The Week In Review

So, Ive been lazy/busy and havent posted in a while, oops, so this'll be a big one. This last week had been a good one. I feel much more comfortable in the city and with the people in the program. Last week was quite eventful. On wednesday our history class took a day trip to an old mining town called Kunta Hora. We wandered the city with our professor, this really cool old Czech guy who chain smokes and wears capri pants, who was an awesome guide. We saw lots of cathedrals (including the "bone cathedral," yes the whole church is covered in human bones) and went down into an old silver mine with this awesome old miner. Pretty solid trip. That night a few of us went up on the hill across the river with bottles of wine (or water in my case) to look out over the city at night. It was awesome, all the major monuments in the city are lit up by spotlights in chronological order (Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque etc.) and had a really fun time. The next night nine of us departed via train to Krakow. The first part of the ride was pretty fun, everyone just hanging out (again) nursing a bottle of wine (i indulged in some excellent eurocandy) and playing middle school games. Then came sleep . . . we were first interrupted by a dude telling us our car wasnt going to Krakow so we had to move. We ended up cramped in a car waiting for like an hour at the Polish border where our passports were checked twice. The rest of the night wasnt much better and we ended up in Krakow around 6 am (on about 90 minutes of sleep) and found a train out to the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau. It was quite an experience. It was incredibly tough to grasp the barbarism of the camp. Wed be outside on a beautiful day, birds chirping walking through the gas chambers . . . just trying to comprehend that 1.5 million people were killed on that ground took a while. After our tour we all sat on the steps between two gas chambers silent for a bout half and hour then walked back along the tracks, pretty intense to say the least. Three of the people who i was there with were Jewish, two had grandparents in Auschwitz. We left the camps, ate pierogi, then checked into our hostel and went to a pub and hung out for the rest of the night and talked. After a glorious night sleep we went to breakfast and took a golf cart tour of the city and saw the castle where amazing pellet guns with laser sights were procured for about 2 bucks (our hallway has indeed become a war zone, we registered our first casualty yesterday -- ankle, tragic), saw a movie to kill time after everthing closed and rode the train back to prague (during which i introduced the group to hotseat, a wonderful call if i do say so myself). After sleeping for the majority of sunday, five of us went to see the white stripes at this really small club close by. It was awesome, we were about ten feet from the stage at the beginning and they put on a great show. Monday was a day of catching up, on sleep, on talking to friends, family and (of course) a very significant other. Im starting to realize a couple of thing a) how much a miss people from school, courtney, karaba, ryd, the drews, annie and all the young life people b) how much those people know how to have fun as well as meaningful relationships, i am truly blessed. The evening of the fourth we took it upon ourselves to celebrate well, with outdoor beer pong and toasts to the first 19 American presidents. Today just more of the same, i miss you all very much.

."The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us; just as the roof of a sunhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes bright because the Son shines on it."

-C.S. Lewis