My Travel Adventures

I made plans to meet an old friend at the Hvězda Game Reserve, a popular park near the edge of Prague, which takes the name Hvězda (meaning “star”) after the star-shaped summer palace at its centre. I proposed the venue since I had never been to Hvězda before, despite the fact that the walls of the summer palace are a very familiar sight to anyone who commutes to Prague from the west.

The weather has been too ugly to do anything pleasurable outside. I spent a little less than two weeks studying for the GREs, which was not as disastrous of a plan as I thought it would be, and spent another two weeks finalising the grad school applications I have not yet sent. By Christmas, I received my first letter of admission, which really take the stress off during the holidays. In the meantime, my internships have kept me busy and it looks like they will lead up to another internship I recently obtained.  

This weekend, my sisters and I made an excursion to the nearby town Lidice, which was destroyed during the Second World War as retribution for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. The Lidice massacre is noted for its completely arbitrary nature as an example of wartime collective punishment. The entire male populace of the town was executed, and the women and children were sent to concentration and extermination camps – only a few “racially eligible” children were placed with SS families.