Lost in Translation

[["The door was the way to... to... The Door was The Way. Good. Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn't have a good answer to." ~Douglas Adams (props to Nancy :)) ]]

I'm proud to say that, tonight, two and a half weeks into our abroad experience, Johanna and I successfully made a home cooked meal. While mine merely consisted of a bag of frozen vegetables, rice and eggs, it still felt good to sit down for a well-balanced meal. I feel like so far on this trip we have been scavengers- searching and grabbing any morsel of food we can find. It's basically like perpetual weekends on the dark side. But, yea, it was definitely nice to come home from a long day of internship and classes and just sit down at our kitchen table and eat. I'm getting sick of going out to dinner or just stopping on the street and picking up a sandwich.

Yesterday was the first day of my internship at The Prague Writer's Festival. The office is conveniently located about 5 minutes away from the NYU Center, so it won't be a problem going right from or right before classes. The office is in a really great area of the city, one which I hadn't known existed until yesterday. I'm pretty sure the hours I will be going to the office are Mondays 3-6 and Tuesdays 10-1. It's great because a lot of the work that I have to do can be done while I am laying in my bed. Perfect. The president of the Prague Writer's Festival is absolutely brilliant and he has interviewed and spoken with so many famous authors (Rushdie, Atwood, Schneider, Burroughs, Auster...to name a few). I think I am going to learn a lot of useful and interesting things by working closely with the festival and it will also hopefully help my Czech!

The main thing I am working on right now for the internship is correcting the english translation on the website. It's so weird though - I almost feel bad translating the English because it's almost as if I am re-translating the translation. Someone has already taken the Czech website and translated it into English and it is my job to correct the existing English; however, the problem is that some of the English is incomprehendable. I feel like by the time my 'translation' is through, the original meaning of the Czech will be twice removed. But, oh well, I guess there isn't really anything I can do about it since I can't read Czech.

So as I find myself lost amongst both English and Czech translations, I have also found myself lost amongst the labryinth-like city streets of Prague. Two weeks ago, my biggest fear was getting lost on a side street alone. While that fear still remains (don't worry, Mom), I have found a sort of peaceful angst when it comes to wandering the streets of Prague. Since I now know the general direction in which I should be heading, I love exploring and venturing off on my own. I feel like the only way to truly feel comfortable in a foreign place is to get lost and find your way.

Today on the third day of classes we went on our first field trip to a Kafka museum and we saw the building where Kafka was born. I could do this whole field trip thing...