Well, it’s been five days since I got here now, and I’m a lot more comfortable with my Czech life (Czechscursion, if you will). My last post was a little on the slim side, as I wanted to hold off on passing judgement until I’d had a little more of a chance to experience things here. It’s still early days of course, and no doubt in the coming weeks I’ll learn a lot, but I think it’s time I shared a little more of what things have been like.
The View from my front door. Can’t complain.
We had our first snow since my arrival on Friday, and it made the village just that little bit more picturesque. Needing to get a few things and wanting to find out where the train station is, I decided to go on a little walk today, stopping in at the local shop on the way back. It’s roughly -2c outside: not acutely cold but definitely the kind of weather that calls for thermals when you don’t have a heavy coat like me, so I stick my flannel shirt and beanie hat on, play my ‘winter music’ playlist on the ipod (which you can check out here if you’re interested), and head out for a little stroll to get a few pictures.
The village, as seen from the train station. It’s pretty hilly around here.
Either the town hall or a church, I’m not entirely sure, but it’s bang in the centre, in the village square.
One of the two butcher’s shops here.
The change between urban and rural here is surprisingly quick – you wouldn’t think it by looking at these pictures, but this village is barely 10 miles outside of Prague. I’d been told before arriving that the city/country line is an almost black and white change, rather than a gradual one, and I can vouch for that being true. You can probably see from some of the pictures that there isn’t a terrible lot of investment around here, and whist that’s true, it’s not an intimidating or rough place. It’s quite sleepy, and the people I’ve met have been nothing short of polite at any time.
My own performance with the locals, on the other hand, has been embarrassing, because my grasp of Czech is at best limited, at worst shameful. The vigor with which I’d pursued learning Czech dropped off a bit with Christmas and New Year’s being the fun and games they always are. When I’m in the school my Czech isn’t too much of a problem; many of the teachers speak English, and obviously the children are learning English so they try and talk English with me, but when I went to the store in the square for the first time I found myself in a situation where not only was my Czech grossly inadequate, but I had no idea what the name of anything was. Rookie error. I could figure out what a lot of things were through a little visual deducing – chicken noodles and beef noodles had their respective cartoon animals on the packet that gave it away, for example, but there was one thing I was struggling with: sugar. With no reference book to look up the word for sugar, and not having the vocabulary to ask someone what is was called in Czech or where it was, I was basically stumped. There were a lot of sugar-looking items on the shelves, but how do you tell the difference between a bag of sugar and a bag or flour or salt when you have no verbal reference?
The other item I struggled with was milk, albeit for a very different reason. For whatever reason, Czech people don’t care for milk that much. In the UK, where buying a big bottle of milk would be a necessity in your weekly shop, not having any milk in a store’s fridge would be anathema, but here in the Czech Republic people simply don’t drink milk. They don’t care for it that much, it’s only really used in cooking, and as such can be hard to find, made doubly difficult because I had no idea how to say ‘where is the milk?’. I find some in the end, but only after 3 shopping excursions, and I found some sugar after coming across a very handy grocery reference page on an expat website.
Milk and sugar: the sweet, dairy-based bane of my shopping trips.
This morning a young boy and his dad knocked at my door. I live on school premises, and from what I gathered the boy had left something at the school yesterday, and they wanted to know if I could open the school for them to go see. Neither of them spoke English, but we struggled through it, and this little encounter really helped boost my confidence in saying things in Czech, because I had no choice but to use what vocabulary I had. I need things like this to happen now and then; sometimes you’ve got to have the crutches kicked out from underneath you. Even though I was just using basic things like yes, no, I’m sorry I don’t understand, it renewed my confidence after the failed shopping trips, and gave me a little more motivation to keep trying to learn. The people here don’t expect me to learn Czech because most people will want to try and practice their English with me, but I don’t think I could live here for 5 months without trying, that just seems arrogant to me.
This post seems to have gotten a lot wordier than I’d expected, so rather than write a novel for you to work through I’ll end it here and pick it up in a few days. My next post will be about my job at the school and what it’s like; it’ll probably be better to leave it a few days actually because tomorrow is the school’s open day and I have a feeling that will end up producing a story or two.
Take care!
Kev
The Only Englishman In The Village 