28th and 29th of November in Prague Cultural Treasures
We went to VŠKK which is a private university of applied sciences specialising in media.
We had a tour there and then students continued working with the architecture photography project. Task was post production of the photos taken on Wednesday and preparing the presentation for Friday. While students were working in the class room, teachers went to a café to have discussions. Lenka told lots of interesting stories about life in Prague, for example how her shoe was stolen.
After students had finished their project, we went to have a fast food lunch. After that we had a visit to the Czech Television, which is a public service broadcaster in the Czech Republic. The main source of its income are television licence fees, so it is financed by Czech citizen. It also gets money by selling books, dvds etc. Part of the money comes by selling programmes and some income also from advertisements. Its biggest competitor is TV Nova which gets its money from advertisements. Since Czech Television is public, they produce programmes for every kind of people. For example they have programmes translated to sign language for deaf people. We had a tour in the building and studios. At the end of the tour we had the opportunity to test the sets and props.
When the official programme ended, I went to buy some art supplies with six students. We had found a nice shop full of pens, brushes, sketchpads and other stuff and now we had time to go there. What a heaven it was!
Every one of us were shopping something and it took a while to get out of there. Some of us continued our journey to the christmas market in Náměstí Míru. I bought big gingerbreads and enjoyed the atmosphere: lights, crowds of people, nice handicrafts and the smell of hot wine.
Friday was the day of presentations. At first students presented the cultural landmarks of their home countries in national teams. They had prepared the presentations before the workshop in Prague. We got lots of information about significant cultural landmarks, like Heroe’s Square in Hungary or Suomenlinna in Finland.
Right after presentations of cultural landmarks the students had presentations of architecture photos taken in international teams. Prague was the perfect place for such a workshop, although the weather is not the best for photography in November. All the buildings represented different architectural styles, from small wooden orthodox church to the dancing house, whose style is known as deconstructivism. One of the buildings was Kovarova Villa, which is a cubistic house. Czech Republic and especially Prague is the only place where cubism was really applied to architecture.
Then we got certificates, and we had to say goodbye to everyone. I headed to the Museum Kampa with Pekka. The museum building and its surroundings were beautiful. There were many art exhibitions, including a large collection of František Kupka works, and quiet atmosphere. Our last evening included tasting chlebíčky, the traditional Czech snack, spending the rest of the Czech crowns, and some tram driving in the suburbs.
