Unforeseen Friendships (Guest post by Ngoc Ta)

OUR FIRST MEETING 

We first met with the local Czech students for dinner – Dávid, Vojta, Lucy, and Cyril. Each Czech student went to one table, so everyone in our CIEE group could converse with a Czech student. 

I’m sure we were all curious about them because they grew up in a very different culture than us. I know my table asked them so many questions, it kind of felt like an interrogation. Thankfully, Dávid — the Czech student who sat with us — was pretty chill about it, even when some pretty personal questions were asked by a table mate of ours. It definitely added some spice to the conversation, but we were shocked. Now it’s an inside joke between the people involved. At the end of our dinner, contact information at my table was shared between only two people.

I asked about people’s first dinner experiences with their Czech student and they said their demeanor was different – it seemed more reserved and serious which I thought was an interesting observation. 

Dávid and Zora (with Vojta in the background in between!)

MYSTERY GUEST AT THE MALL

Our second meeting was at Westfield Chodov, the largest mall in Czech Republic. Dávid told us that a classmate of his is also coming, but he’s not here yet so we can just look around for now. Our CIEE coordinators probably assumed we would shop there like normal people, but we ended up just going to a Starbucks and a game store. 

That game store was where we met our mystery guest — Rosťa. We hit it off well within the first minute of meeting because although he is a 6’4 (193 cm) giant from Europe and I am a 5’ (153 cm) dwarf raised in America, we both knew Japanese. Everyone else was just staring at us like we were weirdos because they couldn’t understand our conversation. 

We walked around the mall for a little bit longer and then we decided to leave. When asked where we wanted to go, we agreed on choosing “Surprise us”. We walked for what felt like 2 miles (3.218688 km), arrived at a tall building, took some passes, and rode the elevator to the top floor where a beautiful view of the city awaited us. Pictures were taken, passes were returned, and we headed back to our aparthotel because our curfew was getting dangerously close. This time, I was the one who exchanged contact information.

The view on top of the tower

MEETING UP DURING OUR FREE-TIME

Zora and I both enjoyed the Czech student’s company, so we decided to meet up again at Crème de la Crème – an ice-cream shop close to the aparthotel we were staying at – during our free time. This means that our meeting isn’t planned by CIEE, we organized this as friends. Our future get-togethers would be organized in the same manner as well. 

We were getting to know each other better and it was a great feeling. We are no longer “weird Americans who ask personal questions” and “interesting students from Czech who know how to speak English well”. We now have more depth to each other’s character and personality. We’ve dug past their reserved and serious demeanors and exposed their lighthearted, humorous side. 

Can you tell what’s wrong with this image?

PADDLE BOATS AND BEING HELD HOSTAGE

CIEE prepared paddle boats for our group to use and another new Czech student joined the mix. Each paddle boat can hold 4 people, but only the 2 people up front actually do the labor. I sat with one of the Czech students, while Zora had 3 in hers. 

Although the sun seemed like it wanted to kill us with UV light torture, I had a blast yelling at Zora’s boat variations of “Heey! Come back! Let’s switch out some students”. Dávid and I teamed up for this because everyone else was worried about drowning in the process. After some resistance and convincing, we finally got Dávid and Cyril on my boat. 

After the paddle boats, we had free-time. They invited us to visit their school since it was a 5-minute walk away and we agreed. Zora was very eager to play the piano there since she used to practice everyday back home. It was a classmate’s birthday, so we recorded a video of us singing “Happy Birthday” with Zora on the piano of course. 

Zora playing “Happy Birthday”

Our piano session was abruptly cut short though, when we were suddenly at an author’s conference at their school. The conference was expected to be 1.5~2 hours long, but I was very hesitant to leave because I didn’t fully understand Czech culture. Would it be rude to leave early? What if this led to a bad reputation for Americans? Would the Czech students be in trouble for leaving with us? We decided to leave the conference an hour in though because it was our classmate’s birthday.

UNFORESEEN BUT NOT REGRETTABLE

I am genuinely surprised at how close our relationship has gotten considering how we first met about two weeks ago. I was expecting more miscommunication to occur, but we haven’t really had any yet – unless I forgot about it, which is highly likely. If I was unable to communicate to the people involved in these experiences, I would bet that 30% of this entire blog is not accurate. 

That wasn’t the only aspect of the trip that was unexpected though; the Prague trip itself was unexpected. I actually was assigned to the Japan trip, but it got canceled due to closed borders – hence the random knowledge in Japanese. As much as I wanted to live out Japanese culture, I don’t regret going to Český either because of the people I’ve met here. 

Home is 14 hours away and I don’t want to return quite yet.

TIPS FOR YOUR FIRST MEETING WITH LOCAL STUDENTS

Prepare a list of questions beforehand unless you appreciate the awkward silence

Don’t be like us – try not to ask any personal questions (not everyone is a Dávid!)

Remember that their culture is different – keep an open mind

Don’t be nervous, they’re human too

Just be yourself – as cliché as this sounds, you’re probably better off not pretending to be someone you aren’t