Wow, I may have been keeping up with uploading photographs but my journal keeping leaves something to be desired! It’s been 17 months since I last made an entry, sitting in an internet café in Singapore the day before I left Asia for Australia.
A lot has happened in that time, if anyone had said then that I would currently be living and working in the Czech Republic I wouldn’t have believed them. But here I am, starting my third month here…
In some ways it now feels completely normal being here, if home is indeed where you hang your hat then Brno is just as much home as being in the UK ever was. I have somewhere to live, the same job as I had in the UK, some of the same colleagues I used to work with etc. In some ways though ever day I’m reminded of the things which are different – catching the tram to work, the church spires on the skyline, my girlfriend, and most of all the double-dutch which passes for a language here…
The language is the most obvious reminder, and the thing I’m having the most trouble with – even the most simple thing is made harder buy never knowing if I can make myself understood. Last week I bought a new pair of Levis and once I got them home I decided that they didn’t quite fit me – even the simple task of seeing if I could take them back to the store meant I had to get Michaela to phone up for me, and then to accompany me into the store to translate for me (and as it turned out I couldn’t return them anyway).
While I admit I have been fairly lazy – I had one lesson and it was so bad I vowed never to have another – I have been trying in my own way and struggling is not the word for it. I seem to have a complete mental block when it comes to languages, even on the rare occasion I have managed to pronounce something I find after 2 minutes I’ve clean forgotten the word in the first place. There seems to be no clear split between Czech people who can speak English and those who can’t, which has lead to some interesting sign language conversations at times!
So far I’ve not made many inroads with the list I made of places I wanted to visit while I was here, so far only Telc and the Moravian Karst have been ticked off. Since I started seeing Michaela however I have been to many places which I would never have visited on my own, whether just walks in the woods, rave parties in old castles, or the 2005 Moto Grand Prix. I’m hoping to get to Budapest before Christmas, and I plan to take a few days off work in November to visit Vienna. Nearer Christmas there is also the possibility of visiting some of the markets in Germany, unless the weather gets too cold and I never want to leave my flat – the weathermen are already forecasting snow in the mountains and it has been mentioned that minus10/15 degrees is not uncommon in winter here! I do have to get my winter wardrobe purchased soon…
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