I'm done counting days... for now

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I had my intensive Czech class for six hours today. Normally, we only have it for four hours a day, but we were trying to make up for the class we will not be having on Friday. The professor has some other commitment at the end of the week, so we get Friday off. Intensive Czech is… well, intense. It’s like cramming half of a college semester into four days. We have about three minutes to memorize conjugations and declensions before we are expected to know how to use them correctly in new contexts. Then we move on to the next concept. The trickiest thing is the simultaneous chaos of cases and genders. You can’t just be like, “Okay, this is accusative. Let me do that simple change so that it’s no longer nominative.” You have to know meaning of each word so you don’t mistake a masculine inanimate noun for a feminine or neutral noun, which all are affected differently by the accusative case, and are even further subdivided by the letter with which they end. (Which vowel, hard or soft consonant, etc) In short, Czech is a nightmare… a train wreck of sorts, and I can’t stop myself from looking… especially since I’m getting a grade for this. We have our first test coming up on Monday. I’m kind of scared because I don’t know what to expect, and I can never remember the gender of words. It wouldn’t be as difficult if there were only masculine and feminine like in Hebrew. The neutral is what’s killing me.

Anyway, after class I wanted to go to Tesco to buy some notebooks, but I didn’t know how to get there. I couldn’t find anyone who both wanted to go and knew how to get there, so I had to look elsewhere for some notebooks. I ended up going to this place called “Book Palace” in Czech. It was a huge store, bigger than a large Barnes and Noble, and no one spoke English there. I looked everywhere for notebooks and almost gave up before I found a tiny section upstairs off to the side, which had a 3 pack of notebooks. Some of them had graph paper (apparently that’s what they use to write on here), but I found the last one with regular lined paper. So, I bought the notebooks with part of my meal stipend money, which I had just picked up today. I knew I was spending a lot, 322 crowns, on these tiny black notebooks, but I figured I didn’t have any other options. Well, when I got back to the apartment, I used the calculator on my computer and figured out that I had spent 19 dollars for 3 tiny, unremarkable notebooks. I was kind of mad, but then my roommate said she bought one big notebook at Tesco for 200 crowns, which made me feel a little bit better. At least I wasn’t the only one who got ripped off.

After that, I came back to the apartment and tried to do laundry. The machine has a whole lot of buttons and knobs and no manual. I put some of my clothes in, along with a decent amount of detergent and a tiny bit of softener. Then I somehow turned the thing on. It kept squirting small amounts of water and rotating for two hours, with no sign of moving to the rinsing or draining parts of the wash cycle. I tried to open it, but I couldn’t stop the machine. I was so scared my clothes would be trapped in there forever. Eventually, I enlisted the help of my roommate Deena because I was tired and worried. Deena managed to get it open after pressing a couple of random buttons, but my clothes were still really soapy and sitting in a puddle of water. I ended up just ringing out everything by hand, which took forever because the clothes were still completely soaked. Then, I put the stuff out on drying racks. It’s still very wet. I wonder how many days it will take for them to dry.

Not long after the laundry fiasco, Joel and I went out to find this grocery store called Albert (not Albert’s). To make a long story short, we got lost. It was cold and dark, so I wanted to give up and just go back home, but Joel has made it a personal goal of his to beat my “defeatist attitude.” (Quick Tangent/background information: The other day we were talking about how I’m never going to be fluent in any language besides English, so there’s really no point in pretending that I will be. Joel took that as me saying, “So why even try?” But I that’s not what I was saying. I will work hard in Czech, one for the silly motivation of a grade, and two because languages are interesting, even ones that I will never have a need for after four months from now.) Anyway, we never found Albert, even after asking for directions (IN Czech, what now?!). So, we went to a shop closer to our apartment. When I was trying to find out the price of this frozen item that I thought was ice cream, the cashier made me buy it then and there. I just wanted to know the price, but he thought I was done shopping. So, I was rushed out of the store while Joel continued shopping. I decided to head back to the apartment by myself. Joel came back about ten minutes later. Then, all of my roommates (Deena, Jessie, Jacob, Joel) and I ate dinner “together” (at different times because we had to wait to cook our stuff until the others were done using the pots and pans). We all talked for a long while around the kitchen table and really just enjoyed one another’s company.

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