So, We're Here

I've been meaning to blog for a month but my stupid iPad won't let me so I had to wait until we got our new laptop. This has been quite the month and a half, let me tell you. I spent months and months trying to picture what it would be like to move here and nothing even came close to what it is. There are so many things that I want to talk about to be able to look back on later, I could write a short book. But I won't.
The first few days were really, dreadfully hard. The time change hit us like a truck. We were not expecting 85% of all signs, directions, labels, etc to be in Czech. It made it super hard to navigate, buy food, and read signs. It didn't help that our school was out in the boonies so there was a bit less English spoken than in the center city where they are used to tourists. Everything was hard, and we got lost for a really long time. I couldn't even really enjoy the scenery at first because when you're lost and it's raining and you're walking on cobble stones the buildings around you are the least of your concerns.
We started school two days after arriving and that was, well, kinda lame. I learned a lot from the lessons, but overall I'd rate the school a 6 out of 10. Not impressed with anything about it except for the fact that they had really great instructors who are amazing at what they do. Two weeks into the course I was given the info about a job opening at a preschool. I decided to respond and just see what happens. The director of the school responded within 3 hours and set up an interview for the following day. It was so amazing how it all came together, we were lost and running really late but somehow I arrived at my interview two minutes early. Of course, God is so good. I took the job based on my gut feeling that this was the right thing to do. I knew that I was jeopardizing my TEFL certificate, the whole reason we came here, to accept the position. I signed a year contract and decided that I was in this no matter what. Afterward, I found out that this was the best decision I could have made. The school is highly desired, the pay is great, and I was able to still pass my TEFL course.
Adjusting to life and culture is going to be a process. It's absolutely beautiful here. The architecture, furniture, and landscape is just amazing. The public transportation is super nice, but navigating through the streets is a challenge. Everything has a street name, even if it looks like just a breezeway or a hallway. The roads are crazy. They are all winding and narrow, and Czech drivers are f-ing insane. They will run you over, they don't even care. I was very nearly hit full on by a car the second week here. Interesting fact- the Czech Republic has the highest rate of accidents and hitting pedestrians than any other country in Europe. The cobblestone streets are a bit insane on your feet. Anything but flats is pretty much out of the question.
I'm a bit bummed about my clothing situation. I started losing some weight as soon as we left California. Walking uphill and basically using my legs as transportation has made me drop some pounds. There's a part of me that's stoked, and then there's a part where it really sucks. Clothing is really expensive here, and I don't have much clothing here with me. We need to go into Germany to do some shopping for winter gear here pretty soon. The fashion here is strange, the rich people look really good (but don't they always?) and the regular people are really casual. Half of them look ok, and the other are just straight weird. Capri pants on men, mullets, socks with sandals, etc.
I really love our new flat. It was the first and only place that we looked at. It's located in the heart of Old Town, which has all of the historical monuments and major things in Prague. The owners were amazing, and they were really genuine people. I made the call during our first viewing that we should take it, and Jay agreed. After we'd already signed the lease they made some major renovations to get it in great condition for us. They installed a brand new flat range-top stove and new cabinets in the kitchen. She also bought us new duvets and pillows. And yes, duvets plural because...we have separate beds. I hear this is normal here? Apparently they just push two twins together if you are married. Very strange.
My job is pretty cool. I'm a teacher's assistant at this fancy preschool for rich kids. The school is at the top of, you guessed it, another big hill. It's about a 20 minute walk from the metro station and I hear it's quite fun in the winter time with the snow. Yeah, not so much. It's a huge adjustment to work with such small kids, especially since 13 out of 14 of the kids were not English speakers. It's kinda crazy how it works. We basically just speak English to them and they look at us like we are crazy and babble in Czech. The head teacher speaks to them in Czech about 20% of the time so that they know important stuff like "the soup is hot" and "we are going outside." It's amazing how quickly some of them are picking up English words though. Most say a few short phrases and words and are learning more each day. It's kinda frustrating at times because I really want to be able to interact with them like normal but I think that the system definitely works.
As for how we are adjusting now, I'm a bit hesitant to share. Mostly because a bunch of people
talked so much crap about how we would hate it here even though they knew nothing about this place and probably couldn't find it on a map. But I refuse to lie, so I will share about how we are currently doing.
It's been really hard for the past couple of weeks. The school/class in the first month was super hard because it took all of our time. Now it's hard because we are more settled and have some routine and are suddenly feeling super isolated. I really wish that we would have chosen a Spanish-speaking country so that we could make friends and conduct day to day business in a language we were familiar with. I'm missing home a lot. I think the greatest desire is for something familiar. When I see ingredients or instructions on packaging in Spanish it makes my day cause I feel like I kinda know what's going on. We hear many unintelligible languages everyday and Spanish is like a breath of fresh air.
Our visas are still completely up in the air so who knows? As a backup, we have decided that if either, or both, of our visas don't go through we will go back home for a couple months and save money and then try again in a Spanish-speaking country. Buenos Aires would be our first choice. There's 3 steps to a visa, and I am in my first step. Unfortunately Jay can't begin his first step until the October 6 as his work required a 30 day trial before signing an official contract. So he's just over a full month behind me in the process which is a bit scary. If his does not go through I will definitely not being staying alone for 3 months while he goes home before he can enter the Schengen zone again. Not happening.
We are definitely in make it work mode. We knew that some parts would be hard, but walking it out in real life is a whole other story. I still believe that we made the right choice to come out here. 1) We got our TEFL certificates which are a great asset to our future travel/teaching. 2) We actually put our money where our mouth was and made it happen.3) It broke up the monotony of routine and gave us an opportunity to see parts of the world that we may never have seen.
I don't believe that everything in life comes easy, so this is no different. We just started looking at tickets to Paris in the end of October and we might go to Austria in October as well. Going to Paris would pretty make my year so I'm looking forward to that. Juliana told me that she heard in a yoga class that "the key to peace is to maintain joy and sadness at the same time." I think about this every single day. It's so much easier to focus on the sadness, and shouldn't it be the other way around?
As far as food goes, it's really not much more of a problem here than it is at home. In some ways it's a bit easier. We have three great vegan restaurants within 1.5 miles. One is directly across from our flat which is pretty awesome. Vegan food is a bit different. They don't really use the processed veggie meats like we have in the states. It's all based on tofu, legumes, and whole grains. I think that this has helped both of us to trim down too. Of course there's a lot of places that don't have vegan food, but not really much more than back home. We eat loads of bread, just tons. They have freshly baked mostly dark breads here that are fantastic. They aren't super processed and always have nuts and whole grains in them. We eat so much bread and potatoes you would think we would be giant by now.
I already talked about some of the language issues. A really cool aspect about the languages spoken here is that it's truly a huge mixture of a ton of different ones. We are getting better at distinguishing between which ones we are hearing.
The public transportation is wonderful. The metro/subway takes us in all directions of the main parts of Prague. There's also trams that take us other places but you have to really know where you are going for that. Finding places can be a total nightmare sometimes. Their addresses don't go in numerical like we are used to (or the logical way). On any street you can have number 264, 5, 13, and 49. How they do this I have no idea.
There's so much more to say about this place and our experiences here, but I think this is the gist of it.

In Transit

These past few weeks have felt like a whirlwind. So much preparation has gone into this move that it feels so weird to not have one million things to do anymore. Jay did such a great job organizing the business side of things, and that took months of planning on his end. This move felt like moving x5. All the shit that you end up throwing in a box cause you don't know what to do with it had to be dealt with before we left. Our storage unit is a lot more full than we thought it would be but we still did pretty well. Three pieces of furniture and 11 regular size storage bins later, our whole loot of worldy possessions are sitting inside of Stow Away Storage.
The night before we moved was so, so, so hard. We had all of our close friends come by for a lovely dinner catered by Phoenicia thanks to the Kivetts. Hanging out was fun, but knowing all the little things we had to do kept us a bit distracted. After everyone left was so stressful because we finalized all of our packing only to realize that all of our bags were over the 50lb weight limit. Mind you all of our stuff was already in storage so we no longer had bins to throw stuff in or any reasonable means to take care of these loose ends. At 1 in the morning it felt like the world was ending. We were so exhausted and emotionally drained from all of the goodbyes. In the end I got about 3 hours of sleep and Jay got about 2.
I saved the worst part for last. I was dreading, absolutely dreading, saying goodbye to Juliana. All of the goodbyes sucked a bit, but this one was the worst. Well, maybe it ties with saying goodbye to my mom at the airport. I'd been trying to prep myself for it for weeks but I knew nothing would make it better. I did ok during the actual goodbye part, but when she closed her car door and they were about to drive off I felt like someone punched me in the stomach and I didn't even want to stand. Poor Jay was standing there with me as I bawled. It's not that I felt like I wouldn't see her again, it was the companionship and everyday things I was going to miss. The idea of not seeing her and Scarlet about every two days is just unfathomable. God I miss her already. Saying goodbye to my mom and sister was really hard. Luckily they were short goodbyes cause otherwise I might not have survived them.
This time in Pennsylvania is going by dreadfully slow. We geared up for all these goodbyes and this new adventure and then there's this lull before all that actually happens. It's funny because I already feel like I'm in a foreign place. Our propensity for drinking coffee and eating vegan food and pretty much anything normal that we did is not received well here. I guess I better get used to it. I'm looking forward to Wednesday, it looks like my dream will come true afterall and we will go to New York city before we fly out. It is still undecided exactly where we will stay, but if my instinct serves me correctly I envision a trip to Red Bamboo and some great coffee in our future. Hallelujah! I could use something to cheer myself up.

2 Months and Counting

A lot of people ask me if this time is flying by, but really it isn't. Perhaps if I had a lot going on, like Jay, I would feel that way. There hasn't been a whole lot of progress in terms of preparing to leave. We did find a really cool language program to help us learn some Czech words. It has some games and it associates every word with a picture so it's much easier to learn than just writing out words on flash cards. I do, however, need to seriously kick it into gear if I expect to be able to survive in the next 2 months. I know that they speak a lot of English out there so I'm sure we'd be fine, but with the way my husband likes to talk to people I'm sure we'll need more than a few Czech words.
Lately I've been trying to concentrate on really taking in and being appreciative of each phase of life that I'm going through. For instance, we just celebrated our second year of marriage. It struck me that we would never go through the newness of marriage in the same way as these last two years. We won't ever go back to the first apartment we had together, or figure out how to sleep comfortably in the same bed. We won't plan our first trip out of the country. It makes me feel grateful for this time even when I feel like I'm ready for the next thing. Jay and I both have this sense that this phase in our lives, living in Redlands and working locally, is something that we won't ever come back to. Not that we won't ever live in Redlands again. I think the permanency of this place as "home" will not change. We will gravitate toward this place in waves but we both know we are meant for something different.
We're coming up to our 6th month living at my mom's house and it's been so much easier than I expected. I'm not sure how we would have been able to prepare for this trip without this opportunity. It looks like we will be able to stay here until we leave or very close to the date of departure. Such a relief! It looks like we also have our first two visitors lined up for the end of summer/fall. It's hard to picture what it will be like during that time but I'm so stoked at the possibility of seeing friends in Europe! Na shledanou!

Four Months and Counting

As uncomfortable as I am with the idea of people being able to read all my thoughts, hopes, and fears I realized that the benefit of me being able to look back at this time in my life and remember how it was would far outweigh any level of discomfort. So here I am, less than four months away from moving to Prague to take the TEFL course and begin teaching English. It's a strange feeling having this move be so close but still feel so far away. I'm itching for the next phase in our lives and I'm elated that this is it. Really, any change would be welcomed. For the past two years I've been spinning my wheels as a substitute teacher knowing that I was meant for something else, that this wasn't going to be my "thing." I'm not sure what my area of expertise will be, but God I hope it's not teaching. I know this sounds strange coming from someone who's excited to be moving away to teach. It's something that I know that I can do, and I'm pretty good at it so far. It just doesn't spark that passion in me that I refuse to live without.

So for the next two months I will continue to spin my wheels until the school year ends. After that, I can't even fathom what my life will look like. There are so many unknowns with our situation that I've come to the realization that I can't freak out about the unknown. Which is not to say that I don't freak out, I just try to remember every day why I am not supposed to. The top four things that make me nervous right now are as follows. 1. We have no idea how long we are going to be living in this house, it all depends on the sale. 2. We don't know where our stuff is going to be placed during our time away. It will probably stay with my sister in her storage or with my mom, but both of their whereabouts after the summer are also up in the air. 3. I don't know if we will be able to find jobs for the two months between the end of the school year and our move, which will affect how much money we save. 4. If this whole thing falls through and we have to come home, we will both be unemployed and trying to find work like the rest of America.

But enough with the negativity. I really do have an overall peace about the situation. I feel like we were meant to do this, and that's a pretty amazing feeling. I'm not quite sure how to prepare myself emotionally for this kind of trip because I have no basis of understanding of what it will be like. That actually makes it a lot easier. My world as far as my family goes is so much different this year than I ever thought it would be. I wish I could step back in time live in that place of security and stability again. I know that it will never be the same, and in a way it makes it so much easier to leave. I wish that this element was a result of personal growth and not unforeseen circumstances but I will take the good with the bad.

The next step as far as planning goes is to book our flights from JFK to Prague. We have our trip to Pennsylvania planned and we will leave on July 27, 2010. Other than ordering some documents, most everything else has to be taken care of this summer. So for now, I keep spinning.