me thinking about what we DO have today, and how different things might be in just a few decades.

So I abandoned my homework, and raced to the computer, where I wrote this.




My mom has always told me that our history is important for us to learn about, because it shows us why we are the way we are today. If it hadn’t been for the Revolutionary War, we’d all be eating crumpets and drinking tea, she says. If the Civil War hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have to weed the garden because we’d have a slave doing it for us, and only half of the states would still be around in our country. If it hadn’t been for the suffragists, I wouldn’t have the right to vote in ten years, and the Civil Rights movement is the reason it’s okay for me to be friends with Joey, the African-American boy who lives down the street. Everyone in the world would probably belong to just one religion, and my moms wouldn’t be able to be married and have me. It’s crazy.

I can’t imagine what it would be like to live back in the 20th and early 21st centuries. I definitely can’t imagine what life was like before then, when pioneers were moving west and had no idea what was out there. To be honest, even the idea of going without electricity is kind of scary. Whenever the power goes out, the candles and flashlights seem exciting at first, and then I just wish that I could have my lights turned back on, and my TV working again. By the time they do, it’s usually just been a few minutes, but it feels like hours. My mama told me that I would probably be a lot more used to it if I had never had electricity before, and that’s the way a lot of things were back in the olden days, before everyone had rights.

My parents grew up in the 2000s, and believe it or not, the idea of a girl and another girl dating back then was scary to most people. My mom went out with a girl in her class when she was in eighth grade, and her classmates started whispering and making fun of her. When my grandma found out, she grounded my mom for a week while she “thought about her problem,” and then she brought her to church twice a week so she could be healed of her condition. The other girl got kicked out of her house, and had to go live with an aunt during high school. Every time I hear that story, I start to cry, because I can’t even think about something so awful happening to my mom. Mama had it easier. Her parents were nicer, and told her that they would love her no matter what. Still, her friends and people on the Internet were always telling her how messed up she was.

I did a report on the Great Recession for school, and I got to go to the library and look up unemployment rates and the stock market numbers and all that cool stuff. Back then, it was a big deal to have a black president, and there were books on that, too. I checked out a really fat book called The Pride Movement, and it was all about what people did to legalize marriage for all people. It also talked about what society did to those people, and that part kind of scared me. It’s so ridiculous that a gay person would ruin your society and idea of marriage. I didn’t even know that there was only one type of marriage back then until I read that book.

I read my report aloud to my class two weeks later, and a lot of them were really surprised, too. Carlos, who’s from Honduras, frowned when I talked about how kids were turned away at our border. Tara, who was born a boy, looked really sad when she heard that transgender people were disrespected and viewed as being creepy. Some kids laughed out loud when I said that people used to only think that Santa Claus was white. A lot of kids raised their eyebrows when I read aloud what I wrote about how teachers could bring guns to school and just carry them around. And all of them were shocked when I told them that marriage wasn’t legal in the whole country back then. My teacher just got married to a guy from Alaska last month, and he nodded and smiled at me when I announced the date of complete legalization.

I might be only in third grade, but I’m so glad that I live now and not thirty years ago. I can’t imagine life for those people. How did their society work? How did they get up in the morning and go about their days, with all of the awfulness that went on? I know that we have problems now, but at least we have freedom. If I had a time machine, I’d go see my moms when they were my age and see what they were like, but I don’t think I’d want to stay there. It’s just like when the power goes out. I can’t imagine living in a world without the lights turned on.

Chapter Three

Day Four of the trip was probably one of my favorites, even if I didn't realize it at first. It was the day that we started moving, and continuing on to another country, a country that I've always wanted to visit. Even though the Czech Republic was gorgeous and oh so European, I was deliriously happy to be going to Austria. I grew up watching The Sound of Music and falling in love with the landscapes. When Austrian exchange students came to my town a few years ago, I was so excited. It's a prosperous country with regal architecture and dignified air, and after seeing the unfamiliar Czech words on signs in Prague, it was really cool to see German everywhere. I don't speak German, but I know a lot more words (which still more or less nothing) in it than Czech. German is a lot closer to English, too, which helped in some situations since not as much in the city was actually in English. People either speak it or they don't, from what I noticed. As we pulled away from the hotel and said goodbye to the beautiful city of Prague, all I could think was that I was going to country where Mozart was born. And Marie Antoinette. And Strauss.

The first stop was Telč (pronounced Telsh, I think), still in the Czech Republic. I'm obsessed with Telč. I have a magnet on my fridge from Telč, and I look at it every day and wish I could go back there. It was straight out of my dreams, or a childhood storybook. At the time, the first thing that popped into my head was Duloc (you know, from Shrek), but then I looked up Duloc on Google and it doesn't really look like it. Anyway, the point is that it could be cardboard cutouts from a movie set. Or a gingerbread fairytale village. I have a ton of pictures, so you'll see what I mean.

Telč looks kind of like a normal town from the outside, and we parked in a normal parking lot and walked down the cobblestone, which was normal by then. But then we walked into the square, and everything changed. It looked like this.

Look that that Czech sky. :)

Why, look at that! A residential alleyway! I don't know how the people living here felt about me taking pictures of their houses, but they're probably used to it by now.

In short, I loved Telč. My grandma and I bought bread and cheese, and Czech yogurt (actually, it was probably just normal yogurt, but still) from a cramped little grocery store (and a clerk who didn't speak any English. It was so cool.) Then we ate it in the middle of the village. That's when I realized that I was fulfilling my dream of eating bread and cheese in the middle of Europe, and it made me so happy. After lunch, we looked around the stores and tried to spend the rest of the Czech money we had. I ended up buying the magnet that's on my fridge now, from a shopkeeper who smiled and hummed as he delicately wrapped it up. And then we were back on the road, and it was on to Austria. Here's a last glance at the town for you.

I detailed all of this in my journal on the bus right after we left and didn't write again until the next day, so the exact details of what we did after this are a bit fuzzy. We crossed the border in the early afternoon, and spent a little time in the no man's land of Central Europe. Since things are duty free, there are a lot of weird complexes around there, including one we stopped at with an airplane and a huge model of the Earth outside of it. It was a mall or something, and it was enormous. There were signs for strip clubs and the like posted along the highway. (Their motto was "The American Way." How nice.)

The countryside out the window kept changing drastically as we entered Austria, and it was so much fun to stare outside and look at the other cars and little towns we passed. The other people on the bus, being from Rhode Island, were saying that it looked a little like the more open parts of New Hampshire, but I honestly thought it looked a lot like Oregon. A few weeks ago, I was actually up near McMinnville, and it could have been the same fields.

Here's what it looked like at one moment.

And then, five minutes later:

When we finally reached Vienna, I was a little surprised to find out just how metropolitan it is; a lot more like a city than Prague. There are trolleys, and a lot more cars and tall buildings (still not nearly as tall as the ones we have here, though.) The Danube runs right through the middle, and there's a lot of graffiti on the concrete edges, but it's pretty good graffiti.

We checked into the hotel, which was very nice, but had a weird bathroom structure (the shower was basically out in the open, with only part of a wall as privacy, meaning that if you opened the door, you could see someone in the shower. Dinner that night was in some kind of beer cellar. To get downstairs, you had to go down a billion flights of spiral staircases, through the kitchen and around some corners. We were seated on two different floors, and going to the bathroom was a nightmare, because you would leave through one door, take a few turns and end up exactly where you started out. I didn't take my camera with me, and therefore didn't get any pictures of this interesting place, or the food we had, so you'll have to take my word that it was quite an adventure. (Or you could look up the Chorus of Westerly on Facebook and see if there are any pictures of it there.) There were an accordion player and a violinist traveling throughout the restaurant (meaning that sometimes we would hear them playing above us, sometimes below us, and sometimes through a wall) and since they know how to appeal to American tourists, they played Edelweiss, Do Re Mi and Home On the Range. Everyone sang along, of course, since they're chorus members, and I thought about how I was sitting underground in the middle of Vienna watching Austrians play the songs that made me fall in love with their country in the first place.



That was more or less it for the traveling day. I was amazed to find out that it only takes a couple of hours to get from Prague to Vienna, which is as long as it takes to get from the coast of Oregon to about the middle of the state. If you'll look at the map below, you'll see that Prague is actually in the more northern part of the Czech Republic, not that close to the border. Incredible.

That's it for now. I'll try to update soon with another one of my favorite days on the trip- Vienna!

More Prague

 Czech out the new post! *Faceplant*

To be completely honest, I think one of my favorite parts about the whole trip was seeing how people live in other countries, outside of the tourist attractions. I was fascinated by the grocery stores we went into, the cars that passed us on the highway with their long, rectangular license plates. I would look at the people in their cars from the bus window and try to decide their stories and where they were going/coming from. The second day in Prague was especially exciting to me because we spent the morning outside of the city, in a small town that was most definitely a tourist attraction but also a place where people lived. Also, it was just the epitome of a small European town, and I just loved it for that.

Karlstejn Castle is up on top of a hill about an hour or so out of Prague, in the countryside, and was built in the 1300s, which is enough to blow my mind. The bus dropped us off in a parking lot at the bottom, and then we walked up the street, past all the shops and vendors to the actual base of the hill, which goes up through the trees on a dirt path. The whole walk was just so pretty, with flower boxes on the buildings and little Czech kids running around. And, of course, the buildings are all white with red roofs, making it even more picturesque. I got this picture from below, when the castle came back into view. It's almost like a Disney castle, only real.

Quite a bit of the castle actually isn't open to the public, or is accessed on a different tour, but I was extremely impressed by what I did see. Everything about it just screamed medieval to me, whether it be the architecture, coloring, or outhouse that hung off the building so that everything fell onto the grounds below. It it doesn't belong in Tudor-era England, then it's straight out of Rohan.

Karlstejn is famous in Czech history because it was used by royalty to house their jewels and relics, meaning it was just packed with riches. The interior doesn't look like a palace or anything, but we went through several rooms with large portraits all over the walls, and in the last room there was a glass case holding bejeweled crowns.

Here's the view from above, down on the lovely little village.

After our tour, the tour guide left us with the words "have a good rest of your life," which was probably the most though-provoking thing I'd heard in a really long time, and we started back down the hill in the heat. My grandma and I bought some cashmere scarves, which were a lot cheaper than what they go for in Prague, and spent some time taking pictures.

Back in Prague, we went to an Irish pub, which is apparently the biggest Irish pub in Prague, across the street from our hotel. Going to a different culture's restaurant in a foreign country is the best.

That night was the first concert of the series, so the chorus had to go to rehearsal that afternoon, and my grandma and I walked there with them. They performed in Smetana Hall in the Municipal House, which put the Newport Mansions to shame.  It was the first time I had heard them sing the piece, Dvorak's Stabat Mater, and the first time I had even recognized the male soloists as being soloists, so the part of the rehearsal we saw was just incredible. The room wasn't let up for a concert yet, and everyone was wearing their street clothes, but I just couldn't stop staring at everything around me; the ceiling, the ornate carvings on every square inch, and the enormous organ pipes.

After a while, we wandered back through the streets, and passed a brick-painting station that another tour member had told us about. You can pay for a brick to paint and then stack next to the booth, which goes towards building a mental health center. There were already hundreds of them there, and the pile just kept growing every time we passed. My grandma painted this one for my grandpa.

Across the street there was a group of kids jamming, which I found really cool. They were speaking to each other in Czech but singing in both Czech and English, and appearing to have the time of their lives. Music on the streets is so common in the places we went, especially in Prague, where people and tourists are everywhere. They played Czardas, which is a famous Hungarian piece that I just started learning on the violin, and it really made me happy. I made it my goal to find someone playing it in every country, and I got 2/3 of the way there (more on that later).

We meandered back to the hotel, stopping to look at more street performers, duck into shops and watch these minnows eat peoples' feet in the Thai spa.

No, really. They eat the dead skin off. And be sure to note the lovely skull (and the fact that they actually do use commas instead of decimal points! My Spanish teacher was right!).

As I said before, that night was the first concert, and it was just magical. Really, truly magical. The Municipal House has plush red carpets on the wide staircases and gold trim and gorgeous dining rooms/restaurants. Smetana Hall was all lit up and just filled with people (hundreds and hundreds). We sat in the balcony, and I suddenly realized that I was in the best place in the world to see places like this, and that it doesn't get much better. The chorus looked so professional, everyone sounded beautiful, and they got so much support and applause from the locals.

Since my pictures don't really do anything on this trip justice, here are some from the lovely Google.

So, so pretty.


After the concert, we had dinner in a restaurant downstairs, which was extremely nice and gorgeous. Everyone was on a concert high (the best kind of adrenaline rush ever), and the doors were open, so we could see out onto the streets. This is when I started taking pictures of my food, which is something I would do at least once a day for the rest of the trip.

And that was our last day in Prague! I loved that city so much. It was just a fairy-tale land, with rich history and so many things you'd never see here in the States, and I would go back in a heartbeat. I never would have thought to visit the Czech Republic, but I'm so, so glad that I did.

If you want to see pictures from the trip that are really, really good, then you can find the Chorus of Westerly on Facebook, where hundreds of pictures have been posted. They're all absolutely stunning and have a lot of people in them (including me, in some!).

Chapter Two

It's the Blog in Prague! Ha ha ha ha ha.

Okay, I'm back to write some more. After pointing out that I haven't written for something like a week, my mom reminded me that I only have a few weeks until school starts, and then I probably won't have that much time at all to sit down, sort through pictures, and try to remember everything I did. She made a good point, and I'm actually looking forward to writing it all out with pictures. So here we go.

Prague is unlike any city that I've ever been to before, in that it's not very metropolitan at all. It's more of a fairy tale town that just keeps going and going. The streets are all cobblestone and the buildings have white walls and red roofs. Since downtown Prague is more of a touristy, historical area than a business section, the only way to really get around is by foot, which is why we took a walking tour the first morning there. The buses took us to the top of the hill, where the castle is, and dropped us off with some native tour guides. There were hundreds of people, all with different groups and countries, crowding the entrance as we made our way into the courtyard, and I'll have to admit that it was a bit of culture shock, to be in a place that looks so different from the cities I know at home with a different language and thousands more years of history.

One of the guards who basically just stood there without moving or making any facial expressions while people took countless pictures of him.

Inside the palace square.

The most majestic building in the castle area would have to be the St. Vitus Cathedral, whose Gothic structure sets it apart from everything around it.  According to its website (I swear I tried to listen to what they were saying, but it was hard to hear, especially when your guide doesn't really speak English and everything around you is just so pretty), it's the largest and most important temple in Prague, and the coronations of kings and queens were held here. And I stood inside of it!

 

Like a lot of the other old buildings we saw, this was undergoing some sort of construction to keep it preserved.

After we finished up at the castle, we headed by foot down the hill to continue the walking tour, where we got a lovely view of the city from above.

A restaurant on the walk down that I thought was especially pretty.

Why, look at that! Looks familiar! One of the things I noticed about Prague was how big the arts are in their culture. Posters like this are papered everywhere. Sometimes the same poster will be up there ten or twelve times, just to emphasize that it's happening, I guess. People are standing in the streets on every corner handing out pamphlets for concerts that are happening somewhere in the city that night. On a few different occasions, the people I was with managed to mention the chorus' concert to the advertisers, and they all said that they would try to make it.

I just loved seeing this guy run down the street with his cello on his back. Normally I'd say that it's a Portland thing, but apparently it's actually a Prague thing.

It's the bridge of love locks! Apparently there's one in Paris, too, and this one isn't nearly as big, but it's still really pretty. The river flows underneath it, and there were people on boats below, looking incredibly picturesque.

Another thing about Europe is that everyone seems to smoke, no matter where they are. It doesn't really cloud up the air, considering there are a lot of aromas (like food), but it seems like everyone, especially young women, is always holding a cigarette. This is just a part of the ground that I glanced down at and happened to snap a picture of. There are people everywhere with brooms who sweep the debris out of the road, but the problem with cobblestone is that things get stuck in it all the time. Basically, all of the streets looked like this.

Our walking tour wrapped up at noon at the astronomical clock, along with every other tourist in the city, it seemed. The clock is a huge attraction in Prague, so the square was completely packed with people, all looking up and waiting for the hand to strike twelve (watch out for pickpockets, we were told. There isn't much violent crime in Prague, but there's a lot of pickpocketing.) The clock has an astronomical hand, a bunch of sculptures that move at the hour, and a dial that shows the months.

After the tours ended, my grandma and I went off with some other Chorus people and had lunch at an outdoor restaurant in the middle of the city. Then we went off to the Charles Bridge, which is like an arts fair with statues everywhere. People were selling jewelry, portraits, and albums every couple of feet. Several different bands were playing as we walked along.

We continued on to the Jewish Quarter after, where thousands of Jews are buried and used to live over different centuries. This street leads down the cemetery, where so many people needed a place to be buried that they started stacking the bodies on top of each other, and then adding more and more dirt so that there would be space. We didn't go inside, but we did get a glimpse of what it looked like.

By this time, we had been walking for about nine hours in total, and decided to find our way back to the hotel. Street performers are abundant in Prague, and here's some puppet-type show that we got a look at when we returned to Wenceslas Square.

And that was the end of day one, more or less. We showered relaxed in our hotel room (I actually have a picture of the soles of my feet after walking around for nine hours, but I'll spare you that image), and then went down to the lobby to meet up with some people to go out to dinner. I got to talk to some people I didn't know very well some more, and heard all about what different things people had done with their day. There's just so much to do in Prague that it would take a week to accomplish everything that had been done in that room alone. For dinner, we went out to a restaurant that I believe was called "Czech Restaurant" (what better place to go when you're looking for somewhere with Czech food?) and I put a thumbtack on where I live on the map in the restroom. Oregon Coast, you are represented!

Chapter One - The Journey

I could say that I tried to appreciate every little thing about the United States the day that we left, every hanging flag and unit of measurement in the standard system, but I didn't really. I had seen those things for fifteen years straight, and was ready to see something else for a change. My grandma and I left the house with a neighbor and made our way to the high school, getting there just in time for the coach bus to take us, and a bunch of other people I had never met, to Logan Airport. One of the coach buses for one of the flights on one of the airlines. 228 people went on this trip, and so far I only knew one of them.

I've been to Logan more than any other airport besides Portland, but I didn't even know that the international terminal was in such a different part of the complex. When we pulled up at the curb, I found myself in a strange building I had never seen, with flags hanging from the ceilings (a fun game to play while you're waiting in line for an hour and a half or however long it was is to try and guess what countries they belong to. It might be harder than you think).

 

 After clearing security, this is where we found ourselves for quite a while, where I met tons of other people, whose faces blurred together at the time but would later become prominent figures in my daily life. If you're curious about the international terminal at Logan, I can tell you right now that THERE IS NOTHING THERE. This is basically it. Or what we could see of it, anyway.

 

I've only ever been on normal-sized airplanes in my life, but, looking around at the amount of people we were with, I realized that a plane that size probably wouldn't work. I looked out the window, and sure enough, this is what I saw. I took a picture right away for my brother, because he's always telling me random facts about planes that I don't really understand most of the time. I was just blown away by the fact that it was a double-decker aircraft, with eleven seats in each row.

This flight was the first time I had ever been over the Atlantic Ocean in my life. The minute we the view below turned from Massachusetts to water, my heart began to race. I was seeing something I had never seen before, traveling farther from home than ever before. In the front of the cabin was a screen that tracked the plane's crossing with a map, so I was able to look out the window into the descending darkness and say things like, "That's where the Titanic sank! Sort of!" Hours later, the little airplane on the screen showed that we were directly above Great Britain, and I scanned the darkness below for the lights that meant those British towns I had been waiting to see my whole life. Even though I was 30, 000 feet in the air, I was still in the same air as Hogwarts. And Doctor Who. And Downton Abbey. And Sherlock. (You can see why I was very excited to be flying over the UK).

At an hour of the morning that would be ungodly in Rhode Island and still the previous day in Oregon, we landed in Frankfurt, and I got my first look at Germany. The airport was quiet as we stood in line to get our passports stamped, me still not really believing that I was in a foreign country. As I stepped up to the passport security desk, where an official whose uniform said "polizei"on it was talking on the phone in rapid German, it slammed into my mind. I was actually going on this trip. The hardest part was done, and the best had yet to come. In the book of my journey, this would be the turning point, where I had a sudden realization that defined everything for me. The rising action, climax and resolution have yet to come. Just wait.

After a while, the airport proved to be not that quiet after all, as more flights landed and the sun rose, bringing rain with it. My grandma and I made our first purchase with Euros, which we would put away after this and not see again until Austria, to buy some fruit. Smoking lounges were abundant in the waiting area, something I've never seen in the United States. Different aromas mingled together and floated around in the hallways; it would smell like one thing for a moment and then change completely a few feet away. Venders peddled bikes through the terminal, pulling carts bearing pretzels, sausages, pastries, and everything else German. A little further down from where we were waiting, a sweet-smelling bakery was built into a corner, providing my first peek into European delicacies. A duty-free shop boasted giant Toblerone bars that were very tempting but inexplicably huge.

After hanging around Frankfurt for several hours, talking to new people and watch the little kids who were on our flight run around, we finally boarded a smaller plane (the size I'm used to) for Prague. It was only an hour or so, and in the blink of an eye (I actually closed my eyes the entire time and fell asleep) we were in Prague, the land of red roofs and glittering rivers. At baggage claim (no passport control or customs here. Interesting....) we met up with our buses and couriers, who are like tour guides but not really. As we made our way through the cobble-stoned streets, past some signs in Czech and interestingly designed buildings, I learned that they drive on the same side of the road as us, the water is clean enough to drink without worrying about getting sick, and that it's against the law to not wear your seat belt on a bus.

I unfortunately didn't get a picture of our hotel, but thanks to Google, this is the lobby. We got our rooms, spent some time in the lobby, and walked down to the square.

 Downtown Prague is a mostly pedestrian zone, which means that people walk everywhere- the middle of the street, the sidewalk, wherever there's room and not a trolley. If cars need to get through, they just push through and don't wait for people to move out of the way, which is surprisingly effective. We were right by St. Wenceslas Square, which is the area I would soon become very familiar with, as we would walk through it to get anywhere in the next couple of days.

 The view from our street, coming into the square, with the building structure (stuck together) that I fell in love with during the trip. 

Taking two red-eyes basically in a row (and being nine hours off rather than six like everyone else) didn't really help my energy level, so the rest of the day was spent recuperating. It was hard to believe, but I was actually in Prague. Amazing.