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.

Milestones and Cobblestones

Winter has more than officially plopped into the alleys of Prague. I first noticed it on Thursday carrying groceries home and my eyes started watering from the cold. People sitting in café windows must have had a laugh at me, as I half-walked/half-skated over the frozen cobblestones suffocatingly wrapped in my scarf, arms full of groceries, and seemingly crying hysterically. Then again, those things tend to happen here. Friday, while not the official anniversary, was the date the Lindsey and I set to celebrate. To avoid waffling for a week, I volunteered to make the arrangements the weekend before, and settled on dinner followed by some live music. After reading several glowing reviews, I made reservations at Klub Architektu, a cellar that supposedly had some dynamite vegetarian options. I figured a 7 p.m. dinner there followed by a jazz quartet at the U Stare Pani club would be the perfect way to commemorate our first year of marriage. The restaurant was, in design, a pretty interesting place: stone lined walls that arched seamlessly into stone lined ceilings. It was also entirely empty. We sat down and the servers immediately cut off the music, which meant that our conversation bounced through the entire building off of those elaborate walls and ceilings. Lindsey had to ask them to turn the music back on.

The stellar vegetarian menu turned out to be different forms of fried cheese, breaded and fried (rind and all). Lindsey opted for salmon pasta and we ended up, like so many of our dining experiences, splitting. While it's difficult to mess up fried cheese, the salmon pasta was so perfectly described by Lindsey: "It tasted like getting Tosi's and heating up the leftovers the next day." I think she was just trying to be nice, though.

We saved dessert for the jazz club. Now the short walk to the club was marked by a misting snow and a wind that cut the alleys to shreds. By the time we got there, we were ready to climb into an oven, or a fireplace, or something equally warm. Yet, despite the information on the website, the performance didn't start for another hour. We were left with the choice of sitting in another empty restaurant listening to the band tune it's instruments, or legging it back to our place to warm up and relax for a while, which we did.

Upon our return, we were happy to see that we would not be alone in the club. We took a booth off to the side and ordered a Bailey's cheesecake (literally cheesecake doused in Bailey's) and a hot brownie with ice cream to split. The club was warm, the band was decent, but the disappointing dinner and wretched weather had taken their toll on the evening. We ended up ducking out before the last set and calling it a night, a very very cold night.

This raises one of the tested hypotheses of our relationship. It is rare that on a night (anniversaries, weddings, birthdays, Arbor Day) when we are supposed to feel incredibly in love, or things are supposed to go well, that we do, or they do. Our best moments, for the most part, have come when we're not doing something for a reason, but just because we feel like it. That said, I guess we'll just have to suffer through many more annual disappointments that we can pad with sweet desserts and fried cheese.
Our roommates, Pat and Nell, suggested another restaurant for Saturday, and despite our meager salary, we indulged in a redemption dinner and joined them and Alex and Liz. The restaurant, Kabul, was a family-run Afghan place, not far from Architecktu. The owner was actually our server as well, and the menu was full of kebabs and various meat and vegetable pastries. Lindsey ordered the chicken kebab and I ordered a leek and potato bolani. Unfortunately, our server wrote down my order on the back of his sheet and forgot to put it in. Now, for those of you not familiar with service in Prague, you're not familiar with it because it doesn't exist. Between the post office and restaurants, the general service motto seems to be, "Stop bothering me by asking me to do my job". So when my food did not arrive, throughout the dinner, I was ready to be told a variety of lies (I once had a waiter insist that I'd ordered something completely different from what I actually ordered and refuse to bring me anything more). Instead, the owner apologized profusely and brought me a free beer. Despite the obvious problem, it was a delightful meal and interesting restaurant. We capped off the night with a trip to a wine bar in Vinohrady to meet our friends, Lisa and Pat Buckle. And instead of navigating the night trams at 1:30 a.m. in single-digit temperatures, we opted for a cab. While it is still common to barter for your fare before getting in, many cab companies are using meters to give the illusion of fairness. I offered the driver 200 kc to take us home (a reasonable rate from where we were) but he decided to leave it to the meter, which let us off with a lower fare. When all was said and done, we'd scored a great meal, free beer, and a cheap cab ride, which puts the ongoing tally at: Jake and Lindsey 1, Prague businesses 200. At least it's not a shutout anymore.

Another go at it

Alright, for all three of my devoted readers, I apologize for such infrequent posts. As it is the new year, I thought I'd try to renew my blogging efforts and actually write more than twice a month. Note that this is not a resolution, as I break resolutions like my Dad breaks pretzels (the three of you should be in on that joke).

My newest addiction, thanks to my roommate, Alex, has been to download podcasts to my mp3 player and listen to them on my commutes. I've been listening to a good number of economic programs from NPR and The Wall Street Journal, as well as the Bloomberg podcasts. They have made my trips to Rakovník and various spots around Prague much more enjoyable.

Anyways, yesterday was one of the stranger days of the new year. My only Thursday class is an 8 a.m. one-on-one lesson with the sales manager for the Czech branch of Ratiopharm. Jan, my student, works in Prague, lives in Brno (a two hour drive), and is concurrently the acting sales manager and getting his Ph.D in pathological medicine in Brno. He is my most eager student, by far, and ever since I fist-bumped him on our first class, has been giving me knuckle on a biweekly basis whenever he does well.

Now, for those of you not keeping up with the state or history of the European generic drug market, Ratiopharm was owned by the German billionaire Adolph Merckle, who owned, among other things, HeidelbergCement. Facing massive losses in speculation in Volkswagen stock, Merckle killed himself on Monday. I hadn't heard the news until Jan, in the middle of our lesson, stopped me and explained the situation. Jan heard from his superiors that Merckle jumped in front of a train. We suddenly went from discussing modal verbs to talking about the effects of Merckle's death, the economy, and the future of Ratiopharm. He seemed concerned that Ratiopharm would be downsizing at any moment, and suggested that we go out for drinks next week, just in case. I'm not sure how this would help anything except his English speaking and perhaps his head, but I agreed, and so I have a man-date with the Ratiopharm Czech sales manager next week.

On my way home, listening to the "What's News" podcast from TWSJ, I heard about Merckle. According to the news, he died in his home and not under a train.

My afternoon was given over to running in the still-freezing Prague, which is like running on a ice-rink covered in sand since the cobblestones are slick and covered in snow. Lindsey then came home from her Thursday circumnavigation of Prague, and we spent the afternoon being a young married couple: chatting, drinking coffee, taking a nap (which is hard to do after drinking coffee).

Our afternoon was not perfect though, as the Caledonian School, hereafter referred to as the ninth circle of hell, sent out another threatening email. This one, unlike last month's, did not promise massive layoffs (which never happened) but effectively lowered the salary of new teachers (not us) and required that any teacher with fewer than 20 teaching hours per week (also not us) must pick up substitutions or new classes, or be relegated to a part-time contract. As it stands, we're not affected by this, however part-timers are not reembursed for their travel passes and do not get any health insurance. After hearing that, I could help but wonder, "Would this be a bad time to ask for a raise?"

Lindsey teaches most nights, and with my SOA 1 exam looming, I took my study manual out to the Tynska Literary Café to study. The place was packed with red-faced-chain-smoking academics laughing over pints and debating whatever it is they debate. I sat in the corner nursing a beer and performing double improper integrations of multivariate equations which are used in calculating joint probability. Trust me, I know that is one crisp pocket protector from uber-nerddom (instead of super-nerddom). And trust me, that is not my usual behavior in such establisments. As far as productivity goes, though, its easier to take the studying when I'm out and about.

Lindsey and I finished the night with paninis and the worst bottle of Czech wine ever concoted. I think if we were to translate it, the winery would be called "Outhouse Cellars" or "Urinal Cake Valley". But that's part of the fun of living abroad, you've just got to brave things. Sometimes you take a bite of a strange looking cake and it's the tastiest thing you've ever eaten. And sometimes you find an inchworm peeking out from one of the slices.

My Classes Part I

What will follow are summaries of my classes, to give you a taste of my leisurely week.

Mondays and Wednesdays for me are the equivalent of the TEFL marathon. I head out the door at half past six, dolled up in slacks, shirt, tie, and an increasing number of layers to keep out the cold, and take the metro to Hradcanska. From there I have a ten-minute walk to the picturesque "station" for the "distinguished" bus line of Anexia. The station is merely a few signs posted beside the road spaced about fifteen yards apart. This would not be a problem, except my bus pulls up to a different "terminal" every day, which means I have to spend a few minutes checking bus numbers, and occasionally asking drivers where they are driving to, something I've learned to say in Czech without too much of an accent.

I take the bus to a village called Rakovnik, a small village about an hour outside of Prague. Unfortunately, there are several such villages on the way, and the bus makes stops at ALL of them. This turns an hour drive into almost a two hour drive marked by clinging to my armrest as the driver, who usually looks like a failed taxi driver (too much hash maybe?) whips this mammoth coach bus through alleys nearly wide enough for a wheelbarrow.

Rakovnik is a quiet and charming little village that happens to be home to main Czech contingent of Procter and Gamble. My first day, I got lost on the way from the bus stop, and decided to follow the billowing clouds of smoke. Sure enough I found the factory. But it's hard to badmouth the company that gives me so much business, so I'll leave it at that.

I teach five ninety-minute classes back to back (to back, etc.) on Mondays and Wednesdays there. I do get my own classroom, although the heat is strangely nonfunctional. I've asked repeatedly, and the common response seemed to be the equivalent of, "Bah! Humbug. Back to work, Cratchet!"

My first class of the day features the HR Director of Education (the man in charge of hiring and firing me). He and his colleagues are more interested in conversation, so I have been working on unscrambling my brains from the bus ride to highlight some grammatical points for them to tweak their English.

The rest of the day is made up of classes designated as "Intermediate". This is a disgusting exaggeration. They are great learners, and have a decent grasp of some important words (to be, to work, death to capitalism) however their listening and speaking is certainly not at the same level as their reading skills, due mostly to the fact that they often have to read emails from their American counterparts. Thus most of my Mondays are spent with me speaking monosyllabically, gesturing like a chimp with ADHD, and smiling like hell.

Just a few days ago my flatmate, Alex, and I got into a discussion about this. Days and classes like this make you feel like you're playing an elaborate game of Pictionary, and either your a terrible drawer, or your partners can't guess for beans. Probably both. Only there's no booze or fondue involved.

My last class of the day is a one-to-one with a budding manager, Jaromir, who has been encouraged to take English so that he could one day become plant manager. His English is wonderful, although he is such a commanding presence, I have to work to find the courage to tell him, "No, Jaromir, you don't cover up your children, you tuck them in." Maybe he has it right, though. Then I'd feel stupid, and shocked.

My day ends the same way it begins, with a Thunder Mountainesque ride back to Prague, and the produce-market-gone-bad smells of the metro. I know I sound callused to the whole thing, but really, it feels like I can't stop laughing about it.

Going Bohemian

Jiri’s switch from alcohol to green tea has certainly affected his sleeping, however with the money he saves from abstaining, he has been able to buy some fairly exotic teas. As it is strange for a man to brag about his tea collection, I was pretty curious as to what made his so great. This all led to Jiri inviting the five of us (Nell, Pat, Lindsey, Alex and I) over to his house in Ladvi for a tea party on Friday afternoon.
It has been a long time (never) since I’ve been invited anywhere for a tea party. I was not entirely sure about the etiquette of visiting a Czech house, let alone tea parties. As a result, I decided to take up any suggestion that Jiri had. Upon meeting him at the metro station, taking a bus a few stops, and walking to his neat little house on the edge of the city, Jiri offered the use of any one of his many pairs of slippers. Sticking to the plan, I accepted a warm plaid pair. The other’s politely declined and offered to take off their shoes, when Jiri assured us that the only reason to do so would be if, “you have shit on them.” Meaning dog shit.
This raises an important point about Prague, and most European cities for that matter. As so much of Prague is cobblestoned, and really the only green areas are a few flower boxes and the parks and squares that dot the city, there is a phenomenal amount of dog shit just lying on the sidewalks. There were times, especially in Florida, where cleaning up after Olive on a jog seemed like such a nuisance, especially since I would then have to jog carrying the waste of a 70 LB dog for three blocks before finding an available receptacle. Now that I’ve seen the alternative, I will gladly jog those three blocks with a bag full of, well, no need to be crude.
Anyways, back to the tea party. So, Jiri welcomed us into his home. His counter was full of vases that were packed with spent tealeaves. I figured it was just an odd decoration choice, but Jiri told me that he was saving them for compost. Our tour was limited the first floor (or the 0th floor here) which featured, among those things you find in most houses, a collection of drums, guitars, amps, and more than enough hats to go around. When he led us to a cozy sectional wrapped around a coffee table, I was sporting an Aussie bucket hat and Lindsey was in a beret.
Jiri brought teas out one pot at a time, insisting that we pour small glasses so that it didn’t get cold. I am sure there is a specific tea-tasting procedure: swirl, smell, swirl, taste, gurgle, whatever. There’s certain things you do when you taste wine, but my palette is not nearly sophisticated enough to distinguish much beyond “I like” and “I don’t like.” Tea was similar, however stacking them up side by side allowed for me to taste and smell the differences between early and late harvest Darjeeling. After Darjeeling and Oolong, we moved onto simple green tea. After nearly six or seven healthy pots of tea, a borderline-unhealthy over-caffination, Jiri invited us to play with his instruments. I strummed a few things on the guitar, and Jiri quickly joined in on his “Fun Box” (Jiri, if you read this, what is that thing really called?), which is shaped like a small stool that you, in fact, sit on and pound the sides of. This all led to a brief jam session between two people with too much tea in their system, wearing flannel slippers and hats.

As we left, the day still strangely bright, I was struck by how strange things can be here without my even noticing.

Vs. The Post Office

Two packages, identical in size shape, weight and destination take off from St. Joseph, MI. One reaches the Caledonian School and is picked up. The other is held at the post office. That’s Czech bureaucracy.
The drizzly, gray Thursday after Kutna Hora, the successful TEFL students seeking jobs piled into a humid little classroom to hear a twenty minute speech from one of the academic directors about how there were not enough jobs to go around. Citing a slowing world economy, terrorism, oil prices, and the threats posed to us by a possible invasion from Neptune (just look at it there, waiting and scheming), the AD then asked for several volunteers to agree to a later start date in exchange for a small (and I mean small) stipend. Lindsey was sitting a few seats away from me, and given the nature of the decision, I’d have wanted to talk it over, maybe sleep on it, but as it was presented, we didn’t have the time or privacy for a proper discussion. As a result, we held them to our original job guarantee, only to have the volunteers convince the school to grant them not only a stipend, but to cover their rent for November.
On one hand, it’s nice to have our jobs figured out, a steady paycheck, and the chance to build a rapport with our students before the Christmas holidays. On the other, we missed out on a week or two we could have spent traveling.
After arranging our schedules, picking up some of our textbooks, and cursing both the academic and scheduling offices of the Caledonian School, Lindsey and I took the tram up to the Prague 5 Post Office to pick up the package that didn’t make the last leg of the journey. I was worried, before this, that going to the post office would be a throw-back to the Neanderthal era, and that we would literally have to hit people with clubs to get any sort of assistance. The Czechs, probably as a result of the Soviet occupation, have installed machines in their post offices that dispense numbers. In order to obtain a number, you must press one of the several buttons that describe the different reasons one may go to an eastern European post office. Unfortunately, our Czech was limited to “Pivo, prosim” and thus we selected blindly. Lindsey, ever resourceful, however, compared our summons to the post office to the various options and obtained a second number. One of our numbers was in the 200s, and one was in the 700s. We watched as an electronic sign called various numbers up in a completely random order. Number 520 would be followed immediately by number 3. We went as soon as one of our numbers was called.
The woman at the window was less than jovial, and despite my explaining (in Czech) that we didn’t speak the language, had some moral objection to gesturing. We stood in front of her, frozen in confusion, as she summoned the next random number, who turned out to be a somewhat-bilingual woman who told us to try upstairs.
Upstairs turned out to be a hallway of closed doors. We tried the first one, and after handing over our documentation, pointing, and gesturing, it turned out we were in the right room. The woman handed us another form and, by way of pointing, told us to go to the office down the hall where something, hopefully, would happen.
The second office was lined with teller-like windows, and my first approach to an open window was turned back by a scowl, a dismissive wave of a hand, and a few Czech words that I’d rather not, for decency’s sake, translate. We then sat in the chairs of the empty “waiting area” of the office for the sour cog in the fine post office machine to sweeten. After a few minutes, he motioned me forward and stamped our document several times. He then explained, by means of pointing, that we were to return to the first office.
Upon our return with our stamped form, we were finally given our package. And as we left, both of us were trying hard not to think about how we’d just spent over an hour taking a form from one room to another room to get it stamped, and then returning it to its origin. You’d think they’d have a guy for that.
But that’s Czech bureaucracy. On one hand it’s stringent, ludicrously inefficient. There’s a love affair with rules, documents, passports (you need one to rent a movie!), and lunch-time closures. You would be hard-pressed to find a Czech, let alone an expat, that would tell you anything good about the officialdom in this country. And yet, if you are equally as severe, if your desperation matches their rigidity, it is susceptible. It’s kind of like playing a game of chicken. You may get arrested, interrogated, and deported, or you might get your package from home or a stipend AND your rent paid. It all depends on who blinks first.

October 14: The Conquests of the Jelly Explorers

This story is impossible without Jiři, so I think as a prologue I should introduce him. Jiři, my first Czech friend here, was a fellow TEFL student. I first met him when we decided to meet, sight unseen, our classmates at a statue in Old Town. He was able to guide us to a few smaller, but interesting pubs, although he has given up alcohol and cigarettes, totally obliterating the base of the Czech food pyramid. On one hand, Jiři is a 35 year-old former software and systems analyst and carries himself with the pragmatism and maturity you’d expect from anyone who has ever had the title “analyst”. On the other hand, Jiři is a FORMER analyst, and thus has an imaginative sense of humor. That is how we got our name, The Jelly Explorers. But we’ll get to that in a second.

With Lindsey and I fighting both a virus and the indignation at having to spend our week off in bed, we agreed to go on a day trip to the Czech town, Kutna Hora. We met, after some minor miscommunications, our fellow explorers at Masarykovo Nadraži. In all, it was Lindsey, myself, Alex (the roommate), our friend Liz from CA, and Jiři. With a Czech-speaking guide, buying tickets was pretty easy, since we didn’t have to do it, however he assured us that simply stating your destination is often enough (maybe stating your destination coupled with a “please”).

Our train was brand new, brightly-lit, and since we had coach-class tickets, we had to walk through four empty cars, through these Star Trek-style airlocks between each, and into another empty one identical to the first four, which Jiři assured us was coach-class. Upon sitting down, Jiři informed us that he brought some recording equipment so that he could create English podcasts for some of his future classes. Now, when I say recording equipment, there was of course a small mp3 recorder (two actually), a large microphone, and an apparatus that Jiři called his ambient mic system. The AMS was actually two small clip-on mics fastened to a pair of sunglasses behind the ears, which Jiři wore for a little while during our conversations. People walked by, and eager for more people to record, Jiři would start a conversation. While most of them stayed to chat for a bit, they seemed a little uneasy speaking to this cyborg of a man with microphones coming out of his ears and wearing sunglasses on a cloudy day.

Not long into the trip, Jiři decided that we needed a team name for the podcast, something, he thought, to do with explorers. Having made a joke a few days before about how drinking beer from big mugs seems more “jolly”, someone suggested “The Jolly Expolorers”. This was misheard by our friend to be “The Jelly Explorers” to which he gave some serious thought. “We travel the world,” he said, “tasting all of the various jellies, and making sure they are safe for human consumption.” Thus, The Jelly Explorers were born. We were each designated positions, The Butter, The Toast, The Head Jelly, etc. and took turns addressing the podcast. At one point, when Jiři removed his sandwich from his bag for a snack only to find that it had fallen apart, we created a module to teach the words death (of my sandwich), tragedy, sandwich down, and cremation in my stomach acids.

Our path from the train station in Kutna Hora took us past rows of communist blocks, painted in bright colors that have corroded so that the buildings are a sickly combination of pastel and bone. We stopped at a café to reload on caffeine and Tylenol before striking out to the Kostnice Ossuary in Sedlec. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, and I’m guessing that’s most of you, the Ossuary goes by the name of The Bone Church in most tourist pamphlets. It is dubbed thusly as it is a medieval chapel that was built on a cemetery. Over the years, as real estate became a bit more restrictive, many of the dead, nearly all peasant plague victims (the wealthy could afford to keep their plots) were dug up and their bones were moved into the crypt. The Czechs, sitting with all these bones, decided (why not?) to decorate the church with them. The result is this tiny chapel dressed in the bones of nearly 40,000 plague victims. In four chambers are pyramids of femurs and humeruses (sp.?) about the size of small busses. Each pyramid has a small tunnel filled with skulls. Along the walls are arrangements of ribs and carpals, and even a coat of arms constructed completely of bones. The centerpiece, however, was four six-foot tall candelabras made of skulls surrounding a giant chandelier made from every bone of the human body.

Now, having been to Terezin, and going to the holocaust museum there, which featured photographs, crayon drawings, clothing, glasses, and various relics of Czech Jews that died in the holocaust, I was bracing from something hauntingly emotional. And yet, these bones were long dead, shuffled, arranged, rearranged, so that any remnant of humanity was something only distantly recognized. For the most part, it was difficult, at times, to even see them as bones as they seemed more like crude stones. It was almost comical, between the misspellings in the visitors guide, the violent symbolism in the coat of arms (which featured a raven pecking a man to death), the way that that the pyramids looked as if they were stolen from the set of the new Indiana Jones movie. However, after a little while, things started to set in. I think it was the chandelier, held to the ceiling by four taut chains of jawbones pulled wide open like screams. It all sort of hit at the same time for us, staring up at the chandelier, and all of a sudden what was funny was not anymore. And the bones, to me, started to take on more meaning. They were vindication of what Milan Kundera would call “fear of becoming a corpse”. They were symbols of the one-sided history of conquest in middle ages of the rich over the poor. We all agreed to leave pretty quickly.

We spent the rest of the day wandering the medieval cobblestones of Kutna Hora’s city center. Alleyways funneled into bright squares circled by ancient mini-palaces and giant cathedrals. Thanks to Jiři, we made our way to some of the better local restaurants, and a park lined by quaint houses that I are a few steps above living in a shack. And climbing the steep ridge up to the Cathedral of St. Barbara, we could peek down into the back gardens of these houses, where grapevines, apple trees, and rows of tilled garden basked in the glow of the trees that line the valley of Kutna Hora changing at the height of autumn.

After our climb to St. Barb’s, we took a few panoramic pictures and peeked inside. That was when Lindsey and I ran out of steam, or perhaps in light of our fevers it’s appropriate to say we became full of steam. Either way, after a day of bones, walking, and eating at strange Czech pubs, we were ready to head home. Fittingly, the bus dropped us at the train station just in time for a mad dash to the platform. We were on the train for literally seconds before it started moving. Our trip home featured a few more podcasts by The Jelly Explorers, however, we mostly stared out of the window at the Czech countryside marked by rolling hills, bright trees, and decayed train stations that predate even the occupation by Austria-Hungary. And so we parted ways with our fellow explorers (except Alex) and returned home.