We're here!

We finally arrived in Prague after nearly 20 hours of traveling.  Luckily, Czech Tech has a great international student club, and each international student is assigned a buddy to help us figure out how to do things and translate for us.  When we arrived, our buddies brought us back from the airport, and we spent the evening filling out paperwork, seeing a little of the campus, getting our metro passes, and running to Tesco for necessities.  I apologize for not posting sooner, but we still don't really have internet access.  We will hopefully be up and running by Tuesday... 

On Saturday, we were so jetlagged we accidentally slept through half of the day.  We spent the afternoon getting more familiar with the metro and navigating the city.  However, we still didn't get to see all the sights we were expecting to see.  On Saturday night, a Czech student (who was an exchange student at K-State last year) and his friend showed us around the city a little and took us to a few pubs.  It really is true that the Czechs love their beer.  They were all downing liter after liter.  Some guys drank 4 liters.  That's like a gallon of beer!  At the end of the night, we finally got to see the famous Old Town Square, which was absolutely gorgeous.

Today, we finally got to do a few more "touristy" things.  We went back to Old Town a couple times and walked around in the daylight.  The city really is as beautiful as everyone says.  All of the buildings are in such good condition, and they are so eclectic.  I can't wait to go back and actually learn about what I'm seeing.  We should be taking a tour of the city with ISC (International Student Club) on Wednesday, so we decided to postpone any organized tours this weekend.  We also had our first traditional Czech meal tonight!  (So far, we had eaten at what I think was supposed to be an Italian restaurant--we had pizza--and a greasy little Chinese place which is very close to the dorms.)  I had traditional Czech potato soup (which was served with a fried potato cake) and some smoked pork (which was very pink, looked like ham, and tasted pretty much like a hot dog) served with mustard and horseradish.  It was actually pretty good, and I'd like to try some of their other popular dishes.  

We also made our first trip to the grocery store (we have a shared kitchen in our rooms) which was interesting trying to figure out what everything was.  We didn't get too much food because you have to carry everything back with you, and you also have to buy (or bring your own) bag to carry your purchases home with you (this is true of most stores except Tesco).  

Tomorrow begins our orientation week, so it should be a day full of meeting other international students!