Cemetery, Paddleboats, and... Other cool things. :)

So, like, a week and a half ago I went to the Vysehrad cemetery, which is quite literally right next to my study center.  It houses a majority of the important historical Czech persons (the culturally relevant ones, not the political ones).  Vysehrad, in case you were interested, was a huge fortress back in the day, and our study center is kind of right in the middle of it.  So getting to class often involves walking through gaggles of tourists taking photos of shit as you're trying to get from the metro to the study center in under 10 min. in order to be on time.  Always fun.  :)  But I digress

This church stands right next to our study center.

Dvorak's tomb.

This is the view from the top of the hill above the study center.  It was a beautiful day, so many sail boats!

Here the wall of the fortress still stands above the Vltava river.

Those pictures were taken quite a while ago, but somehow I kept forgetting to post them.  Lo siento!  But anyway, this week has been so incredibly busy!  Tuesday, I had a meeting with Bara, who is the volunteer coordinator of Mezipatra-- http://www.mezipatra.cz/ (a LGBT film festival that originated in Brno, and is now hosted both in Brno and in Prague) who I will be volunteering/interning for this fall!  The festival here in Prague is in November, so I'll be helping them organize the database etc, and then volunteer at the festival itself as a runner, or someone in the shop etc. as a kind of english liaison.  There're 4 of us who will be volunteering so it should be great fun.  Then Tuesday night, I had a pre-conference meeting for this thing called Forum 2000 -- http://www.forum2000.cz/ -- which I am interning at.  It's this amazing political conference here, which features panalists from all over the world etc.  I'm going to be a "reporter" at the conference, sitting in panels and writing up summaries for... something or other.  And then I'll be carrying on helping after the conference with editing transcripts of the panels etc.  I'm so incredibly excited for this opportunity, I cannot even express. 

Then!  Wednesday was St. Wenceslas Day here in Prague, which meant no classes!  And also meant a special once-a-year mass held in St. Vitus cathedral (the one that's in Prague Castle).  They had vespers before, and then the mass, which was super-traditional (or so I'm led to believe by Martha, who is actually Catholic, so I trust her).  They had incense, and a bunch of men in robes (I'm actually very curious to know exactly how high up these men were in the Catholic church of the Czech Republic) and THE SKULL OF ST WENCESLAS HIMSELF.  WHAT.  We both about hit the floor when the head priest dude walked out with a skull on a pillow.  St. Vaclav (as he is known here, why we translate that to Wenceslas, I don't understand) watched the entire service from a pedestal, just chilling.  In any case, it was a really amazing service.  And it was just unreal to be singing in a church which has been worshiped in for hundreds of years.

The lighting was just.. so incredibly perfect.

Thursday we went to a concert at the Senate Gardens right below Prague Castle.

They had peacocks (including this beautiful albino one) just roaming around!

The Senate building itself.  Gorgeous paintings inside the arches.

Then we went paddle boating yesterday!!  The weather has been absolutely unreal.  Our roommate Maja, who's Slovakian, keeps trying to tell us that summer is over every day that it is a little bit overcast.  But then we get a week like this one where it was in the mid-70s, and absolutely perfect weather outside, and it's hard to believe that it is ever dreary or cold here. 

The National Theatre-- it is such a gorgeous building.

Rachel, Martha and I in our little car!!

Today, Martha and I decided to walk to the Farmer's Market.  However, being slightly unsure of how to get there on foot (we could have gone by metro, but it was too pretty out not to walk it) we decided to wing it, and got a little lost.  But look what we found!

There were these 2 gorgeously graffiti-d garage doors side-by-side on this random street we found, and it was the first artistic graffiti I had really seen here so far.  There's a lot of graffiti, but mostly just people scrawling their names, or random words or whatever, but nothing really artistic like this. 

Then we found an entrance to a secret garden!

Fall has arrived!!  So many beautiful fall colours, but yellow is definitely my favourite.

Okay, sorry for the long post, especially with all the pictures!  But I'll leave it off here now.  :) 
Much love! <3
Alyssa