Praha!

In June, I went on my long awaited Study Abroad to Prague, Czech Republic.  I had no idea what to expect, but in the end, it was a really great trip.  I was a little out of my element, but by the end I think I can safely say I am an amateur artist, or let's just say I at least have the skills to pretend to be an artist.

My new musician boyfriend: Vladimir Pinta.
He plays the saxaphone in the Old Town Square 

There were about 15 students on the program and we spent the first week in Prague, checking out the city and the art inside the city itself, but the majority of the program was spent about 3 hours south of Prague in the countryside at a place called Artmill (www.artmill.eu)  Artmill is an old mill that has been renovated by an American artist and her Czech husband.  They have programs for university students and then at the end of the summer, they have a summer art camp for kids.  It's a really neat place.  They're working on becoming completely self-sustainable, so in addition to learning about photography, I learned a lot about gardening, herbs and butchering small animals.  That's right, I watched two rabbits be butchered for tomorrow's lunch.  It was an experience to say the least.

This is Artmill. The building is the old mill and then the Artist and her family also live on the property in a house attached to the mill.  You can barely see it, but there is a huge wire sculpture of a horse in the yard.

"Um, guys, where did the rabbit go?"

The Artmill Lake

We actually stayed about 10 minutes away from the mill at a place called Krutenice.  It is a hotel/horse stable.  We stayed in the summer camp rooms above the horse stables, so I woke up every morning to the sound of hooves hitting the sides of horse stalls and sound of the neighbor's rooster crowing incessantly.  A couple of my classmates and I got up early almost every morning and went to help the horse trainer with feeding the horses and shoveling hay.

We worked on our art project for two weeks at the mill.  I chose to do a project in photography, but I didn't use my digital camera.  I used a Pinhole camera that I made.  It's a very basic camera made of an oatmeal canister, black paper, duct tape and uses my hand as a shutter.  I had to put a piece of photo paper in the canister, "take" a picture by exposing the paper to the sunlight for 10 seconds, and then had to immediately develop the photo since, if I took my hand off the camera, it would ruin the photo.  I chose to do portraits of all of my classmates and people around Artmill and I think my project turned out pretty neat.  It was amazing how clear the photos were considering there was just a pinhole as a lens.   I can officially be a photographer in the year 1812 now.   After our time at Artmill, we went back to Prague and set up a gallery show of all our work alongside the work of some Czech artists.  We had a gallery opening and everything...it was very ritzy.  

Here's the camera.  The black square is the "lens"

The finished product.  It has a really creative name: "Artmill Portraits"

After we set up the gallery, we had some free time, so I forced everyone with me to go on a boat ride on the Vltava river, which I think they secretly enjoyed...even though it was about 250 degrees outside.

On our last night in Prague, we went back to Old Town Square.  A huge screen was set up so people could watch World Cup games, so we went to one of the outdoor restaurants and watched the game from our table.  I'm pretty sure it was the best way to watch the games, besides actually being in South Africa.