I’m off to Bulgaria for the weekend so Sunday’s post may or may not be late. As such I am going to assume today is my last post of October. I’m always a bit sad to see it go and this is no exception. I had a pretty epic month. October includes my birthday and Halloween which are both awesome days. I also really like what the weather is like: crisp air hinting at the coming winter. The leaves changing colour is very cool as well. I hope everybody had as rockin’ a month as I did.

In other news, turns out that writing a paper for a class that you learned nothing in is pretty difficult. Especially when you choose the topic with absolutely no background knowledge or input from the professor. Apparently this can result in you writing a paper on a topic that there is extremely little information about and thus you can easily put your GPA in peril.

I am also doing some research to present Canada to the other international students. While doing so i came across this which tickled me pink. I am pretty sure nobody but a Canadian would get it though.

I haven’t taken any pictures to go with what I’ve been writing about today, but here are some hot air balloons.

Nothing super interesting has happened recently. I went to a Dark Tranquility concert last night. Insomnium opened for them and it was totally awesome but I didn’t bring my camera and thus do not have any photos from the evening.

What I do have pictures of is a chocolate eating contest Ksenija and I had. We had been planning on it for quite some time but only recently did we actually get around to it. Everything started off dandy but we quickly realized that I had accidentally bought cooking chocolate instead of milk chocolate. Result: feeling that there are terrible gremlins in my stomach that hate me.

Here is a photo of Ksenija drinking some milk to wash down the copious amounts of chocolate we were consuming.The chocolate in question:On the Canada front, my home University recently shot a giant lip-dub. I was pretty stoked about participating in this but filming commenced right after I left for Europe so I missed out on it. The video was just released so click here to see how awesome the University of Victoria is.

I just realized that despite the name of the last two postings, I never actually uploaded there aren’t actually any pictures of Žygimantas (Jesus). So here you go.

I will now explain the photo. Turns out Czech currency is called the Czech Crown (you can also call it a Koruna). Anywho, Žygimantas happened to pay a deposit on the hostel we were staying at. Therefore we all owed him money. This resulted in me getting to say the delightful sentence “Ok guys, we all owe Jesus 23 crowns”. It gave me a chuckle. Pictured is Jesus holding said money.Also it is Spirit Day today, so all you awesome folk out there: break out the Purple! I know I am.

Homophobia sucks. Just sayin’.

Since I doubt you want to read about me doing homework all week I am going to write a bit more about last weekend’s Praguian excursion. During one of our outings the group of us decided to hike up a ‘mountain’ (also known as a hill).  Here is a photo of (left to right) Jovita, Aukse and Aiste walking through some orchards on the way up.About 4/5 of the way up, we heard a rather loud explosion. All of us were startled and reasonably confused but continued up the hill. Before reaching the top several more explosions were heard, all of which kept making me jump. By the time we reach the top I am very curious as to what keeps blowing up at the top of the hill. Imagine my surprise when we come across  what I can only describe as a Renaissance Fair. The explosions were the sounds of muskets being fired. I was utterly delighted by this and had a great time. Here is one of the costumes.In the middle of the Fair there stood this tower. The tower had nothing to do with the fair, but just happened to be located within it’s grounds. We climbed up the staircase and during so I shot the following picture depicting Nina and one of the guys dressed up for the fair. I hope he normally dresses like that. I would also like to take this time to complain about the terrible ‘MyCoop’ site that UVic utilizes to find us jobs. Last year when working on applications I would often be working late into the night and found that at 2:00 AM the site shuts down and refuses to load. I am not sure how long it stays like this, I believe it’s between 1.5 and 2 hours but I must say it is intensely aggravating  if you’re working on a job application due at 10:00 AM the following day and you’re kicked off by their ridiculous system. Eventually I just learned to avoid working that late on applications while back in Canada so it wasn’t really much of an issue after I figured out what was going on. The big annoyance now is since I am currently 9 hours ahead of Victoria time, MyCoop shuts down at 11:00 AM which is prime application time for me. I don’t understand what kind of shoddy system UVic decided to work on so that they have nearly 10% downtime on their server. Preposterous.

I sometimes am very surprised by some of the subtle differences between North American and European culture. The following photo is an excellent example of this. Pictured is my good friend Wiebke. Wiebke was born and raised in Germany and is another purveyor of the photographic arts. She shoots with the same ballin’ camera as Jordie Hein, which is the excellent Canon T2i. We occasionally walk around Brno taking photos of whatever interests us. Earlier this week, Wiebke and I were walking around a park when we came across a baseball field. After a few minutes of walking around the field Wiebke said something very surprising to me – ‘This is a really strange looking football field.’ Turns out this was the first time she had ever seen a baseball field in her life. Concurrently, this is the first photo taken of her on a baseball field. Boggled my mind entirely.On a completely different subject: a few years back I discovered the site Futureme.org. The premise is that you write an email to yourself that will be sent at a time specified. I wrote an email to myself in November 2007 that I received a few days ago. It was pretty interesting seeing how my perspective has changed on a lot of things. It was also very nostalgic for me as it was written during my first year of University. My favorite part was when my past self expressed envy towards me because ‘by the time [I] receive this, George Bush will no longer be president of the United States.’

In media news, I recently came across this video which I think is totally awesome. You should watch it but be warned, there is rather offensive language within so those with sensitive ears may want to stay away.

Over the weekend I traveled to Prague with Nina (mentioned several times on Wanderlust) and a group of Lithuanians: Žygimantas Jašinskas (Jesus for short), Aiste Lukosiute, Aukse Trapnauskaite, and Jovita Vitkutė. If any of you anglophones reading this can pronounce the last names of these folk correctly on your first try you will have my everlasting respect. The following is a picture of a bizarrely decorated TV tower. Yes those are enormous babies with no faces crawling up the structure. Horrific. I am a bit proud of this photo as it is entirely post-processing free. The glow effect was a combination of overexposure and intentional fogging of my lens.I really like Prague but I am definitely glad that I am going to school in Brno instead. Prague is a bit too big for my tastes and I don’t much care for tourist towns. Visiting is fine but I just wouldn’t want to live there. It’s far too busy, prices are much higher and the people are less friendly than in Brno. The last photo is a candid shot of Aiste walking around a harbor or something. I can’t quite remember.

Nothing particularly interesting has happened since Monday. Some plans were made to go skydiving but those regrettably fell through. Since I don’t have any new photos from this week, here are some of my favorites from my travels in the past while.

This shot I took in Kutná Hora, which I wrote about a while back. I like the colours.This is also from Kutná Hora but this shot is (unsurprisingly) inside the Bone Church itself whereas the shot above was clearly taken outside. You may notice the coins underneath these skulls. This is because the Bone Church has become akin to a pond in that people make wishes while throwing coins into the bone structures. In case you’re completely uncultured and have no idea about European landmarks, the following picture is of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Sunday’s post should be more interesting but it may be somewhat late as I expect to be returning from a trip sometime in the evening. See y’all then.

As you may or may not know, this Sunday was my birthday. It was also Canadian Thanksgiving as well as the date 10/10/10 which, as was pointed out to me on Facebook, equals 42 in binary. So all in all a pretty neat day. I would like to sincerely thank everybody who wished me a happy birthday either on Facebook or by other means. You are all awesome.

I spent my birthday weekend at an event called Survival Weekend which was essentially a Star Wars themed bootcamp. If you are thinking ‘Wow Kobi, that sounds like more fun than watching drunk monkeys drive monster trucks!’ then you would be correct. It was epic. I took very few photos because I was worried about breaking my camera but highlights of my weekend include: arm wresting a Sith Lord, eating maggots, skateboarding down a waterslide and being one of the three people out of ~120 at the camp that spoke English as a mother tongue. Pictured below is one of the few photos I did take. This was on the way home where we had a 1.5 hour trip on a train that was filled far above capacity and as a result we were stuck sitting in the hall. That was still pretty fun though because one fellow had a guitar with him so we spent much of the trip singing along to it. At one point the entire train car was dancing the Macarena.You can find a new photo under Frown Town taken at Survival weekend. The fellow on the right is a cool German guy named Alex that I met this weekend. You may notice a small target in my hands. This is from one of the activities where we got to do target practice with something similar to a BB gun.

I then came back to Brno where I was accosted by Ksenija and Nina, both of whom have been mentioned several times on Wanderlust. These two swell friends decided to surprise me with a birthday cake that they made themselves. If you knew what kind of kitchen we are subject to in my dormitory you would be far more impressed with this fact.  The deliciousness of the cake was only surpassed by the awesomeness of these two girls. Here is a picture of us with the cake. It looks a bit funky because the flash on my camera wasn’t firing properly so I had to pull the photo out of something that was underexposed by like 5 f-stops.Here is another photo from when my flash was actually working. Ksenija shot this and in doing so fired the flash directly into Nina’s face from about 20 cm away. I think my expression is great.

Sorry fellas – it’s my birthday. Therefore there is no post today. Come back tomorrow for another Kobi Approved® steaming hot serving of words with a side of photos.

Last Saturday I went on a delightful day trip to a small town called Kutná Hora. This is a town famous for it’s cathedrals as well as the ‘Bone Church’. Now as you may recall, I have already visited the catacombs underneath Paris so I was a bit skeptical as to whether this small church would live up to them.  I was delightfully surprised. The Bone Church and the catacombs are completely different concepts. Whereas the Parisians seemed far more interested in storing a large amount of bodies, this Czech church had the goal of arranging the bones in an attractive manner. Instead of stacks of bones with simple designs, the Bone Church had extremely elaborate structures built out of femurs and adorned with hundreds of skulls. I had a bit of trouble capturing anything really amazing but here is a photo of one of the very simple designs. I will play around with some of my other photos and see if I can get a more impressive photo up sometime soon. There was also a wedding going on during our visit to one of the cathedrals and I quickly snapped this from my hip so that they wouldn’t notice my creeping disposition. This design was outside a Cathedral finished in 1894. A friend of mine pointed out that if one were to quickly glance at it they may think it reads something completely different than what the designer likely intended. In other news, here is my address just in case you need me to dispose of some evidence for you or something. Alternatively, I suspect that mailing yourself here would be very cost effective in comparison to a plane ticket.

Kobi Thomson

Koleje Vinařská, blok A1

Vinařská 5

603 00 Brno

Czech Republic

Well folks, I’ve been working on this for a while but only now have I actually gotten around to getting it up and running on them there internets. You may notice a new addition to the toolbar on Wanderlust. It is called Frown Town and it summarizes every European city I have been to thus far, excluding Brno (where I am currently living) and Noordwijk, which is located in the Neatherlands. The photo I took for Noordwijk became corrupted so it is forever lost to the ages and I’m saving the Brno shot for some time that I get a truly excellent photo to post. I hope you like Frown Town enough to make up for the lack of any story or picture posted today.

In other news, this alert for travelers within Europe was just brought to my attention by a friend of mine and so all you fellow exchange students: keep your wits about you.