Arrival

At the insistence of family and friends to keep in touch in combination not wanting to spend time writing a ridiculous amount of emails covering the same topic to different groups I present to you my "abroad blog".

First thing, for those who don't know where I am... (what are you doing reading my blog?)... I am in the city of Brno, second largest city in the Czech Rep, on an internship for ecommerce.cz. At the date of this posting I will have been here just over a week, and will try to keep the same frequency of posting. This particular post and a couple immediately following, covering the blog's introduction and bunch of content for my first week, will be longer than most articles I intend to post. So don't expect a book sized blog by the end of this.

So to begin the blog proper, my arrival in Brno was preceded by a 20 hour trip from San Francisco to Frankfurt to Vienna by plane, and finishing the last leg by train to Brno. Sorry no pictures of this grueling odyssey, but take my word for it that by the end of it I was going purely on will power and adrenaline from the fear of missing a connection or not being greeted at the Brno station. Thankfully everything went according to plan and I was met at the station by Tereza Vilimkova, and later with another Tereza Netusilova, who is my "AIESEC buddy", local AIESEC member assigned to interns/trainees to act as ambassadors and primary points of contact, for the duration of my stay here.

My first meal in the Czech was at the shopping mall in center of the city right next to the station. The food court itself reflects a multiculturalism (at least commercially) in the Czech Rep, which I'll probably go into detail further in a future post. Not wanting my first meal to be something as American/international as McDonalds or KFC I saw restaurant that I assumed was selling fast food variants of Czech dishes. I saw what looked to be a Greek Spanakopita, but with potatoes mixed with the spinach shown below.




To my surprise however, upon bringing back the food to the table, Tereza was curious as to my purchase asking what dish I had brought back to which I found out that she had never seen such a thing in Czech cuisine :/ First Czech meal fail... but the food was still good though the potatoes added alot more starch than I'm used to when eating a standard Spanakopita in California.

The rest of the night was spent getting dessert at a Kavarna (cafe), obtaining some basic necessities from the department store, moving my stuff into the dorm room, and after a quick shower off to an AIESEC welcome to Brno/ interns moving into a new apartment party. The adrenaline and will power managed to last me through the night ;)