Prague and Adventures

Two Tuesdays ago I saw the Avengers, in at the English cinema in Cannes. Jenn and I were basically on the edge of our seats the entire time, cheering and gasping, and when it ended we were the only ones clapping and whistling, and Jenn yelled “AMERICAAA!!” Occasionally you are allowed to have some moments as an obnoxious American when you’re in Europe, and seeing the Avengers is a really appropriate time to holler in a movie theater about how badass and obnoxious you are and proud to have Chris Evans and his fine self kicking ass dressed like a flag. America is an obnoxious country. But sometimes it’s in a really awesome way. And if you’re gonna be in France and spend all your time trying to fit in and repress your innate obnoxious American-ness, you may as well scream “AMERICAAAA!!!” at the end of a fucking kick-ass movie.

Later that afternoon, Mel arrived in Cannes, and I took her back and showed her around the magnificent splendor that is the College. Over the next few days I took her around Cannes, including to Morrison’s, which is the local pub (which truthfully I’ve probably been to all of one time prior to this), because Stephen and Nick were playing at open mic and we all made a grand field trip to go see them perform. The irony of this of course is that Mel came all the way to France to hear two kids from Chapman sing Irish folk songs in a British pub. So it goes.

On Friday we left Cannes to go to Prague for the weekend, which was really beautiful. Prague is an interesting city, because the city center is very “old world Europe” and picturesque, but the rest of it is like, straight-up Soviet block and really ugly. There is very little Czech culture that you can tell of just visiting, and it’s incredibly touristy, but, like I said, it’s very very beautiful.

A weekend was probably enough time to be there, but we walked around and saw the city and all of it’s stunning old buildings, and SYNAGOGUES! This was probably one of the coolest things about Prague for me. Everywhere you travel in Europe you find these beautiful beautiful cathedrals, and you walk around and them and you’re impressed and stunned, but you also think, wow...this would be even more amazing if I were a part of this. Prague has old synagogues. At least two that are old and special enough to merit visiting, which as a very interesting experience for me. The fact that Prague has any Jewish culture at all is really cool and different from almost everywhere else I’ve been, and there were quite a few groups of old Orthodox Jews getting tours. All of a sudden my culture and history was relevant to what I was seeing, and like I said, it was a very interesting experience. I would love to visit more places in Europe with more Jewish history.

The only thing that rained on our parade in Prague was quite literally the rain, which started at the beginning of each evening only to descend into heavy thunderstorms throughout the night, so Prague was mostly a daytime thing for us. It was a really lovely, laidback time and I ate very well (including one evening in our hotel where we wandered into a huge buffet dinner for an Italian tour group, which the maitre-d assumed we were a part of and we accidentally had dinner for free.) All in all a very pretty city and a lovely and chill experience, and ALSO, perhaps most importantly for you to know, we flew Swiss Air and they give you chocolate. So now you know THAT, and it’s crazy to think that the next time I’m going to be on a plane, it will be the first leg of my trip home. Nice to London Heathrow, London Heathrow to San Francisco. How insane! Further entries and updates to come soon on this past weekend’s excursions--to nature!!