It was about 10 pm on January 30th, 2024 when I arrived at hlavní nádraží (Prague Central Station) after 11 hours of four different train routes, coming all the way from Ljubljana, Slovenia. I had done just over a month of traveling western Europe with friends old and new, when it was finally time for the first look at the city I had done so much research on, and would be spending the next 4 months of my life in.
I wandered out into the dark, tired and disoriented, with a 30-something-pound backpack on my shoulders, then did the only thing I knew how to do at the time, call an Uber. As I would soon learn is a common trait amongst most Czech people, my driver was pretty reserved and not very talkative, but he got me quickly to my dorm in about 10 minutes or so. I checked in with the receptionist, and was the first one to my suite, awaiting the arrival of my friend Brady, and my 1-2 other roommates who would be randomly assigned.
The next day, I woke up no earlier than noon, and walked 10 minutes down the road to a shop called Penny. This is when the first major cutlure shock hit. Unlike other European cities I had been to, this Czech grocery store did not have a word of English anywhere in sight. After about an hour of shuffling around this small store, I went up to checkout where I ran into even more translation issues, as I did not speak a word of Czech, and continued to have this problem until a few weeks in once I had learned enough in my Czech class at the uni to get by. The upside was that I got all of my dorm basics and a good amount of food for probably a third of what I would have paid in America.
The next few days consisted of meeting my new roommate Gurbir, a finance student from Vancouver, Canada, who I hit it off with pretty quickly, and attending some social events to meet other exchange students. My friend/roommate Brady arrived as well after visiting a friend in the Czech countryside. I figured out how the very affordable tram system worked, so I no longer had to get Ubers everywhere, and started to get more familiar with the currency and how the city ran overall. At this point, I was enjoying my newfound home and waiting for classes to start a couple weeks later…