Nearing the End

Ahoj!

Today was the second to last time in our CIEE classroom, and that meant it was time for our final presentations. Our presentations focused on a topic or question that we wanted to look at while we were here in Prague. I was in a group with two other people and our topic was “Comparing Different Genocides to the Holocaust” with subtopics in State Sponsored Genocide, Environmental Violence, and Global Response. This involved lots of talk and facts about other Genocides that have happened around the world, how some of the Governments enabled these killings to happen, what the environmental impacts, and global responses to these Genocides. 

Though our presentation was one of the more, not so happy topics, there were other groups that brought some laughter and joy into our day. It was nice not having everything be so heavy, though that doesn’t mean the heavier topics are of less value. Every group took what they did, saw, felt, and learned from this trip and applied it to a topic and shared valuable information with us. 

After our presentations, some of us went for a delicious lunch at a nearby restaurant!

Afterwards we had a guest speaker, Michaela Pixova, who is a Human Geographer come to the class and talk to us about tourism and gentrification in Prague. There was a lot discussed in such a short amount of time, but as a summary of it all a few things were emphasized the most. One of which is how tourism is affecting the Czech Republic, mainly within Prague. To give a light summary, tourism coming to Prague seems to be doing more damage than good. A statistic that we were shown was that in 2018 there were 7.9 million visitors and 18.5 million overnight stays in just a year in Prague and that number is only increasing. That is a pretty swift jump from just 6.4 million visitors in 2014.

One of the main tourist areas is the Old Town Square which causes not just a lot of road blockage, but a rise in real estate in that popular area. That leads to another point that Michaela Pixova shared with us on how all of the apartments and living spaces are becoming so expensive forcing the tenants to have to leave when new owners buy out the building. Which is kind of just a culminating effect of tourism bringing in money for the local shops, in which people live above, which leads to higher pricing of really everything. This is something that really picked up once the communist regime ended due to the lack of regulation. Michaela Pixova explained to us that the government officials are so relaxed with their regulation because they just got out from under the communist regime which very strictly enforced laws and policies. Not wanting to be like the communists led to the new government being more of a laissez-faire, free-market approach, but that in and of itself isn’t good because it is difficult regulating the economy without set guidelines in place. 

All in all, this was grossly oversimplified and there was a lot learned today and there is still more to learn. I for one will have to go over my notes again from the lecture because there was just so much information.