Rerecharging

Last weekend, like most weekends, was supposed to be about recharging for the next week, planning my lessons, and catching up on the sleep I missed when I was out teaching English in the pubs at all hours of the night and then waking up a few hours before the sun. And like most weekends, it was anything but a recharge, and was instead a recovery. Thus is life in Prague: sleepless and frenetic.

Friday night, after posting, Alex and I went to the store to stock up on potatoes, sausage, mustard, and beer. We had a few of the gents over (to complement the ladies night out) and had a mini-Oktoberfest in our flat. When the ladies returned, they saw the bunch of us sitting around the carnage of our meals, playing cards. Our two nights converged there, and we sat up chatting around our table for a few hours before we all called it a night.

After recovering some on Saturday, I headed up to the park for a run. For the first time in a month or two, I could run without six layers of clothing (don't worry, I wore two), which means I could actually move my arms as I ran. This decreased the stares.

After an afternoon of lesson planning and studying, we headed over to our friend Daniel's new apartment in Zizkov. Daniel's father works for the Foreign Service, and so his apartment was decorated with, among other things, a picture of himself with Barack Obama.

Daniel was a great host, whipping up some delicious enchiladas (better than most "Mexican" restaurants here) and a calzone. After a well-paced three courses, we headed out to some of the local watering holes. Zizkov is notorious for having the most bars per capita in the world, so the walk wasn't so long. After bouncing from one bar to the next, Lindsey, Alex, and I finally caught the night tram home.

And so I found myself scrambling to print off all of my teaching materials, which included a trip to Caledonian. I walked there, a good three miles or so, through the Stare Mesto. Crossing the bridge from Karlovo Namesti to Andel and looking up at the castle, Petrin Park, the Narodni Divadlo (National Theater), the Charles Bridge, and downstream to Vysherad, I realized how much I'll miss this place when we leave. For all of the wicked scheduling, early mornings, and sleepless weekends, there's something intangible to living here that you can't get anywhere else.

When my alarm clock went off on Monday morning, however, I wanted to reach back in time and slap that optimistic version of myself standing on the bridge and folding the city up into my memory. By the time I was heading home for the day, falling asleep gape-mouthed with a book dangling from my fingers on the bus ride home while the Czechs around me chatted away, I was ready to reach back with both hands and strangle myself. But waking up as the bus passed Prague Castle, the Loreto, and pulled onto a boulevard of houses decorated like picture frames, I think I was closer to Bridge Jake than Alarm Clock Jake. That's probably what I meant by intangible.