Day 8

Pilzen has definitely been a whirlwind of activity. This morning was vocational day, which I thought meant I would get to study my vocation but the Czech translation is that I got to study various vocations. So I started the day out on the front steps of the Pilzen City Hall. My host showed up and informed me that I was going to visit the local university Dental school where he is a professor. Okay. I'm playing along and then my host asks me what I do. I told him I was a librarian, and he seemed surprised, but agreed that we could stop in at a local library. We got to the Dental School of Charles University (which is the oldest, most prestigous university in Pilzen) and he showed me all of his classes, how they teach students to make molds, crowns, etc. My favorite part was where I got to see the little Dental museum. They had chairs from the 1930s and dental work from the beginning of time till now. Let's just say I'm very glad I live in an age that believes in "Laughing Gas"! Some of that other stuff looked painful! After the Dental school, my host took me to the medical library at Charles University. As luck would have it, the director (a very nice lady who luckily spoke a little English) was in and I was able to talk to her. She told me that she had recently had the chance to attend an ALA conference, and was very impressed with American Libraries. She informed me that their library was moving away from collecting print materials and moving all online. To the point that there were no print materials in the library! Any archival or print materials were kept in the various dental and medical schools, while the library housed all the up to date online databases. She says this has impacted her job because instead of showing people where to find a book, etc she and her staff have now become databases teachers. They had alot of databases that I recognized from when I worked at my University Library such as: CINAHL, PubMed, MedLine, Ovid, LexisNexis, etc. I asked her about the issue of censorship and she told me that the Czech libraries do not tolerate Censorship at all. The Czech people still remember communism, and the censorship that took place and are adamantly opposed to censorship in any form. In fact, during the Communist area, librarians in the smaller towns would fight against the communists by hiding "safe books" (so called because they were prohibited and if found, would be locked up in a safe) in their tiny village collections because it was unlikely communists would look there. If the soldiers did come by on an inspections,it was unlikely they would be educated enough to know what they were looking for. I thought that was a very interesting view on censorship. We as librarians constantly fight against censorship because of the very notion of something like the Communist era taking place. However, this is censorship on the other side- they fight against it so it won't happen again.

After my visit with the Director of the Charles University Medical Library, I was taken to Western Bohemia University where I met up with one of my other team members, Eleanor to sit it on a University Class. Since Eleanor is a math teacher, we sat in on a Math class. They said that since we were their guests, they would give the math lecture in English. Which was very kind, but they needn't have bothered since the last math class i had was Algebra for dummies in 2001. This was applied advanced mathematics. Once the professor started talking I had no idea what was going on. All this vocation visiting had worked up an appetite, so we went to a local italian restaurant (the Czech people love Italian food). I was looking at the pizza menu, and a pizza caught my eye: it had Chicken, pineapple, and oregano. And it was called.....(drumroll please)....the Alabama! So i ate alabama pizza for lunch. After that, I met up with the rest of the group at the Radio Ceske Pilzen station. The Station director and PR manager were kind enough to take us on a tour of the station, including all of the bomb shelters and pirate radio studios that were operating during WWII (I'm telling you, it's a whole different world here). The coolest thing is that they showed us the unique design of their current studios- to help with noise reduction, the studios are built so that they are suspended by concrete blocks in the area. They are basically floating on supports, so that the noise vibrations from each area will not interfere with recording. Supposedly they are one of the only stations in the world that are designed and built this way. After that, we headed back to our hotels to change into our official team uniforms: grey pants, white sweater, navy blazer, and rotary scarf. It's very not cute. In fact, one of the waiters in the hotel we were meeting at asked us if we were "American Stewardesses". That got a big laugh!

We gave our presentation and met all of the local rotarians. After all of this work, we decided we needed a treat, so the three other team members and I went and got ice cream. I got Marscapone flavored which was a creamy rasberry with chocolate bits. Pretty tasty. All in all, a good but busy day.

Tommorow we will tour Karlovy Vary (Carlsbad in English), a local posh spa town where Casino Royale was filmed.

The Czech words of the day: děkujeme (prounounced "Dj-a-qui-em", which is Thank you in the plural form, like "We thank you". Děkuji! prounounced "Dj-a-qui-ae" is "I thank you" These are both very hard to say and I'm still working on it)
And the other: Chocolada (which is you guessed it: CHOCOLATE!)

I was going to try a really hard word they told me for the red clouds at a sunset, but my host told me to stop trying because all I kept saying was "Worms".