Prague 2008: Day 9 (30 June)

Being Monday, this was our first day of classes. I was signed up for two, both of which would be meeting that day. First was history, and it was a long trek up the stairs from ground floor up through the first and second floors before we reached the third floor. The professor had an utterly unpronounceable name and very broken English. She did her expected professorial ramblings about herself before handing us a syllabus and announcing that she was taking us on a field trip, but not before she got more money so that she could make sure that we would all be able to get in at Vyšehrad. Only problem was, by the time we got there, it was time for four of us to turn around and go back to school so that we could go to Czech Language class. We hurried through the public transportation, being stopped once as we got off the metro at school to prove that we had our transportation passes. Back up to the third floor we hurried, somehow only getting to class 15 minutes late.

Czech class went a little easier, although the professor enjoyed confusing us and scaring us by speaking in far more Czech than we could ever hope to understand in our first class. The first class was mainly the sounds of the language and how they are perceived and categorized, along with some of the most basic vocabulary. I don't think I need to describe how much I enjoyed geeking out about all that and the sorts of deductions I made about the language and its sound system. I read a quote once about Slavic languages: "Whichever Slavic language you choose to learn, go ahead and follow your heart, because your head will hate you anyways." The quote is right. As opposed to the two genders I'm used to in Spanish, Czech throws in a third gender: neutral. Beyond that, there are cases. Don't ask me to explain them, because I still don't rally get it. But we're only learning nominative and accusative cases. I haven't really been able to process why they're used, I just memorize the rules.

I hung out in a room downstairs that night. Kendra taught us a drinking game called "zoo" that entails performing your own sign and someone else's while still keeping to the rhythm the rest of the group is setting. If you mess up, you have to take a drink. Obviously this gets harder the more you drink. I think I had two advantages: playing comparable (albeit non-drinking) games in American Sign Language, and the fact that I wasn't drinking. Some people wanted to play a card game, too, so I ran up (the three flights of stairs) to my room to get my awesome, random animal playing cards. I ended up being very glad I wasn't drinking, because the drink was $1.50 (20 kcz) wine which was apparently atrocious. A chair randomly broke while someone was still sitting on it, but Alex was able to wedge it back together. I went to bed about 1, the person to turn in the earliest.