Keeping very busy lately I think is the theme of this one. We have finally started actual classes where I am responsible for doing actual work. Yesterday we began our first sculpture class, which for me was my first time ever dealing with real sculpture, as opposed to ceramics where you can just about make anything look good. We started the lesson by making hands. Our teacher came in, mumbled some random works and walked into the next room where we all followed him nervously. Soon he handed us all wooden pallets and shoved a bucket of tangled and mangled wires at our feet. Each of us grabbed a wire and nailed it to our boards; I guess this was to serve as the structure for the clay replicas of our hands. Throughout the class period my instructor destroyed my clay hand three times. The first time I had left the molded hand on my pallet as I left the room to retrieve a carving tool. When I came back my hand now was apart of the base for my friend Chris’ hand. Ok no problem, deep breath, I hadn’t gotten that far with my hand even tough all the fingers were in place and it looked slightly more human than ball of clay, it was going to be ok, I would just start over. Second hand, apparently it didn’t have enough arm supporting it, so it became a squished pile of clay to be sculpted into a base for my third hand. This next hand was destroyed because the wire supporting it wasn’t long enough. After my teacher removed the clay from my pallet and ripped off my metal wire, he replaced it with a longer more dynamic piece of wire. My fourth hand was the winner I guess, because it survived the last hour of class. Even though I had sculpted at least four hands, I wasn’t too far behind the rest of the class [thank God]. I was able to shape my wrist and all my fingers. Now I guess the next four weeks will be spent refining and making this thing look like the thing attached to my arm.

In other news we will be off to Poland for the weekend! Will be visiting Krakow and a few other places that I will be happy to tell you all about upon my return to Prague! We depart from Praha train station tonight at 8:41 and will arrive in Poland sometime tomorrow morning. I have a feeling that this trio will test my sleep deprivation endurance as I’m sure we won’t waste any time with sleeping, but will rather start right away with sightseeing and meandering.