A Quick Czech Up

I am in love with this city. Although I've only been here a week, it feels like much longer. I'm feeling settled in, I know my way around well enough to walk around without a map now, and I'm becoming a pro at navigating the metro and tram system.

I woke up quite early my first day here to get oriented to my part of the city. Walking around Prague by myself was a surreal experience. It was difficult to accept that I really was in the middle of Europe and that I wasn't seeing this through someone else's eyes. I've posted all the photos I took on Facebook, so I won't repeat them here.

My first few days here, I was basically alone. On Sunday, we all met up for an initial meeting at our school. There are 10 other students taking this course, and almost all of us are planning on staying in Prague to live and work. It's remarkable how much I enjoy all of them. They're all seriously cool people, and I can tell I will enjoy getting to know them better over the course and hopefully long after as well.

The course itself it actually quite fun as well. Much of class time is spent receiving demonstrative lessons formatted the same way we should be creating our lessons when TEFLing. This means we got to play a lot of fun get-to-know-you games and do some creative activities like create your own evil company and attend an evil company convention (shout out to my personal favorite, "Homophobes R Us"). Near the end of the first week, we were placed in a class of Czech students at varying levels of English skill. All we had to do was run through a warm-up activity and an ice-breaker. I had a class of six advanced English students, and we played "Never Have I Ever" and "The Very Long Sentence." Starting tomorrow, we will be giving full 45-minute lessons of our own creation Mon-Thurs. For Monday, I am doing a vocabulary lesson with the advanced students themed "It's the End of the World as We Know It." They will have to come up with a zombie apocalypse survival strategy at the end of class using new vocabulary terms.

This course also assists with more practical issues of TEFL such as how to find housing, getting visa assistance, job hunting advice, etc. This information and assistance has been great so far, seeing as the whole process starts to feel extremely overwhelming at times. I still need to add TEFL information to my resume, hone in on some potential housing, sort through job listings, setup a Czech bank, etc. You can see how it starts to feel insurmountable. However, I have decided to stay here in Prague to live and work. Housing is actually fairly cheap and easy to come by. I've already looked at two places with my current flatmate. They were both much nicer than my old college apartment and more modern looking than my house in St. Louis. Plus, rent was less than $450 each in both places we viewed. We didn't sign for anything yet because we want to consider living with strangers who came to Prague from other countries or even find some local Czechs to room with.

I'll try to start making it a habit to jot down a few things that happen each day so I can give more specifics on what day-to-day life here is like. I'd also like to answer a few FAQs and nerd out about the Czech language a bit. Let me know what you're curious about in the comments! (I think I changed the settings to allow anonymous posts, so give it a try and let me know!)

-Anthony