Roots, Airports and Angels

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My first four weeks back in the Czech Republic have definitely been blog-worthy despite the fact that no travelling has really occured, it's been such a different and in many ways, heavy experience. Coming from an absolutely skewiff London which I ended up leaving a day later than I was supposed to because 3 inches of snowfall had closed Gatwick Airport for a day, to Prague riddled with at least 4 times this, and temperatures averaging around freezing by day and -5 by night, but then dropping as low as -20 on the nights when the clouds finally subside.

The area I live in is somewhere between the airport, civilisation and hyper-civilisation. To the north is the sleepy, traumatised district Ruzyně, which gives its name to the airport and appears to have once been a tranquil, secluded village before being torn into by kerosene trails. To the south is the rustic sídliště Řepy, piled to the 14th floor with buildings which look like they might fall down any moment, and at its heart, the curious oversized piece of yellow chicken wire, Slánská Silnice. My immediate surroundings, however, are just normal, and a rather good Czech restaurant across the road from me is occasionally frequented by me and my flatmates when we can't find the energy to take the tram two stops to Kaufland in freezing evening temperatures. However the weather and its impact on the city has been but a slither of the heaviness of my return to this country.

Firstly, I've only until recently had a bedroom with a functioning heating system. While my new home is socially great, it is physically falling apart, and when I arrived my room didn't have a radiator. When we got a new one installed it took a while to work, and after having spent three weeks sleeping mostly in the living room with the dog, one of the people in the house left for London and I took up her room.

Secondly, the TEFL course I've been slaving away at for four weeks hasn't been easy, has kept me busy, stressed and unable to do anything except work, go home, work more and then do nothing for the rest of the evening and talk to Jitka on Skype. The course is a combination of good and bad - on one side is the teaching and observation of teachers, which is rewarding, extremely valuable and a great experience, and the grammar and phonology workshops where you discover thousands of things you never knew about your language, but on the other, the sheaves of literature piled with nonsense psychological babble and CRAs (Completely Redundant Acronyms) hurt your head while trying to plan 2 lessons a week and get through tedious, repetitive assignments. Anyone considering doing a TEFL course - be prepared. It's heavy.

Things improved a week and a half ago when Jitka arrived from London, stayed in Prague with me for the weekend with her Colombian flatmate Paula, from London. We spent the weekend showing her the sights of the city - on the Friday while I was at school, Jitka showed her all the main tourist traps in Staré Město and Malá Strana, then I joined them for lunch and we went onto an exhibition at the Academy of Art and Architecture, where one of my students from the TEFL course studies and had invited me to come along to. It was basically an exhibition of a lot of the students' work, including everything from blueprints of buildings to typography displays, and generally quite a lot of cool and crazy artwork, a lot of which was interactive. We then went onto the exhibition of the Czech photographer Jan Saudek to continue the surrealism factor, and then to boulder bar to say farewell to Jana before she headed off to London. The next day we took Paula (who had never, apart from London's ridiculous attempts, been exposed to snow before) to Petřín, enjoyed wearing ourselves out on the stairs of the watchtower, and then made angels in the snow. That night we spent skanking out to dubstep in a warehouse in Smíchov, slept for a few hours, and then Paula returned to the UK while Jitka went on to Moravia.

The next weekend, on the eve of the final day of the course, she arrived again from Zlín as me and my fellow TEFLers drank farewell to each other. The next evening I played another quite cool show in Jablonec (out with the TEFL and back in with real life!) and we spent the rest of the weekend doing nothing save for a small walk in a freezing Přírodní Park Šárka and an amusing game of Czech Scrabble.

I'm now sitting in a free wifi cafe in Zlín, reminiscing over the past month and its accompanying emotional rollercoasters, and settling into a week off which I'll mostly be spending with Jitka all over tucked away places in Moravia I've never been anywhere near before. More blog entries on the actual travelling soon. Now, however, I'm just impatiently waiting "as if on the thorns", as they say in Czech, for my TEFL certificate result to be delivered to me by email. Waiting to see if such a heavy return was worth it at all.*

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*Update (10.02.10): It was. I start work in March 😊

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Photos

Home
Spot the odd one out

Slánská Silnice
Dopravní WTF factor

Dental Floss Windsock...
...which played a music box rendition of "here comes the bride" when you turned the knob. At the academy of art and architecture exhibition.

Prirodni Park Šárka
After climbing some mofo of a hill in -10ish