my job is a cultural experience... ;-) (... or yay for slovak food!)

irst... non-cross-cultural adventure of the day: we've had crazy thunderstorms all evening... earlier tonight before dinner, i was working at my computer, with a fan running in my window 15 feet away... when it started POURING out of nowhere, my fan served as a jet propeller and sprayed water all over my room, including me,... 15 feet away.... this was not quite as fun as the rest of the evening :P

as if i haven't written this 10 times already, i LOVE my summer job. 30 kids are here at rutgers doing math/computer science research with various professors. 7 of these students are from charles university in prague. about once a week this summer, i've gladly taken them grocery shopping and rather enjoy it. as a thank you, tonight they invited me over for dinner.

on the menu was halusky, which is apparently the most popular slovak dish on earth. they're potato dumplings with cheese sauce... the consistency wasn't something i'd quite had before, but they were great. (you can read more about it here or here.)

the humorous thing was, trying to make czech and/or slovak dishes with american ingredients, they run into some conundrums. apparently halusky is usually white or beige in color, and ours were definitely a strange gray due to american potatoes and flour. never mind the presentation, they were fantastic. :) it was also fun to just sit around for 3 hours with the czech students and chat. seriously, my job gets me in touch with fantastic people. :)

to prague in 11 days... yay summer! :)