Pet sounds, and an intense few weeks coming up

The opera was really great, and I only fell asleep once. It was Tajemstvi (The Secret), by Czech composer Smetana. Apparently some people in this country consider him an even better composer than Dvořák. But only some.

This morning, I commuted for over an hour to get to the really beautiful Troja Castle for my weekly Art & Architecture tour. There was a brief, slightly terrifying moment when I thought I might be the only person who would make the intense journey, thereby giving me a lot of alone time with Marie Homerova (a woman so beloved by her classes, past and present, that I had to create a Facebook group to extol her virtues...For some, it's her accent; for others, her catchphrases like "is it so?"; but for me, it's her smell that does it). Fortunately, others arrived.

Rushed to Czech class, where we had a fantastic conversation about Czech interpretations of animal noises (this, after our teacher, a beautiful woman with a hard-nosed tone in her voice who still manages to crack us up on a daily basis, entertained us with the sounds deer make while mating. Can't make this stuff up). Apparently cows go "boo," cats say "neow," dogs say "vuff," and rooters crow "rikidikidat" or something crazy like that.

I realized last night at 1:00am that I had a midterm in my first of three FAMU classes today. So I breezed through that real quick, then found out my second class was canceled (...again). I hung out for a while before my final class of the day. Zuzana was telling me over dinner tonight, about how her university classes were spread apart at inconvenient intervals (too short to go home, too long to focus on something else), so everyone just spent their free time heading to pubs for a bit. Some things never change.

A lot of my time lately has been dedicated to preparations for my parents' visit next week, something I've been looking forward to since about my first week here. It should be an intense next two weeks, beginning with my cab ride at 4:15am Friday morning to the airport (with Steph) to catch my 6:30am flight to Amsterdam. I should mention, because I think you should know and because it's too late for my mother to care about it, that we're going to Amsterdam with nowhere to sleep. No hostel. No bed. We're just kinda hoping for the best. And bringing enough cash to spend the night at a prostitute's place.