Dobrý den!
Jak se máte? I'm doing pretty well myself, though I have been exhausted with classes and having to prepare and write my one on one project. Sixteen pages and two nights up past midnight and I am definitively done with the project. It was actually a lot of fun - the one on one teaching, not the writing 16 pages about the kid's language - and helped me improve my teaching skills. I've just fallen more and more in love with Prague and feel reluctant to leave in just a few days. I'm tired and my mind is begging me not to take anymore classes for a while, but this is a place that gets under your skin, especially after you get lost, poured on, finally find iced coffee (which was totally an iced latte) after three and a half weeks, and get laughed at for telling a bunch of old ladies to write horoscopes. Yes, all that in response to how I am. :) It's a Czech thing that I like, a lot.
Last Friday, I'm not going to lie, was tough as nails. We reviewed our language tests and frowned at our low scores and need to memorize phonemic tables and the actual reasons certain tenses were used (so much for Sunday off...). Then we worked on our lessons and prepping materials for what ended up being possibly the most difficult lesson for my one coursemate and I. The third lucked out and got an hour and half with the advanced students while she and I got to spend an hour each teaching the pre-intermediate students. This would have been great; however, only two showed up and they did not like each other. Not that I blame the one student as the other lady is seriously annoying as hell. She tries, but she is random and distracting and always tries to go on and on. Being between pre-intermediate and advanced, she knows more sometimes and yet makes really basic mistakes. It's not her weird knowledge gaps, however, that make her irritating. That's just all her. I think if they had just gotten over it and actually SPOKEN to one another it would have gone better. We can't change them, I learned, so I should have just done everything as a group of three instead of making them do kind of awkward pair group. They were at least interested in the subject and in the end, they got it and were happy; it was just really, really awkward and even more so to observe and be unable to jump in to help as my companion hit ruts as well.
Needless to say, we were so over Friday and decided to go out for dinner anyway. We wanted beer, prosim, preferably right then. It was nice so we began to walk and bitch and muse our way downtown to the three-week rumored "train restaurant."
Nothing at that moment was cooler than a TRAIN that brought us beer.
The message of this photo is go to Vytopna if you're in Prague.
And to compound all that awesomeness, they had Chicken Cesear Salad, which I have wanted for perhaps two plus weeks. It was an epic way to end the day. As you can see a little bit in the background of the picture of me below, the train tracks ran all the way around the restaurant. The entrances onto the terrace, kitchen, bar, etc had motorized bridges that the employees had to time to lift using computers. They also had a Thomas the Tank Engine train going about! It was so cute and while pricy for here, was still very affordable (pricy for cheap students, so like tourist price not like 5 star fancy).
On Saturday we all pulled ourselves rather reluctantly to school. We were pleasantly rewarded with two facts: we were getting to do English Exams, grammar teaching redux, and music today and we were getting out early. Jeremy had about as much desire to be teaching on Saturday as we had for learning. Nevertheless, it was actually a great day. I learned a lot of super useful methodology and the music session was really relevant to the one on one lesson I was writing for Tuesday. Sure, we grumbled a bit about the whole thing, but we worked hard and learned a ton. And yes, we liked it.
I stubbornly decided that hey, since Sunday's my last weekend day in Prague, I'm going to do a little sight-seeing anyway, even if I have to study for my exam and work on writing the one on one write up later on. The forecast for Prague and Karlstejn loomed eerily: rain, more there than here. While I was saddened that the weather meant no castle as the small town literly contains a castle, tourist shops, and nothing else aside from the opportunity to hike 20 km to a monastery and the neighboring town for the bus (it's very, very small). It was already professed to be a quite difficult hike even when in hiking gear due to the fact that it was hilly and involved a small river and a creek or two; with lots of unpredictable rain and mud on the trail from the days before, it wasn't possible in sneakers. So, I moved on and chose Prague Botanical Gardens.
Adorable park bench swing just inside the gardens.
This turned out to be a brilliant, unregrettable choice. Firstly, outside of Prague, it was visbly pouring with huge storm clouds that swarmed at about the distance as Karlstejn. Secondly, the gardens were absolutely STUNNING. While they were a pain to get to - and finding the bus while the info man tried to find someone who spoke English (he tried Russian, I tried Spanish, no dice) was an adventure that I succeeded on after realizing I'd gone out the wrong way [Follow the signs for BUS - ZOO. It'll take you 20 seconds, I'm just an idiot] - they were worth it. Still technically in Prague, and in Prague 7 (the same as my school, amazingly enough), they were in the boonies and visibly kilometers from the city center. It felt and looked like I was in the country as the bus took its 20 or so minute trip out towards the gardens (and the zoo, if you ever want to go there).
Dizzying view down the vineyard into another garden of some kind.
It began as a beautiful day in Prague. The sun was high and the sky where I was was blue with white puffy clouds. As I hiked around the garden and took a grotesque number of photos of flowers the sky darkened. Everyone looked up as the rumbles began, but no one left or even sought cover. The cloud sprinkled a bit on us and wandered off to storm elsewhere. I continued my journey and played with fate a little bit to take some pictures in the Vineyard and finally find the Japanese Garden.
It may have been filled with kitschy displays, but it was beautiful and relaxing.
You can't see the sky, but it's saying, "I'm about to pour on you, bitch."
Clouds had filled in and it started to drizzle as I duked into Fata Morgana Greenhouse after I took the nature trail hike there (also known as the badly maintained supply road they just call a trail because you can walk up it). I was transported into a tropical rainforest complete with butterflies (that the signs made look frighteningly like something else...as the Czech word for butterfly looks like the English word for itthatshallnotbenamed). There were huge boughs of leaves and brightly colored plants. Lilies floated in a pond and water cascaded down an inside waterfall while fish from Asia, Africa, and the Americas swam in the underground tanks below.
Now it looks like I'm at the Hawaii Botanical Gardens again!
I was happy and content and sat outside (it was dry again) with my cornetto thinking about the beautiful flowers everywhere. Then I felt raindrops. When I looked up I discovered those charming white clouds that had come back had been replaced with angry gray clouds, that then turned black and released holy hell on me. I pulled on my rain jacket, cursed leaving my umbrella in New Hampshire, and made my way to the bus stop. It looked forlornly at me professing over an hours wait. I found out after walking further to the stop I had come from that that stop was the Botanical Gardens stop that the buses did not always go to. The next stop was the zoo stop and there sat 3 buses headed to the metro station. I was saved from the rain, though soaked to the skin through my jacket.
When I made it back to the city part of Prague 7, the sun was shining strong again and I took the chance to head to Letna Park. As is the case with Prague, when it rains the city becomes a ghost town in anywhere that's not touristy, but the second the sun comes back out, the city becomes alive again. Slowly people began walking their dogs again so that by the time I reached the park, it was quite lively. I made my way to sunny picnic table that was already mostly dried off, claimed it with my dried rain jacket, bought a cheap beer from the stand, and proceeded to work on my one on one write up exactly where Jeremy had suggested - "Go, go do your TEFL in a park!" Time passed pleasantly and I even got some normal reading done. I highly recommend Jack London's Call of the Wild! I may not be quite finished with it yet but I am quite enjoying it.
Following that I went for a walk and found the famous metronome that replaced what was once the world's tallest statue of Stalin after it was torn down by the pissed off people of Prague.
Yes, it says "TEARS OF STALIN" in giant hollywood sign letters.
I headed down the hill and made my way to Prague one to do some shopping and find the Czech food festival in the Old Town Square. In my mix up of which direction is which square, I managed to go a weird way towards Wenscalas instead of Old Town (not that it was a bad area or even all that unpopulated) and was accosted by a creepy Venezuelan who in between harassing me, groping me, and trying to kiss me, tried to get into my purse after I refused to "give a donation." In response to "besitos? besitos?" after he had pulled me into a hug I could not get away from, I retorted "CLARO QUE NO" and stunned him into letting me the f go. Just 'cause you don't speak Czech, buddy, don't me I don't speak Espanol. I'm totes fine and nothing was stolen, I was just massively creeped out. I made it back to the Old Square and found the food festival. At that point, I was hella ready for something to eat and something to drink. On the bright side, I had the BEST open coal grilled Czech sausage to date. It was absolutely delish, especially when paired with Ferdinand pivo (no judgement here, please - creepy dude). Then I went home and showered after walking past normal Spanish speaking cute old tourists and feeling better about the world (until I had to study for linguistics again...haha).
The weekend was over and Monday brought more class. We took our linguistic exams and I jumped up to pass with 97%! I lost one point for being an idiot (writing past when obvious have is in the present, ahem). All of did well and passed with flying colors, which made Jeremy and us very happy. The day was comprised of theater techniques, Business English - which was hard and not really up my alley at all - and visuals. These sessions were useful and highly interactive so we warmed up and laughed at the theater video woman who's teacher language made us cry even if she made some valid points when she got to them. Show, don't tell my friend.
Tuesday brought Hana, a doctoral candidate in TEFL, who taught listening and young learners (up through high school!!). She was FABULOUS and I couldn't have been more thrilled with everything I learned from her. It also brought Text Drive Materials, our intro to the materials project, and my one on one lesson. I am very pleased with how it went! He was so motivated, even if he made fun of my mistakes and being told he had to pretend to be Major Tom and yes, he really had to write a sequel song. You tell me you want to do poetry, boy, and by golly, I'll get to it after all that pesky article work you asked for! He really improved and was totally nailing articles in his song even though he complained that "it takes time to write a song!" and clearly 15 minutes resulted in one stanza and one scratched out (but totally grammatically correct!) stanza. He did well, I did well, he stole my bad stanza and thanked me for the lesson, saying he was much more comfortable with articles. Needless to say, that last bit made my day more than even getting to teach poetry and use "Space Oddity" by David Bowie in a lesson could. BECAUSE I AM A TEACHER SAP, I KNOW (-> comment directed towards my mother who is so making a sarcastic comment at this moment).
Today, unfortunately revealed some issues that required Jeremy to go home to England on Friday and that made us all a bit sad. He was surprisingly wonderful to us as we turned in our portfolios and spent the whole day designing all our own material and preparing for our giant lesson on Chinese Horoscopes. His encouragement and suggestions pulled us through and resulted in three well done, super fun lessons with three much more communicative and happy pre-intermediate students. Courtesy the class, the lion, cat, and mouse have all been added to the Chinese Zodiac, haha. ;) It went really great and I know we were proud of how positively they reacted to the lessons and how they loved it even though it was a huge challenge due to the massive amount of new vocabulary (Dear Nat. Geo. for Kids - totes tone down the vocab! Love, ELL teachers who are using your articles).
Tomorrow is our last day and will be filled with materials creation for our last lesson with the advanced class. I miss the old ladies already and I know I'll miss the mixing pot of cuckoos in the advanced class as well. Nothing's quite like the one gentleman's related...eventually...digressive stories.
I'm lying here now, completely unable to believe tomorrow is the end of it all.
On the Esplanade during a walk on Sunday showing the cloud dichotomy and Prague Castle.
Despite the sun, it was raining on me when I took this picture.
All good things come to an end, I suppose.
Nasledanou,
Fallon
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