Prague

We went to Prague this weekend.

Daniel Wille, an old friend from work at OAT came to visit, and for the weekend, we took off to Prague. We rented a car and navigation system, and took our leave from Berlin on a bright Thursday morning.

I don't like to be rushed on trips, but I also don't like to not have anything to do. For this reason, I told Daniel we were going "Southeast." Our trip itinerary included Dresden, Prague, Brno, Bratislava, and Vienna. However, I was fully aware that we probably wouldn't make it past Prague.

So we headed toward Dresden. I have driven out of Berlin a couple of times, so as Jordan and Daniel tried to figure out the GPS system, I just drove toward the Autobahn. When Jordan announced that they had figured it out and had us going towards Dresden, I looked at the display and was disappointed to see that we appeared to be driving through fields. The system was evidently running on an outdated map.

Unfortunately, the GPS system was not plugged in, and by the time I noticed that the system was displaying a "low battery" message, it had entered the state known as the "Low Battery Screen of Death" state, and could not be coaxed to return to normal function, unchanged by attempts to plug in the power or restart the system. Eventually, we decided to leave it unplugged until it ran completely out of batteries, then we would restart it again. Unfortunately, this meant that until we had determined that the batteries were completely dead, we would be relying on the one-page map showing all European highways, road signs (I could read the German ones, but my Czech isn't too good), and my manly inherent sense of direction (which isn't half-bad, if I do say so my self). As a result, it would be an overstatement to say we visited the Czech Republic on this trip because we were only in Prague, and on highways that were leading to and from Prague. Although there was that interesting detour an hour outside of Prague due to the closure of a stretch of freeway ("detour" is "objížďka" in Czech).

Daniel found Dresden to be very pretty, and I'd have to agree that it has a rather impressive collection of good ol' German-style building in a small area. We saw the sites (including the communist mural in front of which I met the communist from England two summers ago) and hiked up the Frauenkirche, which was very impressive.



Then, Jordan stated that he wouldn't mind being force-fed, and that it actually would be kindof pleasurable, so we headed to the Rick-Steeves-Recommended eating area which I somehow remembered from when I toured through Germany with my parents right after my mission. I didn't stop there with my parents. It was at this recommended eating street - which, as Rick predicted, offered a great view of the Frauenkirche at sunset - that I discovered that Rick is not a starving student. We spent the next 15 minutes trying to find a restaurant that had good food for under 15 euros.



And then we drove to Prague. I'd say we visited the Czech Republic, but I think that would be a bit of an overstatement because we were only in Prague and on roads that were heading to and from Prague. We didn't dare stray from the road for fear of never getting back for the performance of my church choir on Sunday.

We arrived in Prague. Unfortunately, the GPS wasn't working. We drove toward the center of the city and found a hotel. I went inside, asked for room rates and a map. We then drove around a little more, asked some people about parking, and discovered that there was a 20,000 Czech Frank fine for parking in spaces outlined in blue unless you had a residency parking permit.. Shoot.

As we drove around, a bit of unnecessary tension arose due to the fact that the GPS wasn't working combined with the fact that the map didn't show one-way streets on it and Jordan kept telling me to turn the wrong way down one-way streets and we kept ending up in dead ends. And we were all ready for some dinner and a nice bed.

We drove back an area of Prague that seemed to have an abundance of hotels, then scouted prices. Somehow, we stumbled upon the Brixon hotel, which offered a room for three for 45 euros/night, including breakfast and free parking for our car. It ended up being a great little hotel, and the slight malaise that had enshrouded our vacation was dispersed.

My only complaints about the hotel were that the garage was small (we spent a good 15 minutes trying to back-and-forth it out of the garage upon departure) and that the artwork in our room consisted of the back of a naked lady dragging a blanket.. But other than that, it was a great deal. Especially because it was close to the subway and we could park our car in a safe spot during the day, where no police officers could notice that we hadn't purchased the "vignette" required to drive in Prague.

Prague was beautiful. Honestly, it had one of the most impressive cathedral interiors I've been to in my life, and it had some good sights. I thought the castle was well-maintained, and although the famous Charles Bridge was under construction, we were able to see our fair share of street peddlers.



On one of our walks across the bridge, we saw one bum approach another bum who was begging. In Prague, the bums prostrate themselves on their knees with their face to the ground, hands holding a cup in front of them. I thought the bums might be hiding their faces out of shame, or were trying to conserve warmth, but I discovered that it is humanly possible to drink yourself into such a plastered state that you can sleep in this position. Or at least this guy appeared to be sleeping. Maybe he was just passed out. At any rate, when the one bum came up to the other bum and shook his shoulder, the bum on the ground did not respond. The standing bum shook his shoulder some more. "Vstávej zadek! Vstávej zadek!" The bum on the ground looked up with a very annoyed look on his dirty face, said something, and put his head back down.



Then, something funny happened. The bum on the ground lost his entire day's earnings as the standing bum reached into his cup and cleaned him out. I had to laugh.

After two days in Prague, we were tired. My camera card was full, my feet hurt, and my appetite for random St. Wenceslaus trivia had been filled.

So we headed back. We got the car out of the garage (no small feat) and headed down the maze of one-way streets and dead ends toward Germany. We had entered Berlin into our GPS system, but the GPS system's route to Germany was "Please turn around when possible" ad infinitum. Finally, we zoomed out on the GPS's map, and tried to follow roads that led us to roads that looked like they were going west. Finally, we could follow the signs to Dresden, and made it home safely.

In all, it was a very fun and fulfilling adventure.

The top three things I will remember from Prague are:

1. Prague has really really deep subway stations. I remember jumping on an escalator and realizing that it was going like twice as fast as a regular one. It was almost dizzying as we rode the escalator for what seemed to be an entire minute to the next level.


2. People don't speak English. But the ones that do (hotel workers, Charles Bridge peddlers, etc) thought that Daniel, Jordan and I came from Denmark or Sweden. Hm.


3. Prague was very touristy. We were only there in the shoulder season, and there were already crowds of people. With cameras. Oh, and I discovered two things that make me cry: The business man in Prague taking pictures of the castle with his iphone (he'll get home with some nice 2MP pictures of Prague), and the tourist who goes overboard with three huge cameras with 50-foot lenses on each of them. I think the trick is to find the balance somewhere in between.

I also felt the same feelings as in Switzerland, that it looked a lot like German ruins of cities. I guess technically, the people in Prague were part of the German people, so that explained the similarities. And Prague had avoided most of the war, or at least survived it better than Dresden.



Anyway, Prague turned out to be a great trip, but I'm glad I'm home, and I'm buying insoles for my shoes before the next trip to London.

Teaching

I have very few memories from my elementary school experience. I don't think I'm alone in this aspect. I think that for a lot of people, the elementary school years are ones that are eagerly forgotten.

Jordan has been accepted to be a Teach for America teacher in Las Vegas, and as part of his training, he is listening to an audio book as part of his required preparation.

I think it's a novel, with different chapters coming out of different experiences the teacher has had with different children. The last chapter was about her observations of two students who had crossed the racial boundary in their friendship. During recess, the teacher would stand at the window and watch the social interactions of her students. She states that she could have written a psychology paper on the relationships she saw on the playground, but her experiences as a teacher have taught her to interpret the actions of the children differently.

As I listened, I was impressed at the teacher's desire for the success of her students. She would take special interest in the students who were lagging behind, inviting them to stay after for tutoring, and she would listen patiently to the child who would tell her facts about anacondas. To this teacher, every child was important.

I wonder how my teachers saw me. I was definitely not the class bully, and probably not the smartest kid in the class. I don't think I was too outspoken, but performed well on school assignments.

I wonder what my teachers saw in my future. I wonder if they saw me where I am now. In grade school, I probably underestimated the soothsaying capabilities of my teachers, but I don't think they would have predicted an extended stay in Berlin.

I guess this has just been an eyeopener for how much time and effort teachers put into preparing good lessons, and how much they care about each student individually. I really admire that.

Last Exam

Man. Had a great day yesterday. I got up and exercised, and did morning scripture study. Yay.. it's March, and I'm still keeping my New Year's resolution.

I started off the day with my very last exam for this semester. Unfortunately, it was at 9:00 in the morning about an hour away from my house. So I took off, and made it 10 minutes early, enough to cram through definitions of ultrametrics and coorthologs.

I entered the office of Herr Dr. Vingron one minute early, and sat down. He informed me that the other professor would be 10 minutes late, and that we could wait for him. I told him I didn't necessarily need his presence. "Ok.. because some students would want him to be here."

He started off by asking me what my favorite thing I had learned was. Unfortunately, I answered incorrectly, and in my attempt to impress Herr Dr. Vingron with a rather obscure topic that I had found interesting, I forgot the name of the algorithm.. "Oh, you mean Markov Chain Monte Carlo. That's completely different from Hidden Markov Models." Oops.

After my blunder, the other professor walked in, and started taking notes. Then I got really nervous.

I was able to field most of the questions well, except for a definition of consistency in phylogenetic tree creation techniques, in which I thought it was that as more sequences are added the precision increases, but instead, the length of the sequences increases the precision. Shoot.

At the end of the talk, he asked me if I knew how the German grade system worked. "Ones are good, five are bad." At least I got that question right. He said "I think you're about a 2 or a 3. Is that all right with you?" Honestly, I couldn't complain. I had studied about 3 hours for the test, and that was probably more than I had studied for the whole semester, aside from completing the homework every other week.

And then it was over. Herr Dr. Vingron asked how my research was going. I started explaining my recent work, and he stated, "Well, let me know if you come up with any good results." Thanks.

To relieve my stress, I took the Ubahn over the city center on my way home. I also stopped by my favorite shopping stores, and scored two scarves for two euros each. They will be good for next winter.

When I got home, I called up a friend who wanted to go to the Jewish Museum here. We met up, and she confided in me that she was hungry. So we walked in a direction that looked ghetto, looking for a cheap Döner. It's not hard to find ghetto areas, so we were quickly filled with some good döner. The only problem was that the enterprising owner tried to charge 50 cents for entry into the bathrooms... even for washing your hands.

On the way walking through the ghetto, we stumbled upon a place that cleans out the apartments of people who have passed away, and try to sell of the stuff. Of course, this place was especially picked over. But still good. I found a book on reading palms which looked interesting. I took it to the counter, and offered the guy 50 cents. He told me that the sign said that all the books were 1 to 2 euros. I offered 50 cents, plus teaching him about palm reading when I came back next time. He took the offer.

The Jewish museum was ok. I have already been to the museum 2 times, but never gotten all the way through it, so I agreed to go again. Unfortunately, my friend wanted to read every single word in every exhibit, and although I also learned a lot, we still had to rush through the second half before it closed. I think that the museum is really well-done. It does a good job of presenting the successes of the Jewish people in the German history, and showing that the constant persecution came because the Jewish people could read better than the others, were more educated, had tighter community ties, and could lend money.

They also had a cool exhibit on contrasts between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. One short film presented information on specifically Islam headwear. They claimed that the Quran mandates that a shawl is worn around the shoulders, and that some people have interpreted it to mean that it must be worn around the head too. I am betting that the film was made by a German.. probably not a Muslim. And probably not a Christian either.

After the museum, we met up with another friend at the Babylon theater to watch a heavily-advertised screening of Metropolis, a 1927 German silent film. I was disappointed when we had to pay an extra five euros for the live "orchestra." I was even more disappointed when the "orchestra" was welcomed onto the stage, and it was a lone man. A one-man orchestra, if you will.

But it wasn't so bad. For the first half (over an hour) I had to shift right and left to see around the guy in front of me with a nasty fro thing going on that basically blocked the view of anyone behind him. The second half I was able to watch in peace because I traded seats with a friend who had seen it like three times and written a report on it.

The one-man orchestra was actually pretty interesting. He started out on the piano, and then would start playing the flute with one hand, and accompaniment with the other hand. Then, he would play the flute as he walked over to the organ, and then he would play the organ.

And then, to top the evening off, I went over to a friend's house to pick up a travel book on Prague for our trip next weekend.

It was a good day.

And I don't have any more exams.

Switzerland

Went to Switzerland.

It was beautiful.

Jordan and I started our trip with a quick flight at an unearthly time, from Berlin Schoenefeld to the Europort airport in Basel. The airport was actually in France, so tick another country off on the "Countries Visited in 2010" list. We'll actually go back to France some other time, although it's not high on the priority because I've already been to Paris, Marseilles, Colmar, and a few other cities.



We guided ourselves around Basel for a couple of hours, and found it to be really pretty. It looked like classic German architecture, except it differed from anything I had seen in Germany because it didn't look like it had been through two world wars, and was really well-maintained. They also had really pretty colored shingling on the roofs with patterns made out of different-colored shingles.

Then, we met up with Jubi in Baden, who introduced us to rivella. He said it tasted like vinegar. However, I'd put this drink in my box of evidence that everything can taste decent with enough sugar and carbonation when drunken cold. It's evidently made from whey. Like "curds and whey". I guess it's kindof pee-colored, which is now fairly grotesque to me.. which is probably why they sell it in a dark-colored bottle.

After a quick look through Baden, Jubi took us to the Temple in Zollikofen. It was beautiful. Afterwards, we bought pizzas and ate them in the dorms near the temple. We also met up briefly with a girl who is studying in Berlin. It's a small world.



We headed home to Jubi's home on the other side of Switzerland. We drove through some very pretty mountains and tunnels, and finally arrived in Malix, and drove into his house. He had to open the garage door before he drove up the final part of his driveway, because if he stopped in front of the door, he couldn't get enough momentum to get into the garage. It was pretty steep.

The next morning, we got up and headed to Lenzerheide to go skiing. Jubi was very skeptical. It was overcast and snowing. He is more of a blue-skies-and-sunshine skier. I am a whatever-I-can-get skier.

Unfortunately, at the top of a run, we discovered that the snow was coming down pretty hard, which made it almost impossible to tell where the runs were.. it wasn't very fun for the first few hours. However, around noon, the storm blew over, the sun came out, and Jubi had his blue skies and sunshine. The storms had kept all but the most dedicated skiers off the slopes, and we had the whole resort practically to ourselves. It was great skiing. Although I definitely felt it in my legs.



After we were done, we headed to the Lenzerheide resort, and spent some time in the outdoor pool. I think it would have been able to stand a few degrees warmer, but the kids who were having snowball fights in the pool probably contributed to the lukewarm temperatures. Still, it was great to sit on these little metal chair things with bubbles coming up under them, breathing the mountain air, and watching the sun go down behind the alps. Of course, I had to dunk my head under every little while to thaw my hair which kept freezing. Literally.

That evening, we came home to a nice Raclette dinner hosted by Jubi's mom, who was about 5 feet tall. She would have probably been even smaller, but her size was maintained by having an overly large and generous heart. Raclette is a traditional Swiss dinner, made by roasting Raclette cheese on a special grill, then eating it on potatoes with onions, pickles, olives, and the like. She was also concerned about our health, and informed us that she had made a tea which was to be drunken with the Raclette, because if you drink water with the cheese, you will get klumpen or "clumps" in your stomach. For dessert, she brought out stracciatella ice cream with warm raspberry sauce. We took our dessert bowls upstairs, where we watched a desert movie called "Sahara" from 2005. After a day of skiing, it was nice to sit and relax while watching a movie that had a very nice anti-let-bacteria-take-over-the-world plot.

We then jumped into bed and would have fallen right to sleep, except that Jubi had decided to sleep in the same room as us. I think he did it because he wanted to pillow talk. Jordan went right to sleep, so I was left to try to keep myself away and stumble through confused conversation.

The next morning, we went to church in Chur, and performed a musical number in the Fast and Testimony meeting. I think all 30 people in attendance were pleased. After church, we made a brief detour through Lichtenstein, so we can also officially check Lichtenstein off the "Countries Visited in 2010" list, too.

On the way to Lichtenstein, we also drove through "Heididorf", which was where the book Heidi took place. Tourists could sleep in the Heidihotel, wake up to a Heidibreakfast, take a Heidihike and Heiditour, then go to the Heidimuseum. They could buy souvenirs at the Heidishop, so they could always remember their Heidimemories. According to Jubi, it was a really big tourist spot for Asians.

On Sunday night, we slept at the apartment of one of my old mission companions, Elder Bader. He just graduated from police school, and is now working as a highway patrolman and living with his girlfriend. It was a little weird to see him in his Gs at 4 the next morning as he saw us off to the airport for our trip home.

We realized that we hadn't gotten anything for the Weimanns, so we tried to do some shopping in the Duty Free Shopping Center in the airport, where we discovered that everything in the store was also sold in Germany at half of the price. Except then Jordan found these cat-food-looking bars that were dipped in chocolate and said "Basel" on the packaging.. Eleven franks. I was all about getting Toblerone at Edeka at home for a euro, and giving it to them, without disclosing the fact that we had gotten it at the grocery store across the street. Whatever.

All in all, Switzerland was very beautiful. Compared to Berlin, there is a lot of natural beauty. I have a couple of friends coming to visit me in Berlin, and I think I am going to focus a lot less on the architecture and natural beauty in Berlin, and try to expose them more to the culture that is here in Berlin. Because really, the Alps were so beautiful, as were the houses, nestled around lakes in the valleys, and they blow the natural beauty of Berlin out of the water. However, I'm not sure that the little towns can compete with the culture of Berlin.

So, now I'm back home. And I want to go back. If I don't make it before I go back to America, I'll definitely come back to Switzerland some other time.