Ahoj moy miláchku! (Hello darling/s)
Rád bych jedl zmzrylina. I want to eat ice cream.
As you can tell, Czech is horrendously difficult. It is thick with consonants, like the goulash with heavy potato dumplings. I have eaten an illegal amount of meat, drunk moderate amounts of extremely tasty Czech beer. The pivo (beer) [was absolutely frickin' brilliant.]
2 days in Prague. A consistently beautiful city sadly not w/o its cheap tourist traps and disgusting Kafka merchandise. And tourists. Everywhere. Mesmerized over and over by the slightly, ever so slightly derelict city buildings. The patterns really are beautiful [...]
What else? Yes, I taught three English lessons to hopelessly shy Czech 16, 17, 18 and 19 yr olds. But I will get back to that in another email. Quite an experience.
I cannot stress how good the beer is.
Ondrej, Loyzic and Alois Horak are very helpful and kind. [I was staying with the Horaks for ten days, or nearabouts. They were very kind and I want to go back, that's if they let me...] Went to brilliant, clean swimming pool + sauna (pool made of metal). Played guitar at an opening for (breath in) Ondrej's cousin's father's photo exhibition somewhere beyond the mountains near where I'm staying.
I am quietly disturbed by the effects of incompetent, proud, masculine, uniform and immoral Communism have had here, and the hatred of the Russians [...] the worry over Georgia is completely undrestandable. [I remember anxiety over Russia's belligerence towards the country at the time.] I can sum up the shock to an English visitor feels with one experience:
At night we took the dog for a walk. We turned left as we left the house and kept going straight ahead. Smack bang straight ahead for a good twenty minutes in darkness, just making out the relentlessly straight crops and the roads now being rebuilt that were destroyed by Russian tanks (Ondrej remembers seeing them go past his window as a boy). We just kept going forward, and suddenly took a 90 degree turn right and, again, kept going straight ahead. It felt slightly unsettling, but even more so and we took another 90 degree turn and headed back along the other side of the crop.
It seems to me the Russians thought that humans were ants. It is disgusting how uniform the towerblocks are huddled together, and how life is sucked out of a neighbourhood thus.
Anyway, moody rant over. Czech really is a good country and I don't want to put you off. The pictures will tell a more uplifting story. The regeneration and soaring economy is wonderful for the Czechs. [hmmm... I'm worried about being a tad patronising, but I'd like to echo the sentiment without such binary optimism. It's really not that simple as that I can now smugly tell you. Katka is an English teacher at a school nearby where I taught. She is now a great friend. I was told a heck of a lot about Czech history and their current identity - extremely tricky issue, especially for an outsider to talk about.]
Odd mixture of very flat, dull countryside with spectacular Moravian mountains.
Tomorrow I will teach some 14 yr olds English ('Prosím vas! Mluvtu pomalu, prosim Pan Ansell' - speak slowly please Mr Ansell) which is an incredible lesson for me. Then older classes on Friday (I will surely be well fed by the school for my services) which moc dobře, very good and very exciting also... Don't know the Czech for 'exciting'. It's probably something like přláštlmi or čtdlěli. Ridiculous language.
Nashledanou,
Pascal xx
I am now qualified to teach English as a foreign language after taking the exhausting CELTA course (Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults) that ate up 4 weeks.
3 comments:
Oooh, where did you do it and how much did it cost? (I'm Florence, a friend of Sarah's by the way!)
In Leeds at the Action English center. It is four weeks of pain but very, very worth it. You'll have trouble NOT getting jobs with the qualification, very much reccommended. My brother Andrew did it in Oxford, and he says the centre there is very professional.
I enjoyed reading it :)! Cheers!
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