Well, what can I say? We are more or less half-way done with the “intensive” part of the semester (aka academic classes). We’ve been here for a month as of this weekend, and have already completed our first of two major semester excursions. We have wrapped up our unit on Art & Nation, and we now move to Art & Dissidence, through the lens of literature, theater, film, politics and history. With our arts study essay and field journaling assignment behind us, and our interview assignment now on hand, we are in the thick of practicing and living the SIT academic student life combining theory with practice. That’s a brief summary of where we have been and where we are going.
I will jump a bit out of chronological order here. First I want to discuss week 3, very briefly. There was a lot of reading involved this week, which is making the upcoming week seem like a windfall with virtually no reading, which is nice. We read Hrabel’s Too Loud a Solitude, which is a very unusual book, in the sense that it is told stream of consciousness style, and is character driven rather than plot driven, though it does have an incredibly surprising and dark ending to it. As we learned in class from our professor, this book was written by the author during his depressive years. He had enjoyed great popularity initially, and then was censored by the Communist Regime, and agreed to renounce his old works so that he may publish again, which the public did not like (leading, even, to burnings of his books) and upon learning this, fell into depression, and in that time wrote this book. The book follows the thoughts of a book compacter, and it definitely has some political undertones to it.
The second book I had to read for this week was Animal Farm by George Orwell. It was surprisingly the first time I had ever read the book, because I was not in one of the teams that read it 8th grade, and I never did in high school either. I found the book very enjoyable, but was very disappointed at the end. I kept waiting for someone to overthrow Napoleon, for those of you who have read the book. As a whole, however, I found it a fun and quick read, and the purpose for us reading it was to learn about the 4 steps that are required to take over a country with communistic tendencies. It was very interesting to then go into actual history and closely examine how the two (story and history) reflected the 4 steps.
If that book was quick and fun, this final book was the counter-balance to it. For our creative writing workshop, we read the book Money From Hitler, by Radka Denemarkova. This book covers the story of one Ms. Gita Lauschmannova. She was a jewish Czech, identified as a Jew by the Germans and as a German by the Czechs, and therefore got kicked brutally (physically) back and forth by the two countries, surviving a concentration camp only to be beaten to an inch of death by the Czechs for coming back to Czech lands as a German. Upon asking our history professor whether this was a realistic situation, his response was he would say so. What also made the book even more difficult however, was the choppy thought-process of the main character at times, and the frequent jumping from her point of view to an outside point of view. At times it made the reading quite unbearable, and parts had to be skipped over in order to read the entire book by class.
The cool part with this final book however, was that we got to meet the author. And we got to ask her why she made the book so difficult to read, and what her intent had been. She responded saying that she wanted to push the reader out of their comfort zone, so that the reading matched the content.
Ok, so that was my brief summary of the week (:P). So now I’m going to jump out of order again, and talk about our recent stay in Český Krumlov, leaving the regional stay discussion for my next post.
Český Krumlov was a brief but enjoyable visit. First of all, I was surprised at how touristy Český Krumlov was. So many Asian tourists were there and even a noticeable number of American tourists. Too many shops were not Czech authentic, which made shopping undesirable other than a few postcards. The first day we simply arrived, had dinner and walked around. The second day, we had a couple tours. The first was of the town, and just getting to see some of the old buildings. We got to see a church, where our guide got into a bit of a fight with a really obnoxious tour guide totally disrespecting the people trying to simultaneously pray in the church. After that we had lunch at a vegetarian restaurant, where I had a very sweet chili. It was interesting, but not on my top 5 places. Then we had our second tour, where we got to see parts of the castle and listen to ghost stories, and hear about different historical racial accounts for Europe vs. the US.
It was after this second tour that we had a chance just to explore and walk around. We started with the castle gardens which were quite beautiful. Then we walked around and looked at all the shops, and it was here that we realized that most of the shops were tourist shops and not actually authentically Czech. Oh well. That night I went to dinner on my own, but unintentionally ended up joining two others at this Italian restaurant that had been recommended to us when we arrived. After dinner was the evening of pool games. I have lost count the number of games I played last night and this morning, but it was a lot. I lost a few and won several, all the while we all laughed at how poorly we were actually playing. At one point in the evening, I went for an evening walk and took a couple interesting night photos of the city.
Finally today we left to go back to Prague. In the morning, we had a meeting to discuss where we’ve been this past month, and where we’re going for the next one. We played several more games of pool, and then finally went out to go see this market/fair that was being set up for Wenceslaus Day, which is a national holiday taking place this weekend. It reminded me a lot of the Chicago Christkindlmarkt that we went to every year for German classes. I got a couple things here, before we left finally for Prague.
And that concludes my third Czech’n. A whirl of two weeks, and keep an eye out for my post regarding the Czech Republic regional stay!
Until Next Time,
Joe