A typical day???

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The phrase, “If you don’t like the weather wait five minutes” is one you hear often in various places around the US. However in none of my experiences is it more true than here in Prague. As we returned last night at 9:15 from the library, a heavy snow was falling with the promise of quite a lot on the ground. When I woke up and gazed out the window, there was less snow at 6:30 than there had been when we went to bed. That was because it was raining. When we went to breakfast I noticed it was snowing. After breakfast there was a mix of rain and snow falling. Soon that turned to rain and now at eleven it is cloudy, but no rain nor snow is coming down. However, just wait five minutes and ………………..

It is now evening. During the day rain stopped and there were periods of sunshine through broken clouds. If the Internet weather forecast is to be believed there will be clouds and sun tomorrow and over the weekend with a temperature hovering around freezing. It was so clear that this evening as I left the library at 5:15 there was a beautiful sunset. The sky had a few beautiful pink clouds. It was the first sunset I had seen.

I am not sure just what a typical day is or will be for us here. No two days have been the same and as soon as the “Intensives” weeks are over we will not have access to the library computers on which we have been working for as many hours as we have had this week. After these weeks are ended, students who work in the library will return to put in their required hours of work there and some of them have to use a computer to do their work. Bill will be working with the periodicals attempting to update their union list of serials. This has not been done for about two years and will be a major undertaking. We are not sure if there will be a special task for Nancy or not. As soon as all the seminary libraries which were represented send their journal lists, Nancy will be REALLY busy building a union list of journals for all the eastern European seminary libraries. At least she will try to do it. The task may be harder than she thought when she volunteered.

Each morning we get up about six-thirty to six-forty five. Breakfast begins at seven. Meal time is a good time to socialize with the students or others who are here for short periods of time. Last week the conference of seminary librarians gave us a great opportunity to meet others in our profession. This week there is a missions conference. We have met and talked with individuals from a variety of countries. This morning we ate breakfast with three Asians, two men and a woman. The two men are Korean. One lives and works in Korea. The other lives and works in Germany. The woman is from the Philippines, but lives and works in Korea. We live in a very mobile world. The country of ones birth seems to play a small role in where that person is now living and working.

Each morning, except Saturday, there is chapel at nine. After chapel, classes begin for students, conferences begin their sessions and Nancy and I go to the library to begin work for the day. This week the library has had extended hours to accommodate the increased number of students who are here for the Intensives weeks. Nancy and I agreed to work in the library most of the extra hours. One of us sits at the circulation desk and when no one is there needing help we work on the retro-conversion project. The other works on the retro-conversion project at another computer.

At ten-thirty each weekday morning coffee, fruit juices, tea and some type of sweet snack are served in the guest room. Everyone is welcome, but no one is required to attend. To celebrate Bill’s birthday we will be sharing the birthday cakes that we ordered yesterday with everyone who comes to the social time.

Lunch is served beginning at noon. Again this is a good time to socialize. After lunch we have taken naps and also worked in the library. We and the students are on our own for our evening meal. A meal is brought in for conference attendees The dining room is closed after lunch. Many students prepare all their meals in their room as it is less expensive. There is a restaurant across the street from the Jeneralka bus stop that we are told is very inexpensive and serves typical Czech food. We have not visited it yet. Nancy was discouraged about going there when we were told it is usually very filled with tobacco smoke.

After our evening meal, if we are not working in the library, we are on our own. We mailed 52 books via M mail, so we are well supplied with fluff reading material. We have library cards and can check books out of the seminary library. Nancy checked two books out today and is reading one entitled, “Not Without My Neighbor: issues in interfaith relations,” by S. Wesley Ariarajah. Bill has not checked anything out of the library yet and probably will not until he has finished the book, “Bad Trips: a sometimes terrifying, sometimes hilarious collection of writing on the perils of the road.” Each chapter is by a different author describing an incident from one of their trips that fit the tone of the book, bad trips. He just finished one and turned to Nancy saying, “We have never had a bad night. How would you like to be awakened in the middle of the night by a not so sharp pain and find a cockroach has attached itself to your lip?” This happened to Timothy Findley in Burma on a night when he fell asleep watching rats run across the bamboo rafters of his room and that was after he leaped from his bed when he saw movement on his pillow. The movement was caused by either a hairy scorpion or a large spider, he wasn’t sure which it was. Most thankfully we do not have to worry about rats, scorpions or HUGE spiders here in Prague. (I never kill spiders at home because they eat roache eggs! But I have killed two innocent little ones here by mistake. First I stepped on one about the size of a tiny lentil and then later I was cleaning the floor next to the sink and saw small white spots on the floor. I took a paper towel to wipe them up thinking they were soap spots but they were apparently the leftovers of digested spider lunches since I also mashed a cute little spider. I will be more careful in the future. I don’t know if Prague has roaches and I don’t want to find out.)

Nancy- I am sick and tired of German! Almost all the books I entered today were German books. First I don’t read German, Second I don’t like to try to type words that I can’t spell. I have to go back and check letter for letter to see if I am correct or not. Third I have decided a German author has no need to write a book after he/she writes the subtitle for the book. The titles are long enough but often the subtitle is an entire paragraph. It takes me almost 5 minutes to enter ONE German book in the library database. However, I am amazed that the German words are so very much like the English ones that I am starting to know what the titles say. So many of the words must sound almost exactly like English but perhaps use a z instead of an s or a K instead of a c. After several thousand or so of them, I may know the spelling and be ok with typing without all this incessant rechecking. When I entered high school, I was not an excellent speller. After I took typing, I got to the place that I almost never misspelled any words at all. When I type I say the letters inside my head and apparently I memorized English spelling that way. Here’s hoping German becomes second nature to my fingers before I start to scream. It was funny yesterday that I entered so many German books and then I started to type in another book. I had stated that it was German in the proper field for language. In the midst of the title, I realized it was French. Apparently my brain had started to be programmed to think-”can’t read it easily=German. Today I ran into Norwegian. Wonder what else I will find??

Readers from last week will remember I THOUGHT I had conquered the washing machines. Well, tonight I learned why our across the hall neighbor had said use the last machine only. The last machine had my whites and another machine had my black clothes this time. The black clothes washed and then the water would not leave the machine. So, I had to scrub the laundry floor dry. Now those same clothes are finishing a wash in the RIGHT machine. I can report to you that the laundry room floor was really really clean. First I used a large mop sized squeegie to get most of the water into the central drain. Then I mopped up the rest with an old shirt. The shirt didn’t even get dirty. When I have had similar problems with my own washing machines at home it seems my floor (under the machine etc.) was full of dust and dirt. Someone must have an accident often or someone does a terrific job of keeping that laundry room floor clean. I noticed as I was going to the basement that all of the halls were slightly damp as if someone had just scrubbed them. Everything seems to stay spotless here. I don’t even find any dust!! I think that is amazing.

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Photos

Prague's Old Town Square
There is so much history here. This was our first of many visits to the square.