More of the Same!

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After a bit of a dip towards the end of November (think horribly stuffy cold; rasping, lingering cough; two unpleasant cases of the notoriously bad Czech customer service in restaurants and multiple laptop traumas in the course of one rather regrettable week), the last couple of weeks have thank Christ now started to pick up once again - here follows just the briefest of run-downs as to what I’ve been up to over the last 14 odd days…

Despite constant promises to myself to smoke / drink / spend less in view of my increasingly extended honeymoon period in the city, I still seem to be busy almost every night of the week here - still keeping up the Lazy V meal on Thursdays, as well as meeting up with a few more individuals from the www.expats.cz site. Have hooked up with this wicked Dutch girl Mariam two or three times now (possibly even more cynical and bitchy than I am and smokes more too - just the kind of person I like!), been out for a modern twist on traditional Czech food with my English friend Helen (still possibly the nicest person I know in Prague), been to an 80s birthday party for one of the LV girls (for some reason rather tamer than I expected, despite the silly costumes involved) and also been out to see the still funny but at the same time slightly under par ‘Borat’ movie at the nearby Slovansky Dům cinema. Needless to say I have also been persevering on my one-woman quest to eat my way round Prague, with regular visits to Bohemia Bagel, Praha Bakeshop, Dobra Čajovna and the as yet unnamed local pizza place to grab a quick spináči s sebou all still making up a regular feature - or at least at the weekends at any rate!

In between all that socializing I have also been known to turn up at the office during the day from time to time, and surprisingly enough work is actually going pretty well there even despite all the various excesses and indiscretions usually committed the night before… Now that I have a full caseload the time is just flying by (was sitting there utterly bored out of my skull before), while my first 1 to 1 review meeting with Julia was really positive as well - apparently all my calls and case handling abilities are being judged at round about 100%!a(MISSING)lready, which is not bad considering I only had about a week and a half of training (as opposed to six weeks in the UK for everyone else) and have been decidedly blagging my way through on the phone so far!! Thank God I am only speaking to English managers all day - bullshitting is just so much easier in your own language!!!

And speaking of managers, just four weeks on the job has been enough to eliminate any respect I once had for my elders and betters in the workplace (already somewhat dwindling after the whole overexposure to the spectacular Ruth / Viv / Jesudas display of communal incompetence at HP). All the managers on our side are all still pretty impressive I have to admit, but the British bunch on the other hand are - to put it bluntly - just a load of pig-ignorant, thick as shit, overpaid, motherfucking retards. Day after day you go through all this trouble to explain to these imbeciles how to fill in this one flimsy piece of paper so that it fits all UK employment law / legal criteria, and then they send it back to you with one vague unsubstantiated sentence in each category, half the relevant information missing and an abundance of spelling / grammatical mistakes contained within whatever pitiful information remains - and then they only go and sign it with a fucking “regard’s” (no apostrophe you motherfucking illiterate managerial morons!!)! Gone is my once deeply-held respect for the higher ranks - even from my lowly position of G grade (practically one step up from the cleaners) I know I could do a much better job anyway half the time, and even if I couldn't then at least I'd document my failures with correct spelling, grammar and punctuation…

And speaking of language, this week I have also started making my first preliminary efforts at the awful Czech tongue (days of the week, months of the year, numbers, greetings etc etc - all very lowly Year 7 stuff), largely so that I can communicate with the sweet little Vietnamese woman who runs the mini-market underneath the flat and who despite the near insurmountable language barriers between us is now officially my friend. It’s a bit of a mindfuck when a Vietnamese person and an English person can only communicate through the medium of Czech, but I figure it’s worth the linguistic effort just to foster a bit of community spirit in the area! Ever since I got here I’ve been deliberately shunning the supermarkets (Albert, Billa or Hypernova being the Czech top three) in favour of bread from my local bakery, cheese from the nearby delicatessen, drinks at my nextdoor cocktail bar and gyros / moussaka from my friend the Tunisian kebab man (I get extra cheese on mine cause I can ask for it in French - yet another practical use for foreign languages here!) instead. In fact the only time I’ve strayed into a Tescos lately was to purchase a new TV and DVD player (cheap at just £70 for the both of them) after the D-drive on my laptop died (now more or less nurtured back to health, thank Christ). Funnily enough here too languages came in more than handy, as a Czech woman behind me in the queue started asking me something, switching into German when it became apparent that I didn’t understand Czech. She asked me if I was collecting my Tesco stamps (the Czech equivalent of a loyalty card I suppose) and if not whether she could possibly have them as she was saving for a new chopping board from the kitchen department downstairs. Not having known these stamps existed until now, I said she could have them, not expecting anything except possibly a thank you in return. Instead she asked me how I was going to get my TV and DVD player home (both obviously quite heavy) and when I said taxi, instead insisted on helping me carry them all the way back to my house at Náměstí Républiký herself. Between the two of us it was actually quite manageable, and to tell you the truth I really was appreciative - this is just the sort of positive impression of the Czech Republic I was in dire need of after the two nasty run-ins in restaurants and near universally chilly service I’d encountered in most shops and post offices here so far (am not going to go into details about any of them because I really might go insane if I do). In this part of the world you’ll simply go crazy if you attempt to judge a nation by the Communist dinosaurs who still seem to man any position requiring any standard of basic customer service whatsoever - I prefer to concentrate instead on this type of totally random, truly generous encounter (got to admit that this would never happen in the UK) instead, or similarly the genuine friendliness extended to me by my colleagues - the new up-and-coming generation who will ultimately change the Czech Republic for the better and drag it (kicking and screaming if needs be!) into the 21st century once and for all.

Such a shame the same cannot be said for Belarus - or not if “little girl lost” housemate Elena is anything to go by at any rate anyway. I know she’s only young, but the constant string of stupid questions addressed to both me and Alethia by poor little Princess Elena is really starting to wear us both down. Some of the more classic examples of recent weeks have been (and I quote): “Sarah, can I wash my shoes in the washing machine?”, “Sarah, how do I turn the oven on?”, “Sarah, how much does a frozen pizza cost from the supermarket?” and of course my personal favourite (for which I was rung up on my mobile phone last Saturday) “Sarah, I’m in Tescos - where do I find the knives and forks?”. For Christ’s sake child - you walk into the shop and you look for them, what the fuck are you ringing up to ask me for??? I can’t remember that much of what I was like at eighteen to be honest, but I don’t recall ever locating cutlery in a supermarket posing me much of a personal dilemma, and if it does then you really shouldn’t be living on your own quite frankly. One more silly question like that and I won’t have any choice but to drop the nicey nice act and just tell her straight that I am her housemate not her mum and it’s not my job to look after her, and that if she still needs someone to wipe her arse for her then she should go home and bare her dirty cheeks to her precious mamochka (who actually seems to ring her about every five minutes anyway) instead. That said, despite the extreme provocation Alethia and I are faced with on a near daily basis, perhaps on reflection it might be more sensible to bite my tongue on this one instead - apart from the fact that we’ve all got to live together till the end of the year, a Russian kid that spoiled, rich and stupid can only be the daughter of some Eastern European mafia bigshot / powerful Slavic obligarch, whose parents I would probably do well not to piss off - or not if I value my life at all at any rate!!!

Other than that, all I’ve got to report at the moment is that I’ve subscribed to TIME magazine in an attempt to educate myself on what is going on in the world (it didn’t work - this is the news from an entirely American perspective remember), kitted myself out with a variety of warm clothes (wooly gloves, balaklava, gorgeous furry suede boots etc) in preparation for the famously bitter Prague winter (still relatively mild at the moment though - suspect the worst is yet to come) and, most importantly perhaps, have recently discovered a brilliant little American-run DVD place right round the corner from my house, so cue several nights in with a take-away pizza in front of my latest televisual addiction of ‘Lost’ to come - hooray!!!

So all in all life is going pretty well I have to say, even if in my darker moments I do wonder what the fuck to do with a life in which all goals have been achieved by the tender age of 25, and where on earth I bloody go from here... The answer to this question so far has always been to light up a cigarette and crack open a bottle of wine in despair - not a very healthy or even particularly helpful solution I know, but in the absence of a real best friend to talk these things through here, it’s the only one I really have at the moment. I know it’s still early days on the friendship front and that all this will come with time, but in the meantime, what I’d give for a Hayley, a Heather, a Laura, a Nic or a Claire out here with me now - the Czech Republic would never know what hit it!

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