Hibernation and Its Frustrations

In day-to-day business, this week has gone well for me. After my marathon Monday, which included a class in which the student has started work for the FCE exam (much more work for me in terms of prep and grading) and a team manager who can't compliment a lesson without finding something wrong with it (by "conversation class" he really means "intensive grammar"), Lindsey and I settled down in our apartment and watched the world freeze outside. My Tuesday lessons were smooth as usual and I'm meeting my student in a bar for class on Thursday. My marathon Wednesday (not as catchy) ended early due to an on-arrival cancellation of my last class. I ran to the bus stop from the factory and was able to catch the "fast" bus back to Prague, getting me in just under two hours earlier than usual. When I say fast bus, I mean that of the three busses (all run by Anexia) two of them take nearly two hours and one only takes an hour and ten minutes, sometimes less. While my working hours usually require me to jump on the slow bus (where I belong), I occasionally have the good fortune of catching the quick one.


On my commute back from Rakovník today, I peeked up from my book (currently Lamb by Christopher Moore) to see the splendor of Czech farmland rolled out in white for miles. The snow was muddled from the bubbling loam and the occasional big black bird (couldn't tell you what kind as I have my father's eyes), cut by ditches and train tracks, and lined with the drooping glazed branches of trees and bushes like cascades around the flat lake of land. Stretches of the land disappeared flat into fog or dissolved into hills, and one field dipped its toes into a frozen pond where a family was skating, or trying to skate through the snow.


And as I looked at this scene, I thought to myself, "I would rather have an ice-pick lobotomy than go out there right now." The world in white is nice to look at but is cuts through your scarf cruelly. My jog to the bus station is a bit over ten minutes (on a jog) but it was so cold that my forehead felt like it had caved in. When I saw the skating family, I wanted to run down to them and ask, "What in the hell is wrong with you people. It's 5 degrees out there, probably colder on the pond, and it's windy!" But that would have required me going out into it.


This raises and important aspect of our post-holiday lives in this cold snap. Outside has become pretty daunting. The walk to the metro seems to be more than enough, and waiting eight minutes for a tram, well, I just start walking. At least then I won't freeze so quickly. With all of this going on, Prague has become an archipelago of indoor meeting places. You could trace our lives from heated venue to heated venue. Apartment to pub. Pub to cafe. Cafe to restaurant. Restaurant to school. School back to the apartment, where we start hibernating. It's become increasingly anti-social here, as nobody wants to travel thirty minutes in the cold, transfer from metro line to metro line to tram line to see each other. At the same time, the hibernation has turned us all a little crazy from cabin fever. This has turned our apartment into a stage for pacing, sporadic comedic outbursts, a runway for pajama fashions, and the center of the universe. So for those of you who have been feeling a little off kilter lately, it is probably due to the drastic change in the gravitational pulls throughout the universe. On behalf of V Kolkovne 5 apartment 9, I apologize.