Prague and Family

Last weekend I traveled via bus to Prague. It was not a comfortable journey, but it was inexpensive and definitely better than an airplane. Ideally we would have had movies playing, but there was something broken.... or something..... In any case, I got a lot of my combinatorics homework done on the ride. We arrived in Prague around midnight, and by 1:00 we still hadn't found our hostel even though we knew that it was somewhere in a radius of about 3 blocks from us. We called a cab which took us about 30 yards, but successfully got us to our lodging and our beds. In my defense, Prague's streets are not user-friendly. The longest straight line in the city is about a block, then the road curves or bends, or just plain ends. The streets are also cobblestone, so we were really obnoxious dragging our wheelie suitcases through these back roads, sounding as though a group of tap dancers were making their way down the streets in the dead of night.

Exploring Prague was very different from anything I'd seen so far. It reminded me of Disney World. Everything was beautiful and larger than life and expensive. The entire city catered toward the tourist industry. There was no authentic Czech culture, just cookie cutter souveneirs and people dressed in costume to make the atmosphere feel authentic. The view from the city is phenomenal, and the architecture is really grand, yet I felt that I could have gotten the same ambiance from a theme park in America. In fact, I heard more English than I do walking down the streets of my hometown.

However, the very good thing about the city is that I got to meet up with my mom and sister! We met at the famous Prague astronomical clock (which is very pretty, yet very anti-climactic). Some friends and I walked around the city with them and soaked up the "culture." My mom bought me a garnet ring. Garnet is huge in Prague. My ring is a very simple but pretty silver setting, and the stone looks black except when it catches the light, then it flashes bright red. It's amazing.

My favorite part about the city was, ironically enough, a church. It was not a tourist trap, rather it was merely a place of worship that had remained standing and un-rennovated. It was the most gothic structure I have ever seen, or even imagined. It had beautiful stain-glass windows, and statues, cherubs, and gargoyles, and paintings so old that they appeared black. There was a statue that my family found extremely moving. I placed pictures of it (and, in fact, the whole tripm in a different album called "Prague" on my picture website). The statue was part of a larger arrangement of statues featuring the typical Christian display of death. However, there was a lady who was positioned over a book, crying. It looked as though she simply couldn't hold her head up she was so torn with grief. I have never seen a statue portray such human feeling as this one did. On closer inspection, she even had stone tears. Aside from these fantastic sculptures and works of art spread throughout the church, there was a continual theme of triangles with eyes inside of them.... symbol of the Free-Masons. Say what you want about Dan Brown and his "conspiracy theories" and ability to write, but as an avid reader of Angels and Demons, I wanted to send a telegram to Dan Brown right then and there, saying, "You're right!" Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminati for a basic explanation of the conspiracy theory involing the freemasons and the Illuminati. The church reeked of history and emotion, and to make the experience even more chilling, the entire time we wandered the space, there was an organist practicing. The organ's pipes spanned a space of about 30 feet, and were almost twice as tall. My mom, as a former organist, hypothesized that there must be 5 or 6 keyboards the musician was using. The organ music made me feel as though I had stepped into some 5th dimension of The Phantom of the Opera, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and The Da Vinci Code. It was really fantastic.

We had beautiful weather, and it was very very very nice to hang out with my family. One of my friends told me that after meeting my mom and sister, I will never be a mystery to her again. True enough, we share a sense of humor that may not be similar to many peoples', but we enjoy each others' company and the laughter it brings. I traveled with them back to Budapest. I hope I was an okay tour guide; unfortunately the approach of midterm exams put a damper on my schedule of free time.

On that note, school is going very well. After doing this semester, I look at courses offered at Gustavus Adolphus, and instead of seeing the course number and title, and thinking, "Oh jeez, that looks so hard and boring," I recognize the concepts discussed and am really mad that I don't have time to take every class offered. Also, after this mathematics program, I will never be intimidated by an upper-level math class again.

Today is the first day of spring. I hope the weather is improving over there in the states! Check out my pictures at http://betsyjane.myphotoalbum.com.