So now it has been a month since I have lived here, and more than ever I feel like I truly am a part of Prague. I no longer double and triple check before I get on the metro to be sure I am headed the correct way or am on the right tram. Since school is in full mode, I feel sometimes like I am back at Emory, going through the routine of classes, a quick break for lunch and then a class again; only thing is that when I leave class around 2 p.m., I walk home along the Vltava with the Prague Castle in sight and never head up going directly home, but to a café or a museum instead, maybe a restaurant or a pub.

Although I really dislike waking up for my 9 a.m. classes every other day, my favorite part of living abroad is just people watching and strolling the streets aimlessly, looking at anything and everything, soaking all of it in. My walk and tram ride to class is right at the start of the business day, so I am crammed in along with businessmen and women, children on their way to school, and people just out doing their errands. No matter how crowded the tram is, morning, noon, or night, they are usually dead silent. Before I left, I heard a lot about how communism still seems to exist sometimes in the people in Prague, and it is true in their quietness and the generally grave and somber feeling sometimes present. For some, it might be disheartening to study in a place where the older generation is not the most friendly, but for most of us, we find it really exciting and interesting to be living among people who were under complete communism just 16 years ago. Studying them and these experiences is the point of studying abroad.

Heading to the grocery store to pick up some food for the flat doesn’t seem mundane when I am living here either. There is an enormous westernized mall just across the river from my flat with a great grocery store. No matter what time of day I go, it is always packed and even though there are 40 cashiers almost every minute of the day, each has a line 4 people deep. (Many people joke about the extreme lack of luxury foods and even staples like fruits during communism and that this feeds into the excess today, but I’m still investigating that). The grocery store puts you to work as well. No one is there to put the groceries in a bag for you, that is your job. No matter how much stuff you have or how long the line is, you are expected to pack everything up, get your cash out, and be ready all within about 30 seconds. I can honestly say I have held up the line about half of my shopping experience thus far, as I’ve attempted to both take the groceries out of the cart with my left hand and pack them into bags with my right.

In the states, my school doesn’t have much of a café culture. For the most part, students do work where they live or at the library, and not overly often in the coffee shops in the area. Here, however, the café culture dominates. It makes it nice that I have neither television nor internet in my flat, so we don’t sit around doing nothing often, if even at all. If I have a spare hour before we are heading out to dinner or in between classes, I can walk a block or two and find a great café, and a different one each time. A part of me still wants to find a little place that I can call “my café,” but there are just so many in every part of the city that it would be a shame to miss out on any of them. No one rushes you out of them either, as I’ve been here for a while catching up on some work and doing some typing; I just wish more of them had Wi-Fi, as that is less common to find in a good, relaxing café.

I love that my days here never seem to stop. I head off to class in the morning, hang around the school for an hour or so in between classes, and head back to the area where I live around 2 p.m. I usually just drop my bag and books off at my flat and head out to a museum (I went to the Czech Cubist Museum the other day), then to a café or do some rock climbing (more information to come), home for a quick shower, and then out to dinner. Dinner usually leads into drinks and drinks into going out and that’s the day. There is a ‘study’ element to the study abroad, as I get my work done and do the readings, but that can usually be done in between classes or at a café in the afternoon. However, when I am sitting in Old Town Square or at a pub in New Town doing work, even a little denser reading doesn’t seem all that bad at all.

At Emory, I do a lot of cooking simply because heading out to dinner each night takes way too long and it is nice to just come home from class to relax on the couch. Here, however, I have been going out for lunch and dinner everyday. For one, the dollar soars here, and great lunch specials, as each and every restaurant has them, cost only $4 or $5, at most, and that usually includes a beer, a big piece of chicken, some rice or fries, and some vegetables. Dinners in the states, especially Atlanta and Chicago, that would cost upwards of $35 or $40 no question, cost maybe $14 or $15 here, and that is if we are going out to a nice place. Otherwise, most dinners are more often between $8 and $10 and that is with a few beers or a bottle of wine. (I swear I am not an alcoholic as I include beer and wine with each meal, but drinking is definitely a staple of life here and a beer at lunch, in between work or class is part of the lifestyle. Just ask my Alternative Culture professor who instructed us that 1 liter of Czech beer is recommended as a standard for men daily, 0.7 liters for women, and has as many vitamins and nutrients as some daily over-the-counter vitamins).

For me, there is not much more important than going out for really long dinner with friends, talking for hours, and having a great time. Here, we can do that with no problem and enjoy great food at a different restaurant every night. I’m going to interrupt myself right now because I was just served the craziest drink I think I have ever had. Like I said, right now I am at a café and I just ordered a cokolada (hot chocolate). It definitely doesn’t have the size of American drinks, served in a tiny coffee mug, but as I just tried to sip it, nothing happened, the drink just kind of sat in the cup. I moved the mile high whipped cream on top, dug my spoon in the hot chocolate, and when I took the spoon out, dark melted chocolate just slowly dripped down.

Apparently, they take hot chocolate literally here, as this is no Nesquick drink, but just a full Czech chocolate bar melted and placed into a cup. I’m eating it more like ice cream than anything else. I can’t complain though, it is good.

Well, now that I’ve headed off on that tangent, I think I’ll go enjoy the drink and do a little reading and Czech language work. Have fun and enjoy.