We found out last night quite by accident that the telephone company changed our home phone number. Our new number is 420 2 4174 0190. It is easier to remember than the last one and it is a digital line. So now we can use tone dialing - which we could not before.
We are wondering when we will be officially notified of the change…
Well it seems that the updates are getting fewer and fewer no matter how hard I try to keep sending them. Surely it has to do with being busier and busier but also you can fall out of the habit of writing regularly and it becomes harder. Another thing is that the longer I live here, the less time I take to notice new and interesting things. I think this is a bad habit but probably normal.
So Prague is reaching for Spring. Our forsythia is blooming, our bushes are turning green and some early spring trees are blooming. You can see some buds on some trees but not very big yet. It has been coldish and rainy for the past week or so. I guess we are currently in league with Seattle and have been having “Sun Breaks.” Is that what they are called?
School is going well. It is not as demanding as either Peter or I expected it to be. This is both good and bad. Good in that I am not at all stressed or worried about it. Bad in that I am not learning as fast as I probably could. We seem to have come to a point in the language where it seems like it is becoming immeasurably complicated. We have learned three cases: accusative, genitive, and vocative (in addition to nominative which is complicated in the plural). So progress feels slow, although we probably need this time to absorb and really understand these cases before we move on to dative, instrumental, and locative (or maybe instrumental and locative are the same thing…?).
At least we have learned the past tense, which in some way is exactly the same as Russian and in some way surprisingly different. Now I don’t have to preface my conversations with our Czech friends by saying “you will excuse me, I want to tell you a story about what happened yesterday, but I can only speak in the present tense… is it ok?” You can imagine what this must sound like: “Yesterday I eat dinner at a restaurant. I drink some beer and talk with my friend….Then we buy some clothes…” (Actually as I am typing this I realize it doesn’t sound so awful and there are people that always tell stories in the present tense…”
Today we learned how to talk about things of which there are more than 4. In Czech, if you have one thing, you can use the nominative singular (for example, chair). If you have two, three or four of a thing, you can use the nominative plural (for example, chairs). But if you have 5 or more of this thing, you have to use another word for the the plural (for example although English doesn’t have this, chairses). It is good you know, because now I can go to a restaurant with more than three other people and order beer for us. I can also request more than four pork chops from the meat counter and buy more than four tickets to the theater. You see the problem that I have had before today… 
And as we are learning this very exciting grammar, I am trying to recover from a pinched nerve in my ribs caused by excessive coughing which accompanied the flu I had almost two weeks ago. This is a very painful experience but not very serious. Every time you cough, or sneeze or hicup or even laugh, you feel as though someone has shot a bullet through your ribs and lung. Your muscles do not appreciate being associated with this shocking feeling and therefore cramp up - causing a remnant of the first pain to last for about 10 or 15 minutes after the cough (or other such system shock.)
On account of this terrible feeling, I have been to the doctor in Prague for the first time. I woke up on Friday morning, saw that it was time for me to get up for school, tried to roll over, felt tremendous pain in my side and promptly went back to sleep. I had had this pain already for three days. By Friday morning I was beginning to get a little panicky. On Tuesday I thought it was just muscles… but by Friday I had every kind of alarming image in my mind about what it could be, including a collapsed lung or walking pneumonia. So instead of going to school I got up and went to the hospital. Of course, as I had to do, I went to the wrong hospital first only to find out after about 30 minutes that the hospital at which I had an appointment was two bus stops down from the one I was at. So, I went there and without further mishap saw a doctor. He examined me and told me he thought it was a nerve and that the first most important thing to do was to stop coughing. Relieved, I agreed with him. So he prescribed some medicine to help clean out my bronchial tubes, advised me to drink a lot of hot tea and do some exercises. Then as he was ending, he said “oh, and, you don’t smoke.” I said, “actually, yes I do.” He looked up at me and simply said, “You will stop.” I was greatly amused and have for the most part followed his directions to the tee. The pain and the cough are slowly (not fast enough for me) improving.
I had to take a quick break from this e-mail to cut my finger nails. For some reason I find it completely annoying to type with long finger nails!
You know it is a strange thing. I sat down feeling that I didn’t have much to say… and yet all this has just poured out. I guess it was all hiding somewhere… or maybe now that I am thinking of all of you, many things come to mind to tell you.
Peter and I have been contemplating buying a car. The idea was put into our heads by our friends who would like a car but can’t get one right now and think that the second best thing would be for us to have a car. It is a very interesting idea for us in some way. Neither of us could be termed a “car person,” as neither of us could drive before six months ago. And I am not sure either one of us looked forward in our lives and said “someday I will own a car!” In fact, I probably would have been much more likely to think “I will NEVER own a car!!!” However, it is a very interesting idea. It would allow us to explore Czech and Europe in a much freer way than we can right now. It would also be an adventure just to try to buy a car, learn all the road signs and laws (which Peter already knows much of and promises to teach me), and then to maintain a car. Oh, the places we could go…. but we have not come to any firm decision about it yet. It is all kind of fantasy talk right now… but perhaps before summer we will decide something.
By the miracles of technology, Peter and I sat for several hours last night entering all our tax information into an on-line tax organizer that we can send to the accountant who is helping us do our taxes who works in New Jersey. It is amazing that they can fit that many annoying questions in so small a space on line. By the time we were half way through, I think we were both pretty exasperated with the whole thing. I wanted an “I just DON’T know” column to appear. It may not be the most prudent way to proceed but I assume that if I can’t understand the question at all it has nothing to do with us!
Peter and I are in desperate need of a CD rack these days but unfortunately we want a good CD rack. You would be surprised at how hard it is to find one of these (for an appropriate price). A good CD rack should not allow CDs to become dusty but it should make it very easy to identify which CD is which and it cannot have predetermined spaces as this is discriminatory towards double and triple CDs. This thought because I just looked over at the stacks of CDs sitting in boxes and stacks near our sound system.
I can see that I am becoming random, so I will stop.
I am so sorry that I am developing this bad habit of not writing. When there are lots of things going on here, it is hard for me to find the time and concentration to sit and write - especially since I have been trying to write about things that touch me somehow.
I am waiting for Spring! It is still cold here in Prague and it still snows occasionally. But! there are little green buds on the bushes and there is even some forsythia blooming in parts of Prague. I don’t know if I told you about the weather here but it can change on a dime (meaning, that it can change really really fast). If you wake up in the morning and the sky is blue and the sun is shinning, you should run outside immediately because in even 10 minutes it could be snowing.
Peter and I took a little trip this weekend to a small town in the South of the Czech Republic called Telch. It was a fun adventure. When we were leaving Peter had a schedule of buses leaving for Telch, but no returning schedule. We figured that we could just get a schedule at the bus station we were ready to come back. So, we got on a bus at about 1 pm on Saturday and arrived in Telch around 4 pm. It was cold and snowing. When the bus left the station, we were the only people standing in the station and we had no idea which way to go or how to find the center. But being the resourceful people that we are, we found a map and using our memory of it (as it was glued to the wall) and Peter’s excellent sense of direction, we had no problem finding the town center.
The first thing we did was to find a pension. This was exciting for me because I never stayed in a pension before. Peter did all the talking (in Czech) but I was happy because I understood mostly all of what was going on. I told Peter this and he asked if I had understood that we were supposed to leave on Sunday by 1 pm. I said no. He laughed and said it was an important thing to have understood. I laughed too. So, I am understanding more, but not everything yet. Then we went exploring until we were too cold and wet to walk anymore. We had dinner and some beer and then went back to our room.
We both wondered about what people do in this town to pass time. We met two couples in a pub - but unfortunately none of them were from Telch. They were also just visiting. The town was so dark and deserted that at 7 pm it felt like it was 2 am.
On Sunday morning we tried to take a bus to another city close by. We couldn’t remember when it left, so we went to the bus station about 11 am. The bus schedules are posted on little stands by the place where each bus stops. There were eight stands. The schedules are completely incomprehensible. We found the bus stand that we wanted and saw that a bus should come in 30 minutes. As we stood there waiting, looking at the schedule, we slowly realized that this bus only runs from May to September. So, there we were, standing in the freezing cold outdoor bus station with no bus coming. We had already left our pension and had all our stuff with us. And we had no idea when or where the bus to Prague would be. Finally, after looking at all the stands several times, we figured out that in 30 minutes a bus to Prague would come. It did come. Yeah! We got on it and came back to Prague. So we when we got back we went shopping, cooked dinner and relaxed.
Right now Krolik is sitting out on our balcony intently watching something, hanging over the side and making me nervous. The cats really like sitting outside, especially Krolik. Today is the first day in a while that it is possible to open the balcony door and leave it open for a while. It is not so cold outside.
Class is good. I am learning a lot and getting a lot of practice. Last night I sat with the dictionary trying to find the words to describe our trip because I knew this morning I would have to talk about it in Czech.
