Olszowy

So my first day here, I learned how to actually say my last name in true Polish. I completely forgot about it, but wanted to write about it now that I've remembered!

When one of the program coordinators here was doing attendance, he said it right and then started talking to me about my Polish name. In the states, my family pronounces it Ols-zowy, just like it's spelt-- so many people like to add in k's and other weird sounds though! In Polish though, it is pronounced Ol-sho-whey. But, for me, being a female, it is Ol-show-wa.

Olszowy, I learned, is a type of tree. Olszowy Kiesz is also a settlement in Northern Poland. It was just really interesting to hear from someone how to actually pronounce my name and what it actually meant!

 

Travel Plans!

So, just hours after my last post, a group of us all sat down together and made some travel ideas a reality! We will be going to Dublin, Ireland for a long weekend up and coming! I am going with Aly and Meggi, and Karen had already planned on being in Dublin at that time. I guess there's a literary conference and the Pope will be in Dublin as well that weekend, so it might be a little hectic, but still great.

We looked at so many different places before deciding . . . it started out with Aly and I agreeing to go to Istanbul, Turkey together. We both really wanted to go, but plane tickets to get there right now are way too much with having to pay for housing and food on top of it. So we eventually partnered up with some other interested travel people and literally looked for flights everywhere! We have a field study our last week here to Austria, Hungary, and Slavokia, so those neighboring areas are already kind of covered. Before coming here, I was super anti- travel to the stereotypical destinations, but it came down to either going somewhere stereotypical that we could afford, or not going anywhere. Within our budget range for flights, was Dublin, Paris, Amsterdam, Toulouse, Madrid and London. Logistically, Toulouse wouldn't work unless we skipped class on Thursday-- highly frowned upon, only having like 11 of them total. London would have been horribly expensive once we got there with all of the Olympic preparations happening. Aly had already been to Madrid. And Aly will be going to Paris later on this summer, so it didn't make sense for her to pay to go twice. So between Dublin and Amsterdam, we went with Dublin!

I personally am a little over 30% Irish, so I'm really excited about going! It was definitely a little chaotic planning it all out, but after all these days of planning I'm really just glad to have actual concrete plans. We're going to stay at a hostel right downtown somewhere-- it has a lot included with it and looks like a good place as far as hostels go. So we're really excited!

Aside from Ireland, I am hoping to make it to at least Germany and Poland. I am unoffically making it to Poland after the field study and before flying out to South Africa, I just need to book my train and such. I'm also like 25% Polish (and happen to have a crazy Polish last name), so Poland is the one extra place that needs to happen in my mind. Germany will be a little more difficult just because of time. Dresden is close enough that a day trip is easy to make happen, but I don't think I will have enough time to make it to Munich for an overnight. If I do go to either of those cities, that trip will have to happen next Sunday/Monday. There just isn't enough time!!

End of Week One

So I have officially been here for a full week! It's weird-- it feels like I've been here forever, but at the same time it doesn't feel like the other four weeks here are going to be nearly enough! I've met so many great people-- I don't think there's anyone here who I actually even dislike-- and in just this first week we've formed some really great bonds. We're in the process of trying to plan some trips to other European countries (more to come on that once it's official!), but there really is just one big weekend to go somewhere distant between all of the other field trips we have around Czech. We will make the most of it, but already I'm wishing that I had more time here. At the same time though, I have another amazing place to be once I have left the program here. It's definitely going to be bittersweet.

So yesterday, we went to Kutná Hora. It was actually really nice to get out of the city and see a bit of the Czeh country! It was a rainy, dreary day, but still a nice change of scenery. We went to the bone cathedral-- where masses upon masses of peasants who died from the plague long ago were picked apart and used to decorate this cathedral still used for funerals and such today. I could literally reach out and touch an actually skull if I wanted-- don't let that fool you into thinking I did though, I didn't! We also visited two other cathedrals that were just absolutely gorgeous! Last, and coolest of all (in my opinion), was the silver mines. We climbed 33 meters underground to see where miners used to collect silver in Kutná Hora. In some spots, I had to completely duck down as much as I could to get through-- and at 5'6", I'm really not that tall. I really liked walking through the mines. We stopped at one point and turned off our flashlights to see what true pitch-black is. I guess there were times when the miners would run into problems and be stuck in that pitch-black for a week, literally. That's not something I would like, but going down the the half an hour or so was a neat experience.

Bone cathedral:

Cathedrals & the countryside:

 

Today, we also had another chance to get out into the country. Honza, one of the staff members with USAC here in Prague, brought us on a hike! We took the train about an hour outside of the city, and then walked over to the next town where we had lunch and then went for the actual hike part of our day. It was only about 20-30 minutes of legit hiking, but was straight up hill for a huge majority of it. It was all worth it from the top though. We had some nice views of the countryside and the little town below where we had just had lunch. Kutná Hora had been great the day before, but can be touristy because of the attractions there, whereas today we saw authentic Czech country side.

 

In the week that I've been here, I feel like I've done so much! I really love being in the city! I've thought about grad school in a city somewhere before, but really think that this has been a good opportunity to test whether I'd really like that or not-- and I definitely would! There are a lot of things about the Czech people that are noticable here, which we've been told is a result of the communism that was here not so long ago. When Czechs are in public: if they're alone, they generally keep to themsleves even if they see someone they know, and do not make eye contact with other people on the street; if they're together, they do not talk a lot in public. We've been told that these habits come from people not wanting to draw attenton to themselves or to be overheard saying anything (and not knowing who hears), because when there was communism here, that was something they couldn't risk. So now, it's a part of the culture. There are certainly exceptions, but it's definitely been noticable.

With week one done, we now have week two to look forward to! I have my first history exam at the end of the week, followed by a couple of different field trips! I am really kind of behind on my photos, so I'm going to try to update those soon, so be on the look-out!

 

Mistaken for a Native!

So today, I was mistaken for a native! Very exciting, I'm glad that I don't have "tourist" stamped across my forehead . . . A group of us were walking back from dinner and found this supermarket we heard was better than the one we'd been using, so we went up to see the hours (it was obviously closed). At the same time, another group of older (well, "old" as in late 50s, early 60s range-- sorry to offend anyone!) were looking at the same thing. The conversation went a little like this:

Man: "Hmm . . . it closed at 21:00. What time is that?"

Me: "9 o'clock, about 10 minutes ago."

Man: "WOW! You have really good English!"

And at that point my whole group just bursts out laughing, as I explain that we're actually from the US. One of the ladies commented on how we must have been here for a while because we looked like we belonged and knew what we were doing! This is our fourth full day here . . .

 

Also, just a side note about my day quickly while I have time to write on here (it's been kind of hard keeping up with writing and going through photos for this) . . . I had history class today for the first time, and it was really good! We had lecture for an hour, which today was pretty much just explaining the class and professor's background, and then went on our first field trip into the city for the other two hours of class! Our professor, Petr (like Peter in the US), is great-- definitely will enjoy this class!

Home Cooked Meal by Aly!

After a day of walking around town with Aly, we (Aly, Katherine, and Lauren) decided to forego another dinner at a restaurant, so we cooked in the apartment! And by we, I actually mean Aly (who, for the record, is a great cook)! Eating in the restaurants can be fun, but we're going to be around for 5 weeks-- there's no way I'm going out to eat for a month straight! Last night, we decided to have spaghetti. Aly and I got fresh tomatoes, spinach, and bread at a local farmers market earlier in the day. That was a neat experience-- pretty much the same as in the US, but it was even cheaper than in the regular market (everything in general is pretty cheap in comparison to the US though!).

Katherine and I had our first travel photography class-- which I'm not sure how I feel about exactly-- and came back to Aly already working in the kitchen.

 

Spaghetti is pretty low-maintenance, but we (or more like, Aly) diced up some tomoatoes, onion, and garlic to spice up the sauce, and then topped the sauce and spaghetti with chopped spinach.

The food was great-- we ate it out on the balcony outside of the apartment! Czech tomato sauce for pasta is so much sugary than American, which definitely surprised us. Still good, but definitely different. As you an see, Katherine and I each wore light colored shirts-- and of course the second I mentimed it, each of us had a speck of sauce on of shirts!

It was really nice to get out of the restaurant craze. It made the meal a lot more personal, and the night overall was just so much more relaxed not having to find something to eat and dealing with all of that. We will be doing it again! Tonight is dinner at a restaurant after we go to Vyšehrad castle, but Thursday will have something else in store!

Our First Prague Adventure!

Today was a great day! We got poured on by rain not once, or even twice, but three times with no jackets or umbrellas, but even that didn't bother us because of all the other great things that came out of the day. I think that a big part of why the day was so exciting, was just because we were out exploring a completely unknown place on our own with unlimited time. I feel like the last few days before today had been a struggle between being a student living here and a tourist. I don't want to have a camera dangling from my neck all summer and be marked as an outsider automatically, because I am actually living here too. And doing all of the orientation stuff, it's been a lot more introduction to how to get around the city and what areas are located where, etc.-- it really wasn't about seeing the sights, even though we inevitably did see some great places. Today though, I was a full fledged tourist!

I spent my day with Katherine and Aly-- Aly is actually from New Hampshire, but goes to school in Chicago, so it's been fun making some connections with her. We met up early, when everyone else went to class at 9. We really didn't have a plan, but one of us suggested the Charles Bridge, so that is where we went! The Charles Bridge connects Old Town and the Little Quarter, modeling some classic gothic architecture. We were there early enough that there were no crowds and then there was some live music, so the environment was just really nice! We walked from Old Town over to the Little Quarter.

The Little Quarter is one of the most adorable places I have been! We stopped into a little cafe and had some crepes-- super good, but definitely not authentic Czech food (speaking of which, we did have "fried cheese" for dinner later on, which is authentic Czech!). . . We spent the afternoon wandering around the little cobblestone streets that make up the Little Quarter. It's really just so picturesque there, I finally really felt like I was in a foreign country! At one point we saw a group of people all walking out of a door within a huge city wall, so we decided to see what was on the other side. It really felt kind of magical-- as cheesy as that is-- but we found a labyrinth with peacocks and gardens throughout. Katherine and I later agreed it reminded us of Harry Potter! On the other end of the labyrinth, was the Czech Senate building! We had gone off on a whim to go explore what was on the other side of the door and ended up on finding somehting really great! The day and everything we did was really simple, but it was without a doubt the best day yet!

I really like it so far in Prague! Today definitely gave us a great taste as to what the city has to offer just by walking around. The Little Quarter is one of many areas within the city limits, so we'll have a lot more exploring like this to do, and definitely will be returning to visit the Little Quarter itself again!

I am going to post a link to some photos in the "photo" section, right next to the home page tab-- check them out!

 

Settling in Prague

Quick side note for everyone: if you clicked on a link to get here and see a really slanted, decorative handwriting and have trouble reading this-- you should just type in the address you clicked to get here (halieolszowy.blogger.com) into your URL bar. Apparently, the script I have this blog set to show doesn't come up sometimes when you just click the link . . . Slightly irritating, but I just wanted to mention it so that if you do have trouble reading it, you know how to fix it! Hope this helps!

On to more important things now . . .

So I've been in Prague for a couple of days now! Nothing too eventful has happened yet, we've just been getting settled in and being introduced to different parts of the city. All of my flights went smoothly and I was able to get a taxi right to the apartment with a few other people in the program when we landed in Prague, no problems. I share an apartment with four other girls-- it is actually really great! We have a kitchen and two bathrooms, two large bedrooms that each have two people that have double doors connecting them to make one giant room, and then another single room. We are right downtown, boardering Old Town-- a historic part of the city. We have groceries and restaurants all around us, so it's been a great place to be so far!

We have done a couple of orientation tours with our rogram directors, but really haven't had a huge amount of time to just wander. Prague is such a gorgeous place to be though-- I know that even with just the little I've seen. There are so many different buidings-- both of historical importance and no importance-- that seriously look like perfect copies of something you might find in Disney or somewhere where they're trying to replicate castles and all. It's really like something out of a medieval fairy tale book!

Classes start tomorrow, so we'll have more of a schedule and some unstructured time to go explore wherever we'd like. I don't have classes on Monday, so I will be off on my first adventure with a couple of girls I've met! We don't have any concrete plans now, but I'm sure I will have more to share tomorrow!

 

On my way!

Well, I'm officially off! Almost. My family is off to a Red Sox game after taking care of some other business, so I'm at the airport in plenty of time! My brother thinks he's getting the better end of the deal going to the Sox game. It will be a blast, I'm sure, but I'm not so sure he's right about that one! I've got my hat to be there in spirit though!

I fly to London, where two of my roommates coincidentally will be at the same time, same terminal. And then I have the same flight to Prague as two others in my group. Despite the day finally being here and having actual plans to meet these people, things are still very surreal!

I'll have more updates in the next few days from Prague!!

Final Preparations

Two important final things happened today!

1) I got stuck with 3 needles-- the last of all the shots I need to go to South Africa! I had two others done about a month ago. . . I also got my prescription for my Malaria pills! I hate shots (but really, who likes them?), so hopefully all of this will be worth it and I'll have a healthy trip!

2) More exciting than the shots . . . I got my rooming assignments for Prague! I am in an apartment with four other girls, right in the city! I don't really know anything except for their names and where they go to school at this point, but it was exciting even just to get that bit of information!

Four days from now, I'll be on my first flight to London, before getting on my connecting flight to Prague!

 

Why Prague and Cape Town?

I drove home from school a few days ago, and at some point during the two-hour ride this huge smile found its way onto my face- as cheesy as this all seems. Until that point, I don't think that this trip seemed real to me. I've been planning and preparing for it for months, but I've been so wrapped up in school stuff that I hadn't had the time to even just consciously recognize that this is in fact real life! I think it was that moment in the car that I first realized that this wasn't just another crazy travel idea, but is actually happening-- in less than a week!!

Needless to say, I'm getting pretty excited for my trip! In telling people about it though, I think that it deserves a bit of an explanation-- why am I going to two major places in one big trip? As an RA on campus, I knew that I would have to go abroad during the summer. And initially, I was going to do the UNH Cambridge Program, to Cambridge, England for five weeks. I was all applied and had even recieved a scholarship for part of the cost. Then, I found out the date that I needed to be back on campus for RA training. I think that it was about 3 days before I would leave England. So really, adding in the travel time and a day at home to unpack from England and re-pack for school, I was looking at needing to take 5 days out of my study abroad experince. As great as the program would have been for me, I wasn't interested in missing almost a fifth of what I would remember as being my college study abroad experience. It just didn't make sense.

I had been fully set on my summer plans, but then suddenly found myself back at square one. I was slightly frustrated with the situation; at needing to put more time and energy into something that had already been taken care of once. In hindsight, I'd like to give a big thank you to ResLife for how the scheduling worked out-- not that they really had any control on how the dates fell. But seriously, had those dates matched up better, I would be going to England for about 5 weeks this summer-- and that would be it. I hear great things and definitely don't want to take anything away from what a great experience the Cambridge Program is-- there's a reason I had wanted to do it, after all. But I think that what was brought to me out of my misfortune of not being able to go, is going to prove to be such a unique experience-- not to mention double the time for a similar price! I'll make it to England eventually, it just doesn't look like that will be this summer.

In finding my new study abroad program, I didn't really have a specific destination within Europe in mind for study abroad, but knew that I didn't want the cliché trip to Paris, Rome, or the like. I'd like to visit them, definitely, but I didn't want to live right in all of that. After hours of researching different programs , I found USAC's summer program in Prague. Compared to the many other programs I considered, the selling point for USAC and Prague was the Travel Photography class. I am very much so an amature. Being in the process of teaching myself on my DSLR though, a class in travel photography was really appealing.

Aside from studying abroad, something I've always really wanted to do is volunteer abroad. Conveniantly, the USAC program in Prague left me with about a month and a half until I would need to return to UNH. Over a year ago, the CIE office at UNH had given me information on International Volunteer Headquarters (IVHQ), a volunteer program based out of New Zealand that has volunteer placements all over the world. They have a Facebook group that I had followed that whole year, through which I was able to see how much everyone enjoys their time with IVHQ, how safe they feel, and how affordable the programs are. When I proposed to my mom that I could go to Prague and then fly right down to Cape Town to volunteer, I hadn't expected to get approval. Clearly though, as I write about my upcoming trip to Prague and Cape Town, I got the okay to go!

Just the experience of applying, planning, and preparing to go has been quite a process. This time next week though, I'll be starting the best part of the experience-- actually being abroad!