American scum in the Czech kitchen

One of the nice perks that you're entitled to as a chosen child of the NYU in Prague program — at least if you live in Machova residence hall — is a maid service that comes three times a week to clean up your horrible, horrible mess. Wails can be heard as they scrub caked mysteries out of our bathrooms, as you may recall from last week's column. In our waste they see, perhaps, the effigy of president Vaclav Klaus, undulating around the toilet bowl, grasping the Lisbon Treaty in his sullied hands as he is flushed down. Or something like that.

What surprises me most about NYU students is how much we love our nice digs. I base this on my experiences living in the absurdly lavish Gramercy Green apartment-style residence hall last year (wherein I attempted to use an oven only to realize some five minutes later that I was inadvertently baking a discarded beer can). But we also love assuming the role of Swamp Thing once we've moved into these luxury homes. Come on: Gramercy residents were initially barred access from the building's courtyard because students were hurling produce and frozen goods from their windows. This was Welcome Week, I believe.

Lord knows I hardly made things any better, having spent at least several days with a can of peanuts superglued to my ceiling, but I'm fascinated by this phenomenon of "mommy and daddy shell out thousands upon thousands of dollars for me to crap all over my hardwood floor."

To my bemusement and exhilaration, things are even more dismal in Prague. Two suites, which house at least 12 students, share one kitchen. To enter such a kitchen on Sunday night, the ass-end of a miserable two days without our exploited sponge mules, is to enter a parallel dimension of dripping pasta sauce and brown, pustulated lettuce.

I ventured into my floor's kitchen on Monday morning before the cleaning service entered, bringing the fearless WSN photographer and my loyal cohort Alexis Johnson in tow. What we found was a stack of putrid kitchenware stacked so high that a brood of infants could plausibly be drowning in the muck beneath. So we took pictures, just to prove that we NYU students really are a cluster of filthy ingrates. (To generalize.)

Though I try to clean up after myself on the rare occasions that I cook in the kitchen instead of, say, hoofing it an entire block to snarf some Fu Lai, even I can understand succumbing to the siren's call of dumping half a chicken breast into the sink or putting a non-non-stick pan, ripe with freshly cooked omelet remnants, into the dishwasher and hoping for the best. It's just so logical, so fiercely savvy. Why wouldn't we just dump our crap for some withering Czech women to deal with?

I don't know. God help us; we are so horrible.

But, dare I say, so American. Flying across the globe as ambassadors to this austere European country, only to make a mockery of its blue collar workers who have no choice but to roll up their sleeves and dive into our stew of rotting meat and unkempt utensils, we NYU students are truly leading with our best foot forward.

Damon Beres is a columnist.