By Jordan Shields

Our first weekend in Prague was quite eventful!  We landed in Prague on May 25thand were met at the airport by Tomas.  He helped us get set up with European cell phone service and navigate the public transit to our dormitories.  The Alexa, Liz, and Davida are all staying at Strahov, while I am staying in Masarykova.  Once we got settled, we spent the weekend exploring the many sites in Prague.  

rooftopiview of city

For the first half of the week, Dr. Ray accompanied us and gave lectures in soil physics and hydrology to prepare us for the different experiments that we will be doing over the coming weeks.  Liz will be in charge of the modeling, Davida will be in charge of the CT image analysis, Alexa will be in charge of the characterization of samples for hydraulic properties, and I will be in charge of analyzing the results from infiltration tests.

 

On Thursday, we were given a free day and decided to make a day-trip to Kutna Hora, Czech Republic. Kutna Hora is a smaller town, about an hour’s train ride southeast of Prague.  Our main goal for this day trip was to tour the Sedlec Ossuary.  It is a chapel that is decorated and furnished with human bones (below left).  Once we had toured this, we walked further into the city to explore.  Further into the town we came across the St. Barbara Church(below right) and went inside to look around before catching a train back to Prague. 

chapel interior  church interior

On Friday, we attended a research group meeting and gave individual presentations to introduce ourselves and our research interests to our new peers. Once this meeting concluded, we all caught a train to Vienna (below).

 building in foreground with city in background