There are roughly 6.8 billion people in the world. I am 4,000 miles away from home. Yet in the last week I have had two encounters that make me feel like the entire world is no bigger than Rhode Island.
As I may have mentioned, I trek pretty far to my room in my giant dorm. I walk through this halfway that always had a bunch of guys playing poker or just hanging out, and they would always say hi. I clearly knew they were American, but I always just said hi and kept walking. However, the other day we started talking, and I found out that they are from Union College, and there is a group of 20 of them at our dorm going to a different university in the area. When I said I was from Rhode Island, one of the girls in their group, Kelly, came sprinting over. She went to Moses Brown, and I played on the Rays with her best friend from elementary school for years. We were both so excited to have run into another Rhode Islander, and we decided to go out together sometime.
Kelly is in the international students' club at the university she goes to here, and they were giving a presentation on the United States at the weekly meeting last night so she invited me. My friend Blair and I headed to the bar where the weekly meetings are held. It was a lot of fun hanging out with Kelly and meeting people from all over the world.
One of the people I met was a girl that I knew when I was in preschool. She didn't go to Slatersville Preschool like me, but she went to preschool in North Smithfield and did dance with some of the girls I was friends with back then. She and I realized that we were at a lot of the same birthday parties when we were younger, and were even in the same Girl Scout troop. She's in the same program as Kelly, and is living in my dorm too. I was also talking to another kid in their program who lives in my dorm, and he went to Hendricken and knows my PC roommate Marybeth. Talk about a small world.
Anyway, after the international students' club meeting, Blair and I met up with Megan, Karen, Alexa, and J.C. at an establishment downtown that has "Erasmus" parties on Wednesdays. Erasmus is a program at Charles University for exchange students in Europe, and even though we aren't technically in the program, they invite us. It was great to meet people from all over the world, but it ended up being a late night.
Today was the first day here that I can honestly say that I wasted. I have been so busy since I've been here that there hasn't been a day yet that I haven't set my alarm to get up and run or get up and head somewhere to get things done. Since I have a busy weekend ahead of me, today I let myself catch up on sleep. I slept until lunch time, did some grocery shopping, and then napped for a couple more hours. Now I'm at the Globe cafe with my friends again, attempting to get a little ahead on my work.
There are a couple random observations about Prague that I've been wanting to share, so here they are:
- I will give a million dollars to anyone who can make deodorant popular in Europe.
- EVERYONE here has a dog. I swear there are more dogs than children. And people bring their dogs EVERYWHERE. For example, I spent a good deal of time playing with a bull mastife at the bar the other night. And almost every time I ride the metro or the tram there is a dog on it.
- They don't know what customer service is. After reading that article for my politics class I understand that they think their coldness is professional, but after working in a customer service related job, I find the way people treat us very strange.
- I am probably losing years of my life with all of the secondhand smoke I've been inhaling. I had to mcguyver a clothes line outside my window to hang our clothes to air out. If I don't air them out and just wash them, I can't get the smell out! And I have to shampoo multiple times to get the smell out of my hair! The sad thing is that I'm almost getting used to the smell now.
- Our dorms don't have microwaves. I have never missed a microwave more.
- There are coffee vending machines EVERYWHERE, and they're actually really good. You can get a little cup of coffee, or a latte, or cappacino for about 60 cents. We are all addicted.
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