Jídlo

(Translation: Food)

I'll give a quick update on the activities of the last few days, and then I will tell you about the food situation here in the CR.

This week was a pretty lazy/relaxing week, meaning that I only did one or two things a day instead of a million. Thursday I had a class trip for my financial crises class, and we went to the Czech National Bank. It was an interesting little tour, and I even impressed the guy by being able to pick out the counterfeit bills. All you, Dad. The best part of the tour was when we got to hold a real solid gold bar. They're much heavier than they appear in movies!

Thursday night we tried to go to this cute place, Orange Bar, but it's tiny so we ended up spending some time at a place called Radost. This was my second time at Radost, but the cool part about Radost is that it is actually where Rihanna filmed her music video for "Please Don't Stop the Music." (Nikki and Katie might be the only ones that will find that interesting.) If you click here, you can see the music video though. The other cool part, which you can kind of see in the video, is that the wallpaper in the place is the same as the wallpaper on this blog. Funny coincidence.

On Friday my program hosted a tour of Josefov, the Jewish quarter of Prague. We toured a million synagogues and saw the Jewish cemetery. Later last night we went out to dinner at a microbrewery called Pivovarsky Dum. This was actually one of my first dinners at a restaurant with traditional Czech food. They had a bunch of flavored beers (banana, coffee, wheat, sour cherry, nettle(GREEN!), etc.) which were fun to try. It was nice 'cause the restaurant was non-smoking which is VERY rare in Prague. It was great to get back last night and not have to hang my clothes outside my window to avoid the smoke smell!

Last night's dinner was very atypical of the meals that I have been having here in Prague. As I have shown some of you on Skype, my cooking situation is not ideal, so I end up making eggs for breakfast and Ramen, soup, or rice noodles for dinner. That part is getting kind of old, but it's cheap and easy so it works. The part that I am getting spoiled from is lunch. I had been kind of nervous about being vegetarian here, but it is actually very easy. There are more restaurants here that are solely vegetarian than in the whole state of Rhode Island, and all four are walking distance from Old Town Square. Two of them, Lehka Hlava and Maitrea, are owned by the same people and are nice restaurants with AMAZING food and reasonable prices. They aren't all hippie vegetarian either-they don't use weird meat substitutes or try to tell you you're eating "steak" or anything. One of the others is a vegetarian Indian buffet where it's kind of like a cafeteria and they weigh your plate. That one is my favorite to get lunch at, and Alexa and I go way more than we should because it's pretty cheap. The last one is the slightly more out-there one. It's called Country Life, and it is the same cafeteria, weigh-you-plate style, except that it's vegan and I sometimes wonder what the "cheese" that I am eating really is. Overall though, I am getting spoiled by the vegetarian options that I have here. Even when I go out to Czech restaurants there is a section labeled "Vegetarian" on the menu, which is more than I can say for most restaurants at home. Add another to the list of reasons why I'm not coming home!