Far away from the snazzy Ratty dining hall and my 197 on-campus facebook friends, this semester I won't be strolling off to my C-block class in Sayles or to Starbucks on a Friday afternoon for an iced chai. I will, however, dine on Vienna-style bratwurst from street vendors, drink a large pilsner for 50 cents, take Eurail to other countries just for kicks, and spend my time in a dormitory which - hold onto your popped collars, kids - is almost four centuries older than University Hall and still considered modern. And while most Herald readers will decide between the latest Roots 'n Shoots dish and a slice of chipotle chicken pizza in the Trattoria line later this evening, I will face a similar, yet altogether foreign option - utopenec or bramborove knedliky?
The former, literally translated as "drowned man," is an uncooked pork sausage pickled in vinegar; the latter is a traditional Czech potato dumpling used for sopping up gravy from the mass of beef on your plate. Oh how I yearn for the days when life was as simple as a grilled chicken Caesar salad and when I only had to steer clear of the French taco lasagna. Tonight, and for the next four months, I will be living, eating, traveling and studying abroad in the Czech Republic.
When I tell most people this, both eyebrows usually hit the ceiling. Don't you mean Czechoslovakia? Why not go to somewhere cool, like Australia? You're flying to a former Communist country in Eastern Europe to learn a language you can't even use the rest of your life? At this point in the conversation, I usually explain that Prague is not only gorgeous, but an increasingly cosmopolitan, globalized city where people actually do speak some English. Sometimes I throw in that as a Russian history concentrator, the country is the perfect place to immerse myself in Eastern European culture, travel cheaply and make lots of bad Czech jokes. Well, they might reply, unconvinced, but not in the mood to argue the finer points of the 1989 Velvet Revolution, barely studied in U.S. high schools, at least there's cheap beer.
Like most juniors preparing to study overseas, the initial excitement and anticipation of arriving in foreign lands in many ways overshadowed the fears, anxieties and uncertainty of leaving Rhode Island, my friends and my family for four months. The more that people asked me how I felt, the more I convinced myself of how brave and independent I was to take such a leap into the "real world" which everyone talks about. In some sense, I fell in love with the idea of going but was completely unprepared for actually living there. But as the reviews of the Czech Republic came flying in from all angles - breathtaking, dirty, dangerous, Communist, vibrant, beautiful - I really just wanted to get over there and see for myself.
So as the day of my flight approached, I ate lots of sushi, drove around with my sunroof open - I wasn't going to take sun and 80s pop music on the radio for granted - and avoided packing. On August 25th, walking toward the final security checkpoint at the international terminal in San Francisco, my dad emphasized that I absolutely had to try the real Pilsner Urquell and my mom told me to take lots of pictures and not to end up in prison, because the U.S. Embassy wouldn't help me and then I couldn't email her pictures of my exploits.
Five hours and 12 minutes into my British Airways flight from San Francisco to London to Prague, I was having second thoughts. Not just contemplating second thoughts, mind you, but a fully developed theory that I was a first-degree idiot currently on a plane to Eastern Europe. Just 37,000 feet above my beloved Providence Place Mall, I began rationalizing the risk of jumping off the plane for a simple jaunt into Forever 21 and a $5.83 2-item orange chicken meal at Cathay Cathay. Rhode Island was already 3,000 miles away from my Bay Area abode and here I was, jumping the whole pond? Oh well, I thought, turning my attention back to the in-flight movie, it could be worse. At least there would be toilets ... hopefully.
And with that I was off.
Courtney Jenkins '07 will spend the semester writing columns on her experiences abroad.
