What a whirlwind! We have now been in Prague for about 2 and 1/2 weeks, and it has flown by! Been a little hectic and crazy, but I think we're starting to get the hang of things here.
But before all of that... I had a great visit in New York and New Jersey. Got to see a bunch of friends and family, and Jason joined me out there for a couple of days as well. We had a great trip.
From NJ, we flew to Brussels and had a day stop over there before heading to Prague. Both Jason and I had been there before, but it's been about 10 years for both of us. I barely remember it from my first visit, so it was fun to go back and spend the day walking around. We got pretty tired by the end of it, but got to visit a cathedral, beautiful park and gardens, the main square, etc... And of course, we took some time on our first day in Europe to sit out at a cafe and enjoy a cup of tea. Always a must.
After our great day in Belgium, we were exhausted and slept the entire flight from take off to touch down to Prague. We sleepily made our way on the bus and metro and found our great hotel near the center of Prague (thanks to a coupon from Expedia we got the place for 1/2 price!). [By the way... we were disappointed to NOT go through customs and get a stamp when entering Prague! Only got one when arriving in Brussels. Bummer!]
Our hotel ended up being a great base for us for the first four days. Luck would have it that a friendly British guy working at our hotel had a friend who needed to sublet an apartment. So after just four days in the city we moved into a little apartment for a great price.
So for the last week and a half, we have had a home! It's a very simple place but is clean and comfortable and has everything we need (pretty much...). We're trying to figure out if we'll stay here or move on to a new place. The area where we are living is very nice with many cute cafes and restaurants and even an organic grocer right down the street! I was thrilled. Only problem is that it's a little ways from the center, takes a while to get anywhere. And while that even wouldn't be so bad if we were working regular 9-5 jobs and only had to go back and forth once a day, we're not.
Teaching in Prague is definitely handled differently than other places I've taught. Most "schools" here don't really hold many classes at their offices, but rather send teachers to companies and private residences to teach courses there. It seems like there will be good (variety, not being stuck in your school all day) and bad things (lots of travel time) about this. That means that some classes might be really far from the center and there could be up to an hour travel time between different lessons - this is why a 'full time' schedule here is only around 20 hours a week.
And the other thing that's different - and this might just be because of the bad economy, I'm not sure - it's difficult to find full time jobs. Most schools we interviewed with were only hiring part time positions. So, here I am now, with two part time teaching jobs. I'm a little nervous about balancing them and scheduling issues that might arise. But I guess I'll handle that problem when it happens. So my two schools" both seem good, different from one another. One is a smaller school that handles mostly private individuals with one-on-one classes and is pretty flexible with how the courses are run. The other school is big, about 2000 students with some big name companies. Everything is pretty fixed, although still leaves more of the planning up to the teacher than the other places I've worked. And even though they offer a lot of support for their teachers, it really seems pretty impersonal, such as many big companies are.
So far I've only taught one lesson, which was with an 18 year old high school student/model. I think I'm bound to meet some interesting people here...
More of my classes will begin this week or in October.
So, this is life in Prague so far. As for the city itself, it is incredibly beautiful. We've been so busy figuring out life here we haven't had much time to explore the city and see the sites. We did take two days to see things and think we are going to do more of it this weekend.
