Most of the students here live in dorms, spread out through the city. I stay in Máchova 20, known here as B2. This dorm was my first image of Plzeň, and therefore I thought it would resemble a lot with the typical characteristics from the eastern part of Europe: a fair amount of concrete, and very few colors. Luckily other parts of the city and especially the city center are more beautiful. Furthermore, a lot is to be done in the center as well!

I’m here for my internship, so 99% of the time I’m working Matlab, C or Python. A lot of programming and debugging. I will not bother you with those details here. My colleagues are nice, their English is okay, which cannot be said about the average citizen of Plzeň. To be able to do my laundry in the dorm I have to ask a Czech lady at the reception for the key to the laundry room. She only speaks Czech and Russian, so this is generally a fairly one-sided conversation between Google Translate on my phone and her. She reacts curtly to me in Czech, on which I usually nod friendly and reply with “Ano”, which means “Yes” in Czech.

In Czech Republic, lunch is the most important meal of the day. Everyone here on campus has lunch (which is a full hot meal) in the "Menza". I usually have lunch with my colleagues at 11.30 am, so I already had a hot meal at noon. I have to say that I am slowly becoming a fan of this phenomenon.

In addition to my weekly life, I also go on weekend trips, e.g. to Prague or Salzburg, or to craft beer festivals, one of which was organized in Plzeň as well!

On Tuesdays I usually have a drink in “Studna”. This student is bar is located 50 meters from my dorm, and has half liters of beer for €1,10. Here, we usually play table football or darts, but also just having drinks until late is quite common. Speaking about drinking beer, the joke "Pilsen in Plzeň" is made quite often, but it is also confirmed here. According to research done in 2013, Czechs consume an average of no less than 144 liters of beer per inhabitant per year, whereas in the Netherlands we only reach 70 liters per person per year [1]. It also helps that you always get half a liter in Plzeň when you order beer, unless you explicitly state that you want a small beer. This is also the case with craft beer. For half a liter of craft beer you pay € 2 here. Should I say more?

Čau!