Travel Abroad

How to Fall in Love with a Place
The river split the city in two while ornate bridges worked like stitches connecting one half to the other. The spired Parliament building led the façade that eventually spread out into the tapestry of short, grey buildings that were Pest. Behind us on the Buda side, the red clay roofed houses suggested a fairy tale town that was more show than substance. I was sitting with Tünde, my Hungarian friend, at the top of Buda Castle, getting a run down on why Pest is infinitely cooler than Buda.

Impressions of Amsterdam
“I watched the universe fall apart. Twice. When I went to Amsterdam,” was one of the first thing my now ex-boyfriend told me when we met. A concise, albeit dramatic, summary of what Amsterdam means to the uninitiated. Mushrooms are no longer legal in Holland, by the way.

Northern Bohemia: Part Two
Kladno
After searching Google using phrases like “coats shoes hanging from the ceiling” “mining town performance art czech republic” my efforts at finding exactly what it was Otto took us to in the Central Bohemian town of Kladno proved fruitless. I searched Kladno in the New York Times online which turned up stories from 1939 with headlines like “German policeman slain near Prague; Nazis punish area” and lots of news about the Kladno soccer team. I visited Kladno’s official website but they’re not exactly flouting the abandoned mining facility just outside town that gets taken over by experimental Eastern European performance artists once a year.


Northern Bohemia: Part One
Mosquito Mountain
Northern Bohemia is a region north of Prague where fourteen NYU film students spent 48 hours they would have otherwise spent in clubs and bars. But when our professor Otto Urban—a Czech art historian and curator who is as cool as his name—told us he was taking us to Northern Bohemia, it didn’t set up much in terms of expectations. When we pressed him for details he said things like mosquito mountain, bone chapel, mining town performance art piece… In other words, we really just had to trust his judgment on this.