Another year has passed

Like time, the often mentioned distance from home seems to be just as relative: while I speak of being far away in Edinburgh, there are at the same time those who have chosen to study across the Atlantic – which is a distance considerably greater than that between mainland Europe and the island across the thin strip of water called the English Channel; nevertheless, I know a few students, Děčín men like my humble self, who study (far away) in Brno, and mark my words when I say that when these embark on describing their painfully regular travels, one barely manages to resist the impression that one is being given the description of some never-ending journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway… So there. — In the end, it comes down to whether one is at home or away: it scarcely matters how far away.

At any rate, I have been back home for a whole month by now, my companions in Edinburgh and I sat all exams already in May, and so in comparison with those who never defected and stayed to study home we have again become free a month earlier. Not much (that is at least not much related to school) managed to happen between when the reader saw my last report (which I wrote in March) and the end of the academic year – of course so: March (with a small negligible part of April) was the last month in which there still were lectures being delivered – or, to be more precise, only some lectures, as many lecturers kept on striking in the whole country for better retirement conditions (to simplify the matter almost vulgarly). Most of April was then devoted exclusively to preparation for the May exams, which in reality meant that great majority of students left the city for their homes almost overnight, no matter whether it took just a few minutes on a bus or multiple hours on a plane. In this regard, I very gladly chose not to step out of line, unlike last year, and decided to go home as well, knowing it would inevitably mean having to take some notes with me to study and prepare for the exams in order not to betray the meaning of this time off entirely.

The three weeks I spent home were gone in the wink of an eye, and that meant that I had to go back in the sole order to plunge myself into the tormenting chaos called by the rather innocent-sounding term “examination period”, while in reality it stands for anything between two and four weeks of excruciating affliction. Fortunately, IB graduates are trained to cope with any monstrosity of this sort, however dreadful it may be. For me, there were considerable intervals between individual exams, so while some were done within less than two weeks, I did not sit my last exam sooner than on 23rd May, and so I once again was one of the last students still present in the city of Edinburgh. But my time eventually came nonetheless, and I was on a plane to Prague a week after the last exam.

In the one month that I have been home so far, I managed to visit Moravia two times already: first I went to Bojkovice, a small town near Uherské Hradiště in the heart of Slovácko, where the international folklore festival Světlovský bál took place (as it does every year) with which I absolutely fell in love last year when I was there for the first time, and a week after that I wanted to experience the foreshadowed miserable ride from North Bohemia to the Moravian metropolis. Both were amazing.

I wish to use the conclusion of this article concluding this past academic year to express my immense gratitude towards the Kellner Family Foundation for its support – for if it were not for them, I would surely not be able to tell the honourable reader about anything of my experience in Edinburgh as there would be none.