oh, work ethic, where have you gone?

i'm officially terrible at this blog thing. sorry for not updating for such a long time; i've been pretty burnt out since i got back from spring break. all that traveling really took its toll!

i'm far too lazy to do an actual update about my trip to italy, so i'm just going to direct you to my webshots page to see my pictures. i think they speak for themselves, for the most part: http://travel.webshots.com/album/558336588LIHxUC

germany and back in twelve hours or less

i went to dresden for the day today. i love being able to go to another country just for a day trip - i don't think the novelty of that will ever wear off. dresden is about two and a half hours from prague by train; it's definitely an easy trip to do in a day. despite the fact that there's not much to see there (the whole getting-fire-bombed-by-the-allies/just-being-rebuilt-now thing), i'm really glad we went.

memo to self: remember to update blog!

i've been seriously slacking in the blog-updating department. my apologies!

i went to vienna last weekend for my birthday with whitney and rachel. the experience as a whole was infinitely better than budapest, reason being that we were traveling with 14 fewer people. who could have predicted that? pictures can be found below.

this weekend is my first full one in prague in a month. a month! all this traveling has caught up to me big-time, and i really needed this weekend to rest up and actually enjoy this city. pretty much my entire dorm is gone (including the 4 other girls in my suite) this weekend, so it is blissfully quiet here. two of my friends have people visiting this weekend, so today i got to see some touristy things i haven't had the opportunity to really appreciate yet; we walked across the charles bridge, stumbled upon a street fair, and saw the castle (again). i'm sure that when mollie/jerry and mom/dad come to visit i'll do even more touristy crap; i'm not complaining, though! it's nice to play the tourist card every once in a while.

our spring break is in three weeks, and earlier this week, i bought a plane ticket to rome! we're planning on spending a couple days in rome, taking the train down to naples, and seeing vesuvius/pompeii/capri before going back up to rome and flying home. i'm really excited; i've always wanted to go to italy, and when else will i have the opportunity to bum around my motherland for a week? some people are planning on using spring break as a chance to sit on a beach and get a tan, but you can do that anywhere! i don't need to go to egypt or croatia (true story, some kids are planning on going to both those places just for the beaches! bizarre) to sit on a beach. that's what summer is for back home. if i'm going to go on a spring break trip, i'm going to do what i've always wanted to do - and that's see italy.

pictures from wien:

also - instead of posting all my pictures here all the time, i created a webshots account for my semester here. i'll continue to post a couple with each update, but if you want to see the rest of my pictures, go here:
http://community.webshots.com/user/emilymarie217

pest > buda

this weekend i spent sixteen (total) hours on a bus to go to my first foreign city of the semester - budapest, hungary. i think budapest is a city that you need at least a week to do any justice to; there are so many things to see that it was impossible to hit every one of them in two days.

highlights of the trip:

our hostel. it was surprisingly cozy, in a really convenient location, and super cheap. our group basically dominated the place - there were sixteen of us! crazy, i know.

the chain bridge, buda castle, and the view from the top. my pictures do not even come close to doing that view any semblance of justice; it was absolutely gorgeous.

the labyrinth under buda castle. they give you an oil lantern, and you make your way through the pitch black caves. it was just really, really cool.

the museum of fine arts and heroes square. both lie at the end of andrassy street, a fifth avenue-esque boulevard of embassys, high end hotels, and gorgeous buildings.

parliament and st. stephan's basilica. i thought i was sick of seeing churches, but this one put all other churches i've ever seen to shame. the interior was essentially entirely gold leaf and pink marble. parliament is an impressive piece of architecture in it's own right. we couldn't get that close to it because there were police barriers surrounding it; there were riots and protests there in october over some controversy with the prime minister, so i guess they were just taking precautions.

the house of terror. this is a museum located in the former secret police headquarters. both the nazis and communists used this building as their center for interrogation and other such atrocities. the museum is incredibly well done; despite the fact that all the audio and video was in hungarian, i still got a lot out of it. it is definitely worth seeing.

even though travelling in such a huge group was difficult at times, i still had a great time. making it back to budapest sometime in my life is high on my list of things to do.

exchange rate = love

i just got back from grocery shopping. every time i get back from the store, i immediately go to my google homepage, and covert the czech crowns i just spent into us dollars. it never fails to impress me that i can buy a half kilo of chicken, oj, a pepper, an onion, some brocolli, granola bars, tissues, and green tea for less than eight us dollars. EIGHT. if i had bought the same things in new york, i would have spent at least twenty bucks, if not more.

i love it.

facism & frostbite (again!)

so this weekend we took an nyu trip to western bohemia. let's just say that the only positive thing about this experience was the fact that it was free. our tour guide took advantage of our very flexible itinerary - nothing was really set in stone as far as excursions were concerned - and basically did with us what he wanted to do and ignored the desires of the group (including the one nyu staff member, honza, who was on the trip). i won't bore you with my bitching and moaning about the eight kilometer hike he dragged us on, or his complete disregard for the fact that it was 20 degrees out the whole time, or the fact that some of us actually need to eat to make it through the afternoon, so i'll just show you some pretty pictures instead:
these are some ruins of some castle somewhere between prague and karlovy vary (aka carlsbad, aka a ritzy-titzy spa town that we went to). sorry for the vague-ness about the location, but i honestly cannot remember where the heck this was. these ruins were probably the highlight of the trip.
the river that runs through karlovy vary. honestly, this town is really pretty, and i can definitely see its appeal (gorgeous buildings, hot mineral springs, the hotel/casino from the latest james bond movie), but we were there in the middle of the off season, so things were kind of dead.
the beginning of the now-infamous 8km "short walk." our guide tricked us into believing that we were going on a short walk to a nearby town, and forced us to hike through the czech woods along some no-name river on a dirt road. two hours and twenty-five unhappy kids later, we trudged into the quaint town of loket.
this is the view from loket castle. this town looks like pretty much every other czech town. bright buildings, cobblestone streets, an ancient castle overlooking the whole thing. if you've seen one, you've pretty much seen them all (not that i'm jaded, or anything...).
and this, this is the tour guide from hell, the anti-christ, the facist. if he paused to take one more picture of a moss-covered tree, i was going to launch him like a javelin into the next stream. fo' serious.

moral of the story: don't let tour guides take advantage of you. stage a mutiny, or, at the very least, refuse to leave the bus.

kutna hora: churches, bones & frostbite

on friday we took a trip to kutna hora, a town 90 minutes outside of prague. despite the fact that i couldn't feel my extremities for the majority of the trip (it was absolutely freezing out, and our tour guide apparently didn't realize that we aren't used to the central european climate just yet), i had a great time. kutna hora was, at one point, the second-most important city in the czech republic next to prague. silver ore was discovered there during medieval times, and the city became a huge mining center, and eventually became the main coin-minting center in the country.

this is saint barbara's cathedral, the construction of which began in the 14th-15th centuries and was completed after the second world war (bombings destroyed the stained glass, so they had to recontruct a lot of it). i wish they would have allowed us to take photos on the inside because it was absolutely breathtaking.

i'm not sure what church that is in the background, but i think this picture gives an accurate portrayal of the town; the skyline is dominated by church spires.

ok, now for the infamous bone church. the land this church was built on was deemed a holy site, so thousands of people wanted to be buried there. not surprisingly, they ran out of room in the cemetary. so, they dug up the remains of thousands of people to make room, and used the bones to decorate the entire inside of the church. all in all, there are the bones of forty thousand people in this church. try to forget that all these bones once belonged to actual people; it makes looking at (and being in the presence of) this much, much easier. behind that coat of arms in a giant pile of skulls and other assorted human remains. there were four such piles in the church, containing the bones of god-knows how many people.

this chandellier includes every bone in the human body - even toes and the tiny bones of the inner ear. macabre? perhaps. really, really cool? most definitely.