Social Life in the Czech

Blog #9

Social Life (6)

Social life here in the Czech Republic has been great! With the population of Olomouc being 25% college students, there always seems to be something fun to do. The exchange student program here is called Erasmus, which is an organization of students that arrange fun events for exchange students to attend. One of the major things that they do is arrange places for presentations and parties for each country represented at the University. Every week a country will give a presentation about their culture and then have a party the next night. We just recently had the United States presentation and party. We had a great time showing our American pride and teaching everyone about our country! It is a super fun way to learn about different countries and their culture and meet so many people too!

The girls on American night!

I have noticed here that most of the college life is during the week. This is completely opposite from America where the weekends are when everyone gets together. Often times many of the students go home during the weekend so they spend a couple nights out of the week out with friends. This was hard to adjust to at first but I have loved it because we still get to hang out with people here in Olomouc since most of the time we aren’t here on the weekends.

The program is coming to an end soon and I head back to America in two weeks! I think the thing I am going to miss most from here is the people. We have had such amazing luck running into people who have become great friends along the way. We met a family in a coffee shop that recently moved here from America and they are doing church planning here in Olomouc. We had dinner with them a couple times and enjoyed home cooked meals for the first time since we left! They cooked some great American foods that we had been craving! (burgers and milkshakes) They have three young kids and we had so much fun playing twister and board games with them!

Hanging out with our new friends :)

We also probably couldn’t of survived without the help of one of the students from the university. We met Tereza when we first got here and she has helped us more than we could have ever asked for! Everything from translating our train tickets from Czech to English to giving us directions around the city, she has almost dropped everything to help us when we needed it. This just shows how many great people are out there and makes me want to be just like her for people back in America. I have a whole new perspective on foreign exchange students and how tough it can be. I never realized it until I was an exchange student myself and I am now so much more empathetic and willing to help. Because truly one person can make a huge difference.. Tereza was that difference for us!