The New Apartment

Last week I finished moving out of the dorm after spending the past 4 months living under "student" conditions. I'm quite happy to finally be in an apartment, and I hope I've fulfilled my dormitory living quota for the rest of my life :p

The Good:
Here's a video of a quick tour of the layout of the apartment. It actually is a lot cleaner now since filming, I think I managed to guilt my apartment mates a little into being a bit more self conscious of how messy the place was. Of course, now that I have a more proper kitchen pictures of my cooking on facebook will look a bit better (hopefully.) Also in a country where AC is not that common in housing residences, and in the middle of one of the hottest Summers in the Czech Rep I honestly don't mind the heat due to my room being in the back of the house with the windows facing large backyard garden and some strategic trees that give ample shade to my 2nd story window.





Only small complaints thus far:
The water heater that sits in the bathroom sometimes chooses not to work :p All good during the Summer not so good during winter :(
Increased time to get to work. The new location adds about 15-20 mins to my commute (essentially double the distance from the dormitory.) Not that big by American standards when riding a car, but this is also a city where by car you could prob clear the whole city in the same amount of time.
However the convenience of having a bus stop less than 200 ft away and 2 different tram stops servicing 3 different lines each only a block away totally beats my old daily routine of walking up a hill, Masaryk University campus stairs, and 4 flights of dormitory stairs to get to my room.


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4th of July just isn't the same...

Being an American in Europe during the 4th of July weekend can feel like an office birthday party where someone forgot to bring a cake. Missing out on the BBQ's, traditional firework show, and the general "AMERICA Yeah!" vibe that permeates the country has probably brought me the closest to being homesick I've been since my arrival.

However in what could be described as an act of conciliation the Czech Rep gave me a 4 day weekend for my troubles. In reality it's because of Saints Cyril and Methodius Day (5th) and Jan Hus Day (6th). Two Czech holidays celebrating the saints who brought Christianity to the Slavic region in 863, and the execution of the martyr who laid some of the philosophical seeds for the Lutheran  (Protestant) Reformation in 1415 respectively. Typically most Czechs would decided to spend the vacation days to get the full week or more to take a family trip somewhere, and my boss was very casual about the idea of if I wanted some extra days just to let her know. Unfortunately this holiday crept out on me before I had a good chance to plan for it, with my old roommate in Sweden having just gone through eye surgery which made the weekend visit an impossibility, and embarking on something like a tour through Italy would have required a couple more days than I had to map everything out.

Despite this I managed to fill a rather eventful low cost weekend with day trips to the Brno lake, Vienna, and the local aquatic center (links to Picasa found below).

Vienna

Marianske Udoli - the local lake for sun bathing, picnic-ing, and a refreshing swim

Vienna was fantastic, and it's mind boggling how much a 1.5 hour trip by car from the Czech Rep can make. Between the architecture, population mix, culture, food, and prevalence of very fluent multilingual citizens I actually felt tempted by the thought of this is the kind of city I could live in indefinitely :) I will definitely be making as many return trips as possible.

Renault World Series

VROOM!!!! VROOM!!

Saturday June 5th was the Renault World Series, while actually not the largest race in Brno, which is the MotoGP later this year, this one was still really entertaining, and as you can see from the video the weather was perfect for basking in the sun, sitting on the hill with an ice cream, and enjoying the combination of technology and testosterone that is Formula Renault and the GP2 :D

Europe's mobile network

One of the biggest unfulfilled promise, in my mind, of the EU's common market is the fact that there is not one unified phone service provider. I think it's ridiculous that I can travel the equivalent of a small US state, and find my phone's sim completely useless upon crossing the border into a neighboring country.

There are certainly large providers Tmobile, Vodafone, O2 Telefonica that provides service in several countries, but none of them can claim to operate in "most" much less all of the EU. Instead they claim that upon entering a country that they don't service you should still be able to have a working phone through their "partner" networks. In theory you should have uninterrupted service, with a slight additional fee, but nothing too noticeable due to EU tariff restrictions. However this has NEVER worked out for my phone anywhere I've gone thus far!

I've done a lot of scouring of travel forums and find many posts by Australians in a similar position to myself. The options for using a prepaid sim card over a subscription basically break down to 3 choices (most only accessible through British retailers):

1) Get a global sim: higher, but mostly negligible, fees. Data is still a bit of a novelty for this market niche (not sure why as most people picking up these sim cards are prob international travelers with a smartphone). You would think these things would be about as common as an ice cream shop next to a fat camp/ gym, but on my last trip to Brussels when I asked at the airport if I could pick one up they said they were sold out. I was impressed by GO-SIM which seemed to have a nice broad list of operating in 75 countries, data, and would cost about 20 pounds for a starter set plus shipping.

2) Pick up a different sim card in every country you go to. The price of a prepaid sim is so ridiculously low, that in pure cost terms I can understand the logic. However, I'm not looking to start a collection of these things like they were baseball cards. They're ridiculously small, and lack a convenient way of hold them. I've tried every possible pocket in my wallet and they always find a way of ending up on the floor. That's bye bye 10+ Euros if I'm not careful about looking on the ground. Add to that the fact that if you're someone who's traveling within a city or country for less than a week, do you really want to spend half a day at an electronic store/ phone boutique picking one of these suckers up?

3) Rely on your major carrier to be able to utilize a partner or competitor's network as stated above. All of the major mobile service providers list option plans for travelers, especially for roaming within the EU. In fact O2, which I currently use, stated that for their prepaid sims it is an AUTOMATICALLY ACTIVATED SERVICE. For some of my other friends, it has been about as easy as receiving/sending a txt message to confirm that it is okay to connect to another network once they power up in another country, and they were good to go. I thought this would be the most convenient method, but I have been finding that the ease of switching service networks as you switch borders to be a load of crap. I've never gotten anything besides a network unavailable and an emergency call option out of my phone even if it can see the other phone networks.

Possible difficulties due to the handset itself. There are some issues that I feel might be inherent in the fact that the Nexus is not available for retail in Europe beyond Great Britain.

Mobile internet for some reason has always been a huge annoyance I don't know how convenient it is supposed to be for other phones, but following activation instructions for me only gets me as far as seeing that I have credit to spend on the network without any ability for actual net access. I'm not sure if it's something inherently lacking in the Nexus's design, but access to both internet and MMS services seems to require me manually inputting the NAT info for the network, which is not the most convenient thing to track down. Phone and sms always work as soon as I put in the chip, and call the network with the activation code, but it's been beyond my research to find a reason as to why getting internet from the same network has been such a pain in the ass.

Ajou Reunion

It took two years to finally get my butt across the Atlantic to do it, but on May 29th it finally happened! The long awaited reunion with some of my best friends from when I was studying abroad at Ajou University in Suwon, Korea. As anyone who has gone on a study abroad will concur about their own experiences, the nature of being in a foreign environment with adventurous types who chose to put themselves in such situation tends to create deep bonds. This was certainly true of our group, where our misadventures could have filled an entire tv series, but as is typically the case post study abroad return our lives moved on and we began to lose touch. Although time and distance took its natural toll on the frequency of our communication with one another (the occasional facebook message) there was a sense of blessed surprise during the weekend. Despite how much we had changed individually as a group we were able to pick up right where we left off in Korea.

The 4 day weekend got to a rocky start as I was supposed to take a 4AM bus to the airport (which required me to walk to the station from my dorm since trams would not be operational at that hour), and due to my trying to avoid sleep so I could pass out on the long bus/ plane rides I ended up passing out around 2 in the morning and waking up at 4:45... A panicked search of the bus service website and online ticket purchase for the next departure (the faster route to the center of Prague instead taking me all the way to the airport unlike my original ticket), and I was out the door with the urgency of a firefighter. Thankfully around 5AM is when the trams start running their 10 min routines, and I was a good 20 mins early for the bus.

After looking at the time table for bus service, I realized that once arriving at the Prague central station I would have to wait 30 mins before a bus to go to the airport, and that it would arrive with less than 20 mins for me to check in before the flight. A frantic search through my google Nexus (thank you mobile internet) found no public transport routes that could get me to the airport any faster. So I bit the bullet, and put in an online order for a taxi to pick me up as soon as I arrived at the station. The decision got me to the airport a safe 45 mins before my gate closed, but cost me about $30 for a ten minute drive (in purchase power parity perspective I generally can go most of the entire work week only spending that much :/)

I thought once I got on the plane everything would go smoothly, but as is generally the case with most of my plans, that would work out beautifully in other people's hands, I was bound to be sidelined by other freak externalities requiring me to make quick improvisations and adjustments after my arrival. Fortunately I guess, this crap happens to me so often I'm used to such disasters happening.

Obstacle 1: Sim card never works upon crossing the Czech border (more on this in another post).

Obstacle 2: Brussel's street signs while more coherent than Czech's are ridiculously confusing randomly switching their names between French and Flemish variants, which made my detailed maps, I printed before my trip, about as useful as a child drawn map scrawled in crayon on the back of a napkin.

Obstacle 3: Upon purchasing a local prepaid sim card, I still could not get the thing to work. Eventually got a visiting French speaker to help me activate the phone, sms and internet services, but although I had credit activated for the account my phone still could not detect the internet network without me manually inputting the NAT information. Spent 10 euros using the hostel's 1 euro per 15 min console to search through a bunch of phone forums with none of the NAT addresses working on my phone :(

As I had arrived a day earlier than everyone else I took the opportunity to explore the city on my own i.e. wander the city with an emphasis on looking at the places residents hang out more than tourists. I checked out the Jardain Botanique park near my station, snacked at a cafe, and of course checked out the local mall and book stores (Brussels is the world capital of comics after all). Although Brussels already has the distinction of having both French and Flemish as primary languages and it not really being a tourist hot spot it does have a very international feel due much in part to the fact that the EU has several of its governing bodies located within the city. This pays off for me as I was able to easily get along with all the shop clerks speaking only English, something I really don't get in the Czech Rep unless I'm in a tourist infested neighborhood...

As impressive as my solo tour was it was the rest of the weekend that I had really come for, starting the next morning with the arrivals of Pedro, Vanni, Ania and Rikard. After some hugs, comments on how "fit" people had become, and some overly affectionate gestures from Vanni (one can only assume due to him being Italian :p ), we were ready to explore the city proper as Ania had lived in the city before for a year. With perfect weather (sunny with a slight breeze) that could rival SF the day became a walking tour hitting up all the tourist attractions, stopping wherever we saw food and drink that looked appealing, and slowly being joined by the later arrivals as the day progressed.

In order of arrival: Adrian, Viri, Maciej, Magda, Otto, Adam, Juan and a brief "in spirit" appearance by Arnaud the one member of the Spring semester group that actually resides in Brussels, but couldn't make it to the event. At dinner we were joined Ajou Summer member Simon and Hunnie who are currently living in the city as well, and they showed us a couple of hot spots, and we all finished the night at their apartment before making the trek back to our hostel in the wee hours of the morning. Sunday morning was mostly spent recovering from the previous night, but by noon we were out again repeating much of the previous day's agenda of taking in sights and grabbing up the local treats wherever possible, while starting to make our goodbyes to members who were returning back to their respective homes. I was understandably completely exhausted by the end of the day (see photo), but was recharged by the restaurant Simon and Hunnie took us to for dinner, which in French translated to something like "Find or End of the Century". It was easily the best meal I've had in all of Europe thus far... seriously look how happy I am in that photo :)

The next day was time for my own goodbye, and though I was already missing them by the time I got to the airport I knew that after this weekend it doesn't matter how many years pass I'll still be able to count all of them as friends. (cue sappy music yea yea I know I shouldn't have said such a corny ending to my post)

More pictures of my trip can be found on my facebook account, or here on my Picasa.

A list of recommended things for people to do if they make a trip in the future:

Grand Place Grote Market

Manneken Pis

Atomium

Galeries Saint Hubert-Sint Hubertusgalerijen

Palais Royal de Bruxelles

Rue de la Loi

Sorry for the break in service :p

Lot of activities going on the last couple weeks, which left me too tired to meet my weekly deadlines for this blog. But since today is a slow day at work, I may as well use the time to catch you all up with what's been going on!

Quick list of topics for subsequent posts:

Ajou Reunion - Brussels, Belgium weekend of 29-31rs of May

Renault World Series - Brno, Czech Rep weekend 5th-6th of June

Start of Summer - some of the hottest days in Czech history, and my escape from the heat by frequenting the local pool

World Cup - June 12th - July 11th, located in South Africa, but I'm viewing in Brno, and it's my first time watching with a wide group of internationals all zealously supporting different teams

Ignis Brunensis

So I'm after some frustrating experiments with blogspot's upload function I found that it was a far easier route to just upload my vids to youtube and embed them. So I hope you enjoy the fruit of my efforts in posting these, though honestly it's not that different from a screen saver :p I'll have to take better videos in the future so stay tuned!

Last week was the start of the annual fireworks competition Ignis Brunensis, which might be the biggest spectacle in the Czech Republic outside of them cinching IIHF hockey championship on Sunday :) The atmosphere is generally filled with that mix of Summer carnival and the energy of students both high school and university sensing their Summer holiday is almost upon them. The weather has serendipitously held up during the nights of the show, while during the day there seems to be an extreme fluctuation between harsh thundershowers then blindingly sunny weather every couple hours.

Just a small snippet of the first actual show which lasted for about 20 mins, at a certain point I have to put down the phone and just watch the show :p