Prague
I can't believe Prague was only one month ago. It already seems like ancient history. In the past month I've finished my Croatian course, started taking private Croatian lessons, started teaching a new student, finished teaching my teenage groups, traveled to the coast, had 4 family bar-b-ques, gotten obsessed with the World Cup, and started complaining about the heat on a daily basis. It's been a pretty good month. Pictures of most of that stuff are forthcoming, but now I'll finally get to the Prague stuff.
Prague was amazing. Around every corner was something more beautiful and unique than the last. The center of the city was packed with tourists from all over the world but it also was early enough in the season that it wasn't hard to get away from the crowd. The mix of distinctly gothic, baroque, and Art Nouveau architecture and design was something truly unique and beautiful. We sampled a lot of local food and of course beer. We walked and walked and walked but didn't miss an opportunity to sit and enjoy a coffee at some great cafes. It was really an ideal trip except of course for the hotel. I can't decide if it's a good or bad thing that I don't have photos of the hotel. Either way I must say it had to be one of the most depressing hotels I've ever seen. It was a good reminded that socialism, in the worst sense of the word, had a very strong grip on Eastern Europe in the very recent past. But let's get on with the good stuff...
On the way to Prague we stopped for a few hours in Vienna. I can't really remember what the building in the background was but it was pretty.
Here's Prague's world famous astrological clock.
And a few views from atop the clock tower.
A surprise around every corner.
Typical Prague street-scape (hardly typical if you ask me).
Sunset on the river.
Mmmm...Art Nouveau. We even got to go to the
Mucha Museum. Mucha as some of you may know is one of my all time favorite designers.
This one looks just right for me. Maybe I'll stay.
On the way back we stopped in Telc which is a little bitty town that has
UNESCO protection for the beautiful Baroque facades that surround its center square.
The view from the bus was filled with amazing yellow safflower fields. The Czech Republic is big into
biodiesel. Two thumbs up for that.
ummm...
well the bottom line is that I don't really think I like blogging. I mean, it seems like a nice idea. It's a great record of my experiences and feelings, but I just don't like it. One problem is that it's time consuming. For the sake of posterity I'm going to continue posting here from time to time, but I've realized that writing is really not the medium for me. The real problem is that I never feel an urge to write "in the moment" and writing things down after the fact feels like more of a burden than a release or a resolution. My thoughts come and go and polish and refine themselves amazingly quickly in my head, and once their resolved there it just doesn't seem fun to have to reconstruct the whole thing on "paper" when my brain has already moved on. So that's my deal. I guess I'll have to try hunting for a new medium of expression, but don't worry my few dear readers, I will be posting many photos from Prague soon as well as a few from my Croatian class and some family gatherings. So for the time being stick with me.
Mega Photo Update 1
Well I guess I took a little break there. Sorry about that, but now I'm back and I've got a lot of stuff to show you. I'm going to be lazy and do this mostly in photo form. This post will cover a trip to Ljubljana, and a crazy soccer match. Our trip to Prague lat weekend will be a whole post in itself that will be up soon I hope. I'm not promising anything though because this week in my final exam for my Croatian class! I'm just a bit freaked. My brain has definitely not been cooperating on the whole language acquisition thing lately. Okay, I'm rambling.
Here we are in front of the big castle on top of the hill that overlooks LjubLjana. Ljubljana is the capital city of Slovenia and is only about a 2.5 hour drive from Zagreb.
This is our friend A being eaten by one of the baby Jaba's that guards the castle.
H was in charge of the digital photography for the day. Unfortunately he has been to Ljubljana many times and was thinking mostly about the cake we were going to eat after I finished dragging him around to all of the tourist sites. So this photo is one of the only ones he took of the beautiful parts of this little city.
We stopped at a cute little castle on a little island on our way home.
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Zagreb's soccer club won the league this year so we decided to go to their celebration game with some friends. They gave everyone in the stadium blue t-shirts. It made a pretty cool effect in the stadium. I wish I could post video here so you could hear all those 30,000 blue shirts clapping in unison
Here we are in our blue shirts with our Belgian friends N and F.
We purposefully sat on the calm side of the stadium. At first I was disappointed because our side wasn't getting into the chanting and clapping, but once a goal was scored I totally understood why we sat where we did. It's a good thing H knew what tickets to get. The hard core fans have a guy on a podium with a microphone and a bunch of guys with big drums who keep the crowd chanting and singing and screaming through the entire game. They bring flares and smoke bombs that they throw onto the field at the slightest provocation. It was pretty wild. The riot police even surrounded the opposing team's fans from half time until all of the Dinamo Zagreb fans had left the stadium to avoid a riot. Everything a European soccer experience should be.
Clearly I've been feeling less than inspired to post something here for the last few weeks. Well that's not entirely true. I've been struggling with inspiration and the rare times it hits me H is at the library with the computer so I watch some stupid show about Hitler or "Mega-structures" or restoring classic cars or saving the endangered Australian Bilby and then by the time he gets home either my inspiration is gone or I'd rather hang out with him than compose a post. But that's no excuse right? Right! So here's a big old update extravaganza. I can't promise it will be interesting but hopefully it will be informative.
So as many of you know I've had a back problem for over 10 years now. It wasn't until about 2 years ago that I finally got a proper diagnosis. I started physical therapy and everything was starting to feel much better until my insurance company decided that since I could get the pain down to zero with a few Advil I clearly didn't need any more therapy. So after 10 years, 3 general practitioners, an orthopedist, a chiropractor, 2 acupuncturists, a physiatrist, and finally a physical therapist I reached a dead end. Once we got to Croatia, I decided that I should take advantage of the super cheap healthcare here and try once more to get someone to help me. The first thing the doctor did was send me for an x-ray. That x-ray cost me $1.75 and showed more than I expected. Here is my new x-ray. What do you think?
In other news we spent a nice lazy Saturday on a hillside outside of the city last weekend. H's grandparents have a quirky little house up there. His grandfather has planted all sorts of fruit trees and a bunch of grape vines that are hard for him to keep up on his own these days. So H, his mother, his grandparents, and I headed up there to have a nice lunch in the fresh air and get the vines ready for spring time. Here are a few photos from our time there:
We were planning on stopping in Samobor on our way home for some kremsnite, but right as we were loading up the car H's mom got a call that H's dad was in the hospital. He'd been paragliding and he fell and hurt his back. We rushed back to Zagreb to see him. He had surgery that night and had a bone graft and 4 metal rods placed onto his spine. He'll need a lot of physical therapy, but a week after the surgery he's already talking about windsurfing this summer. Although I take this as a good sign that he's staying in good spirits, I also find this a little sad since I know the doctors will probably never allow him to windsurf again.
So that's the major stuff from here for now. I'm still teaching and studying and learning how to get the things I need. I navigated the market all on my own this weekend. Here are a few final photos from that. I plan to capture more of the market before we leave, but I think this is a good start:
Water Water everywhere!
Yesterday we took a little trip to Rastoke with the in-laws. Part of the town is situated on a delta between two rivers. Where they meet, there is a beautiful set of waterfalls. Much of the town was detroyed in the war but has since been rebuilt. Now the part of town on the delta is a lovely little springtime attraction with great views and little resturants right on the waterfalls. In the past there were quite a few corn mills there but now there are only a few that operate as more of a tourist attraction than a cottage industry. The restaurants all serve fluffy corn bread and deliciously fresh trout that they collect from the rivers, but I can't tell you how good the fish actually is since fish is gross. H seemed to like it though. Here are a few photos from the day and there are a few more
here:
Just make it stop
How do you heal the pain of a tax bill bigger than you could even possibly imagine? Three words:
McDonald's Caramel Sundae.
And how do you make sure that the pain stays gone?
You say YES when the guy asks if it's okay if he gives you both caramel and hot fudge since the caramel is running low.
Smartass to idiot in 1 day flat
In high school I was smart. I knew what I was doing and I had confidence in my intelligence. I wasn't a perfect student by any means. I didn't give a speech at graduation, but I could have. I knew at the time and still today I believe that if I had wanted to I could have had a 4.0 GPA. I was just a bit lazy and I was much more interested in TV than textbooks. I did enough to get by and to get into decent colleges. I was never great at taking tests but my standard stupid mistakes here and there could have been overcome if I had set my mind to it. This I'm sure of.
Then I arrived at college. Suddenly I was surrounded by all of the people who did try a little harder and did end up on that stage at graduation, many without having to try very hard. Suddenly my professors had turned into Charlie Brown's teacher and I actually had to study. Of course I hadn't really developed good study habits in high school so I still was doing basically only what it took to get by. I'm not sure when it happened, but at some point my confidence took a nose dive (It was probably in Engineering 1. Damn 4 Tran!) . I started to loathe people who would complain about getting a 92% on an exam. In high school I was that person now I wanted to poke their eyes out. Luckily I studied Architecture. With each passing year of college I had fewer and fewer exams and more and more projects. With projects it became clear that if I put in enough time and sought the guidance of my professors there was no way to fail or at least no way to make stupid mistakes that I could beat myself up over. My slightly perfectionist nature could be harnessed into attention to detail instead of self loathing over a missed spelling or a carried 2.
It took a long time, but eventually my confidence started to come back. I started to remember what it felt like to think I was smart and to have faith in my ideas. I remembered that I actually could achieve the things I wanted to.
When I started Croatian classes my old confidence was fully restored. I knew a few things that others didn't. I had a better handle on Zagreb and Croatian culture than most, and my pronunciation was clearly the best in the class. I also had lost my fear of being labeled a nerd and I spoke up frequently in class with questions and comments. I appeared to be a top student. And I must admit that it felt great. Maybe a little too great.
On Monday we had our first exam. I didn't study all that much. Neither did anyone else. I took the exam and felt confident. A few hours later I realized I had probably screwed up a whole section. The next day I found that in fact I was right and in addition to that I had made a handful of outrageously stupid mistakes. I had even taken the time to read back through my exam after finishing and still I didn't catch any of these things. It took less than 24 hours for that black pit in the bottom of my stomach to open up and try to swallow me whole. It was a familiar feeling but not one I had expected to feel again. It was a feeling that had been easy to forget about but like a bad dream that you can't remember when you wake up it suddenly popped back into my mind and has been haunting me since. I guess that injury to my confidence all those years ago left a scar I hadn't noticed before. I'm getting over it, but I notice I'm not quite as likely to speak up in class when I think I know something. Others are catching up to my level and quickly exceeding it. I've re-learned a valuable lesson. Over confidence is a pretty dangerous thing to indulge in. I still think I'm doing well in this class and have the potential to do really well and learn a lot, but I will actually have to study. Imagine that!
