Anyway, if you hike into this wild park a ways, there is a large water reservoir that you can swim in, and a little further in is a swimming pool made out of filtered river water from the nearby river. The little tugging I'm feeling from Seattle is my desire to take a running jump into the lake at Madrona and then sit on the dock until my back is sunburned and I only want to eat really salty kettle chips. I'm not sure if this little river pool is going to stave off some of this, but I think I'll give it a try as soon as the thunderstorms quit. Plus, there's a little pub right next to the entrance to the park, and finding good beer in the Czech Republic is like finding good tea in Ireland. You can go anywhere and ask for "beer" and something delicious and large will be brought to you.
Thunderstorms are among the many, many small things I'd forgotten about in the Czech Republic. When I thought about it too much, rain in Seattle always made me miss the stronger rain in Arizona, but I have that again, here. Here, I also have a lot of interesting notions about fashion - old women who dye their white hair to various purple hues, dreaded mullets (business in the front, dreads in the back), business professionals who actually wear color, high heels and short skirts on cobblestones, and (though this is new this year) skirts with legs. They're difficult to describe...they are skirts until about mid-calf, when suddenly the fabric becomes skin tight. If I knew the word for them, I'd google image a picture to post.
Speaking of words, my 5 hrs of Czech language instruction each day is going well. I'm filling in some of the basics I missed out on the first time around, and my understanding is rapidly improving (even watched a movie in Czech with Czech subtitles instead of English, and I think I got most of it). Those 5 hours include 30-60 minutes of private phonetics lessons. This means that for at least 30 minutes every day, my instructor says something and I repeat it until she gets really excited that I pronounced it correctly or she gives up, in a fit of laughter. I hold firmly that the most difficult sound to make in Czech is not [ř] as everybody thinks, but rather [d'] and [t']. My usual day starts at 7am - get up, shower, eat a breakfast of Albert granola and white, a little bit salty, yogurt. I head out for class around 8, finish up there at about 1:30. My old study abroad school has been kind enough to give me a key card, so if it's warm I take over the little study room with a futon and enjoy one of the only air conditioned buildings in Prague while having a roll and some cheese and chocolate. If it's nice out I eat outside somewhere, and if it's raining I usually come home to eat something warm. In the afternoons I spend time doing something in English...reading or watching gilmore girls, and I've been spending the evenings at the dorm where most people in my program live - they have Czech movies on almost every night and really terrible dinner food :-)
Saturdays and Sundays the school offers day trips around the country - last weekend I went to Hradec Kralove and Male Svatonovice (birthplace of the Capek brothers with a nice museum), and this weekend I'll have a saturday in Pilsen and spend Sunday in Tacnik and Zebrak. We take country roads when we travel.
All in all, these two weeks have felt, unexpectedly, like coming home. I met an old friend and his friend for a beer a few nights ago, and the friend wanted to know why it is that I like living in his "little country." The last time I was here I didn't write down much of what I did and saw, so I'm attempting to do a bit more of that this time around, hopefully, at the end, coming out with some account of why I do like living here. Also, so I remember things like the old women with purple hair.
A Josef Capek painting, for your enjoyment:
