Christmas 2009 (December 24 - January 7)

Hey everybody! I’m really, really sorry it’s taken me so long to get a blog post up. My trip over the holidays took a lot out of me and then it’s taken a month to get settled back into school. So I finally have enough brain power left over after a week to put something new up.

I'll start with my Christmas. Well, I got a site mate right before Christmas, who has an incredible amount of stuff in common with me, the most important of which is cycling. It’s nice having an American just across the city, especially one who’s easy to get along with. He and the other new kids weren’t allowed to leave site during Christmas, so we kinda worked together to host a big long Christmas party for all the volunteers in the area. We ended up with 8 people in my apartment, with a couple people sleeping over at his. Basically, we cooked, baked, and spoke English to our hearts’ content. For Christmas day, we went to the local bazaar, drew names, and had 30 minutes to spend the equivalent of $2.50 on gifts for each other, secret Santa style. Later, after we cooked a massive Christmas dinner with apple pie for dessert, we had a riot exchanging our gifts. It really made me feel like we were back at my house doing Robbins annual Christmas party. It'd been a while since I'd thrown a party like that and it felt really good. We started on Christmas Eve, and the last of us left on Sunday. I went to Kiev on Sunday for a flu shot and to fly out to meet Austin in Prague.

I left Kiev for Prague on December 29. My trip started off rough because we got 6 in. of snow the night before I left Kiev, then 6 in. during the day leading up to my flight's departure. When I magically arrived at the airport after a slippery bus ride, I was met by a wall of people dazed and confused about what was going on at the airport. The airport had been closed and thousands of people were stranded in the relatively tiny Kiev airport. My flight was scheduled for 2:45, and started check-in at 2:30. I thought to myself, surely it won't be on time, I've got plenty of time to get through the airport. I was standing with hundreds of people in passport control when a woman came and announced that those going to Warsaw (my connecting city) needed to ask those in front of them to cut line cause you're gonna miss your flight. I didn't even ask. I jumped up front, threw my passport down on the desk to the officer's dismay, and sprinted off to my gate. My flight left a miraculous 30 minutes late, just in time for me to make my connecting flight. Then I got super confused in the Warsaw airport and thought I missed my connecting flight. Turns out I had just forgotten to set my watch back an hour, meaning I had plenty of time.

Landed in Prague, figured out the ridiculous Czech currency, figured out how to get to the hostel, and decided to make a detour through the old town square. Milled around there, took some pictures at night, in the snow, and watched the clock for the first of many times. Feeling like life had finally paid off, I started off for the hostel. The further I went, the more I realize my hostel was in the redlight district. Sure enough, the entrance to my hostel was guarded by bouncers of the cabaret that shared the same entrance. Instead of having a callbox, or buzzer, or something sane like that, guests must, at all hours, call the host's cell phone to be allowed in the first time. Well, since nobody could tell me how to make a phone call in the Czech Republic either on my cell phone or a pay phone, I spent the next hour trying to figure out how to get in. After finally getting the hostess to come down and paying a $100 deposit I never got back, I went to bed. I had to cover my head with the blanket to block out the flashing lights from the cabaret across the street, and plug my ears with my iPod to drown out the droning music from the floor below. It was a well earned night’s sleep.

I spent the day browsing the Christmas market and went to meet Austin at the airport, I took him back to the hostel, and we hit the town. We ate on the square at a traditional Czech restaurant. We established the routine of searching for the most amazing hole in the wall Czech restaurants every night. During the days we killed ourselves running around the city checking out all the stuff there is to see. Saw several gorgeous gothic churches, climbed the tower overlooking the astronomical clock, laughed at the thousands of people who gathered every hour to watch the anticlimactic show at the astronomical clock, realized we often watched too, so maybe we're just as dumb, and went through, what I consider the highlight of Prague, the Jewish museum. I'd never been in a synagogue before, much less one that was 500+ years old. There was a really tight district where all the Jewish residents of Prague were centered. The coolest part, and I'm not morbid, was the cemetery. There were thousands of grave markers piled on top of each other because the thousands more dead were buried in layers in a very small area. Some of the markers dated back to the 1400s.

Somewhat exhausted, we set out to search for dinner before New Years. We had a terrible time finding a place to suit our tastes and our wallets. We walked ourselves silly till we finally stumbled upon this little quiet place in a cellar. Got down there and new we'd found the spot. We were surprised by the number of people already down there eating so early. Had our best dinner in Prague by far. After dinner we rolled our overfed selves around Prague trying to kill the last few hours of 2009. Then we headed out to watch fireworks from beautiful, ancient Charles Bridge. In the crushing mass of people we found our spot while dodging exploding M80's, and realized the people standing behind us were Ukrainian. I struck up a conversation in Russian and realized they live not too far from me. I was asked all the requisite questions: Do you like our Ukraine? Why of all places Ukraine? Have you found a wife there yet? We made friends, and I felt vindicated: if I'm not celebrating New Years in Ukraine, at least I can celebrate it with Ukrainians. Then all hell broke loose. The moment the church bells throughout the city rang in the New Year it seemed everybody had some form of pyrotechnic disaster in their hands to let loose. There were fireworks exploding everywhere. Complete sensory overload. Explosions flashed, bells rang, people shouted, the earth shook. I'm pretty sure I had shell shock afterwards. Then, in the words of Tolstoy, there was a massive movement of people from west to east, then east to west. All the people on the bridge decided to see what was going on in the square, and all the people in the square wanted to be on the bridge. It was like swimming upstream in all directions. Austin and I found the square looking like a war zone, large swaths of cobblestone cluttered with the debris of all the fireworks, some still erupting. People didn't dare enter the hostile zone, and we were sure to skirt the no man's land. We meandered around a little more to check out the mayhem, and finally walked in revelry back to the hostel.

We poured ourselves out of bed the next day to get Austin to mass to atone for our most recent sins, and fulfill Holy obligation. In the mental smoke lingering from the night's fireworks, we got lost and missed mass in a really important church. We ended up just shooting the breeze with a really cool monk who spoke 12130984 languages. He loaded Austin up with souvenirs to take back for his entire seminary, many of which became 'take one please' at the entrance to the cathedral. We milled around that part of the city, had some good lunch, and then headed up to Prague Castle, just in time to be late for everything. All we could do was walk around the grounds though we were dying to get into the exhibits. Only major failure we had the whole trip, and probably would have killed us if we had made it into all the galleries. Something to go back for I guess. Highlight of my last night was when I haggled a guy down $20 on a ceramic beer stein in Russian.

We left for Munich on January 2. Getting on the train to Munich, not surprisingly, wasn't easy as they didn't post the platform number until the moment we boarded. The train ride was super relaxing as we rolled through the snow blanketed countryside of Bohemia and Bavaria. Got to Munich and life felt normal for the first time in 9 months. Despite everyone around me speaking German, I got that inexplicable, indelible feeling I've had in New York, London, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Durango, Nashville- I could live here, I'm comfortable here. Munich was a surprising blend of modern with ancient. There was plenty to see, and it was interesting that there were as many German speakers in every church as foreigners. After we got checked in to our hostel, which blew us away with modernity and cleanliness, convenience and overall logic, we headed out to find dinner, and stumbled across Hofbrauhaus, the epic beer hall, and got our first taste of Munich. We had to charm our waiter with sideways glances and well timed head nods to get any attention from our waiter (it was worse than flirting with a pretentious woman- one wrong smile might signify desperation and we might never see him again) and the oompa band played songs that somehow everyone else knew. That pretty much sums up the spirit of Munich. The next day we actually made it to mass, went to a museum filled with Renaissance paintings, then started ticking off sites around Marienplatz. Next day we headed out to Nymphenburg Palace which gave us our fill of Baroque. We walked all over the neighborhood around the palace, which was really cool, but only out of necessity because we were lost again while looking for food. The place we settled on, after walking in a huge circle, had me call upon my meager German abilities to get us through lunch as the waitress didn't speak English. We headed back to the old town and walked through Residenz, another palace.

It was hard to say goodbye to Munich. Austin headed out early the next day and I got to see some other parts of the city, unplanned and whimsical, the way I do best, the only way. Had an uneventful flight home. Trudged through another foot of snow in Kiev to the train station and an overnight train ride later landed back in Konstantinovka, on Orthodox Christmas morning, January 7. It was an amazing trip and another epic New Year’s Eve. Austin and I are really setting the bar high for future New Years.