It’s hard to believe that this point in the semester could ever arrive: The last Czech’n of the semester. There were 8 in total. In retrospect, that seems like such a small number. And yet so much has been covered, so much has been learned, and most important of all, so much has been lived. It seems remarkable to me that this is the same experience where on our first full day in Europe, we were given the directions for a drop off and told to go find our way and report back. It seems so long ago we were going over sexual harassment policies and preferences for homestay experiences, before being assigned our families. I can still vividly remember the afternoon when Lenka, our homestay coordinator, took 40 minutes to go over policy stuff, keeping our families until the very end, to keep our attention. And now here I am, writing about the finals week for Study Abroad in Prague. Finally! (Heh, heh, cough, heh!)

This week was a whirlwind of activities, starting off with the lecturer’s panel discussion Monday morning. Now THIS was an exciting event, getting to see where and how all our lecturers agreed and disagreed with each other. Now we got to see how the history of literature confronted with our history lecturer, and where our theater history lecturer disagreed with the political overview of contemporary Czech society. It was very interesting to see how the literature professor and theater history professor stressed the absence of theater attendance in the years immediately after the Velvet Revolution than the political and history professors were, though maybe that’s not quite fair to say, but rather were certainly much more vocal about it, as one example.

A couple hours after that, I had my first final for the week. Creative Writing. Whereas I usually create a portfolio, write up a discussion of what I’ve learned that semester, and throw in my observation of visiting writers events as a final portfolio, this time, I had to present my work. The idea is that none of us has seen the others’ creative classes (since they all met at the same time every week) and now we got to show off. I read my last work, which had been revised a number of times. I ended up not being particularly satisfied with it, and Petra (my professor) said that was because you could see the back stage of the story, in other words the effort I had put in to change, revise and improve it, when in the best stories, that effort is invisible and it appears to just be a story. I completely agree, and perhaps is one valuable take-away as a writer for the semester.

Immediately after our final presentation, the visual artists engaged us with their exhibitions. What struck me was how half of the artists (2 of the 4) created an exhibit that required you to engage with it in order to get a full experience of the art. I guess it was their way of rebelling against the conceptual preferences for their professors of the semester. One exhibit was this coded language of symbols, which you could decipher into messages. Another was images printed on transparencies that you could stack in front of each other and make some really bizarre images. The third was a series of more conceptual intricately cut papers placed in front of a photo of a design that had inspired the paper artwork. The final presentation dealt with computerized imagery and constructing and deconstructing artwork similar to the artistic ceiling of a chapel.

The next day we had our next round of finals which was our social change group. They had a panel discussion where their professor (and us as a group) asked them questions and they ran a discussion regarding one organization they had each chosen from their semester study to learn more about. We learned about efforts to get people cycling more in Prague to the gender studies and gender equal rights movement in Prague.

On Wednesday, we had the last of our creative finals, which was for the actors. This was amazing. It opened with an improvisational act (completely silent), which I understand was something they had opened with/worked on every week of the semester. Then after that, we got to see a couple performances of how each actor had contributed an observation of something going on in Prague, and then they cut them and “re-glued” them in a jumbled order to almost make a new story of different moments around Prague. It was really quite something to watch.

That was the last of the fun and entertaining finals (for those not involved, because now we were all involved in the last two finals). First we had the Czech Language final on Thursday. This was fine, except I could kind of sense how easy it would have been to make careless mistakes on the written part of the exam, and not realize it. On the flip side, the speaking exam was set up like an interrogation room, but I felt quite solid on it, and the teachers seemed really pleased with the partner dialogues we had spoken. But now I have been formally assessed on my ability to use phrases like:

• Já jsem Joe. Odkud jsi Joe? Jsem z Chicaga. Co dělaš? Jsem student. Ahoj! Čau!
• Prosím vás, nevíte kde je Hotel? Ano, musíte jít rovně, a pak druhou ulice doleva, a pak první ulice doprava, a pak Hotel je pravo-nahoře.
• Dám si gulaš a knedliky. Mám rad Zmrzlínu. Dám si Palačinky s marmeládou. To je všechno. Zaplátím.
• Můj bratr se jemenuje Richard. Je mu 24 let, je hudebník. Naše prvni Auto není nové nebo elegantní. Já jsem zdravý, moderní a mladý.
• Nechceš jít na Tenis? Ano, a kdy? Dneska v pet odpoledne? Dneska nemůžu, musím studovat. Můžu Zítra ráno. Zítra ráno nemůžu, musím skypovat. Třeba zítra večer? Kdy se sejdeme? V 7 večer? Hodi se ti to? Ano, hodi. Dobrý! Teším se! Ahoj! Čau!
• Co dělal jsi o vikendu? Ja spál moc, a pak uklízel and studoval. A ty? Ja hrál Fotbol, vařil oběd, a pak studoval.

And there you go. I’m sure you perfectly understood every single word of this incredibly small language in the scope of the world. But to be fair, it shares many similarities to polish and Slovak, and I’m sure even some with Russian.

Our final Final (finally) was the Thematic Seminar final. This was a more typical sit down, in-class essay final, with multiple prompts, some being short answer or fill in the blank, and others being essays. It was not difficult except for one of the singled out terms was one I had forgotten to study, so I simply answered it truthfully, honestly and, well, creatively! And then we were done. Just like that. We were done with classes for the Fall of 2014. Unbelievable. Now it was time to turn towards the ISP.

Until Next Time,

Joe