Aside from work, not much has been going on here in the past week. For the most part, teaching has been going pretty well except for one of my four hour classes which has been quite difficult. I'm pretty sure that it’s the fact that these students are relative beginners that makes this class so difficult. For example, when I speak too quickly (at a normal pace) most of the students don't understand anything that I say, but then when I speak slowly it takes too long to say what I'm trying to say and they don't remember what I was talking about by the time I get to the end of the sentence. Therefore I find myself writing almost everything on the board. And even when I do this, I have to define many of the words that I write and this is hard to do since many of their vocabularies are so small and the words that I think of when I’m trying to define a word are often more or as complex as the word I’m trying to describe. For the previous class, one of my students said she would bring Ratatouille and I was looking forward to teaching a lesson about food and tying it in with the movie, however, she brought “300” instead. Although this may not have been the most educational movie, it helped the class go by much more quickly and my students learned phrases such as “Madness...? THIS... IS... SPARTA!”

Some of this may sound a little bizarre, but here is what I have learned from my students about Christmas traditions in the Czech Republic. Instead of opening presents on Christmas morning as we do in the states, they open their presents on Christmas Eve. Also instead of the legend of Santa Claus (who the Czechs have learned about through coca cola ads), they have the legend of baby jesus. I’m not sure exactly how the legend goes but I think they wait until Christmas eve to decorate their Christmas trees and the shiny ornaments lure baby jesus out of his manor and he brings them presents. For dinner on Christmas eve, about 90% of the country has the traditional meal of fried carp with potato salad and fish soup. My students tell me that in the days leading up to Christmas, all of the stores stock up on carp. Then on Christmas day, everyone sits around the TV watching Czech fairytales.

Alas, my quest for Svíčková (sveech-kovaa) continues…Matt and I went out to the new restaurant in town on Saturday night. I became very excited and immediately ordered when I saw a word on the menu that appeared to be svickova, but I guess this can also mean “piece of raw pork tenderloin on a slab of heated granite”, because this is what I got. This was also tasty and came with a salad and two different types of sauce to dip the meat in (a tartar sauce and a thousand island tartar sauce). However, it was not the thin slices of marinated beef in a creamy brown sauce with dumplings and cranberries that I had hoped for.

Also, Matt and I have been invited by one of my students to play indoor soccer with him and his friends again on Friday afternoon. This is in the neighboring town of Litomyšl (Leeto-meeshul), about 20 minutes by bus. Last Friday Matt and I had a blast and all of the players were about at our same skill level. My new indoor shoes worked great and I even scored a couple of goals!

No pictures this time…as soon as I take some more decent pictures I’ll post them.

Around Vysoké Mýto

Today I took full advantage of my day off from work to go eat a leisurely lunch of traditional Czech food and do a bit of exploring around town.

My Lunch
(the plate and meal are much bigger than they appear
to be in this picture - this is becuase the beer is so big!)

Click on the album for even more pictures:

Joel in the CZ

Beer Tasting

Last night, I picked out 4 leading Czech beers and conducted a little taste test to see which beer would be my favorite. Keep in mind that these tests need to be conducted many more times so that I can confirm the results and possibly discover new beers that I may enjoy even more than any of these.

The results are as follows (on a scale of 1-4, 1 being the best):

	Staropramen	Pilsner Urquell	Radegast	Krusovice
Initial Taste	3	1	2	4
After-Taste	3	4	2	1
Overall Taste	3	2	1	4
Totals	9	7	5	9

First Day of Teaching

Yesterday was my first day of classes and everything went surprisingly well. I was actually really nervous on Sunday night so I did not sleep well at all and due to the jet lag I woke up at 4:30 on Monday morning and could not go back to sleep. So I only got about 3 hours of sleep before my first day of teaching, but this affected me much less than I thought it would. My first three classes were at a factory where they refurbish and overhaul train locomotives. These classes were all small with one or two people in each. After these I had a class with 5 people at an automotive repair place with students ranging from 22 to 53 years old. This class was fun because they preferred to have conversation rather than do book work. When the older man was speaking about his wife, he said his “women” is at home which gave me the opportunity to correct him as well as teach the class about Mormonism. Needless to say, all of the men in the class very much liked the concept of polygamy while the women did not.

Me Teaching

View from the hotel that I live in

After lunch today, I saw blue sky and a peek of the sun for the first time since I have arrived so I hurried back to the hotel to take some pictures. While I was taking these pictures it started raining again and the sun disappeared soon after.

Getting Adjusted

I slept well last night but woke up an hour earlier than i needed to this morning at 5 am. I attended several of Matt's classes to get a feel for what the job will be like and it seems much better than i had imagined. The class this morning was quite long at four hours but the students (19-20 yr olds) were fun and we had some interesting discussions. Today it was mostly about religion which was particularly interesting because a majority of the population is atheist. After this, we went to a restaurant and i got a quick bite to eat--had some fried brie with ham which i thought was very good. Fried cheese is very popular here. Matt had a total of 4 classes today and the second one seemed much harder because it was with relative beginners and you have to speak v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y.

I came back to the flat and slept during Matt's third class but then went with him to his fourth which was with two high school girls who are well spoken. Afterwards they took us to a tea house where I practiced phrases from the Czech phrase book and among other things we discussed the Mixed Pickles (a band in which one of the girl's boyfriend is a drummer).

Our apartment is located in a hotel which i think is the tallest building in Vysoké Mýto (pronounced Vee-soki Mee-toe) that is owned by an Italian bus company which employs workers from Poland and Slovakia. The building looks modern and nice on the outside but our apartment (on the third floor) is not that impressive but it has all of the essentials.

Long Trip and First Impressions

Here's my first post from the Czech Republic. Read as little or as much as you want or you can just look at the pictures.


Wrote this on the flight over:

Quite the journey so far...
After the brief flight from Austin to Dallas, I had only 10 minutes from when I arrived in Dallas to when my flight to London was boarding. This afforded me a chance to get in a little exercise as I took a jog through two terminals and across a sky bridge to reach my departure gate before it left. Right now I'm about on hour 4 or 5 of my transatlantic flight and I've made myself a little challenge to remain seated for the entire flight.

It turns out that I won my little challenge and managed to remain seated for the entire flight.



Next was my wait in London Gatwick in which I felt I was in an alternate universe of sorts. On the outside and some of the inside, the airport itself looked ancient but the waiting area was just like a modern shopping mall. Everything seemed just like a shopping mall in the US with all of the displays, shopfronts and free giveaways yet everyone talked so much differently. Upon revealing that I was from Austin to a group of people while we were waiting for free mojitos, all they could talk about was the TV show "Dallas" and something about JFK being shot and as it if was the most popular TV show in the UK today. Mabye its a generational thing for Americans but they were all very disappointed when I told them I had no idea what they were talking about.

Prague Train Station

My first impression of the Czech Republic is that there is a mix of the way things used to be and a rush to catch up with Western Europe. This is particularly reflected in the Soviet era architecture with the exterior being redone with modern glass. Also with the presence of many modern conveniences, but from my experiences today without an emphasis on service in supermarkets and restaurants.