Hey everyone,

The other day we finally arrived in the Czech Republic!!! We flew out of Newark and had a 6 hour layover in England. In England we were able to leave to terminal and take a tour of a castle near by. Being my first time in the country I found it very, very interesting. I enjoyed meeting all the nice people with their unique accents, looking at the awesome architecture and freaking out about the cars driving on the ‘wrong’ side of the road. What I took away from our quick stay in England is because I fully understood the language I was able to appreciate the culture more. So in essence our similarities allowed me to better view our differences.

Once we arrived in the Czech Republic I was immediately struck by the ‘communist’ architecture style, which I found very interesting. I also found that 90% of the vehicles are made by the Russian car company Skoda, which also intrigued me.

Today we woke up at 9:00am for a nice breakfast and planned out the day. At 1:00pm we walked over to the Czech Television Station, which is the equivalent to our ‘CNN’, and got a personalized tour of the entire station. What was very cool is we had an English speaking tour guide who works at the Foreign Desk portion of the TV Network and he was able to answer and understand all the questions we had. I honestly was completely blown away by the full access we had because we are ‘foreign strangers’. 

After wards we walked over to a Czech grocery store and bought food for lunch. It was very interesting how ‘cheap’ a lot of the food is when you have American money. What I have learned is the Czech people do not make a lot of money, hence a lot of their food is cheap. Also I was shocked that I had to purchase my grocery bags to carry my items out of the store. However it did teach me to not just throw those bags away when I got back to the bed and breakfast, but to save the bags for a possible future grocery store trip. I would recommend this concept to America because we would severely cut down on the amount of plastic we put in our landfills.

After changing into more comfortable clothes and making some lunch we set off to visit the center of Prague and the oldest university in central Europe, Charles University. Once again we got a personal tour of the school and its telecommunication studios. In this instance our tour guide could speak some English, but our Professor was able to act as a translator for this tour. After touring the school I walked away stunned that the school is older than our entire nations existence. The school was founded in 1347 and has had only minor architectural updates since. I also was intrigued the reason a lot of students learn English is because their editing software on the computers are in English so they are forced to learn the English language. After touring the school we walked around the corner and we were in the center of Prague. Once again I was blown away from the old style of the architecture and how beautiful the entire environment was.

Well Its time for bed, I need to get up early tomorrow to go visit parliament and the castle.  Until next time…

Cheers,
Drew

Location: Prague, Czech Republic