The Flat

I like the word 'flat' for a dwelling. It's much simpler than 'apartment' and allows a lot more leeway for what it covers, at least in my mind. My flat is most of the top half of a house in a nice neighborhood not far from the city center. It's off tram 4, near a park with a planetarium. Not sure if this is the place where they display pictures of the heavens or do the actual observation of same. The former seems more likely given the amount of light around here.

There's a wall along the street and a big green metal gate, and you go up two flights of steps to get to the front door, which is narrow and has deep brown wood. The key often sticks in the lock so you have to jiggle it up and down. There's a second door a few feet after the first and you're in a small room that stretches about ten feet in front of you with a child's toys, coats, and a few home improvement supplies. Immediately to your right is a 6ft set of shelves where you leave your shoes, and maybe collect your house slippers, as you come in. The stairs which start there are old dry wood with black rubber matting tacked to them. They make an angle after a few feet, stretch up, across the house, and angle again at the far side for the last few feet. There's a door there on the right, a small room that is supposed to house two students of German who I still haven't met, on the left there's an alcove with a ladder to the attic. The door in front of you is mine and opens with a antique Ben Franklin style key.

The hall is white and runs twenty feet to the rooms Ahmed and I sleep in. It's tiled with large white hexagons. Just in front of the door at the far end there is a folding door on the right, which leads into to the shower room, which has a metal tub ensconced with square blue tiles. There's a tall skinny radiator next to the door and a sink with a mirror further to the right. The hot water heater is a two foot box that hangs in the upper corner of that wall. You can hear the gas and the flame thumping to life every time you turn on the hot water. While we do have a shower curtain rod, this bath isn't designed as for standing in, as the shower is a wand on a hose and the bracket is on a vertical rod. At the fullest possible extension it comes up to my ear. It's always chilly in there when you're wet, I worry how cold it will be come winter.

Across from the bath door there is a doorway through the very thick wall, which is faced with raised panels like you'd find on a front door. The main room is about 25 feet by 20. The floor is a herringbone pattern of foot long wooden strips which sometimes shift as you put your weight on them. There are two windows on the far side, both of the one set on the inside of the wall/one on the outside style common to old Czech buildings. We have some white lace curtains that Jarek's mom gave us. The walls are a burnt orange squash color and there's a bare bulb hanging from the center of the ceiling. We have a coffee table to the left of the door and a small dining table in the far corner, which is normally covered in cords and laptops. Next to the table is the door to the kitchen.

It's the newest part of the flat, with laminated wood cabinets and lousy laminate plank flooring that sinks where you walk on it. In the left corner there's an old gas stove/oven, with a shallow countertop that stretches to the single sink, about 8 feet to the right. The cabinets hanging above and the ones below have blue fronts and feel new. The whole set has the feeling of a kit or that they were salvaged from a house that was remodeled too cheaply. The fridge in in the corner and stands about 3 ft tall plus the microwave on top. I've had dorm fridges bigger than that. Just past the sink and the end of the counter is the door to the toilet. It's a tiny room with a sink right in front of you and the john just to the right. The tank is about five feet off the floor and has a pull cord flush. There wall is one foot in front of you as you sit down. At the top there's a one foot plexiglass window for light and by your right knee there's a 3 foot slit that allows the air from the radiator on the other side to circulate through. The kitchen window is above the radiator.

Across the main room from the kitchen is Cynthia's room, about half the size of the main room, where she's got the double bed and a wardrobe. Her husband, Jarek (he's Czech, she's Brazilian) visits from his job in a different town for a couple days every week or two, so Ahmed and I decided that we'd rather they have enough privacy that we aren't bothered with their marital activities.

To get to my room you have to walk through Ahmed's. His is about 15 ft square with blue carpet, a single bed, and a desk. To to the right there's a wooden divider painted white with lots of frosted glass and a set of sliding doors in the middle. My room is a mirror image, except the far wall is taken up with two large windows over looking the back garden and the radiator below them. In addition to the long skinny bed I have a set of shelves and my stuff strewn all over. There's a door in the wall that leads to a tiled room that's full of shelves and old cabinets, it's always cold in there because large windows and a lack of insulation. Our landlord tells me that that it was water damaged and won't be fixed anytime soon.

I realize I've made it sound like kind of a dump, but it's kinda homey and not too different from many other Czech dwellings of similar vintage (early 1900's I think). It's slightly shabby and lived in a way that testifies to its longevity and functionality. There's a comforting lack of plastic and everything has a little texture.

A post for Joe....

Hey all. Been a little distracted with my last days of freedom this week. I have been productive tho, I got a Czech bank account (thank you, Cynthia's husband for translating!) and I've been doing some cooking.

But here's something really cool to see. It's Rorscharch from The Watchmen. What's so special you may ask? The Watchmen is a graphic novel, aka comic book, that is arguably one of the great works of literature of the 20th century. It's unlikely to the extreme that there will ever be action figures licensed from this comic. So, someone decided to do this instead.


And, no, Joe this doesn't help me find world-weary European women, but sometimes you just have to let your geek light shine, neh?

Second Trip to Drahonin

Returned to Drahonin this weekend with Sam and Marketa. It was Vlasta's birthday, cool old guy in the village. He'd gotten a piglet in a contest of some sort towards the beginning of the year and decided to slaughter is for the party. I'm told it was something like 200 kilos when they weighed it.

We arrived just as the sun was setting and went straight to the Boofy's house (Rudo, Ivana, and the kids from last time). Mickey was there, too. Beer was immediately produced for each of us. Current music in the Czech Republic, at least for the thirty and forty somethings sounds like Metallica or AC/DC, in Czech. Pretty good, but a little surreal. There was a little flurry as Ivana and Marketa debated what to use to wrap Vlasta's new shot-glass roulette wheel, eventually settling on a plastic Zara bag. Sam went out to get more beer from the car. I got to look at the stove built into one side of the kitchen. Blue and white tile, of the old fire-box variety, with a stove top at waist level and two ovens that stretch up to head height. Just like Grandma woulda used. This is what Ivana cooks on. Meanwhile, they were trying to set-up a new cellphone for Dominic, the twelve year old. It's one of those 2^nd gen. Razrs that don't actually have any buttons, but just a keypad printed on the plastic that senses when you touch it. It's also uber-simple, black and white display, intended for old people and kids. So simple in fact that the adults can barely figure out how to use it. By now we've asked where Sam is a couple times, so I go out and check on him. Can't find him, so I walk down the driveway and look down the road. There's a faint little blur in the dark, which soon turns out to be Sam carrying the Boofy's dog. He looked a little bushed, saying that the dog had led him all the way up out of the village, onto the fields, before he said “Enough!” and turned around. At which point the dog decided that he'd had his fun and ran past Sam back toward the village. We drink a little more, while Rudo chain smokes, and Rudli (the 8 year old) vies for the attentions of the foreigners with his Lego creations.

Soon we head to the community hall, think an Eagles or church basement set-up, where there are a couple dozen gray hairs interspersed with a number of the younger generations, mostly children and cousins. We're greeted heartily and happily, even Sam and I, and as soon as we sit down Mickey finds us some beer and a woman brings us each a plate of food. The schnitzel is breaded and fried pig-slab. The potato salad is a little mustardy and very creamy, probably the first piece of food I've had in months that tastes like something I'd get at home. I eat it very quickly. There's a couple of greasy guys in red hawaiian shirts on stage playing all sorts of music. They look like the cheesiest, my-cousin-has-a-band kind of outfit, but they play some awesome tunes. One's a keyboardist, the other switches between sax, clarinet, and guitar, he also does a mean Louis Armstrong impression. They even played some Dire Straits later in the evening. It made me very happy.

Sam and I wind up hanging around outside. It's a little quieter and the kids have fled the adults out there, too. We talk with a couple guys who grew up in Drahonin, one drives a tram now, I didn't really get the other one's CV. It was fairly difficult to talk with them, the tram driver knew just a little English, his buddy almost none. Eventually a couple girls (high-schoolers, I think) showed up and one of them spoke very functional English, which is all I can really hope for in most of those situations. So we pressed her into the conversation and made her be translator for an hour or two. She's studying to be nurse in Brno and works in a pub near Drahonin in the summer. She told us a little about town life and the people, it felt like home in a lot of respects. After awhile all the kids decided at once that it was time to leave and they did. Oddly enough a couple of twelve year old girls showed up a few minutes before that and decided that they needed to be the official keg minders. One of them spoke a little English, but found the older kids and the toasted Americans a little intimidating.

Other pig parts, ham and bacon, were being trotted out as hors d'oeuvres, with cheese spread on bread with onions and peppers on top. Some Czech food is really good, but lots of it will prevent you from kissing anyone until you've brushed your teeth twice. I was pressed into a game of shot-glass roulette at this point, using a nearly neon peppermint liquor that was not quite schnapps. After a round or so of this I decided I needed some more air and went back out into the cold, clear night.

There I met Jacob, who turned out to be Vlasta's nephew, and his cousin, whose name I don't remember but was wearing a denim vest with “Minotauru Fight Club” across the back. Jacob was pretty cool, just about my age, and he works in a CD pressing plant near Prague. He decided that we needed to have some slivovice to cement our acquaintance. Slivovice, which I can hear you trying to sound out, is plum brandy of serious fire-water caliber. It's clear and has a slight turpentine and sugar odor, generally coming in 60 and 70 proof varieties. Think high quality plum moonshine. Jacob led me to the bar near the stage, which Vlasta himself was tending. Perhaps he hadn't seen me well when I walked in, or he was trying to warn me off the slivovice, but he said something along the lines of 'I remember you! You were here earlier.' I wasn't sure that he should remember me, but he quickly produced a phone with pictures of me on it. Pictures of me from the last time I was in Drahonin. Sleeping on the table next to the town drunk. We laughed, him heartily, me a little embarrassed. But he clapped me on the back and produced a bottle. Jacob had hunted up some shot glasses, which looked tiny, maybe half an ounce each. Vlasta poured us our shots, we toasted, “Nazdravie!” and downed them. It burns all the way down, not terribly, but enough that your eyebrows go up and you let out a breath that could melt paint.

After another half an hour or so, things had been visibly winding down for a bit, Sam and I were both fading. He at least had the excuse of being somewhat ill for most of the week and having a serious case of the sniffles. I despair of ever keeping up with him on a long night. This was about 3am and Mickey was still intent on plying us with beer, which I had the good sense to refuse. We made it to the cabin, walked down the path in the dark because there was no moon, and tumbled into bed.

Thus ends the Second Trip to Drahonin, Pt. I. Look forward to Part II and, finally, a Description of The Flat, in the next couple days.

You'll never guess what happened to me....

Soooooo....

I'm not dead! (Point in my favor.)

In the last week I have been actively recruited for a full-time position by not one but two different schools here in Brno. After weeks of running around here and Krakow just trying to get people to talk with me, coupled with the perma-temping feel of the schools I've hooked up with down here, this is freaking awesome.

The options basically boiled down to this: A) work for an indie school run by very nice Czech woman, who actually impressed me with her attitude and knowledge of her clients (as opposed to some of the 'we think they're about intermediate, and they're probably just working from magazine articles'), which would have paid me more per hour for fewer hours per week with an easier class load. Or B) work for a giant, globe-spanning, very respected school, which was only talking to me through a fluke of networking. (They normally don't even bother giving an interview to people who were certified through my program.) Which demands about 50% more time on the clock for about $1500 less per year, not even counting all the extra homework and lesson planning I have to deal with. Bigger classes, too.

I kinda freaked out. The decision felt like a very serious Robert Frost “Path Less Traveled By” kinda moment. For one thing 10 months contract (for either of these places) is pretty intimidating. I haven't actually planned my future that far ahead since I was in college. (This adventure doesn't count, I had originally planned to be out of the country in 9 months.) Another is that I really wasn't planning to work really hard while I was over here, but then again I also wanted to do this to rehab the ol' college application image. I mean I had to bust my keister for six months to just hop the Atlantic, do I really wanna keep that schedule? Option A is easy and puts plenty of money in my pocket. Option B requires a ton of work, think 'English teacher boot camp' mixed in with 25 hours/week of actual classes, and looks really good on a resume. Did you know they call those things CVs out here?

Mom and Dad seemed to think it was a no brainer. I wasn't so sure, but after running some numbers and doing the comparison, which wasn't as far apart as I had feared, I had a better picture. Even though an extra $100 dollars/month would allow me to live very comfortably and put some money away, it wasn't enough to outweigh the benefits the other school would offer, the skills I'd pick up, and the possibility of going anywhere in the world, both with the school and on my own.

So I went with Option B: International House – Brno.

The training starts next Thursday. I'm still pretty scared about all this. Filled with trepidation I guess you could say. See I have no problem punching above my weight in a corporate environment, where the worst I could do would be break the copier, wipe an important hard drive, or inadvertently commit some sort of malfeasance. This worries me for two reasons. I'm on stage all the time I'm in class, sort of me vs. a bunch of funny talking foreigners, only I'm actually the funny talking foreigner. The other is that I'm really worried about screwing up because the students will either ask for a different teacher or come away not really able to speak English. I don't any problem failing for a corporate boss, or even for the school; I would feel really lousy failing students who'd paid a large chunk of cash to learn from me.

Sooooo, into the fray, eh?

New House!

Spent all day running around and negotiating, and renegotiating, the terms of our move in, but I am now one third of a flat. We're in northwest Brno, about 10 minutes out from the center on the number 4 tram line. I'm living with Ahmed and another IBM'er Cynthia, she's from Brazil. Will talk more later, but for now: Wooohooo!