Wintery Fairyland

I went from having 4 months to 4 days left in this wondrous city of Prague and it pains me to think that this is probably my last blog post written from my home in K17 surrounded by some of the best people I could have hoped to meet. This isn’t my final post so I’m not going to get too sentimental yet so let’s change the subject and find out what I’ve been up to since Paris!

So as everyone is very well aware, this is the most wonderful time of the year! And what better way to spend the Christmas season than in Prague who is the best at two things: beer and Christmas cheer. Besides watching Christmas movies since November, the real festivities began on Wednesday, December 5 also known as St. Nicholas Day. It marks the start of Christmas for Czechs and in Old Town people dress up as three figures: St. Nicholas, an Angel, and a Devil.  So when I was buying some decorations for the Holiday party Marisa, Erica, Kat, and I threw later that night it was amusing to see devil horns next to Santa hats. Our Holiday party was a great success since it was a combination of dessert night, sweaters, holiday cheer, singing, and everyone in our program!

The rest of the weekend was filled with more Christmas celebrations and markets. On Friday we took a day trip to Nuremberg, Germany for one of the oldest Christmas markets in Europe and later that weekend the family and I decided to venture to the Charles Bridge and see the Christmas markets set up in Old Town Square. Prague is already the set of a fairytale but during Christmas it is even more magical. When stepping out of our apartment Sunday for an outing to the beautiful National Theater to see the Nutcracker we were surprised with a downpour of snow, making this city feel even more like a wintery fairyland. Prague is the first city outside of Russia that was allowed to put on the Nutcracker ballet and I was really curious to see how they would tell the story since the Nutcracker was such a huge part of my childhood. It was very…interesting. Instead of the rat king it was a terrifying devil and instead of rats they were characters out of some scary Pirates of the Caribbean nightmare. Other than that, it was enjoyable but all the dancers were adults with the exception of 10 little girls who I guess were supposed to be the marshmallows. I still prefer the Drosselmeyer I grew up with and it made me miss ballet more than I thought I did.

After the show we all went to dinner at our pub for some fried cheese in between two snowball fights that took place. None of us even cared that we were in our dress clothes still, we still let out our inner Elf by throwing snowballs, making snow angels, and played with several puppies that wanted to be our friends, including the pup we named Marcus. Yet again, this will be one of my favorite days in Prague when looking back at these 4 months spent with my favorite people here. I don’t even want to think about not being surrounded by them in less than a week.

As family back home knows, my childhood friend Erin has also been studying here and even though we didn’t see nearly as much of each other as we thought we would, it’s comforting to know that we’ll have each other in Modesto when going through Prague withdrawals. It’s crazy that we’ve been friends since the age of 3 and studied in the same city this past semester 17 years later. We had a mini touristy day going to Old Town Square, across the river to see the swans, and ended the day getting lost while on the verge of frostbite trying to find a flea market. So glad I got to see her one last time in the city we both fell in love with!

This is study-abroad so I should probably mention the first time we have all had to study way more than we were used to this whole semester – finals week. It included hours of bottomless coffee, staring at computer screens, blank word documents, and multiple tabs open on the internet with far too many having little to do with the papers that needed to be written. I think it’s safe to say everyone here has attention spans even smaller than they were when we arrived as my newsfeed blew up with pictures of puppies, comments, and tumblr links so I think we all agree that next semester is going to be dreadful.

Awesome picture of Charles Bridge in the snow! Photo credit: David Stokes

What these next 4 days are going to entail:

• Dog-piling Erica after our Farewell party tonight
• Tears
• Beer
• Fried Cheese from our pub
• Kebabs off of I.P. Pavlova
• Christmas markets
• All my favorite places with all my favorite people

See you in San Francisco Mom and Dad!