Since I am in Belgrade for the weekend, I shall not be posting on Sunday. Instead I am posting a photo that has nothing to do with my trip.

This is Louise Magliano. She is from Rome and is an amazing dancer.

Well friends, turns out that for this week I am busier than a monkey in a banana plantation. I have 5 exams in a 72 hour period. This period starts tomorrow morning. I also have a paper to polish off. I am not looking forward to this.

On Thursday I was slacking from my homework by helping out some friends shoot a zombie film in our dormitory. This included standing outside for somewhere around 45 minutes in a t-shirt. I didn’t realize when I agreed to this that it was somewhere around -10 degrees with 20-30 km/h winds. Unpleasant.

Anywho, one of the scenes included a rather large party. I took the following photos during said party. This is Anna, you may remember her from my Krakow post. If you look carefully you can see a solitary dreadlock among the rest of her hair. I think it is awesome.Next up is my friend Stavros from Athens. If there were one expression that I wish I could replicate, it is this one.

Last night we had an enormous snowball fight in the courtyard in front of my dormitory. This courtyard is somewhat visible in the bottom of the bottom photo of this post. Between 40 and 60 people showed up which was absolutely epic. A shoutout to Ksenija for organizing this delightful romp. I don’t have any photos from this but I know Ksenija bravely toughed out the fight with her trusty camera by her side. Perhaps there will be a guest photo by her if she is so kind as to lend me her intellectual property. She was indeed awesome so here is a group photo. By this point a lot of people had left and thus it is not a good indicator of actual participation rates but I still like it. Since I have no photos of the snowball fight, I dug through some photos from early on in the semester. I found this shot out of my window that I took one of the first days of living in Brno. I had to post it for the severe juxtaposition with Wednesday’s post. Too bad the angles were not a bit closer. Completely off the topic of myself and Europe in general, I recently came across this short film by a friend of mine, Pravin Narsing. If you are ridiculously perceptive you will have noticed his Flikr account linked to on Wanderlust’s sidebar. This is because he is a photographer who puts my skills to absolute shame. I highly recommend you give his film a watch and his photos a browse through. You will not be disappointed.

Howdy friends! As you may remember from last Wednesday’s post, I was in Bulgaria for the weekend. As a result I am getting slammed for work right now and don’t have time to write about my trip. Instead here is a short plug for a DJ friend of mine back in Victoria. He goes by the stage name Dirk Spanier has some pretty fly beats. I highly recommend you check ‘em out

I particularly enjoy the following three songs.

One

Two

and Three.

The following photo Dirk used for the cover art for one of his earlier remixes that can be found here. This picture was one of the first times I made something using Photoshop that I really liked. The eyeball belongs to a certain Ms. Chelsea Olson and was heavily photoshopped sometime during 2007 or 2008.

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.

I have noticed that there are very few discernibly homeless people in the parts of Europe I have traveled in thus far. I have several theories about why this may be. It may be that the way the social class system works lowers the predisposition towards being homeless. Another theory is that governments may be more likely to provide low income housing. Alternatively, there may be stronger government policies against the homeless that force people to be less conspicuous or to move out of cities. Perhaps people are more likely to help out each other on a personal level as well. It may be simply the cities I have been to that this is the case for or maybe its just the specific areas that I have been around. Or maybe it’s because Europe is totally awesome. I’m not sure.

Another interesting thing to note is that despite the (presumably) lowered homeless population, there are still just as many people asking for money, they just do not dress in the stereotypical manner of the homeless.

Pictured is one of the few European homeless people I have seen. He was sitting on a street corner in Amsterdam and something about him just bums me out.This next picture is the polar opposite of the one above. This was a fellow dancing in front of a giant statue. What was awesome about this guy was he was dancing along to a Michael Jackson song while lip syncing. I figure he actually looks more like Michael Jackson than Michael Jackson did by the end of his life. For another picture of this guy’s dance moves click here.

I once again apologize for the delay folks. I imagine that once I get settled into my room in the Czech Republic I will finally start to become reliable in my posting. Until then you will just have to be patient. Also I am very sorry for the lack of picture but I don’t have internet access on my computer. Pictured is Sarah Koury, a theater student kicking it retro for a Mad-Men themed photoshoot.