Top 300!

My flatmates may have been wondering why I was locking myself in my room the past few days, but I just couldn't say anything, since I was working on a top secret project. Last year I promised it would be the last time that I made a top 300 of my all-time favourite music, but I just couldn't resist the temptation in November this year. Since it's impossible to post the list in a clear and understandable manner on my weblog, I used a different website.

You can check out the list here.

Enjoy. :)

New place to live + a little experiment to make you feel better

Finally it's going to happen: I'm gonna move out of my cheap flat in Rajská Zahrada and into a great flat in a majestic building in the center of Prague. This will be my new home:



I will be living on the fifth floor, which is nice, because over there you won't hear much of the sounds of the city and we have a very luxorious elevator, in which you would just like to stay as long as possible. Maybe in the first week I will just play lift-boy for a few hours, just to go up and down in that wonderful elevator. :)
Anyway. I will move on 2 January 2011, and I will have 2 flatmates: a French expat and an American student. I already met both of them, and they're both very nice people, so I can't wait to move in. The room itself is also very large and I have a double bed, which means I will have no problems hosting any kind of guests. Which is a good thing, because it's always nice to have guests. :)

Something different now. I noticed that I am feeling really happy the past few days, seemingly for no reason. Of course it's nice that I am enjoying life here, but I'm wondering why I feel so good. Maybe it is all due to my strategy to avoid the Winter Blues. Want to know this strategy? It's very simple. Every morning when I'm on the subway, I close my eyes for a few minutes and stare into the light above me. So to find out more about this, I would like to encourage all of you who are living in a big city with a good subway system to try this out for one week and let me know the results. And for those of you who don't have the privilege to live in such a city: staring into a light bulb for five minutes each day will also do.

Just be sure to close your eyes first.

Back in Holland

Hi all!

So the long weekend in Holland went over quite quickly and now I'm back in Prague. And actually today is the first day that I would want to go back to Holland permanently. It was so good to see everybody again and to always have somebody around to talk to when you need to share something. But probably such a feeling is quite normal on the first evening after you leave your family and will not be home for the at least 6 months.

Of course the fact that I have this feeling a bit tonight means that I had a great time in Holland. It was so nice to see everybody again and to live my "old" life again for a few days. And of course my last night in Holland, the reason why I went back this early, was also great: the concert of Scouting For Girls at Tivoli. The whole evening was amazing! I was amazed by the support act called Handsome Poets. If you don't know them, you should really check out their song Dance (The war is over) on YouTube. And of course I really enjoyed the enthousiasm with which lead singer Roy of SFG played his keyboard (can't believe it wasn't broken at the end of the night) and the pure passion with which he sang his songs too. Seeing him perform again was almost like meeting an old friend and it gave all of the people that were there such a unique feeling. Unfortunately the feeling was ruined a bit at the end of the night by the Dutch railways, because there were no trains going to and from Utrecht. Again a problem with the Dutch railways. That was one of the things from home that I didn't miss the past three months. Maybe life in Czech Republic is not so bad after all.

Winter in Prague

Winter has arrived in Prague. The city is covered by a thick layer of fresh white snow and the temperature is well below zero every day. And in fact I'm already getting used to the cold weather. Today I went outside and thought it was quite a lovely day, even though the temperature was -7 degrees. Which means I'm adapting pretty well to the climate in Czech Republic. :) Although I must admit that the prospect of having this kind of weather for the next 4 months still is a bit frightening. But well, there are ways to escape the cold of course. :D More about that will follow later.

Anyway. What I was going to write about. The Christmas atmosphere is taking over Prague. There are already lights everywhere, Christmas songs on the radio, Christmas trees in the city and also real Christmas markets. Today I visited one. The market was great, a lot of nice stuff is being sold there and in fact I also tried some kind of food that seems to be a Czech specialty. It tasted very good, but I don't know the name of it, so I will describe here how it is made, and hopefully somebody can tell me the name. :)

So. It is made out of dough, that is put in a fryer for around one minute. Then there is some red sauce on it, that seems to say: "sorry, sorry, sorry, I really didn't mean to, but I'm a bit spicy, can you please forgive me?" and finally there is some grated Czech cheese on top of it, that actually has no taste, but makes the snack complete.
I'm really curious what this was, so if you're Czech and know what I'm talking about, please enlighten me! Děkuji in advance.

Have a good weekend.