Pride and vanity rafting in Slovakia

This past weekend I gave myself a lesson in the penalty of vanity and pride. What should have been a simple weekend company rafting trip was complicated by my falling ill the day before I left. I had committed already to paying the trip's fees, and purchased gear specifically for the event so there was a huge part of me that refused to let that money go to waste by bailing on the trip at the last moment. The idea of having to sleep in a tent at 2C and rafting down mountain rivers did not phase me (pride) though in hindsight my experience with keeping warm in a tent is limited, and I had always taken a solo Kayak with very limited experience with operating a 2 man raft. Needless to say I aggravated my cold to the point, where I got through the days and nights on a combination of will power and constant shots of Czech family brewed alcohol, called Smilovitze, advertised as the Czech "cure all "by my co-workers. Still I managed to have an amazing time, and see some pretty cool sights, but I'm seriously going to need to take it easy for the next couple weeks to recover X.X








Slovakia's mountains in the distance are an impressive sight.






Shot of me by the end of the trip looking pretty worse for wear

Lastly need to vent...
First month anniversary of my arrival in Brno => shittiest day I've had in the Czech Rep thus far.
Things that made my shit list today >[
Retarded dorm managers and her anal complaining to every middleman (getting them annoyed at me >[ ) instead of just contacting me with what the f' she wants.
Almost getting hit by a car despite walking through the crosswalk WITH A CROWD OF OTHER people: file under you dont' have to be "asian" or a woman to be a terrible driver
Traveler cheques the most useless form of pseudo-currency the protection it offers is the equivalent of a credit card, and is accepted in even less locations (only accepted at banking institutions) :/
Incompetent bank tellers: If I give you a stack of 200 USD traveler cheques and say "Crowns" then give you another 200 USD stack and say "Euros" then I expect Crowns and Euros. Not take the second stack, and give me a conversion of 194 USD.. literally you took 200 USD from me and gave me 194 USD back....I understand a conversion fee, but they get applied when you're actually PERFORMING A CURRENCY CONVERSION, if I wanted US cash, I would have just brought US cash with me!!
FTL Komercni Banka!!

Friday Afternoon in Prague

This past Friday the CEO invited me to drive with him to a Expo in Prague. Though honestly since he was there to meet with clients, he only expected me to attend for about an hour, before letting me have the rest of the day to explore the city on my own ;) My first impression for the bulk of city was that it was just rampant modern urbanization with skyline completely congested with towers and multinational advertisements strung across the streets. But you reach the old quarter of the city, and it's practically a different world. The pictures I felt worth showing are from the Charles Bridge.









The bridge is such a tourist attraction completely bustling with foreigners, and it was the first time I heard native English speakers in the last 3 weeks (though it was British accents mostly.) It somehow felt odd, and I had a slight longing to try and have a conversation with them just so that I could once again talk at my normal speech tempo.






Views seriously don't get much better than this :D The rest of the photos I'll throw into an album on facebook.

I spent the rest of the afternoon attending a costume art museum, taking 3 course lunch for less than $5 at this lovely little restaurant up the hill, and found out during the car ride that my boss is an ex-head banging metal head (nose piercing and hair down to his waist as a teen), which is just shocking as now he's your typical laid back IT guy who loves his clean t shirt and jeans look :)

Also this week marked my first attempt at playing squash. Session was great exercise but my swinging arm was seriously sore for the rest of the week. I might have to stick with swimming, easier on my body :p

The rest of the weekend was spent with an absolutely solid group of friends, from Poland, who I met all the way back when I studying abroad in Korea. When they knew I had finally arrived in the Czech Rep they went out of their way to find a weekend to visit me. It's friends like that that make my world travels so addicting, and me completely grateful for the life I have, THANKS GUYS!

Denis Gardens (“Denisovy sady”)

Built on a hill leading up to the iconic St. Peter and Paul Cathedral (pictured below, I should have taken a picture from the other side from the bottom of the bare hill as seen from the center of town to really give the impression of how stunning it is. The side shown is cobblestone street that eases up from the other side of the hill) the Denis Gardens is amongst the best places to get a panoramic view of Brno. The large open space offers itself up as a local favorite for a romantic date regardless of the time of day, or just relaxing away a sunny afternoon. The combination of the occasional hobo, families, and a closed circuit camera system always in clear line of sight keeps the PDA at appropriate levels, (unless you have some serious exhibitionist urges...), proper level of PDA displayed by my tour guides Tereza and her boyfriend Karel (see panoramic picture 4, ;p)



The inside of this church is just amazing...I didn't take any pictures of the inside though. I'm not terribly religious, but sometimes I feel places of worship deserve to not be treated as a tourist spectacle...




Make shift panoramic, I'm too lazy to use a photo editor to combine the pictures together.






Great place to grab some drinks have picnic and hang out

Easter and green beer?

So despite decades of Communism, and a 50% atheist rate in the population Easter is a HUGE deal here compared to the U.S. While the devout in the US do have a set of traditions to follow leading up to Easter Sunday, for the secular portion of society there is almost no visible impact. Here on the other hand university students got off from school starting on the Thursday, and the Monday is a national holiday. Most of the city shut down, except for the foreign restaurants (thank you Asian restaurants), and the most commercial areas (the shopping mall was virtually undiminished in its services).

The entire week though has been a lead up to Easter with a special festive market set up in the town square, and constant rotation of traditional entertainment groups.










But most unique of all is probably the tradition that takes place the Thursday before Easter, where people partake in the consumption of something green as a symbolic gesture relating to continued life. In Czech fashion of course this tradition has manifested in the creation of a green beer! So that afternoon as a form of company bonding I had the pleasure of joining my coworkers at the pub to partake in a few ;)

Now many Americans, especially the cynical ones, will say well we do the same thing on St Patricks, and it's just food coloring in the beer. No company would brew a batch for a single day... Well STAROBRNO the local brewery does! With a secret addition of certain herbs for color and taste along with special distribution requirement that the beer be only served on the Thursday by its vendors. Why would the company do such a thing? Well if you think of the consumer base creating a 1 day batch probably isn't any different than their regular production schedule, and it's nice PR plus. For further marketing parallels consider the seasonal McRib at McDonald's.

The dormitory

So this a photo tour of my dorm room post spring cleaning and IKEA shopping (I might have to make another trip to pick up some bathroom rugs if I decide to stay), yes it was even messier before I tried to vacuum, reorganize, scrub the crap out of everything before taking these photos. Nevertheless it is still a dorm room shared with my roommate Min (who has been living in the room for months before my arrival), so I can't just do a major overhaul of everything. The photos are in sequential order from the front door to the window view, skipping over the small kitchen (the one room I didn't touch because it's full of Min's dishes, and didn't feel like cleaning a room I would probably never use :|)and the toilet stall, which basically looks exactly like a airplane lavatory just a little older :/

Also note the shower is elevated over what I imagine is a communal drain for the sink to feed into as well, it's efficient in theory but getting the shower curtain to provide a proper enclosure when you have a giant sink overlapping a significant portion of a quarter of the tub is problematic. Also for whatever reason our shower head is disconnected from the hose, and I think it's missing the clamp and bolt to firmly put the two back together. My roommate said he's complained to the manager about getting it repaired, but it looks like my options are to figure out what size screw and other fastening device is necessary, buy myself a new shower head and install that, or continue showering from a hose redneck style...It gets the job down, but I still feel like a dirty 10 year old getting hosed off in the yard after playing too much in the mud every time I do it.

There are actually some very nice apartments in the area, that I'm considering moving into later, but for the time being I really can't beat the cost of living in this dorm room. Housing prices in Brno are fairly decent, for a furnished apartment smack dab in the middle of the center of the city/ tourist-y area you're looking to spend about $500 USD. However to put that in perspective to my earnings, it would cost an extra 1/5 of my salary to get a furnished apartment with internet, and that's with an apartment mate. Frankly the money would probably be better spent towards doing some weekend traveling anyways right? ;)

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 ;)