OVERSEAS BRIEFING

Author: LISIE MEHLMAN

PRAGUE - The advent of the TV-show on DVD has played a large role in shaping my study abroad experience. I have enough sense not to let "24" and "Gilmore Girls" dominate my life whilst in the Czech Republic. And when I say that I don't allow them to dominate my life, I mean that I exhibit excellent self-restraint and only allow myself to watch between the hours of midnight and 4 a.m. so that I am sacrificing sleep, and not time that could be spent enjoying Prague, to watch television. Nonetheless, the DVDs have proven extraordinarily handy.

Take, for instance, the night I was flying back to the lovely Praha on an Alitalia flight from Madrid. The flight was incredibly late, causing me to miss my connection in Milan. In the Milan airport, I managed to quarrel with security, was promptly removed from the security line and placed in a special holding room. Upon release from said holding room, I was transported by Alitalia to a hotel where I had to spend the night all by my lonesome until the next day, when I could catch a flight back to Prague. I met a few quirky people on this serendipitous adventure from holding room to hotel, which I like to call "Milan Mania." We shared an interesting dinner together, compliments of Alitalia, which I learned from one of my fascinating Italian dining partners is rumored to stand for Always Late in Take-off and Always Late in Arrival. Good to know.

Once dinner ceased, however, I had to retreat to my surprisingly ritzy room - and was I glad I had brought good old Vladimir, my laptop named after everyone in Prague, and a disc of "24." When everything is going wrong in the world, i.e. you are stuck alone in a scary hotel and can't sleep because you are afraid that if you do fall asleep you won't wake up because your cell phone's alarm clock is your only means of waking up at 5:40 a.m., watching Kim Bauer make poor decision after poor decision is reassuring. The next morning, I felt happy, and I felt certain that my surviving "Milan Mania" was due in large part to the fictitious Bauer family.

And then, of course, there was the eight-hour train ride to Budapest. My travel bud Lisa and I somehow managed to pull our usual put-as-many-pieces-of-luggage-on-the-seats-as-possible-so-that-it-looks-like-the-compartment-is-full routine. Unfortunately, it proved futile, as a couple with an obscene age difference between them woke us up from naps and requested that we place our luggage overhead. Then the couple began smoking incessantly, and we realized our error - we had taken seats in a smoking car. And so there we sat, lamenting the loss of our lungs. It was rainy and foggy, making it impossible even to enjoy the view. And while I did squelch some joy out of forcing my travel bud to state, "I am hungry. And my gosh, I am in Hungary," sporadically throughout the trip, I would say the most fun that we had during those eight hours was watching "Gilmore Girls."

Later on, when the train ride was far from our memories, we titled the weekend "The New Lis: Mind, Body, and Soul" because we visited the Museum of Terror (mind), soaked in Roman baths (body) and did various other activities that might not have contributed in any way to our souls, but hey, nobody's perfect, and it's our title. A pennant of this "New Lis" doctrine included aspiring to be as quick and witty as the Gilmore duo. Our quick wit may have been lost on the Hungarians, but it was probably just because they hadn't eaten in a while.