Skipping back in time a little, I should probably talk about my birthday before spring break. I had a wonderful 20th birthday. The girls in my flat pulled out all the stops for me. I woke up to a bouquet of roses from Lily and Keiko and a pair of earings from Scotland from Mandy. I then promptly consumed Pop Tarts from my care package from Mom and then talked to both sets of parents. After that, we went to the London Eye. It was a beautiful, clear day. We could see for miles. It was perfect. My birthday was Red Nose Day - a Comic Relief Festival to help Africa and some English schools. It was really funny to see people walking around London in red clown noses. But I found out today that the festival raised 7 million pounds. I'm happy to share my birthday with such an excellent event. The night was spent at dinner at a noodle joint called Tuk Tuk and then at a few pubs. It was a good time.
This post really should just be full of photos, but it takes forever to load them. So I've uploaded them to another Web site. Here's the link so you can enjoy my pictures from Prague. Unfortunately, the pictures are in backwards order, so start from the end and work backwards if you can.
The trip was wonderful. The city has such amazing character and history. Prague has survived so much - it's one of the only European cities to have much of the original architecture from before the second world war. It was left basically unscathed and because of that, the whinding cobble stone streets are packed tight with beautifully ornate Baroque, Romanesque and Gothic buildings. It's an architectural wonderland, and I had a fabulous time wandering around with Olivia, getting lost and exploring a city that has seen hundreds of years of kings, the dark years of Communist rule and is now a modernized member of globalized Europe.
We didn't have as much trouble as we thought we would with the language. Both Olivia and I printed out little pocket guides to Czech. I can now say about 4 words (please, yes, no, beer, wine... that's about it) in Czech. Most everyone spoke English, so it wasn't a big deal.
It was great seeing my dad and staying in the hotel with him. We stayed at the InterContinental. It's a 5 star hotel and the room came complete with a hot tub, a sauna, tons of bath products which we pilfered, a queen size bed, slippers and a rubber duck. Yes, that's right. A rubber duck. He disappeared after the first night - not because we took him, we don't know where he went. We used the hot tub a few nights because it was so terribly cold outside. But despite the frigid temperatures, we had an amazing time.
The only bummer came when we tried to come back to London. Our flight was delayed about 6 hours. We were supposed to leave Prague at 8:50 pm. We didn't end up leaving until 4:15 am. That put us into London around 5:30 am. We got to our beds at 7:45. It was miserable. I was so tired yesterday, and I'm a little sick, so that didn't help the situation. Unfortunately, because we flew easyJet, it doesn't look like we're going to see any sort of compensation for our time or trouble. It's really too bad, because I would feel a whole lot better about their airline if they actually cared that I was a zombie all day yesterday. Oh well. We made it, and we made some good friends at the airport while we waited. We ended up talking to these two girls from Bristol and playing card games with them for the majority of the time. It passed quickly enough, so it wasn't so horrible, and if anything, it's a good story, right?
But now, the fun is over and it's back to real life. I started my internship back up today and class starts again tomorrow.
More soon.
B
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