Ahoy!

It’s Liam Martin, for today’s blog I’ll be talking about the family home stay that I experienced last weekend with two other students and two Czech students. The name of the two Czech students that took us for the weekend were Klara and Katerina, we went to Klara’s grandparents summer cottage. The cottage was about 45 minutes outside of Prague towards Brno. The cottage was nestled in a quiet village in some countryside foothills, from what Klara said most of the other cottages around her grandparents place were also summer cottages. As soon as we got there we went to a castle nearby the village called Konopiště. This Chateau is famous because it was the home of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who is famous for being assassinated and subsequently starting World War 1. Franz Ferdinand was an avid hunter and up until his death he was hunting all over the world and all had over 20,000 trophies. These days the chateau hosts around 2000 specimens ranging from bobcats and bear to varied fowl all with the location and date of bagging them displayed on a placard. The rest of the chateau is richly furnished with furniture from all over Europe falling mostly between the 17^th and 18^th century. After the castle, we went back to the cottage and then walked about a half kilometer down the road to a clearing near river where there was live music being played, of course beer being sold, and tons of people were swimming in the bend of the river. It was relaxing place to spend the evening before dinner and I’d love a similar place in Columbus, where I’m from. After the river Klara’s grandfather made us Chinese food and we played cards late into the night. Sunday, we went to another castle and went to the Staropramen brewery and what our friends described as the “Czech Grand Canyon”, it wasn’t that big haha.

Hi, my name is Liam Martin. I am a 4th year EEDS major. It is midway through our second week of our time here in the Czech republic. Today, many of us are exhausted because we had a wonderful time last night with our Czech buddies who held a bonfire/cookout for us. We a few interesting classes today, one of which consisted of our lecturer talking about the production of milk and other dairy products and the economics behind it in the Czech Republic. The other interesting class was from our good friend Jaroslav who gave us another wonderful lecture about Czech History concerning the early history of the territory in the 14th century. For lunch today as with most days we had some kind of meat and potatoes, which never seems to get old here haha.

In the afternoon some of us played volleyball with a few Czech students from the university. Other than that the rest of the day was pretty uneventful and many of us either relaxed, did laundry, or went into the city to do some shopping. In the evening we visited a pub in Prague that had many traditional Czech dishes which many of us loved. A big favorite was the steak tartare which many people have never tried before. After our late dinner many of us trickled out of the pub and made our way home. I was one of the last to leave and I was proud of my self for making it back efficiently!