Hey! This post isin't as late as I'd thought it would be, but its still a bit late, so sorry for that. This post will be about the Rotary Winter meeting in Třebíč. This meeting was just for the inbounds to the czech republic so I didn't get the chance to meet any of my friends in Slovakia again, but I'll get to see them at the district confrence, sothat will be great. Anyways, the winter meeting. It was fun, however there were some moments that I found a bit frustrating and poorly organized. All the kids arrived friday, I got there by bus, it wasn't too long of a drive, but my legs got a bit cramped near the end. When we got there there was the normal sign in and registration where we got our rooms, I dont know why but I'm always with other Prague kids for my room assignments, not that I don't like them, I just wish I had a chance to room with some of the students I don't spend as much time with. That being said I did get to spend lots of time with my friends so thats good. The most exciting thing about this meeting was getting to meet the four newbies, there are three girls from Australia and one girl from South Africa, theyre all so nice and I'm really happy I got to meet them. After dinner we started the language test. I was a bit more nervous going into this one than the last becase it had been only one month since the last one, but I did all right, I got a 2 on the speaking part and a 2.5 for the written part of the exam. I didnt do as well as the last one but I'm still happy with my results(though I set the bar real low for myslef so...). Something I found reallly frustrating about the language test was the fact that they organized so the speaking part would go on until about 1 in the morning. I dont know if this was planned or not, but theyve been organizing these meetings for at least five years so I'd have thought they'd know how long it would take. I think a much better way of organizing it would be to have the language test earlier in the day, staring before dinner and then if its not finished by then it could continue after dinner. After the language test we all went to bed because we were all exhausted. Saturday we started the day of with a tour of Trebic's Jewish quarter, we got to visit a synagogue and a house that was made and decorated as a Jewish house would have been in the past. I found it really interesting to learn about all the history. After the Jewish quarter we walked up to the Baslica of St. Procopius, it was a nice walk, even though it was a bit cold. The tour of the Basilica was really interesting, and then the best part was that we got to have a huge snowball fight afterwards. It was a blast and quite honestly the best part of the weekend. Once the snowball fight had calmed down a bit we headed on to the badminton courts, we all played some badminton, and then afterwards we headed back to the hotel, it was a bit difficult to wald back becasue the slush we had walked through to get there had frozen into ice, I was very careful and I didnt trip, but a few others did. Once we got back to the hotel we had dinner and then we started the talent show. The reason we had this talent show was to practice for the district confrence's talent show. As a group we all will be singing three songs: We are the world by Micheal Jackson, Waving Flag by K'naan, and a really old czech song that I cant remembe the name of. Those all went surprisingly well since most(me included) people hadn't practiced at all or memorized the lyrics(or in my case, not even looked at the lyrics). As Canadians we did a skit about a Czech kid who will be going to Canada on exchagne, and all her friends and family are incredulous that she wants to go to Canada(All they do there is drink maple syrup!), and why she still decided to go on exchange even though shes going to a small town in Quebec and not Toronto(I mean, thats the only city worth visiting in Canada ayways). I think that we'll be preforming it at the distrit conference, Zoe did an amazing job of writng it(lots of great jokes:)). We watched all the different skits and performances and then after all of them Mr. Barak(Chairman of the district) chose the ones that would be performed at the district conference. After all the skits and such were finished we sang our three songs again and then went to bed, I wanted to stay up and talk with people more but I was so exhausted after staying up so late the night before and from the whole day, also I was getting more and more sick over the weekend and I ended up loosing my voice so that was fun(yes, I’m being sarcastic, it was not fun in any way shape or form). The next morning we had breakfast and then left pretty quickly to get back to Prague. Down below you can see the photos from the weekend, I captioned some of them, and I tried to arrange them in some semblance of order, but I don’t know if Weebly will save them in that particular order, but whatever, c’est la vie. Anyways, I hope you enjoy them:) Thanks so much for reading this!! I hope you enjoyed this post and make sure to text or email me if you have any questions. Also I'm sorry for the various typos in this post as well all my previous(and probably future) posts, most of this I'm writing on my phone or a czech computer, and the autocorrect(and the keyboard) is a tad bit different than the Canadian ones so I don't catch all my mistakes, thanks for understanding:)
I hope everyone has a great week and I’ll be posting a late 6 month update soon(my six month mark was yesterday so yay me for staying on time for things yikes) -Emma
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Hi everyone! So once again this post will be divided into two parts because I really didn’t see the point of making two separate posts about a similar topic, also if I keep up making so many things about Christmas then it’ll stop being a blog about my exchange and it’ll become a blog a lot czech Christmas, not that that’s a bad thing though, Czech Christmas is pretty great. So jumping right into things, the first part will be about my rotary Christmas meeting that was here in Prague and the second part will be about my class’s Christmas party that was of course also in Prague;) Rotary Christmas meetingSo this meeting was all about Christmas in the Czech Republic, we did a gift exchange, a sweets competition and some other Christmas traditions. We all arrived at the hotel at around three and we got to our rooms and got organized and everything. This was really easy for me because it was in Prague I didn’t have to travel at all, which was kind of nice, but I do with I had gotten a chance to see another Czech or Slovak city. Once everyone was here and we had hung out a bit we all went to dinner at a nearby restaurant, it was really nice to see all my friends again, and I got to talk with many of them during dinner. After dinner we headed back to the hotel for the dreaded language test. I was pretty nervous because I did horribly on my first language test, but that was back in September, almost four months before the time of the test, five months before I’m actually writing this darn blog post though. So the language test was composed of two parts, the written and the speaking. On the written part they basically were checking to see if we knew the basic verb conjugations for the most common verbs and then we had to write ten sentences on our favourite day in the Czech Republic(baking and decorating gingerbread with my family). The speaking test was basically where Mr. Barak, the chairman of rotary your exchange here asked us a bunch of questions, most of them were pretty simple like do you like it here, how is your host family, what’s you’re favourite czech food and a bunch of other simple questions, there were some harder ones but he only asked the kids that were the best in czech those questions. We got back our results on Saturday(or Sunday? I can’t remember), and I got a one on the speaking and a two on the writing. Now Mom and Dad, before you freak out that I failed the test, he czech marking system is different than the one back home, one is the best and five is the worst, so I did fine, no need to worry thank you very much. After the language test we all went to sleep because we were all very tired. On Saturday we woke up, had breakfast and then left for a walking tour of Prague. We started at the Prague castle, in St. Vitus’s cathedral and went down to the bridge and then on to old town square with a stop along the way to the church of baby Jesus. St Vitus’ cathedral was so amazing, I had never been in it before and I’m so glad I got the chance now. I wasn’t really looking forward to the tour because as I live here I already have learnt a lot about the buildings and the history of lots of things but I did learn a few things, one of which being that before the streets had names and the houses had numbers the way everyone had to address letters was (for example) to the house of the white swan. Which meant that the letter carrier had to find the house with the carving or painting of a white swan above the door and deliver the letter there, it wa so terry interesting and on some houses in the old parts of Prague you can still see the signs above the doorway. After learning about that we walked down the the church of the infant Jesus, it’s a church dedicated to the statue of baby Jesus they have inside and they dress him up and it’s a really important part of Prague, and it’s apparently quite famous around the world too. After that we walked on towards the other side of the river and crossed the Charles bridge, I didn’t really like this part because it’s always soooooo full of tourists and it’s so hard to just walk in a straight line. I’ve also crossed it a few times and the novelty has worn off, it was still fun to take photos with my friends though, but after the photos I tried to speedwalk across the bridge without much success. After the bridge we walked to the Palladium shopping Center for lunch and shopping. By this time it was about two in the afternoon and we all had had breakfast at seven thirty, so we were all starving. We all had inch in the food court and then lots of people did some shopping, I wasn’t really interesting in that because a) I live here and I can go to palladium and any other shopping mall whenever I want to and b) I was exhausted and all I wanted to do was sleep and eat, wich I did, well the eating part at least. After palladium we walked over it the old town square and spend time at the Christmas market there. The one in Old town square is the biggest and most impressive in Prague, but that also meant that it was packed with tourists, I walked around a bit but everyone was shoulder to shoulder like sardines and it wasn’t very pleasant. I found that the smaller Christmas markets had fewer people and they had s much more enjoyable atmosphere because of that. Once we were back at the hotel we had dinner and then sang a few carols in czech. This was very fun for everyone, I think all of us inbounds said most of the words incorrectly but it was still a great time and a good laugh. After the carols we had a quick presentation about the travel rules, nothin we hadn’t heard before but it was still good to have a refresher. Once the presentation was done we went back into the main room to try a czech tradition, putting candles in walnuts and floating them on water to tell your future or your fortune. It was fun and apparently I should stick close to my friends this year, which I was planning on doing anyways but it’s still nice to get confirmation that my choice is a good one from a walnut;). Once the walnuts were all burnt or sunk we started the gift exchange, the idea was to have it be sort of like a secret Santa but a gift that’s suitable for everyone, and then to assign each gift a number and then everyone picks a number from the hat and is given a gift. Overall it worked well, I got a little notebook that has cute owls on it so yay? It was super fun though becassue at the same time as the gift exchange we were also eating Christmas sweets. Some of it was czech and some of it was also from various home countries, but it was all delicious. After all the gifts had been exchanged and the food all eaten, well almost all there was too much to eat so there was some leftovers, we all headed to bed. The next morning, on Sunday, everyone headed home on the train or on a bus and I headed by tram back home. Overall it was a much nicer trip than a train, for that reason I’m glad the meeting was in Prague instead of some other city. The whole meeting was amazing and I had a wonderful time talking with everyone! My class’s Christmas partyThe Friday before the Christmas break started we had our class Christmas party, it was really fun and I had a great time with my class. On that Friday school started at 8:45 instead of the normal 8:00, but did I know that nooooo. So I showed up to a completely empty school and I kinda panicked and then I texted my friend who let me know that school was starting later that day, I then checked the school website for my schedule and found out that if I had been smart the night before I would have checked it and found out that it was starting later. So that was a great start to the day, luckily the rest of the day was much better, and my friends and I had a good laugh about me showing up early once school had actually started. In class we played a bunch of games and just overall hung out and talked. A bunch of people brought assortments of cukrovi(read my previous Christmas posts if you don’t know what those are) and I got to try a bunch of different types. They were all really yummy. After a while we did the gift exchange and that was really fun. Here in the Czech Republic it’s a bit different because here you buy gifts for all of your friend group(for me that was every girl in my class) instead of just your best friends like in Canada. I like both ways of doing things but I have to say that one is much easier than the other on my wallet. After the gift exchange we all had lunch and then walked through Prague to a cafe where we had hot chocolate together. I had such a great day with my classmates and I made many great memories. I don’t have any photos of the class party but I do have one of the crishtmas tree, sorry there’s not more. So that’s everything for this post! I hope you enjoyed it, if you have any questions feel free to leave a comment down below, I’ll do my best to answer it quickly.
i hope you enjoyed this post and check back in the next couple of weeks for another one! Bye for now, -Emma:) Wow! Another really late post from me! This is getting to be a trend, well I guess it's no surprise for anyone who knows me, I sure do procrastinate a lot. So anyways, this post is about my Christmas in the Czech Republic, the title "Vánoce v české republice" means "Christmas in the Czech Republic". At first I was a bit nervous for Christmas, everyone told me that it would be the time that I get the most homesick, so I wasn’t looking forward to that, but there was so much to look forward to, baking with my family, decorating, going into the forest to find a tree(now it wasn't the tree for my family, but it was still fun to help pick it out), the Christmas markets and everything else. I'm going to be seperating this post into two seperate parts, one for before Christmas, all the prep, and some of the traditions and the second being the actual Christmas day and what I did then as well as the traditions of the day. Christmas preperations.Christmas in Czechia is really special, they bake amazing sweets, have great Christmas markets and decorate their trees really nicely. Around the start of December families start baking gingerbread people, to decorate as the members of the family and different "cukrovi". Cukrovi are the different little cookies that are made for the time around Christmas, each family has their favourite type and they bake up to six or seven different types a year, however some of my exchange friends had families who baked over 10 different types!. That's a lot of baking!! In my family we made vanilkove rohlicky and these chocolate coconut ones, and then my host grandma made about six others. My favourites were the vanilkove rohlicky, the ones with some jam or nutela between two cookies, these little chocolate ones and of course good old fashioned gingerbread. In my previous post I mentioned that I made and decorated gingerbread with my family, and then with my sister I made vanilkove rohlicky. The cookies are meant to be eaten from the 24th until... well, until they're all done, so for us it took while because there were so many(but I wasn't complaining AT ALL). We decorated our tree with our gingerbread families, my family had all of them plus some extended family, and then I made my Canadian family too. They also hang these little gummie candies on the tree as well as chocolate ball. At the start of December we also started decorating everything for Christmas, the advent calendar was put up and Klára and I made two wreaths, one was for the door, and the other was for the table. On the one for the table there were four candles, and every advent Sunday a candle was lit. I’m not exactly sure what the advent candles or the advent Sunday’s are meant to symbolize, but it’s still a really nice tradition(and one that I’ll have to do more research on;). On about the 10th of December the Christmas markets start getting set up, they're so amazing and I just love the feeling of festivity thats all around them. There were lots, the largest being Old Town square, I only visited that one once because it was super super busy. One of my favourites was the one at Namesti Miru as well as the one at Namesti Republiky. At the markets you can buy traditional mulled wine(Svarak) as well as honey wine and Christmas Punch. There were also a variety of things that would make good presents, scarves, gloves, paintings, christmas ornaments, and many other things, there were also many types of food, like sausages, and of course trdelnik. Another really traditional thing that Czech people do before Christmas is they watch fairy tales, these fairy tales many people watched when they were children and they’re always aired in the weeks leading up to Christmas. The most famous one is “Tři oříšky pro Popelku” which is the Czech version of Cinderella. Overall the preparations before Christmas in Czechia are amazing. Below you’ll see photos of the time leading up to Christmas, I have some photos of the hristmas market there, making cookies, decorating cookies, the final products of the cookies(there may be a trend to this post;) and photos of me and my mom and sister at the Christmas market in Annaberg, Germany as well as me, my sister and my sister’s friend at another Christmas market in Germany, but I forget exactly where, it was a ten minute drive though, also there are Christmas markets in Prague, the one in Vaclavske Namesti and the one Namesti Miru. Christmas Day.mIn the Czech Republic they do all their celebrations on the 24th, and the 25th is just treated as a day of rest. All in all I think thats what made me the most homesick, the timing. I was fine on the 24th but on the 25th I knew that my whole family was celebrating and I wasn't there. But less sad stuff, lets get right to it. On Christmas Eve Day there is a tradition where you can't eat until Christmas Dinner, if you sucseed and you don't eat you get to see the Golden Pig. I'm not exactly sure where this tradition comes from but I'm very glad that my family didn't do it, they just said we can't eat meat unil the Christmas meal. We spent Christmas morning relaxing, until lunch and then we had this dish called kuba and Vanocka, Christmas bread. I'm not exactly sure what kuba is, I thinks its made of mushrooms and maybe lentils?? Whatever it is, I'm happy I had the experine of trying it but I don't think I'll ever have it again unless if I'm in Czechia for Christmas again. The Vanocka was really good, the bread it's self is very sweet and fluffy and there are shaved almonds on the top. Vanocka looks really neat because it is braided, and then placed on top of each other, I'm not quite sure how to explain it but it makes it rather dificult to make. After lunch we tried to do the “fortune telling” tradition of dropping melted led into cold water and then the shape of t tells us how are year will be. It was rest but the canldle that we were using wasn’t very hotbso we decided to do t at my host grandparents house. Side note: I got one of these sets for Christmas as a joint gift from some of my classmates so it’s definitely something I’ll be doing at home, even though the accuracy of the fortune telling is debatable. At around three we went over to my host grandparents house in Carlsbad. My host grandparents are so kind, I loved spending time with them. When we got there I helped prepare the carp with my host grandma and my sister, Klara. It was fun because I was talking with my host grandma and we managed to communicate even though she speaks very little english, and I speak very little czech. A traditional Czech Christmas meal is a lentil soup, so that we'll get money in the coming year(I guess lentils look like money?), carp, and potato salad. The carp was okay I loved the potato salad, even though it was very different than what I was expecting. After dinner we sang carols all together and I misponounced every single word but it was still so fun. We also played darts, which I discovered, with no surprise, that I am TERRIBLE at. It was very very funny though, and I still had a great time. After darts it was time for presents, I got really good presents and I'm so thankful to my host family as well as my family in Canada for sending me them. The present that takes the cake is a pillow with a photo of me and my host family, I love it so much and it will definitly be in my room in Canada. I think that's all for my Christmas post, thanks so much for taking the time to read this and I hope you enjoy the photos down below. The photos below are of Christmas Day. Thank you so much for taking the time to read this update, I’m really sorry it’s so late, I got caught up with life here and also procrastination(okayyyyy mostly procrastination). Hopefully I’ll have a few more updates in the coming weeks about the Christmas rotary meeting(okay that’s ones reeeeaaaallly late), the winter rotary meeting and an appreciation post for my previous family(the one you see in all these photos), but like the last times where I’ve tried to set a goal for myself in terms of posting here it hasn’t really worked out, sooooooo maybe don’t get your hopes up.
Anyways, thank you once again, and check back here in a months time and you may be surprised with another oost(or you might not, I’m going to keep you guessing;). Bye for now, Emma I can not believe that I’ve been here for just under four months!! It feels like it's flown by so quickly, I can only imagin that the rest of my year away will pass just as quickly, if not quicker. I didn't do an update for my two month mark because not much had happend, but a LOT has happend for me this past month.
I've been hanging out a lot with Mckayla, she's from Penticton and we've gotten really close. I really like spending time with her and the other exchage students. I have started having Czech lessons twice a week, and I think that they have helped, but I'm not really sure. One thing I am sure of is I've started to understand a bit more when people are talking with each other. I think this will help me a lot because I'll be able to start recognizing more words and overall learning more, quicker. My class is with a bunch of other exchage students in Prague, we are mostly from Rotary, but there are a few from AFS, as well as from a program run within the school where I have my lessons. One thing that I'm really struggling with(apart from the speaking part) are the cases. The Czech language has a few cases that I need to memorise and I'm finding that quite challenging. After Czech classes those of us that are free usually spend time together, at a cafe or just walking around, lately it has been a bit too chilly to walk without a warm place to get to, but some Christmas markets have opened so I can't wait to visit more of those. One of my friends, Madelyn, from the US visited Prague and we got to go to a Christmas market together, it was a blast, the whole Christmas spirit here is just amazing. Over autumn break I stayed at the cabin of another one of the host families in my club, I was in Staré Krečany. It’s a small town near Rumbourg, which is in the north of the Czech Republic, and right on the border of Germany. I had an amazing time, I got to go on a few hikes and also did some work stacking newly chopped wood to dry for next year’s winter. Seeing as we were so close to Germany we went there to pick up our groceries because it’s about the same price, but apparently better quality and better selection. I had an amazing time and I’m so thankful for the oppertunity. At school I did a presentation on the Canadian school system for my french class, I think it went well, but I believe my teacher underestimated how in-depth I would go, but in my defence, when asked how much I should include she said as much as you can... Soooooo. That being said I probably should have asked her how long she wanted it to be. Still a good experience and a bit of a funny story. The biggest thing that has happend over the past two months is that I moved host families. I moved host families on the 8th of November and I'm really happy here. I have a older brother named Ondrej, and a younger sister named Klara. Klara and I have gotten really close, we read the same books, we both like Hamilton and we both love baking. So lots in common. Another thing in common is their whole family spent three months living in Canada last year, the lived in North Vancouver, it was really fun to show them some of the pictures I have of Vancouver and of Tofino(they haven’t visited Victoria, but they spent time in Nanaimo as well as Tofino), and then seeing basically the same photos from last year when they were there. I am so happy I moved when I did, even though it was a bit early. The first weekend i was with my new family I went with my host mom and my host sister to a hotel to the south east of Prague to celebrate Saint Martins day. Its a tradition to eat goose, and the goose there was really good. The hotel we were at was having some sort of celebration for St Martin’s day, so there was a party one evening with most of the people staying st the hotel. While I was there I got to meet a bunch of my new host family’s family friends, it was so nice to meet them all. Recently we’ve started preparing for Christmas, we made three kilos of gingerbread and decorated two wreaths, one for the door and one as a centrepiece for the table, the gingerbread took us three hours to cut out, so we spent the whole evening cutting out gingerbread. One of their traditions is to watch Mama Mia when they’re doing the gingerbread, it was a blast, we all sang and danced along to the music and I can honestly say that it was one of the best days I’ve had so far. So far I’ve been here for almost a month and I’m really loving it. I am so so happy that I was able to move and I’m so grateful to rotary for helping me. My favourite experiences from these past three months have been getting to know my new host family and spending time with friends, below you can see some photos, they may not all be in chronological order, sorry, but I hope you enjoy them anyways. As always thanks so much for reading and I hope you enjoyed it :) -Emma Hi everyone! sorry for taking so long for this post, ive been busy and ive also been putting it off, just because I'm a bit lazy. In this post I'll be writing about two weekends that I spend out of Prague. The first weekend was from the 27th of September to the 30th. In the Czech Republic they had a statutory holiday on the 28th, so I only missed one day of school.That weekend I went to southern Moravia, it's a region south of Brno which is known for its ideal wine growing conditions. The next weekend(October 6th to 7th) I visited the cottage of one of the rotarians in my club, it's near Karlovy Vary(Carlsbad), right next to a small town called Bozi Dar. South MoraviaDay 1 On thursday I left in the middle of the day for Brno, with Ludvik, a local rotarian and his father, in Brno we picked up his daughter, Brno looks like a really nice city and I hope that I'll be able to visit it while I'm here. After we picked up his daughter we drove to a wine cellary place for a wine festival. It was very interesting to learn about how the wine was made. The place we were at used the modern way of making wine, and was pretty small. Day 2 today we visited an old windmill and learnt about the geology of the area. this region of maroavia is called the "Moravian Karst" and it has really cool rocks, as well as the second longest cave system in Czechia(I think). After the windmill we went on a bit of a hike in the forest. It was amazing, and it was the first time I had gone on a hike for over a month! That's got to be a reccord for me(albeit a bit of a sad one)! After the hike we went to a really nice church, and then on to another cave. This one however was special because it was used by the millitary in the past. It was so interesting to learn about the history there. There were beds inside the cave, and they could live there, unassisted(but probably very uncomforable) for two weeks. They also had a whole intellegence station there, for communicating with planes as well as millitary units. How they disguised it so as not to draw suspicion from satelite images was they made a volley ball court and a pool along with some(unused) bungalows and said it was a place for tourists. Day 3 On the 29th we visited another wine cellar, though this one I think is one of the biggest ones in South Moravia, the tunnels were made big enough that a horse with a rider on it could ride in them. The cellars were constructed 1230, when the Kinghts of Templar arrived. They built the cellars as well as stronghold. Walking through those tunnels was so cool, and it has the second biggest(in use) wine barrel in the Czech Republic. After that we went on a walk up to the top of a hill were there was a lookout tower, all around were feilds of grapes, it was very pretty. Once we got back to the town at the bottom of the hill we had lunch and then went on to the town that had our hotel. Once we had put all our things in the rooms we went on another hike to the top of a hill, at the top there were castle ruins and a beautiful view Day 4 Today was my last day in south moravia and I was quite sad to go, the scenery is very pretty and learning about wine was very interesting. We first went to the center of the town to see a few of the pumpkins that some of the children had made, they were placed in front of the church along with a scarecrow, they were already getting into the Halloween spirit. After that we started the drive home, but on the way we stopped at Lednice castle. The Lednice and Valtice area is cultural-natural landscape complex of 283.1 square kilometers. It is a registered UNESCO World heritage site. Both the Lednice and the Valtice castles were owned by the Lichtenstein family but were annexed in the second world war. After World War II the family made sevral legal attermpts to regain their property. But the area still remains the property of teh Czech republic. After that we headed back to Brno and then continued on back to Prague. Overall it was a great long weekend and I learnt lots about history and how wine is made. Karlovy Vary and Bozi DarThis weekend I visited Carlsbad(Karlovy Vary) and Bozi Dar. I arrived in the early afternoon of the 6th and had lunch and then went to explore Carlsbad with a niece of Ludvik(I was staying at his fathers cottage) and one of her friends. I was picked up by her mom and we drove to a small town and got some cake(yummmm) and then continued on to their appartment in Carlsbad where we ate our cake and talked a bit. I got to show the three of them on a map where in Canada I'm from as well as where my extended family lives and other places in Canada that are important to me. After cake we got to explore Carlsbad for the rest of the day. Carlsbad is known for it's many spas, as well as the mineral water you can drink. The water is said to have healing powers, but it tasted pretty bad so I'm not sure ;). Below you can see some pictures from that weekend, including the little hike I took. Hi! Welcome back! Wow! I’m posting when I said I would? Will wonders never cease? This blog post will be talking about the orientation that I just returned from, on Friday I didn’t go to school, and instead I traveled to a town called Kroměříž, it’s located between Zlín and Prostejov, and it’s along the Morava river. The train ride to get there was about 4 hours and it was so fun, I love the trains here, well, I loved the first train we were on. The second train was just for about ten minutes but it was a bit sketchy, we had to stand for the whole time and it wasn’t near as nice as the first one. Once we got to the train station in Kroměříž we took a bus to the school we were staying at. There were already many exchange students and I had an amazing time getting to know them. We got told out room numbers, I was on the fifth floor, and there were SO MANY STAIRS. But my roommates, were great so that makes up for all the stairs. Thinking back on it, the fact that there were so many stairs was probably a good thing, it helped me work off all the bread and potatoes that we ate there. This orientation was mostly presentation, as we had to reviewing of the rotary international rules and the RYE district 2240 rules, but I had a great time talking with my friends in between the sessions. On Saturday we had the chance to go on a walk around the town of Kroměříž, it’s such a lovely town. We also took so many pictures as a group, I don’t have all of them quite yet, but when I do I’ll add them when I do. Overall the weekend was so so great, and I had the best time meeting everyone and I can’t wait until Christmas time so I can see some of them again, the Czech and Slovak inbounds have different meetings, but I’ll be able to see a lot of my friends again. Below you’ll see some of the photos I have from the orientation meeting. Those are the photos, there aren’t any more of us as a group, and as I said before I’ll put them up here or on my photos page when I get them.
Also, I don’t know if you’ve checked it out yet, but I have a new page, it’s just my photo-barf page as I like to put it, I’ll be uploading photos of my time here, some will have captions and some won’t, but I’ll do my best to put a date them all. That’s all for today, I hope that you’ve enjoyed reading it, and remember, if you have any questions, feel free to pop a comment down below, or contact me on the “contact” page. Thanks for reading! -Emma Hey everyone!!
Just a few days ago I passed my one month mark here. There have been so many ups and downs, but overall it has been a good experience, despite the dificulties. Some highlights have been starting school and making many new czech friends, and also spending time with other exchange students that are living here in Prague. I hve continued to keep up my running and my longest run is now 9.88 kilometers, it took me about an hour, which I'm not to happy about, but I did it and I can work on getting a better time in the future. I'm not really sure what to write for this post, as not much has happend that I havent already written about. So I'll tell you about my plans going forward. Tomorrow I will be leaving Prague to go to my district orientation in Kromeriz, I am so so excited because I'll get to meet all of the exchagne students that in this district(all of Czechia and Slovakia) as well as see some of my friends again. I'm getting to Kromeriz by train, and I'm travelling with a Rotarian from my club as well as a few other students from Prague. It's about a four hour trip to get there and I am looking forward to spending that time talking with the other exchagne students with me as well as sleeping or reading(probably sleeping, boy oh boy do I need it). The orientation is just for the weekend, which I am a bit dissapointed about, I do wish it was longer. Another thing coming up is me travelling with my counsellor to her grandmother's house in the north of Czechia. I'm so happy that she has invited me and I really look forward to it. So thats about it, sorry for not having much, but when I come back from the orientation I'll make sure to write a blog post about that, and I will most likely be including many pictures. Goodbye for now! Hi everyone!! This is just a little update on my school and some other things. Mainly school though.
So last Monday I had my first day at Gymnazium Nad Štolou. Surprising my enough I wasn’t too nervous, not leading up to it at least. I started to get the nerve when I walked into my classroom, I think they all thought I was lost. So I just kinda sat down and tried to look like I wasn’t having a mini panick attack. After about a minute one of the girls sitting behind me introduced herself(in Czech) and I told her my name and that I was from Canada. I think they were all kind of interested, so it was nice that I got to meet many of the people in my class right away. How school works in Czechia is you have one class that you have all your subjects with, I really like it this way because then I can get to know everyone in my class better than if I had different people in all my classes. The first day of school was only about two hours, which was quite nice, and afterwards some girls invited me out with them!! I was so so happy and I had a great time. They made an effort to include me in the conversation the whole time, but sometimes it was nice to just be a part of a group, even though I didn’t understand anything. On Wednesday I got the chance to hang out with another Canadian, who’s also from BC. We had a great time and I really enjoyed her company, it was nice to have someone around that reminded me of home. Over the week I introduced myself to my teachers, what I’m doing in many of the classes, is working on czech, other classwork or homework. This is because I have a very limited grasp of czech and therefore can’t understand many of the lessons. My favourite lessons are French and English, it’s great to be able to understand stuff, and to be able to participate. I’ve also learnt some new words through these classes as we’ve been givin some work sheets that have both the French(or English) and then the Czech beside it. So far I am very happy with my school, even though some of my classes are a bit boring as I don’t have much to do(I didn’t have any assigned homework this past week). I’m the free blocks I have I’ve been spending them in the library, I really like it because it’s very quiet. I was looking through their book selection and I found many Terry Pratchet books as well as the Rangers apprentice and Harry Potter series’s. I’m excited to read those once I have a better vocabulary. Now on to a different topic. There isint much else, but jybhost sister has been quite sick this past week and I’m really worried about her, so that’s been the bad part of the week. I’ve also sometimes found t dificult to communicate to my host mom, not just because of the language barrier, but sometimes even when I treanslate the question she doesn’t answer it, so I don’t really understand or like that. But overall it’s been a fantastic week, and I’m ready for school again tomorrow. Bye for now! -Emma Wow. I’ve been here over a week. I’m glad I arrived on a weekend, because that meant that I had two days to spend with my host mom, visiting different places in Prague. So the first day i walked around Zličín a bit, it’s a lovely area, but quite close to two major highways. There are so many beautiful houses in Zličín, I’m looking forward to exploring it more. The picture below is of a pond near the center of Zličín The second day I was here my host mom and I went into the Center of Prague and walked around a lot. We went to the old town, old town square, Prague castle, Charles bridge and Wenceslas square(not necessarily in that order though). The images down below are from all these places. There was also an audiovisual exhibit at a concert hall(I think) that had Bedřich Smetana’s Vltava put to a bunch of video clips of The area around Prague and around the river. It was so so beautiful, I love that piece of music so much and I can’t wait until I can go hiking here. I also had my first rotary meeting on Wednesday, it was so so fun, everyone that I’ve met so far seems really nice. It’s a rather small club, with only about 14 members. There will be two other inbound exchange students in the same club as me.
Another cool experience is that I got to go to a czech grocery store, everything is so different, it was really cool. Over all I’ve had a pretty good first week, I did go running a few times so that was really fun. Thanks for checking this blog out! I hope you enjoyed reading this, comment down below if you have any questions! Ahoj everyone!! It’s almost a week that I’ve been here in Prague! Wow! It’s been a lot to take in, there are so many new and exciting things here! Sorry for not posting this sooner, I’ve been super busy this week. So let’s start with my flight here, it was pretty uneventful, up until I got to Frankfurt. My flight in had run a bit late, so I had less than an hour to clear customes, which didn’t take long at all, especially considering the very large line. But after customes I basically just ran through the airport, I had no time to even catch my breath. When I finally got to my gate everyone had been boarded, but the bus to take us all to the plane was still there(thank goodness), when I got in I met a fellow exchange student. It was really nice to talk to him, and, of course, catch my breath. The flight from Frankfurt to Prague was so pretty, I had a window seat so I could see all the fields and the beautiful red rooves as we descended. When we landed I got off the flight and I walked to the baggage claim area with the two other exchange students that were on my flight. After the baggage claim we went out to meet our families, I was met by my host mom, host sister, counselor, a rotex student(former exchanger), and the president of my host club. It was amazing seeing them all for the first time, I’m really looking forward to spending the year here. Overall it was a good travel day(minus the running) and I loved meeting my new host family. I’ll be writing another post in the next couple of days about what I’ve done in Prague so far. Thanks so much for taking he time to read my blog, it means a lot to me.
Na shledanou! -Emma Johnson |
AuthorHi! I'm Emma, I will be going on a yearlong exchange to the Czech Republic and I'm using this blog to catalogue my experiences during my exchange. Archives
January 2019
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