24.

since it's tradition for me to find a song and post a corresponding blog each time it's my birthday, i suppose this year should be no exception. thankfully, this year, i didn't have to think too hard about it. the most appropriate song, unimaginative though it is to say this, is switchfoot's "twenty-four."

the thing is, this year, i had a birthday party with some good friends, a fantastic boyfriend, flatmates that i'm happy to be living with, enough money to get me through the night, mexican food, in prague, and not dreaming about how different my life could or will be once i make the necessary changes. i'm happy with my life and am pleased that all my choices, good and bad, have led me here.

i am far more fortunate than most.

my holiday...

and then i realized

this, as with law school, or 11 time zones, or fear, or timing, or film, or mormonism, or just knowing too many people, or all the things that were supposedly but not really wrong with me...

well, this is about right.

because it's always always always always something.



not gonna lie, i'm frustrated with "this." and wondering when God is gonna finally relieve me of this.

tramspotting theories no. 3 and 4

(of, like, dozens)

how long the tram waits at i.p. pavlova in the morning is directly proportionate to how many minutes you're already late.

how many minutes it takes for the next tram you have to catch to come is equal to how many swear-words you've just invented in your own head.

krakow is like prague on acid. no, on speed. no. on steroids.

so this past weekend involved a whole lot of time on trains. 15 hours, to be precise. for a reason i truly can't explain, i felt suddenly inspired to spend my weekend, complete with a bonus friday, in the land of my people. some of them, anyway.

krakow is quite beautiful and i'd recommend a trip there to anyone. and a special surprise (for me, anyway) was how similar polish is to czech. shockingly, my horrendous czech vocabulary and incomprehensible pronunciation went a long way there. prosim? yes. prosim, bitches.

the weird part, though, is that it also felt a bit like i'd never left prague. in essence, krakow is the same place i've been living in for 6 months. allow me to demonstrate:

let's start with the centerpiece.

awww... look at that! krakow how a charming old town square with a statue of an obscure polish politician/activist/monarch that i couldn't identify for you. and it's dotted with little restaurants serving perogies and cheap beer.



wait... what's this?! an old town square with a statue representing an obscure political situation, surrounded by pubs and restaurants serving typical czech fare... gulas and whatnot! amazing!

onto the second landmark...

wow, that's so unique. a church with two steeples right in old town! how beautiful! how quaint! makes me feel like i'm in an eastern european time warp.


hmmm.... that's weird. a church with two steeples. where have i seen that before?

number three...

hi clock tower.


oh snap. clock tower.

and of course...

large medieval castle with church perched on a hill!


wait a minute...




what krakow did have that sets it apart from everywhere else i've been, however, is something very sad and about which i will not make poorly-timed, inappropriate jokes. i'm actually not a crier, but i choked up a few times on this part of the trip... my day trip to auschwitz.

there are many reasons why i'm not posting much about this. i suppose i realize that i don't even possess the vocabulary or verbal prowess to do it justice. and i don't have many photographs as, out of respect for those who suffered, we were asked not to take pictures in most of the exhibits. but i would like to share a few things that i saw.

first, the camp itself is divided into three sections... auschwitz i, birkinau, and monowitz. monowitz was completely destroyed as the soviet army came marching through during the liberation. the most dreadful parts of birkinau were also destroyed, along with the "canada" barracks -- where they kept everyone's possessions. and auschwitz i is still standing and relatively well-preserved. they've put exhibits in most of the barracks, and of course, the grounds are disarmingly well-maintained.

we began with this building here. i can honestly say i was expecting them to start us a little slow, but felt blindsided when we stood under a vent when we got inside and were told that that's where they dropped in the gas. 200 people at a time fit in there. shock value inexplicable. actually, this was one of the few chambers and crematoria left. the others had been destroyed, and were considerably bigger.



the vast majority of the exhibits were photographs. we saw maps of the prisoners, mug shots, models of the camp, photographs of the malnutrition that people had suffered taken after the liberation, heart-breaking stories about children, families, and women. they also had several photographs of the bastards that did all this. for me, the most startling was a picture taken while they were doing the "selection" process. only about 25% were chosen as fit to work, and the rest were sent immediately to the gas chamber. most of the chosen ones were young men, and the women and children who were spared were subjected to cruel, painful sterilization and developmental experiments. in one of the photographs, there is a small line of elderly people with canes arriving at the camp. you can clearly see the man who was doing the selection process... and with each person, he would point towards the barracks or give a thumbs-up direction to the crematoria. you can't see his hand very clearly because of the quality of the photograph, but if you look below him, you can see that he's casting a shadow. and the shadow shows quite clearly where he's pointing. haunting. side note... he was recognized by his son years later upon visiting the exhibit. his son had known that he had been part of the war, but not that part. hard to imagine how shocking that was.




among the other things we saw were horrible electric fences, rooms for punishment (as if it could get worse) and the walls in front of which they conducted executions. terrible, horrifying, frightening -- all of it.


they also had on display many of the possessions they'd managed to preserve after the liberation. too many things to talk about, the most devastating for me was the case of suitcases. hundreds, if not thousands, of suitcases. and of course, people had written their names on them and where they lived. it's hard to explain, really, what seeing something so personal does to you. you remember that they'd packed up the most important things to them in this world and lovingly labeled their cases because they really believed, deep down, that they would get them back again.

the second part of this whole thing was of course, birkinau. it's 30x the size of auschwitz i, and has been mostly destroyed. but you can see, clearly, that is stretches as far as the eye can see. and it's just like the movies.
only worse.
everyone should see it before they die.






and never, ever forget it.

damn you, efl.

yesterday, i mulled over a single sentence in my head 3 or 4 times before figuring out the grammatically correct way of saying it. i'm well-aware that it's a side-effect of teaching. and i am clearly living alone right now.
"i'll ask him to tell me what is the move-in date. wait. i'll ask him to tell me what the move-in date is. what is the move-in date. what the move-in date is. what is. what it is..." you get the idea. this went on for almost a minute before i decided on the latter. the former is just a bad czech habit that i'm starting to pick up. other charming features of being a teacher include miming almost everything i say, failure to use proper intonation, frequent written spelling and grammatical errors, lack of variation in vocabulary and sentence structure, and, of course, epic mispronunciation. that englishman points it out to me everytime, too.

i even had to proof-read the e-mail i sent to jim last night, because, apparently, i think it's the best of idea's to throw s'poradic apostrophe's anywhere... 's.

it's only going to get worse.

i am

terrible with goodbyes.

it's only the first, and it's all gonna snowball from here.

the prague made me do it!

i had the weirdest week ever, and i'm exhausted. so bad, in fact, that i had those crazy moments when i'm standing on the platform of the metro, and i can hear it coming and the wind tunnel blowing my hair, and i think for a split second about simply stumbling over the edge; that that has to be better than feeling like my head is going to explode. those moments, of course, always pass.

and things ended fairly well. i say "fairly" because we did abysmally on the pub quiz. all that aside, friday made up for a lot of things that the rest of the week lacked. severely.

and today is a new day.
well, today is almost over, but right now is new, and i'll take it.

whatever you like, james. whatever you like.

oh, i probably give him a much harder time than he deserves.

my past few weekends have been a conglomeration of a lot of things, most of which were medieval, dependent on trains, near the nature, and included some alcohol.












i even got some smiling for the camera; without need for prompting or begging. oh snap.

cesky krumlov might go on the list of favorite memories. and that's a pretty exclusive list.

oh be ay em ay comes to pea are ay gee you ee

so besides the usual niceties that a weekend with no school entails, there was some unusual excitement over a certain someone coming into town.

first, however, the weather has been truly amazing these past few days, and has inspired drinking beer in parks and gardens overlooking the city of prague with happy friends. life seldom gets much better.

second, rachel's here! we realized that we hadn't seen each other in one year exactly. imagine that.


but really, other than these things, my friends and i did something this weekend involving:



and



and



and a whole lot of



and


that's right. barack obama came to town, and we woke up at 6am to see him speak.

don't worry. it was actually a great deal more fun than my friend on the far right would have you think. something about not liking being forced to smile, because that approach is clearly more effective/attractive than smiling.

thinking about it, i realize that it's not often that one has the opportunity to see the president speak in the flesh.

...except that one time for me in taiwan, but that's a longer and much more painful story altogether.