Classes... begin!

This weekend was lazy. I hung out at the house and went to the store a couple times. I bonded with my roommates... overall quite relaxing. We have been attempting to cook a bit with our somewhat limited utensils. We don't have a tea kettle or a coffee maker... no pans for the oven, etc... but pasta has worked so far, as has delicious Czech Ramen, and that's enough for now. I want to make some chicken, but I am scared at the supermarket, since I don't know what the packaging says... and I don't even know how to approach cooking a whole chicken... so, we'll see how it works without that, and how long I can last.
Yesterday, my classes began! We went to school early, because Breanne and I wanted to switch our schedules around a bit. Unfortunately, one of the classes I really wanted/needed for my major, Politics of the EU, is full! I switched it out for "Reporting", which should actually be great, since there are no journalism classes at Lewis & Clark. I'm a bit sad that I won't be able to fill that International Affairs requirement, though.
After the registrar, we hit up the library for textbooks. Here, we get textbooks and readers from the library... for free! We just have to return them at the end of the semester. Overall, this seems like a pretty good deal... No shelling out $600 for textbooks, and no heavy things to sadly depart from at the end of my time here.
My roommates and I then paid a visit to Bohemia Bagel for some coffee and, well, bagels. It's pretty cheap-ish (although it would be cheaper if we had a coffee maker... grr...) and RIGHT down the street from school... less than a block away. It seems like this will probably be a hang-out location all semester.
My first class is "Media in a Democracy". My professor's name is Bruce Konviser, and he is a freelance journalist from the US, living in Prague now for over 10 years. He has been in the Washington Post and on CNN, so I trust him to know what he's talking about. This class is about media ethics, and the role of media in a democracy. After a year at the PioLog, I think it will be really, really nice to discuss the issues of ethical and moral journalism... the duty of the media in the system, etc. It's pretty complicated, and I don't think we all really "get it."
Speaking of PioLog (being the Lewis&Clark school paper)... I miss it! I'm sad to be gone this semester, and I'm concerned that there won't be a good position for me open when I get back. I don't really want to edit news again, and I am nowhere near wanting to edit sports, features, or arts... but there's really nothing I can do; they need to give positions to people who are There. If I had my mac with me, I would offer to edit from here... but that's not really reasonable, since I'm completely out of the loop and the time zone. I really wanted to steal "back door"(the back cover, comedy page) this spring... but apparently they've offered that position to Ben. I guess I'll just have to fight him! :)
Back to Prague: Today, I had two more classes: Elementary Czech, and Prague Art & Architecture. Czech is a difficult language... but my professor seems like a nice guy who is very interested in us taking advantage of our time here in Prague. I hope I can be dedicated in challenging myself and learning as much as I can.
Prague Art & Architecture is going to be amazing. Today, the first day of class, our teacher took us on a walk up to Prague castle, where she talked to us about the Romanesque and Gothic styles on the churches up there. It was really cool! One of the big theses of her lecture today related to the "layering" of Prague's architecture. One building can show features typical of several different eras, as through the centuries, it has been renovated, repaired, and redecorated. For example, the St.George's Monestary was first constructed in the Romanesque style. A Gothic chapel was added a century later, and then a new Renaissance entryway was constructed centuries later.
Anyway... I love this class. I have never done art history before, and so far it's really quite amazing. I spoke to my Professor briefly about research she's been working on; currently she is specializing in the transition in the 1990s, directly after the fall of the Soviet Union. She said that there was a lot of change going on in that time, since during communism there was no private art market, no independent galleries, etc, and all of it thus needed to be created from the ground up.
Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my classes: I will have "Reporting" and "East Central European Politics." Hopefully they will go as well as my first three have.
I went to TESCO (our wal-mart superstore) today to try and get some school supplies... and ran into the entirety of Prague, trying to do the same thing. Kids and their parents held lists of school supplies and were crowding the aisles picking out notebooks and pens. I was scared... so I went home. There's always tomorrow.
And here, my friends, are the photos:


Technical note: The photo captions should just "show up" now. I went back in time (to old entries) and fixed the other slideshows as well... to make them hopefully easier to use and prettier. I also added slideshows to old entries that didn't have photos... So... yay! Everything is documented now.