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.

The Prologue

Hallo!

That's what the flight attendant said to me when I first boarded Lufthansa's Boeing 747 almost exactly a month ago. The flight was to Frankfurt, and Lufthansa is a German airline, which meant that the entire flight crew was bilingual, with some level of accent. Up until that moment, I had never been on an airplane that big. I had never boarded a plane that would leave Boston and go east. I had never even been in the international terminal of Logan airport, but there I was, and I was getting ready to go further than I'd ever gone before. And that greeting was the moment I realized I was actually going to Europe.

I should probably back up. Several months ago, back in February, my grandma in Rhode Island emailed my parents with an idea she had had. She was the middle of her third month living alone after my grandpa passed away in December, and had been talking to some of her friends from the local chorus she had sung with for over thirty years. The chorus had taken three international trips in the past, the most recent one nineteen years ago, and was planning another one in July, for ten days in three different countries. My grandma stopped singing with them about five years ago, but still knew most of the members, and had a lot of people asking her if she was going to go. After looking over the destinations and what the group would be doing, she contacted my family and explained the situation. Then she asked me if I wanted to go. It would be a musical tour, she said, in great cities with amazing people. If we scheduled things accordingly, I could fly out to meet her and we could get back to Rhode Island the day before my parents and brother arrived from Oregon for our usual two-week trip to the east coast. And that's how I ended up going to Prague, Vienna and Budapest with the Chorus of Westerly.

For me, this was actually a dream come true. I had spent the majority of middle school talking endlessly about Europe, connecting castles and sights I planned to visit someday into all of my essays and projects. In seventh grade, I did a project where I planned out a dream trip to Europe, right down to the exact dollar. According to my itinerary, I "went" to France, Germany and Austria and saw some amazing things. I also learned a lot. I'm the kind of person (or maybe it's just me) who has an idea of what Ireland or France or whatever looks like in my head, and then sticks with it and pretends that I know what I'm talking about. I did tons of research for this project, and it became my dream to actually travel to Europe someday. I live in Oregon, 6,000 away from these places. For all I knew, the rest of the world didn't really exist and I lived in a bubble like The Truman Show or something. I needed to get out there and see it. When this opportunity came up, it was so surreal that I almost didn't believe it. The first miracle.

I told everyone I knew or thought would care, of course, and then everyone who asked me what I was doing during the summer. My best friend freaked out with me, after saying that it was "almost as good as Disney World," (her family's spring break trip) and that I would have to bring her back something. My violin and band teacher smiled knowingly, thinking of the rich musical history in all of the cities. I looked up the temperature for central Europe in the summer, panicked because I didn't have that many summer clothes, and went to Goodwill to stock up. I checked on my passport every day to make sure it was still there. I listened to recordings of meetings that were going on in Rhode Island so I would be up to speed on my information. Everyone told me that I was going to have the time of my life, and even though I was really nervous to be away from home for so long and go off to another country for the first time, I was extremely excited.

On July 9th, I said goodbye to my dad, brother, dog and the beautiful place where I live and drove with my mom to Portland so I could catch a red-eye flight to Boston. We stopped at my great- aunt and uncle's house in the city for dinner, and walked around the campus of Lewis and Clark College (I'm going to have to start thinking about that whole college thing at some point, and I guess that now is better than later). Around ten, we drove out to the airport, which was still pretty busy considering it was late at night, checked in, and went to wait at the gate, from where my plane would depart after midnight (gotta love those overnight flights.) Even though I've been on countless planes in my lifetime, most of them to Boston, I had never been on one alone, and never overnight, and was terrified out of my wits as we waited around with the rest of the people I would be stuck with in a metal tube for the next six hours. When it was time for me to board, I took a deep breath, hugged my mom goodbye, and walked down the walkway thingie, by myself in one of those things for the first time ever.

After I got on the plane, things didn't seem as bad. I got an aisle seat, which was nice, and Jet Blue provides nice televisions, which I didn't actually watch, but were a nice amenity. I tried to fall asleep, which made the long flight go back a lot faster, and when I woke up, it was light outside and we were descending into Boston. I was born outside of Boston and lived there for the first six years of my life, but I had never been there without the rest of my family, and it was actually terribly exciting. I followed the signs (#1 rule of the airport, according to everyone who told me about traveling alone) down to baggage claim, where I met up with my 20-year-old cousin, a student at Tufts University who's living in Boston and working as an engineer intern. After retrieving my bag, we made our way to the train station via public transportation, and then took a detour through Chinatown and the financial district so that she could drop off a box for work that had been haunting her for the past twenty-four hours (it's a long story). We made it back to the train station about fifteen minutes before my train arrived, and she told me everything I would need to know about railway travel. Fifteen minutes later, I was on a train to Rhode Island, so that my grandma could pick me up, and the while thinking "Ha ha ha, I'm doing this more or less ALONE!"

Nothing too exciting happened after that. That is, until the big trip started. My grandma got me from the train station and we spent the next day and a half sorting out foreign money, dropping off plants at the neighbor's house, reading up on the countries we'd be going to, and running errands. I knew my perspective on the world was going to change in a few days, and in a way it kind of already had. Either way, I couldn't wait. Those days in suspense, wondering what the future would bring, were like I was Maria von Trapp leaving the abbey for the first time and singing about confidence. Except the US was my abbey, and Europe was the von Trapp's estate.

Here's my dresser in Rhode Island with some random essentials, and then all of the money I had, in different currencies.

I'll continue in the next post with the day we left and onwards to Prague.

More about the Chorus: http://www.chorusofwesterly.org/site/PageServer?pagename=deploymenthome

A Very Potter Birthday

I really am back now. I mean it. Rereading everything I wrote on here in eighth grade, I realized how much of that I had forgotten, and how things looked through my eyes back then. I shouldn't put all of my faith into a computer to save my memories, but it's a good place for them to be, and a place where other people can read them. The title of this blog means "living the life." If my life became a book, it would basically be about nothing, just another lifetime out of billions. But it's a story, no matter how monotonous or ridiculous, and I should probably write it down. When I die, my life will eventually fade into oblivion, like everyone else's, but it's writing that keeps history alive and real. I'm not trying to insinuate that my story will be the one that future archaeologists look at to figure out how people lived way back in the 21st century, but if I've learned anything from writing, it's that it keeps ideas and stories alive. I feel really bad that I didn't really document my freshman year at all, but I'll try to keep up with my sophomore year as best as I can. I won't make any more promises or excuses, but I think I owe it to myself to try to stick with this goal. If I did it once, I can do it again.

Anyway, now that whole thing's out of the way, I can focus on the cool stuff. Shortly following this post will be an amazing, fantastical post I promised a lot of people I would write, and I'm actually pretty curious as to how it will turn out. It's possibly it will take me a few days to finish, and I might end up putting it up in chunks so it's easier to follow, but it will be there soon.

I was in Rhode Island last week, and found myself once again celebrating Harry Potter's birthday by making sure we stopped at Stop & Shop when we were in town, pestering my family for decorating ideas, finally deciding on one and then taking forever to carry it out, and making sure that everyone in the house recognized the Boy Who Lived's special day. And J.K. Rowling's, for that matter. And Joey Richter's (he played Ron in A Very Potter Musical). In the end, I decided on making the cake yellow like a snitch, and then fashioned two cardboard wings covered in aluminum foil to stick out of them. Last year I made the cake Hagrid brought Harry in the first book, and this year I made the cake that Mrs. Weasley made Harry in the last book, so I guess that next year I'll just have to use my imagination.

Most of the credit actually goes to my grandma, who understands how her kitchen works and is much better at baking than I am. Here's the cake before I frosted it.

And here it is after the snitch transformation, which my mom actually did most of because she's a lot better at cake decorating than I am. Really, all I did for this project was pick out the design, mix the cake batter and frosting and make the wings. I didn't even remember to light candles.

YAY! I think Harry Potter would be pleased. At least, I hope he would be pleased. Maybe I'll get a magical sign.