Celebration and Consequences

Our last week of the TEFL course was a week of raw nerves and sleeplessness. As we were so near to finishing, it seemed like everyone was in a desperate scramble not to screw up. I even went so far as to impersonate my observer for my final lessons. I felt a little bad about it (it wasn't the most flattering of impersonations), but he seemed to love it. And after all of the madness of our first month in Prague, we turned in our final portfolios and set off to drink any memory of the class out of our heads.

We started our night, the last Friday of the program, at a brewpub called Pivovarsky Dum (which translates to "beer-making house"). They serve up these giant 4-liter cylinders of beer called "giraffes". We had a herd. And some dinner.

Our group then set off through the tree-lined squares of Vinohrady, crossing past the monolith of the TV Tower lit in supernatural red and blue. We walked parallel to it for some time, and it kept reappearing at the ends of blocks, like some relic of the arms race.

We found another place close by, U Sabu, which is a restaurant, pub, and 24-hour gambling parlor. It also has foosball, which kept our attention for a much longer time than it should have. The bar turned out to be a pretty popular expat hangout, and I ended up talking to a girl who had been teaching English for a year. She started off at a language school, but recently struck out as a freelance teacher. Of course, while telling me all this, she made a point to tell me how difficult the first months of teaching are. She told me as many times as she could. It almost felt like she was playing some weird game where the more she mentioned the terrors of TEFLing, the higher score she got. I told her that instead of teaching British English, I planned on teaching Ebonics to all of my classes. She told me I wouldn't last a month.

Our night soon spilled over into a bohemian club called Akropolis, which features not one, but two different dance halls of DJs spinning techno-reggae, and spinning it badly. If there is ever a great equalizer, it's dance. Czechs who would ordinarily look down their noses at us were the butt of every joke in the universe. Seriously, you try not laughing at soused Euro-trash (maybe Euro-trash is a bit strong, how about Euro-recycling?) dancing to bad reggae. There was, and this is not made up, a pair of what I can only hope were interpretive dance students that kept doing weird fanning motions with their hands and dancing with each other as if they were enraged salsa dancers.

Our night wound down with a fried cheese sandwich (exactly what it sounds like: fried cheese and mayo on a bun) and a night tram ride home. I awoke the next day to a slight hangover that blossomed into a low fever, which blossomed into a stomach virus. At first I thought that I had simply overdone it. After about four days of it, though, I realized that between the four weeks of stress, staying out until 4 a.m., and fried food from a questionable vendor, I had actually gotten sick. It seems like the number 4 is pretty unlucky here. Because after four days, the virus passed on to Lindsey, who had been nursing me back to health. So with our week off, we spent a lot of time lying in bed watching DVDs and drinking broth. Funny thing, though, I still haven't lost my appetite for fried cheese...