Figure Drawing + Weekend in Prague

After missing Drawing class on Thursday afternoon to leave for Budapest I had to make it up and go to the Monday morning class. When I arrived at class I remembered that we were going to be doing figure drawing and our teacher had previously described the figure model that she was going to have come in as "old" and "quite fat." We quickly found out that these things were both true as class started and our model was a 67 year old lady who was pretty chubby. I had never done figure drawing before and it was actually a little easier than I expected. We had to draw the naked lady in several different poses for almost the whole three hours of the class. I then had to do this again for three hours in class on Thursday too. Needless to say by the end of it I was ready to get out of class.

On Monday night John and I really wanted to see a movie at the movie theater since we hadn't seen any new movies in about two and half months. Since the new James Bond movie Quantum of Solace had just come out and I had just seen the first one about a week before we found a theater that was playing it in English and after eating dinner at Café Slavia, we went to see it. The movie was good and was shown with Czech subtitles.

I don't think that I have mentioned at all where the pension that I live in and the building where I go to school are located in Prague. The pension is located in Prague 10 which is about three miles east of Old Town. Every morning I take a metro (line A, the green line) to go to school. I get on at the station Jiriho Z Podebrad and ride it only three stops to the station Mustek. This station puts me out right at the bottom of St. Wenceslas Square, in Prague 1, and then it is about a 5 minute walk to the Prague Institute. On the way to the Institute I pass a large market one street over from the Institute that sells fruit and souvenirs. The Institute is located on Michalska where I enter a nice little courtyard before going in, and studio is located on the second floor of a building that also has offices, a tea house, a gallery and apartments. The studio is a little cramped since there are about 25 of us and it is usually cold since they are always trying to save on heat but overall it is a nice space.

On Tuesday night we had our last official school outing and went to a jazz club on the other side of the river called U Maleho Glena. The jazz band had a female singer who had a nice voice and I don't know much about jazz but they sounded pretty good. The whole back room had been reserved for us so we all piled in and the only beer on draft was Bernard, which I hadn't seen before and it was pretty good.

Over the weekend my roommate Danielle was out of town visiting a friend in Florence and a few other students left to go to various places like Krakow and Brno. I stayed in Prague to visit some things around here and I was tired from going to Budapest the week before. On Friday I walked around Old Town Square and took some pictures and then John and I went around to see some things. Unfortunately things by the castle are starting to close because it is November and the tourist season is ending so I was not able to see a tunnel that I wanted to see but we did stop at the bottom of Petrin Hill to see the Memorial to the Victims of Communism. It is a series of long stairs with statues of men that wither away as you walk higher on the stair. The monument was dedicated to anyone whose life was ruined and changed by Communism. We then decided to visit the Communist Museum which had been something I had wanted to do since I came to Prague. The museum explained in writing and pictures how the Soviets helped free Czechoslovakia from Nazi rule after World War II and then slowly turned them into a Communist state before bluntly enforcing Communist rule by bringing in troops and tanks in 1968, taking control until 1989.

That night John and I met his friend Jennifer and about six of her friends who are studying abroad in Florence this semester and had come to Prague for the weekend. We went out to a bar with them and then the following night had dinner with them and went out again. It was nice to hang out with some new people for a little while and it was good they could come and see Prague.

It was nice to have a weekend in Prague again and I am looking forward to heading to Rome for Thanksgiving break on the 26th through the 30th.