Presentations and off to Prague!

This morning I got up early again to both work on my presentation at 2:30 and to pack all of my things up so I would be ready to leave for Prague, Czech Republic right after the presentations were supposed to be over. At 1:30 a group of us left for the University to get to the room we were presenting in a little bit early. When I got there, Manuela saw me and asked me if I would go pick up Abidal, who is the man from Ballhaus Naunynstrasse that I interviewed, from the U Bahn station. I said of course I would, so I put down my backpack with my weekend clothes and things and went back to the U Bahn station. I found Abidal and we talked some on the way back to the presentation room, though his English isn’t very good and my German and French aren’t so great, so there was a little bit of a problem with a language barrier. When we got back to the presentation room Abidal sat next to me and we waited for the presentations from the first group to start. There were some technical difficulties with the projector not being on though, so we didn’t start until 15 minutes after the original start time. Then, the first group of presenters ended up going over their time for their presentations, and pushed us back a little bit later. Abidal, who had come hoping to see my presentation, had to leave before I did. Things continued in this manner until the presentations that were supposed to be over at 5:30, still weren’t finished at 6pm and unfortunately we had to leave in the middle of one of our friend’s presentations. We literally ran between each of the connecting trains that we had to take to get to the station for our bus to Prague. When we got to the station we couldn’t figure out which of the terminals was the right one for our bus, but with five minutes to spare we finally found the right one and made it on.

Then we traveled on the bus for five hours and I spent my allotted time on the wifi writing up the last blog post. I spent some time reading, but as usual, I began to get a little motion sick and had to take a nap to fight the nausea. When I woke up there was a rainbow out one side and a beautiful sunset out of the other. Soon after we passed through Dresden, which looked amazing in the setting sun.

We came in to Prague at 11:45, and I was surprised to find that the night life of Prague is not at all like that of Berlin. There was no one out and nothing was open. We got some Czech Crowns out of an ATM, but we had no way to break our bills to get change for a bus ticket. Fortunately after looking lost and confused, a nice man who spoke English came to our rescue and he bought all four of us bus tickets in exchange for euros of equivalent value. We got on the bus and got off on our stop, and then were once again lost because we couldn’t find any street signs. Eventually we figured out that there were street names on the sides of buildings that were at the corner of a street, but that didn’t help us figure out where we were supposed to go. We asked two more people on our journey to the apartment that we rented on Airbnb, while trying desperately to contact our host on her cell phone. Finally, Hannah turned on her international data and we used the Airbnb messenger to let the host know we were there so she could let us in. At that time it was 12:45, but since the presentations went on so long we didn’t have time to buy food for the train ride so we hadn’t eaten for approximately 12 hours. We went to the nearest place that was open that we could find. What we found was an Italian restaurant that heavily over salted all of our dishes, but we were too hungry to really care. When we finished our food, paid, and got back to or place it was 2:30 am and by the time we had made all the beds and gotten settled in it was 3:30. Needless to say, we were exhausted and didn’t even bother to set an alarm for the next morning.