Real Pigs, Fake Cows, and Homemade Cheese

If you take anything away from this post, it should be this simple lesson: “Holy shit, the Slovakian countryside is beautiful.” That’s what I learned, at least. 

A side note for some context, this was the same day as this encounter so we were already a bit tipsy from all those welcoming shots as we drove from the old couple’s cute cottage to an even cuter farm. There were animals in every freaking nook and cranny.

[Jenna Klein once captioned on a similar picture, "Art kids first encounter with nature," which I enjoyed]

Not only that, we explored some sort of homemade playground as well. Damn, climbing ropes is fun.

After spending some time in the gorgeous fall weather in the gorgeous countryside farm place, we were ushered inside for lunch. Perhaps I should say Lunch because this was intense.

The first course was soup. Two kinds of very heavy soup plus many bread baskets. One must soak in the bread baskets here because they are not complementary at restaurants, not even Italian ones. I know, right? We once asked for one at a restaurant and caused a lot of confusion and possibly even resentment from the Czech tender. (Tender being short for bartender. You got that, right?)

After the soup, there was a main course: potatoes, meat, lots of very filling things. I was honestly going to explode when they brought out the two desserts. I forgot to take pictures until they gave us pickled beets, so this is the only representation you will get of the food at the epic Lunch. 

After lunch: more animals!

As our class wandered around staring at the beasts, our teacher Sarah had an epiphany, "Wow, these pigs are so REAL!" The most real of the real pigs she had ever seen, I guess. (Don't worry, we didn't let her live it down.)

[First line of a real life high school paper, written by a friend: "The spirit of the wild horses will never be broken." So hilariously terrible, and yet when we told Aidan, she defended the horse-loving writer. You can see it in her face here.]

 [Side note: The "spirit" was all over this place.]

 Soon enough our translator offered to take some of us on a walk. As we ventured out, we asked her how far we'd be going. 

"Ten miles."

"Ten miles? That's a really long way--nearly 20 kilometers!" We argued, but she insisted, pointing to some distant hill as our destination. (SPOILER ALERT: We didn't really go ten miles.)

But what a photogenic walk this was! We ended up stopping in this fantastic sunny field and taking some photos. And a nap.

Soon enough, it was decided that Joe was dressed like "a Sears model" and needed to pose for his cover shoot in the field. 

Oh, and don't think I forgot about the nap.

[Photo by Danielle Lashley]

 We stayed in the field too long and had to take a short cut across the field for more food.

This resulted in my left foot getting sucked into a giant mud puddle. 

[Ne, ale dekuju. ("No, but thank you.")]

 The return was worth it though, as we were introduced to unlimited homemade cheese and given a demonstration on how it is made. 

[He is wearing these pants that every Czech person seems to own, but few in our American group have been able to find in stores.]

I was so pleasantly full from the cheese, the perfect light dinner after a long day. Then we went to the hotel and were pretty much force-fed more food for dinner. On this day I decided never to eat again. 

p.s. More farmage.

My Prague Cottage

For some reason during week three there was a lull in my normally overactive picture-taking. Needless to say, I have not written a full length novel for you today.

One nice day, I shot a pic of the main square (namesti, if you will) of Roztocky. I was trying to go to the Post Office, which had sadly closed ten minutes ago.

After taking this, I decided to try and get a close-up of that couple on the bench to illustrate how strangely okay PDA is here... but unfortunately they were just cuddling and not making out or anything else these gutsy CR couples do.

Roztocky has an abundance of cute little shops, my favorite of which is "Dog Pet," though I have not yet ventured inside.

 

I also took a photo of the cottage I live in! OMG, motherfuckers!

That's okay to put this on the internet, right? No one knows exactly where it is. Wink.

Do you like the green and brown striped fence? Me too.

Oh! And don't let me forget my deaf and blind dog pet, Homer.

He doesn't really sleep on my bed this much, he only very rarely ponders it when Jarmila is gone.

Which leads me to... drumroll, trumpet blast... my BED! As they would say on every episode ever of MTV Cribs, "This is where the magic happens."

[And by "magic" I mean Homer slept there once.]

I have a pleasant view through the window every morning. Lets just say, there are flowers. Ready for it?

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I've also begun wearing air-dried clothes. So Prague. I know. 

Yep. That's my underwear and I am not ashamed. Also, we often see a pretty white cat in our backyard named Angie. Today I got her to let me pet her and found out she has one green eye and one blue eye. I didn't take a picture though... we don't know each other well enough yet. 

Let's see... what else to say? Jarmila has grandkids, as evidenced by her refrigerator. (Side note: I met some of these aforementioned kids on Skype the other day.)

The girl on the fridge is one of Jarmila's daughters. The English words are courtesy yours truly. 

I close with a picture of Naomi. She said, "I feel like such a bad-ass hipster right now, someone needs to take a picture!" 

Don't worry, she's not usually a hipster, it's just that she happened to be borrowing a guitar, wearing a scarf, AND smoking a cigarette she had rolled herself. The stars aligned. 

Turtle/Dove

My sad, sad absence from the blog world is finally over!

I am working with Bethel's gallery again this summer. An artist named Sandra Ceas showed there. She makes these little porcelain Blessing Doves that she prays over and leaves all around the world as unexpected gifts for people. No note is left or anything, just a smooth white dove.

I got to leave one, so I went to a bridge near where I grew up in St. Michael.

My thoughts were that maybe a child who played by there now would find it, because I totally played there. When you live in a suburb, small bridges are exciting.

I shoved the dove above my tire with love... just kidding... I put the dove and my camera into my bike basket and biked back and forth suspiciously until people left so I could put the dove there without anyone seeing.

It is supposed to be a surprise, after all.

There was no question in those stroller-pushers' minds... These packages were holding drugs.

Eventually, the people walked past and I put the little guy by the bridge. 

 

On the way home I found ANOTHER baby turtle! Just a little quarter's worth of a turtle! 

I decided to "rescue" him by leading him closer to a little stream. Turtles want water, right? Right? So I delicately placed him in my basket and cranked the pedals as slowly as I could while still keeping the bike straight. I was amazed at my brilliance, until the little guy tried to jump out of the basket. This was bad, I thought, as I poked him away from his unintended suicide. This light poke made the basket fall off the bike! Lucky my turtle had a shell. I walked him to the stream area, after scarring him forever, I'm sure. 

The unknowing victim.

Hope to see you more often this summer :).

Reptile-mania-insania

Taking pictures of kite festivals wasn't the only thing I did in my January photography class. You see, we had to make an entire project based off of a random subject line from a spam email, drawn out of a bag. Mine was:

533 reptiles stolen from wildlife park

So many possibilities, but obviously I decided to make shitty cardboard-duct-tape-pipe-cleaner costumes for my friends and coerce them into dressing up as reptiles. Seemed the most logical, right?

The first day I started to make costumes, I got my awesome friend Sarah to help. We both figured it would be easy to get people to wear our fantastic outfits, so we went excitedly to Brian's room after a few hours of working. His roommates were surprisingly reluctant.

Begging and pleading and begging a tad more did work eventually, and I got some pretty quality photos that day:

 

[Nick Ramberg was a  stegosaurus of some sort.]

[Brian was a sensitive dragon]

 [with a definite coy side.]

 [And good ol' Paul was a snake.]

Luckily my teacher found the combination of (admittedly crappy) costumes and sets really funny and urged me to keep going and make it even more elaborate and stupid. Hooray!

Shelby posed for me and hers turned out to be some of the best:

[Lady Gaga-esque? Chameleon.]

[Might be my ultimate favorite.]

My good luck kept coming when my mom agreed to play:

[A reptile shocked by its reflection.]

 Things got even better. A guest artist came to my college to help us make an on-site artwork. It was going to be a giant cardboard collard green, but there wasn't enough time to paint the leaves so we ended up with a hideous duct-tape and cardboard tree-like thing. This was my moment. Or should I say, Sarah and Chris's

[Shallow depth of field]

[Deep depth of field... "deep depth" sounds wrong.]

[At this point I have no idea what kind of reptiles they were.]

[But they looked pretty awesome.]

The final photo shoot was just a 23 minute free-for-all with random costume parts and set pieces all over the place. 

[Chris makes a good anxious turtle.]

Chris called the costumes "repties," a play on the little know cult/club of furries, people who dress in animal suits for fun. He wanted the subtitle of the project to be "Reptie Convention 2011."

Sometime this semester I might be able to print out more, if so, you will see them!