Life is Prague has definitely been a little crazy. Getting settled here has been much much more of a challenge than the other countries we have moved to (Peru and Korea). In Korea, we had everything settled before we even left the US: jobs, work visas, apartments, etc. In Prague, we came with NOTHING. All we had was a hotel to stay in for the first four nights and some names of schools to start sending our resumes to. So when we got here, we hit the ground running.
Luckily, we found an apartment after about 3 days. We met a nice British guy who worked at the hotel we were staying at (he has since become a good friend here) and asked him for any tips on getting settled here. He just so happened to have a friend who was moving out and needed to sublet his apartment for a while. Perfect! The apartment was in a really nice area of Prague, but a little far from the center. It was also pretty old and not the nicest place ever. But it was fine. But after a couple months of living there, we decided we needed something new. And the guy we were subletting from was planning on moving back in in January. So we had to find a new place eventually. We found a really nice apartment closer to the center and closer to a metro station and just moved in three days ago. The only trade off was that we couldn't afford to live in a central location by ourselves. So we are sharing a place with two other American girls, both teachers as well. The apartment is big, recently redone so everything is nice and new, and we have a nice big bedroom on the 5th floor with a little view! Life is good.
We started going on job interviews our second day in the city and landed our first offers after about a week. Like everywhere else in the world, the Czech Republic has been affected by the financial crisis (although not as much as many of it's neighboring countries). Because of this, we realized we were most likely not going to be able to find full time jobs. We both ended up getting two part time jobs, which leads to plenty of work. Jason and I both work at a small language agency and then we each have separate jobs at two bigger schools.
I use the term "school" loosely here, as very little of the actual teaching is done in the school. The majority of classes in the Czech Republic are taught 'in company', meaning a language teacher is sent out to various companies around the city and teachers individuals or groups in their own company. So, I spend my days running around all different parts of the city. I go everywhere from the very heart of Prague to places that I don't think are even technically considered to be part of Prague. This definitely was a little crazy at first, figuring out everywhere to go and how to get there, but after a few weeks it became pretty easy to get it down. All of my classes are once a week, so my schedule is different everyday. On some days (like Wednesday, my easy day) I just have one class in the morning and one in the evening. Lots of free time during the day to plan for classes, come home and relax, etc. However on other days (like Thursday, my busy day) I go non-stop from 8am to 6pm - 5 classes that day.
I have almost all individual classes and most of my students are at a pretty high level. So I have a lot of conversation classes where we spend our time just talking about various topics. I have a lot of students that are very interesting people and make my classes really enjoyable. I learn a lot about Czech culture, food, history, etc. from them. A lot of my students have very interesting jobs, and it's a good experience for me to get to talk to all these successful and different people. I teach everyone from a high school aged model, to the owner of a media production company.
And as for the visa process...... still working on it. Jason is further along on his than I am on mine, and we're getting different types of visas. Coming here, there was so much mixed information, it was really hard to figure out what our best options were and how we should go about doing different things. One of the big questions we had was about the visa. You can choose to get either a regular employment visa or a business license (Zivno). The advantages of the business license is that you don't have taxes taken out (you're supposed to be able to keep more of your money with the Zivno) and you have the freedom to work how ever many jobs you want. I got convinced to do the Zivno, so I'm in the process of doing that. I have to go to Germany on Friday to apply for the visa at the embassy, so we'll see how that goes...
Only problem with the Zivno that we're just learning about, is that I may not be able to leave the country for quite some time. It has a long processing time - several months- and until it's finished being processed, I'll kinda be here illegally as far as I understand. So if I were to try to leave the Czech Republic and come back in, my tourist visa would be expired and I might not be able to do it. This is going to be a problem for Christmas when we have two weeks off and were hoping to travel to some warmer countries... Border patrol is pretty lax in these parts, so we may just be able to go somewhere by bus or train where we won't be stopped and have our passports checked. We'll see!
So that's life here in Prague. Who's coming to visit!?!
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