Budapest

sooooo....sorry it's been a while since i've written last. inspiration hasn't struck. i went to budapest last weekend and it was vundabar! it was weird arriving in a city which i had no previous preconceptions about. it was like completely fabricated, it could've looked like anything! it was really interesting, like a bigger more eclectic prague, with more bullet holes and modern buildings. one of my favorite things we did was visit this art gallery (called bumbum), the paintings there were the strangest i have ever seen but when i looked around the corner there was this huge scene of big dark evil dogs perched around a gothic conference table. i was afraid to approach it initially but when i did i couldn't pull myself away (see photo). unfortunately i neglected to take a photo of the plaque behind the piece because it appeared that each dog had a biography, all in Hungarian of course. i want to study it for the paper i'm going to write in psychoanalysis and art. something about contemporary art...something...something.

so my internship/volunteering thing. i'm going to this graphic design firm called ArtD (they have a pretty snazzy website) but it turns out the dude guy mostly just wants me to teach him english, which is fine with me cause he's really nice but i also wanted to be able to use this for my resume so now every tuesday i spend an hour talking to him in english and two hours doing some meaningless task in photoshop. two hours is really all i can take, doing things like extending the pages of some bible so that it fits into a perfect rectangle, in complete silence mind you. it's good practice but it's just a little frustrating at the end of the day when i ask if i should save me work and he tell me "it's ok, i have to redo it tonight anyways". not to mention that the whole program is in czech, i had to google translate "similar" and "inverse". AND it's a mac. it's all got to be worth it at least a little. next week i'm excited though because Cerny says i'm going to help him translate an artist's calendar into english. i can do that!

tomorrow i'm going to see swan lake. this weekend will be the first weekend this month that i'm spending in prague. i'm looking forward to it.

oloumoc

just got back from oloumoc, we were learning about psychology and witch trails and stuff. terrible thing that. the countryside in the czech republic is BEAUTIFUL and i can't believe how lucky i am to have chosen to come here. it's pretty much exactly what i was hoping for.
on the bus back to prague we watched this absurd czech comedy called skritek. it's pretty great, i recommend you find it.
this was my favorite scene, it reminds me of my days working at godiva:

pictures from Pisek

Pisek

Last weekend I went to a little town called Pisek with my school for a film festival. It was really nice, we watched a bunch of student films and also Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, which was really good. We went to a lecture of this great animator whose work I had just seen in my history of animation class. She's amazing. We saw her the next day after the film award ceremony at this concert of a beatboxing master (also super awesome) in a bar. She had on a tanktop and long gloves and I think she was there by herself. I'm going to try and attach a link to my favorite short piece of her's.
The next day we went on this amazing hike and it was all foggy, I guess the czech's call it being in milk or something like that. And then it cleared up and we walked to a beautiful old castle in the hills. Pictures to come. The hike was like 10 miles though, which was kind of rough.
let's see if this works: