Recuperation!

Hello everyone,

            Well, you’re catching me at an interesting moment in my experience abroad. We, the students of CIEE/FAMU International, have been granted a five-day weekend, sort of a surrogate Thanksgiving break for a country that doesn’t actually celebrate Thanksgiving. Most of the eleven of us chose to head out of the country. Some went to Budapest, Hungary, others to Italy (both Venice and Rome), and one to Geneva, Switzerland. Even our Czech flatmates have vacated, taking advantage of the gift of free time. The only of us left in Prague are myself and my new, good friend Allison. That’s right, just the two of us. We chose to stay here, taking a cue from Jonathan Swift, who suggested that anyone interested in travel start by exploring their own bedroom in depth before even heading to the kitchen.

            So far, we have welcomed the weekend with open arms. There is a lot to do, from surveying the as-yet unseen niches of Prague itself to allowing ourselves some moments of tourism for the sites of the city. Also, this weekend, I’m hoping to do some location scouting for my film, finding the most cinematic areas for our shooting. I may even get through a first draft of Erika’s and my script. Finally, Allison and I are looking forward to some well-earned rest and peace in our suddenly empty flats. We started things off with a, well, not quite a bang, last night with an outing searching for dessert (the Czech Republic could really use an IHOP) and a chick-flick, followed by a morning of sleeping in. Like I said, I think we’re both most excited about the prospect of resting up from the first half of semester. I am equally excited about spending some serious bonding time with Allison. We’ve been getting pretty close, and I relish the thought of having basically uninterrupted hang out time this weekend.

            School has been pretty exhausting lately. As we approach the end of our Topics in Production classes and head towards making our projects, the pressure is beginning to build. Deadlines creep towards us, from script dates to papers for our elective classes to presentations and midterm exams. I love all of my classes, especially the difficult ones. My cinematography class, for instance, makes me constantly question what I know about light meters, exposure speeds, frames-per-second (all terribly technical film elements that I’m expected to know off the top of my head by the end of this). The professor, a well-known Czech cinematographer named Michal Gahut, will ask the class a question, which is always followed by a moment of absolute silence as we all wrack our brains for the correct answer. I tend to think of it as a game of Tetris, with falling bits of information that must be turned and manipulated before you know where they should go.

            I absolutely adore the challenge here, even on the technical things, but MAN, does that all make the school day tiring. I tend to leave the school week wiped out, using the weekends to rest and study for the next week’s adventures.

            As far as our film projects go, Erika and I are chugging right along. Our final literary script is due by November 5, and we’re working diligently on getting it together. We’ve been assigned our technical mentor, a man named Jaromír Sofr who is a fabulous Czech cinematographer when he isn’t busy teaching at FAMU. Also, we were given our directing mentor, who is named Pavel Marek. He is currently our directing professor through our Topics in Production class (convenient, I know), as well as being a working Czech director of his own films. I like them both very much, and I’m excited to get feedback from such professionals. We’re also working with editing and sound professors to get to know the technology we’ll need in post-production.

            Even outside of working on our projects, Erika and I are spending quite a bit of time together. She is extremely cool, and I love hanging out with her. We’ve learned that we share a love of comic book heroes and their respective movies, and she’s introducing me to some pretty interesting horror films that I’m sure I wouldn’t have gotten to see otherwise. What generally ends up happening is that we begin a day together, working on our script or going to class, and then we “barnacle” onto each other and spend the entire day hanging out. I enjoy it, and making such good friends here makes it so much easier to be away from home.

            Well, enough of a novel for now. I will be sure to update this as the weekend proceeds, as I’m sure it will be full of interesting travels in our new home city. My mom arrives in Prague in SIX days, and I am SO excited to see her and have a little taste of home. Hope everything state-side is well. I’ll be home soon.

Christy