Due to the Farewell Party the evening before, I hadn’t
expected that many people to be in class that morning. My suspicions were
confirmed at breakfast when only 12 people were sitting down when I entered the
room. However, when we got to class we discovered that several people were
already there and as the lesson went on, more and more people turned up.
However, there were still some notable absences! We finished our lessons at
ten, and at half ten wandered over to the reception room on the other side of the
castle where we had our graduation ceremony. We all received a certificate and
a DVD with all the photos and everyone’s contact details on. The DVDs also
included recordings of the multicultural evening and the farewell party, so we
could impose them on our friends and family. Which I fully intend on doing. So
sorry to the four people who read this *evil grin*. For lunch, we headed to
Trattoria, where we began ordering fairly expensive food in order to use up the
lunch vouchers we still had left over. Sheffield!Nic headed to the railway
station shortly afterwards, as she was spending a couple of days in Brno with a
friend before heading back to the UK. So S, Misha, Jones, Mike and I headed to
the Chinese for dinner later that evening, where we met up with a couple of
people from B2. They came from Volvograd, and freaked Jones and I out with
tales of hot it got in Russia in summer. When I told the girl, Tanya, where I
was going on my year abroad, she laughed.
After dinner, we headed to the dorm’s TV room, to watch the
opening ceremony of the Olympics. As the commentary was in Czech, and therefore
hard to understand, we made up our own. Which as in the ceremony went on,
became different ways of saying “What the hell?!?” I think Alice, a French
friend in B2, summed it up when she said she wasn’t surprised, as the “English
are weird, as their ceremony would be weird”! The strangest part of the evening
for Jones and I though came as we watched the athletes enter the stadium, the
others had gone to bed by this point, so it was just Jones and I with another
Ukrainian girl from B2 watching. When the Syrian athletes came in, Jones and I
made a few comments about how welcome they would be in London, given the state
of Syria at the moment. At that, the Ukrainian girl turned round, and asked as
what we meant by that, as she had friends in Syria and they were fine, nothing
was happening there. Jones and I were shocked, and then explained what was
happening there. But the girl refused to believe us, saying that walking down
the streets in Homs, the Syrian town the rebels and the government were
fighting over at the time, was just as safe as walking around in London. I
don’t know when she last went to London, but last time I was there, I didn’t
risk getting snipered as I walked down a street. What rendered Jones and I flabbergasted, and
completely speechless though, was her next statement.
“There’s nothing happening in Syria. It’s just a plot
stirred up by America, who wants to take over the world.”
The Cold War clearly isn’t over, regardless of what anyone
says.
I really enjoyed my time in the Czech Republic and I know my
Czech has improved immensely. It was great practise for my year abroad and I
made lots of new friends. I really hope I get the chance to come back next year.
