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Published: June 11th 2009
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It's only been a day and a half and I'm already feeling pretty much at home here. The flight over and journey to the flat were both fine, I arrived quite late in the evening and bloody starving, so took the opportunity to go and discover the local 24 hour shop, where I was attacked by some dog, twitching from god knows what someone had slipped in its food. The first czech I learned while here is that a viennese shortbread is known as a "třený bananek", which literally means "fricative banana" and made me lol.
Yesterday, first and foremost I had a huge cold, but I spent a productive day unpacking all my stuff, sorted my room out (which is lovely and with loooads of space) and did loads of shopping for stuff I knew I was going to need while I was here in town, such as a czech phone, a small pair of speakers (my monitors were no way fitting in my case) and some more plug adaptors, which took me about 2 hours to find and reduced me to asking at the tourist office in rubbish czech-english-fake sign language mishmash. Back at home, I put all
my setup together and realised I was missing one silly little cable for it all to be complete.
Today I woke up and my cold had got better, so decided to start my exercise routine, which is basically: every morning, hara alignment, run. It wasn't easy, Prague is a fair bit hillier than London, to the point where you have a lot of staircases going up hillfaces in the city like in Knaresborough, and my area especially so as only 3km further out is the highest hill in the city (381m). It just so happened that you have to run up a lot of these staircases, probably equivalent to about an 8-story building, in order to reach the park where I plan to run every day, ladronka, which it turned out is on top of a hill with an absolutely stunning view of various bits of prague, and some not particularly stunning paneláks.
After returning, I found an electronics store in an old warehouse in holešovice on the internet, so got on the tram again to get this cable. I was prepared, bringing a minijack and a phono lead with me to show them what I wanted. I
view from my window
being woken up by trams every morning is ever so slightly surreal for a londoner! was a bit better at the czech thing this time - I bluttered* something to the effect of "I want one tail like this one and this one the other tail" before surrendering again to rubbish czech-english-fake sign language mishmash, but it all worked. I will break this language barrier while I'm here, I swear.
Holešovice is an area I'd like to explore more - it seemed like the czech republic's answer to Shoreditch. On the one side (the "right" side) of the railway line you have Strossmayerovo Náměstí, which just looks like Prague city centre except less of the funny shaped glass shops and a lot of interesting looking music shops in its place, still overshadowed by unmissable bohemian structures. On the other side, which is where this warehouse was and definitely the "wrong" side of the tracks analogous to how the great eastern mainline (from Liverpool Street) separates Shoreditch in half, you have grime, grime, and... did i mention any grime, so perhaps this is where all the interesting night life is happening.
So yeah - that's how one and a half days of suburban Prague life has treated me. I think now that I've settled
so quickly (aside from language), tomorrow I will go somewhere and get inspired.
*edit - I have just lolled rather noticeably about the fact that "bluttered" is not a word, and I'm getting worse at english already.
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Aaron "I say my name correct" Griffin
non-member comment
All looks pretty swax
Nice entry, impressed by the running too. The room looks massive man. As you are under not many time constraints are you going to come off the caffeine or do they do red bull over there? Glad the travelling went well man.