Prague is great. You should go there. There's interesting old historical stuff, pretty parks, great architecture, lots of good food, and cheap liquor. And so much music! Every little hole-in-the-wall church has a daily concert of Vivaldi, Mozart, and Dvorak, but there's a lot of respectable stuff too. We saw, appropriately enough, La Bohème. It was really well done, but would perhaps have been slightly more compelling had it not been in Italian with Czech subtitles. Other highlights included:

• The Communist Museum: Very one-sided presentation, but really moving footage on the 1989 protests.
  
• The Dvorak Musem
  
• The oldest synagogue in Europe: not much to look at, but really impressive in concept. Also moving since there are only about 1500 Jews left in Prague from a population of many thousands before the war. Hitler preserved the old Jewish Quarter because he wanted it to become a museum, and that's exactly what has happened.
  
• Sitting up on a hill overlooking the city right where the 30m statue of Stalin used to be, reading, admiring the view, and chatting with a Swiss cameraman filming a documentary on last summer's floods. (I got to use my French a surprising amount -- it seems all the tourists were wither French or American.)
  
• "Hellish goulash" and bread dumplings at a local pub.
  

I was staying with my step-sister Lyndsay, who's doing a semester abroad there. (She goes to UW-Madison.) She and I are very different -- she's in a sorority, extroverted, drinks a fair amount, though still somewhat studious (and pre-med). Immediately after my arrival, while I was still trying to calm my racing heart after a perilous cab ride in which the average speed was at least three times the posted limit, I met her suitemates and was thrown into American College Girl culture shock: "Oh, for sure!" was the most frequent response to any statement; then someone came in and announced, "Wouldn't it be great if, like, after our exams were done we, like, got some wine and sat up on Petrin Hill and got wasted?" (You'll have to imagine the singsong tone.) Lyndsay seems a bit more down-to-earth than the rest of them, and we had a good time together and even bonded a bit (as you might have guessed from last night's post, which requires a fair amount of background knowledge). And I drank on three consecutive nights for the first time ever. (Now four; I'm definitely taking tonight off.)

On the way out, I discovered a great way to get rid of unwanted foreign currency: airport duty-free shopping. It actually is cheaper than buying stuff here.