Things I Have Come to Notice About Prague:

1. Everything here is absolutely beautiful.  The architeture is spectacular and all of the buildings are unique and colored.  It's funny because you will see a spectacular building and realize that the bottom floor is like, a convenience store.  There are also carvings and statues all over the buildings. 

2. My Czech Professor is fantastic. Her name is Zdenka and she is a native Czech, but used to teach Czech as a college in Ohio on a Fullbright so she speaks very good English.  We have had intensive Czech for 4 hours a day for the past 5 days, and on the last day instead of having class we went to the grocery store so we could ask her questions abou all of the different Czech foods and try and figure out what things were.  Then she took us to a cafe that used to be frequented by Vaclav Havel (the ex-president) and we sat and drank coffee and talked about all things Czech.  It was great.

3. The Czech language is hard.  There are no two ways about it.  The words have way fewer vowels on the whole than English words, and are just downright confusing to attempt to pronounce.  For example:
Strč prst skrz krk. Okay, so I am not really going to need to tell people to 'Stick a Finger Through Your Throat' all that often, but stil.... its a little ridiculous.  I have a Czech test tomorrow and I have no idea how I am going to memorize all of these crazy words!   

4. People do not clean up after thier dogs.  The dogs just go to the bathroom all over the sidewalks, hence there is dog shit everywhere.  You always have to watch where you are walking... Also, dogs are strangely well behaved here.  They don't wear leashes and I rarely see them stray from the sides of their owners... Jess and Nick, you should come and learn how the Czech people discipline their dogs.  Harper would be the best behaved dog in America.

5. The tram system here is fantastic.  I have only had to wait more than 10 minutes for a tram once, which is super convenient.  They also don't shut down for the night like busses do in DC.  There are night trams (numbered in the 50s) that run every 30 minutes from 12am to 5am when the day trams pick back up.  We have 4 or 5 night trams that stop by our apartment, so we have never really  had to wait long for one of those either.  DC should take note!

6. Almost everyone under the age of 50 here speaks some level of English.  This is great when you are trying to ask for directions or order in a restaurant, but also kind of frustrating when you want to try and bumble through an interaction with your limited Czech and they automatically switch over to English...

7. It is way easier than I though it would be to keep vegetarian here.  Every restaurant has vegetarian options, which is nice.  We also found a fantastic vegetarian restaurant off of Old Town Square which will definitely be my new favorite place to eat.  Anywhere when I can order guacamole is allright with me!

8. You need to bring your own shopping bag with you to every store.  The American stores around here will give you bags, but no one else will.  Especially at grocery stores, not having your own bag creates issues.  The cashirs just expect you to have one, and don't take kindly when you try to buy one/get confused and take too long to bag up your groceries.  Luckily, Jess gave me a little shopping bag that rolls up as a present which I have taken to carrying around with me everywhere, so it hasn't really been an issue for me yet!

9. American coffee here is a completely non-existant concept.  You can only order espresso or cappucinos in shops here.  If you try to order American coffee, you will end up with an Americano.  Not the same thing.  Also, coffee comes only in really small cups (like 6oz or so).  For someone who loves coffee as much as me, that my be an issue. 

10. You can't get American coffee, but you can get KFC.  It will forever amaze me that the two restaurants that foreigners have chosen to export from America are KFC and McDonalds. They are everywhere here!  Also everywhere are Chinese restaurants and Italian restaurants/pizza places.  I am definitely not complaining about those though!

11. Most of my internet has switched over the Czech and I can't figure out how to get it back to English... All of the ads on Facebook, all of google, and all of the buttons on blogspot have all switched over.  Google has also started to place results in Czech above results in English.  I really need to figure out how to fix this...

Classes start tomorrow, and I am actually pretty excited about them.  I have 3 classes tomorrow, one of which is the Czech class that I have a test in.  I don't know how that is going to go, but I am excited to have my first Czech Republic in Transition class and my Nationalism class.  Those are two of the classes that I have been looking forward to most, so we'll see how they go!

P.S. pictures soon to follow on Facebook!