Ahoj

I would say Happy Belated Thanksgiving! in Czech except people don't even know what Thanksgiving is. I asked a woman at my internship if she knew about it and she was like...I know of it, what day is it. (It was Thanksgiving when I asked her.) So I told her the whole story about the pilgrims and the "Indians" so now at least one person in the Czech Republic knows the story of our special holiday.

Thanksgiving here was pretty much like any other day. There is this deli/restaurant here called Culinaria that is a haven for homesick Americans. They have Cheerios, Skippy Peanut Butter, Reeces Pieces, Betty Crocker Cake mix and even icing. So Culinaria holds a thanksgiving dinner each year. Most of my friends preordered turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes and the whole deal. I decided to just make my own dinner and order some pumpkin pie, because that is the best part of thanksgiving dinner. People put about 5 tables together and made centerpieces and lit candles and brought their friends and we had a little thanksgiving feast at Osadni 35. Everyone agreed that it was pretty strange, but it was a nice placeholder until we are all with our families again next year.

I bet you are all a little bit more interested with what happened the week before thanksgiving. That being my fall break and ITALY. It was the most wonderful trip ever. I decided to travel with just one of my friends to make everything nice and easy. Her name is Sarah if you look at my pictures. Our flight was nice and easy into Rome, and then from Rome we took a little flight into Venice. We had five hours in the Rome airport in between so we played five hours of Rummy500. Definitely time well spent.

So we got to Venice, took a bus and walked a pretty long way...with HUGE backpacks on our backs mind you, and a day of traveling on our feet....so we are very relieved when we find the little red building with the white door that is our hostel. We get our key and walk the 20 minute walk to our actual hostel building and it is the most wonderful walk ever. The air is so thick our hair frizzed up almost immediately upon entering the city. The canals were so much fun to look at, and take pictures of! Though to ride in a Gondola was 100 Euros, a little out of our price range....and I didn't really need to be in a romantic setting with Sarah, I mean we are good friends and all, but yeah. We got a late dinner and then headed back for a quick sleep at our hostel. We only had one night in Venice so we woke up the next morning pretty early and got on our way. One of the main goals with this trip was to see everything but not to get stressed out about NEEDING to see everything. We get to what we get to and we can never see it all. Venice was so amazing at first glance! OH THE SHOES! There were soooo many shoe shops we must have gone in about 50. And besides the shoes there was Venetian glass and masquerade masks. We saw all the big piazzas and I learned about the basilica and the duomo, and made it my goal to get to the Duomo in every city I visited in order to pick my favorite. After about seven hours of walking around all the shopping got a little bit old, but the canals did not. I bought a pair of glass earrings for 2 Euros and Sarah got a pair of beautiful shoes and we made our way to the train headed for Bologna.

It was SOOOO nice getting to Bologna and seeing my dear Nicole again. It had been since May and that is way too long to go without seeing a friend. I had such a wonderful 3 day stay in this College city. It was different from the other three cities because it was not a place tourists would go. I saw the Duomo and the Basicillica and the University, but mostly the time was spent shopping and eating amazing food, wandering around and catching up on old time gossip. I met all of her friends and her roommates Davide and Vincenzo. This part of her program is really neat! Upon arriving to Italy the students are put up in hotels for a week and that is their time to find an apartment. Nicole found hers from a flier on the street. So she really lives in Italy. I am so happy for her because she had to work SOO hard in order to get into this program rather than the NYU in Florence program. It was also really cool hearing people speak Italian. I picked up more than I thought because of my Spanish, but it was very hard to switch from Czech to Italian.

After Bologna was Florence. Sarah and I were going to stay with friends but my phone ran out of money so we didn't want to separate knowing that we couldn't easily contact each other. We found a nice cheap little 2 bed room that we bargained a decent price on for two nights. Sarah's friend in Florence came and picked us up at our hostel and made us dinner that night. It was so nice since we were pretty exhausted. We spent the next day in museums. We woke up early and spent three and a half hours in the Ufizzi. WOW, Sarah must have stared at the Birth of Venus of 45 minutes. I found a da Vinci painting that I attached myself to. We sat in the museum in different rooms just writing things down. It was a pretty neat moment, all the art in the museum and even the museum itself was so breathtaking. Then we also went to the Academia. WOW, we stared at the David (e) is there an e? for over an hour, different angles of course. My friend Leah, who is in Florence for the semester, then met us and took us around to the Duomo and shopping and back to her really nice apartment. We had some wine and then we parted ways and met up with some NYU in Prague friends for the rest of the night. The next day was our church day and we went to St. Croix and we climbed the 100,000,000,000,000 steps to take us to the top of the Duomo. That was pretty freaking breath-taking. It was so cold at the top but we didn't even care. We were about to start our journey down the steps when three of our favorite NYU in Prague guys walk up. It was SOO funny, out of all the places and all the people we happen to be at the top at the same time. We talked with them for a bit and then came down to catch our train to Rome.

Rome was my favorite city. I didn't think it was going to be coming into the trip, but it won my heart. I loved it so much because it was a real functioning city that would be alive even without tourism and English speaking people. Florence felt a little bit too American for me, Venice was very small and Bologna didn't have all the museums and ruins. Rome had it all, everywhere I turned was an old statue or Ruins from farther back than I can even perceive. We stayed with two of Sarah's Tufts friends in Rome. They were SOO nice to us and kept us for all three nights. We went out right when we got there to a bar Campo de Fiore!! It was soo fun because there is a restaurant with that name in the center of Weston. We woke up and had pizza for breakfast each morning, it was pretty funny. The first day we got there we went to the Vatican (which I had been wanting to see since I read Angels and Demons 2 summers ago) and saw the Sistine Chapel (wow!) and then saw St. Peter's church ( I wonder how much it cost to make that thing.) That night we went to see the Trevi fountain. I think I can safely saw that the Trevi fountain at night is one of the most beautiful things I have ever set my eyes upon. It was FREEZING out, and I really never ever wanted to leave, EVER. The next morning we woke up early to see the Forum and the Coliseum and that night we went to the coolest club I have ever been to...called art cafe. We had special VIP wrist bands, because of this guy that our friends were friends with, that got us into this special area where most people were not allowed. We had our own booths and a private dance floor. The bottles of alcohol cost $150!!!! I certainly didn't buy any, and people were carrying around platters with pineapple, kiwi, Mellon, grapes. I seriously felt like royalty. It was sooooo cool! Unfortunately the next day was our final day. It was realllly sad to leave because I had sooo much fun in Rome i needed another couple of days. But ultimately we saw everything that we came to see. Our flight home was easy and fast and we came back to Prague for snow.

I love snow. I want to go skiing NOW! The mountains here don't open for awhile but the snow is such a tease! It is so gorgeous here. There was a tree lighting in Old Town Square last night. (Staromiestska) And Christmas fairs are popping up everywhere. In case you were wondering, I found an amazing backpack for really super cheap!! Oh yeah, and I bought a pair of the most gorgeous, me shoes I have ever seen in Bologna. It is getting pretty scary here because I only have three more class periods for each of my classes before finals. Its weird because I just had midterms a couple weeks ago, but I guess that is how they do it in study abroad.

So that is my life right now. There have been a lot of ups and some downs but everything is going wonderfully. I have my concert on Dec 7th, I think it is going to be a kind of practice recital so I am looking forward to it. It is before our farewell dinner also, so more than the normal 10 steinhardt followers should be at this show. Very exciting.

Cau!

Emma

dobry den!

Hey what's up?

I am waiting for my friend to get out of class at the moment so she can help me do some educated backpack shopping. I am leaving on Friday early morning for Italy, I have all my hostels booked and everything double checked with the friends that I am staying with. I am super excited except for the fact that I have a pretty bad cold right now and I have four midterms tomorrow.....in a row. I guess you all know how good I will be feeling tomorrow at 3:00pm.

So...what have I been up to lately?

Leah and two of her friends came to visit me last weekend. It was my first time playing tour guide because Nicole ended up missing her flight from Milan to Prague two weekends ago because a bus never came or something like that. I felt really bad but I hope that she ended up having a nice time in Milan for the afternoon. She said she may try one more time to get over here. So I took Leah and her friends to the normal places...the Prague Castle (Prazske Hrad), the Charles Bridge (Cecuv most), Old Town Square (staromestska). We saw a wonderful concert at the Rudolfinum that turned out to be a jazz trio that I saw on Thursday night at U stare pani (my favorite jazz club here) only at the Rudolfinum they played with a filhormonie behind them as well as a guest saxophone player who bordered on cheesy and also the most amazing violin player I have ever heard in my life (second to Aunt Amy of course). He looked to be in his 20s and he must have been a child prodigy...he had BRIGHT red looong hair and he was wearing black converse sneakers on the stage that everyone else was wearing tuxes and dress clothing. It was a LOT of fun. I think they enjoyed themselves, it was really nice to see a face from home. It was also really funny because they were from Florence and BOTH my roommates had friends visiting from Florence. In our room for the weekend we had three NYU in Prague girls and three NYU in Florence people. And as it turned out, none of the NYU in Florence people knew each other. It is a MUCH bigger program than in Prague.

The weekend before that a lot of people were visiting but like usual I wasn't feeling completely healthy. I tried to stay low key and do my work so that I would have an easy week and be ready for Leah to come. I think I saw a couple of jazz shows and hung around getting work done.

For all of you who want to come to Prague (haha)...the date to come is December 7th. That is the date of my concert. I am playing a monteverdi opera excerpt with my friends....the instrumentation is Alto saxophone, Harp and Dobro (for those of you who don't know what a Dobro is you should definitely look it up!) I am also playing Pacabelle's canon, with sax, trumpet, harp and violin. It sounds pretty awesome and funky. Not the most common group of instruments to put together. I think I am also going to be playing the Creston Sonata with my friend accompanying me on Piano because they told us that we were welcome to play any solo pieces that we wanted. I have my work cut out for me because I am going to be away all this week, but I am up for the challenge.

I think I failed to mention this but a couple of weeks I went to a horn festival, also at the Rudolfinum. It was one of the most amazing shows I have ever seen in my life. It started out with a french horn octatet playing some standards and then intermission. After intermission this man came out with his french horn and also an alpine horn. He started out playing his french horn. He played what sounded like a bassline then we realized that he was recording himself with a foot pedal. So the next second he was playing back what he had just recorded and jamming with it! He did that for about five horn lines and it sounded sooo cool. Then he put his horn away and took out the alpine horn, and I was in the first row for this...I could almost touch the bell of the horn. He was playing and beat boxing into the horn. It was like nothing I have ever heard. He could also circle breathe so he took a couple moments to show off and hold the note for like 5 minutes. It was very entertaining. Then he got the other horn players out and they played a couple of his compositions.

So I am all cleared to register for next semester. It is a little strange to think about now, but my registration date is in the middle of my journey. I think I will be in Florence, but Leah has wireless internet in her room so as long as I plan ahead I don't think I will end up running into any issues.

Jessica's class let out so it is time to find me a cheap backpack that I can carry and fit my life into for 10 days. I hope everything is going well with everyone at home. I miss you all!

Emma