Now Up

September 1st brought the end of our TEFL course and we, we proud and tired Caledonian TEFLers, we were glad to be done. O me O my, this much for sure. It’s not so much stringent as it is an intense first month in the city, forcing your personal compass to be constantly rooted to the Northern Star of TEFL. To be done with the course was to be cut from the umbilical.

The end of the course dinner and drinking binge was a little lackluster—only three of us ventured out past twelve for various lame reasons. But we three, we celebrated. Oh yes. We toasted each other till we couldn’t be toastier. But it wasn’t till Monday, when I booked it out of Prague, that I begun to settle down.

Now let me say this about Prague: great city. Beautiful city. Cheap beer, millions of places to go, great public transportation, etc. But it is a major capitol. It is the big city. And you (or at least I) can only live that life for so long without getting out for a little while. This is where Cesky Krumlov comes in.

Cesky Krumlov is located in the southwest of the Czech Republic, and its main tourist draw is the second oldest and largest castle in the country. Its architecture predominantly harkens from centuries Renaissance and older—a nice little berg, for sure. But my friend David and I weren’t just looking for town, we were looking for country. We were looking for the nature.

Funny thing about Czechs speaking English: when they want to say they went out to their cottages in the country, or went mushroom picking (which is huge—HUGE—here), or went biking, they say they went “in the nature.” It sounds funny at first, but the more I think about it, the more sense it makes. What’d you do this weekend? Oh, you know, went out in the nature, relaxed, chilled, swam. No biggie. Think I’ll go out to the nature next weekend too.

So that’s what David and I were looking to do—get out into some beautiful nature. We hiked ten kilometers the first day and about twenty the second, played chess in between. We start work next Monday so this is all the vacation we’ll have for a while. It was a good time for me to really think about WHAT THE HELL I’M DOING HERE. This is a sub sect of the quandary of WHAT THE HELL I’M DOING WITH MY LIFE. I feel like I’ve only got one really good friend here amongst a bunch of so-so friends. And I’ll tell you this much for sure—you think you can tell an American from a European, but you can’t. Oh no. No sir, no maam, you can’t. You’re in a language wasteland, blind to spot speakers of your tongue. Like I said, the TEFL course has required our undivided attention. It’s a month later and I’m only just wiping away the cobwebs.

So time and the future are sitting like big soft-boiled eggs in front of me. Hopefully I peel these suckas correctly, dig?