Prague Zoo, Pope visit, and Poland

Prague has an amazing zoo. It was recently remodeled so all of the exhibits were really nice. The zoo was damaged by a flood in 2002 so much of it has been rebuilt since then. It is rated the one of the best zoos in the world by Forbes magazine. Admission was just $6 too, so it was very inexpensive. We were there for more than four hours and still did not see all of the exhibits. The best exhibit was for the lemurs. You could walk around with the lemurs in an enclosed area. That exhibit was really cool. Someone had their dog by the tiger exhibit and the tiger came close to the glass to check out the dog. I got some nice pictures of the tiger with him so close. The zoo also had a pack of wolves, which I have never seen before. That was cool to see because they would run around their enclosure together just like a real wolf pack. Most of the animals were sleeping so it was nice to see some acting somewhat natural.


Pope Benedict XVI was in Czech Republic for a weekend in September. He was in Prague for a few hours on a Saturday and a Monday. I was able to see him on the Monday when he was saying farewell to Prague. I was about forty yards away from him. He was waving from a balcony above the Vatican Embassy for maybe ten seconds. It was exciting to see him. I have a few pictures so you can see how close he was. You can look at the higher quality pictures in google albums, the link is at the bottom of the post.


Last weekend I went to Warsaw, Poland. I went with my roommate from New York, a guy from Denmark, and one from Belgium. We had a good time there. We took a train there Friday morning and came back on Sunday. The hotel that we stayed at was a five star Hilton. The guy from Denmark works for Hilton so he gets really low prices for rooms. We ended up paying around $35 a night per person which is a little more than you would pay at a hostel, but the five star hotel is ten times nicer than a hostel. There was not a whole lot to see in the town. It is much more eastern Europe than Prague is. It was interesting to see. You can tell it was damaged much worse by the second world war than Prague. In the center of the town there is a huge palace that dominates the landscape. There are also a lot of new buildings being built that look very modern.


Students can volunteer to teach their language to the other international students. I am teaching intermediate/advanced English with a guy from Georgia that goes to school in New York. The class is going to meet every week for 45 minutes. We had our first class last week and we have about 30 students. There are ten students from Czech Republic and the rest are from all over. It should be pretty interesting to see how it goes. I hope that I am able to teach them something. They all want to practice working on conversational English and grammar.

Every week a few countries present their culture/traditions to the rest of the international students. This past week USA presented with Germany and Turkey. Our presentation went well. We showed a slide show that had popular American icons such as Obama, Michael Phelps, Lance Armstrong, etc. Then we played a drinking game, flip cup, with some people from the audience (which we won). After that, some of the Americans danced to a few songs: the cotton eyed joe, cha cha slide, and soulja boy. I did not dance, but the presentation was fun.

Pictures from the past few weeks.