what DOESN'T make me feel better?

To make me feel better about the heat being off last night....My roommate, who's flat this is (it was his grandmother's before him) just told me that it was off for two weeks during February of last year because the kettle was broken. THAT doesn't make me feel better!

the universe and her crazy ways

For about 2 days I couldn't find my iPhone headphones anywhere. I had just about decided that I had lost them, that I would have to buy new ones, when i found them yesterday tucked in a rarely used pocket of my backpack.

Last night....Kazi found them.


I guess when we've resolved to buy something new, the universe will make sure it happens! (Actually, I just looked more closely...he only chewed the left ear. Which means they're still fine for phone calls, just not that great for music. He's only a partly bad dog!)

Baking in Czech

I bake. I LOVE to bake. Anyone who's been around me, or especially anyone who's lived with me, anytime in the past probably 8 years has reaped the benefits of my baking. I'm no pastry chef, but I do a pretty good job.

I miss my pink KitchenAid mixer. I miss my beautiful clean mixing bowls and cookie sheets, used exclusively for cookies. I miss words like "cup" and "tablespoon"! I miss things like 350F. I know...it's not that hard to convert those things to grams and Celsius, but I miss the familiarity of working my way through MY kitchen with MY tools!

So, after being in a foreign country for about 6 months, I finally decided to attempt to bake something. That was the easy part. I talked to my roommate about the Czech words for "flour", "baking soda" and "baking powder" and headed out to the grocery store. I thought brown sugar would be easy...but after two stores just opted for the unbleached sugar to use instead. At the first grocery store I showed the woman the words for "baking powder" because I couldn't see it anywhere. She finally handed me this little packet. (They put everything in little packets here.)


Then I asked for "soda" because I still didn't see that either. She was puzzled, looked around for a bit and finally handed me "saf-instant".


There was no peanut butter (for the peanut butter cookies) to be found at store #1, so I headed off to store #2. I was skeptical about the "soda" since my roommate told me it would say "soda" on it. At store #2, where I picked up the way over priced Skippy, I found something with the word "soda" in it. Upon arriving home, my roommate told me that the first woman sold me yeast. (And I'm not 100% sure that the "soda" I got is "baking soda".)



There is nothing at my flat with which to weigh anything. So, against all of my fine baking instincts...I had to EYEBALL all of my ingredients! It was painful!

However....despite all of these things...I got compliments on my peanut butter cookies. They were NOT phenomenal....I wasn't all that thrilled, they were certainly not my best work....but they were a crowd pleaser!

First Christmas in the Czech Republic

One of my roommate's (or, in European, "flatmate") invited me to spend Christmas with her family in her hometown. They do the main thing, with CARP, on Christmas Eve (what they call "Christmas") with family. So, on the afternoon of the 25th, I hopped on the bus for a quick one-hour journey north toward the German border.

It was such a weird thing. I was on the bus, just looking out the window. I see this wonderful wall with grass on top and it looks like what used to be a moat surrounding the wall. I was wondering to myself what wonderful place this could be....and then I saw the sign...Terezin. And then there were all the tour signs for the Jewish Ghetto, etc. I would like to go back and have a tour, maybe when the weather warms up a little. And when I'm really ready for a good cry!

The name of the town in Czech is Terezin, but like most things in that region there are Czech names and German names for just about everything.
I didn't read all the detailed history, just the beginning and the end...of the 15,000 kids sent there...93 survived. Uuuggghhh...how can people do this to one another??
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theresienstadt_concentration_camp

Here are some pictues (not taken by me...just from Google Images): http://images.google.com/images?q=terezin&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=M3Y4S42YEomEmgPoi6iTDw&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4&ved=0CCIQsAQwAw

The city I was headed to was just a little further on, Litoměřice.
http://www.litomerice.cz/eng/
A truly beautiful city. I loved it there! December 26th was a beautiful warm (relatively) and sunny day! So we took off on a hike up a hill. The view of the city was incredible. I spent 2 nights with my friend's family. They were so warm and inviting to me. I had such an excellent time. A wonderful first Christmas in the Czech Republic!

Pictures to come soon!

Applying for a Long Stay Visa

To apply for a visa to a country, you have to do it at the country's embassy OUTSIDE of the country. So, in order to apply for my long stay visa for Czech Republic I had to go to the Czech Embassy in Bratislava, Slovakia. The embassy takes visa applications from the US, and other "friendly" countries without an appointment between the hours of 10 and 11 Monday through Thursday. In order to be there on time, this required getting on the train in Prague at 12:42 A.M. for arrival in Bratislava around 5:30 a.m. The train was going from Berlin to Budapest but I was lucky to find a seat to commence 5 hours of attempting to sleep sitting straight up. Lucky me.

At 5:30 a.m. nothing in the Bratislava train station is open. I just needed to kill some time, have a cup of coffee, etc. Not even the coffee shop was open. And the train station is open air. There are no main doors, it just opens to the street. So, at 5:30 in the morning, when my options for warmth included only coffee and hot chocolate from the vending machine, I found a place to sit on a ledge (there aren't benches there either) and read.

Finally, around 6:30, the coffee shop opened. I sought out some warmth and a freshly made cappuccino.
Disappointment 1: it wasn't any warmer in there
Disappointment 2: the cappuccino tasted like someone made it yesterday it was the WORST cappuccino of my life
Disappointment 3: the first and ONLY cockroach I have seen since I left New York City was slowly meandering it's way up the wall next to the table where I was sipping the worst cappuccino of my life

Around 8 a.m. I left the train station to head into the city to find the embassy. The bus was dirty ... dirtier than any I've been on in Prague or NYC. I found the embassy. A very unassuming building right next to the American Embassy. The American Embassy had a huge fortress covering the street so no cars could go by without checking in. There were metal detectors and guards and just an overall showy appearance. The Czech Embassy had a red door and a doorbell. I rang the doorbell, told them I was there to apply for a visa, and they buzzed me in.

The process went pretty quickly. I was there for about an hour...not sure why...just waiting around. But I was able to get back to the train station to get the 12:30 p.m. train back to Prague! And I was so happy to be home! I picked up Kazimir from the babysitter (ahoj Sarka!) and headed home to sleep.

Except I wasn't able to sleep. My friend Dave came over and then guilted me into going to movie night at Tim's house. So...I had a VERY long day!

Keep your fingers crossed that the embassy will smile on me and grant my long stay visa!!

the other day in the grocery story

So I was in the grocery store the other day humming along to the music. I didn't really realize I was doing it at first because I was paying more attention to my shopping list than to what I was listening to. Until I started singing along....I was singing along to "I touch myself" by the Divinyls. Lyrics and everything...not elevator music...was playing in the grocery store.

Here's the youtube link so you can reminisce about high school with me! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SszHoW5ogNs

I love Prague!

Venetian Travels

Wednesdays are really long days for me. I got home around 9 p.m. on Wednesday, 18 November. My roommate started talking about going to Venice...would I be interested. Come to find out...they were leaving the next night. Well, of course I was interested! So, we left Thursday night around 9 and drove through the night. Got to Venice and settled into a hostel and wandered around the city. On Saturday and Sunday we toured La Biennale, a huge world wide art exhibition. It was wonderful! We left Venice around 6:30 Sunday night and after driving around Innsbruck looking at architecture, got back to Prague around 6:30 Monday morning! I slept for a few hours in my bed and then started the week!

Of course, Kazimir came on the trip. He was such a good boy. We even met another chihuahua in Venice who looked a lot like him!

The funny thing is that while I was driving to Venice my mom was driving from Northern California to Southern California. The drive to Venice, going through Plzen, Munich, Innsbruck, etc was about 575 miles. The drive from my mom's house to my sister's house, going through PART of California, was 550 miles!