Long overdue

I do apologize for sort of falling off the map for the past week. It's been pretty crazy around here with all my classes and trying to figure out life once again. Besides, the weather has actually been decent as of late, and rather than sitting inside and being online endlessly I've been taking to the streets and enjoying strolling along the river or sitting in the square.

Basically, I know that the nice weather isn't going to last for very long, so I have to drink in as much sun as I possibly can. And so I've been remiss at the updating thing. We kind of have internet at home now, it just doesn't actually work. Soooo frustrating. I figured out how to hook it up, so the ethernet says that it's connected, but when I go to get online it won't do anything at all. REALLY frustrating. All this just to say that I'm at Bartholomeus again because at least here I know the internet will work :)
I've just got a few pictures to add today. Not really a whole lot to say because mostly all I've been doing is work, and there really isn't a whole lot to say about that. I've made it through the first two weeks, which is a great relief. Today Tammy was finally released from "house arrest." Here in Czech when you're sick you're not supposed to even leave your house. So after her surgery she had at least a week during which she wasn't supposed to do anything at all. She's really happy to be able to go out now. She still has no idea what her problem has been, but at least she can come back to work.
I'm actually really excited about this coming week. Tomas set up this big project for the students in our L2 and L3 daily classes. They have to do research on their home towns, and then we're going to go on tours. It should be a lot of fun. On Monday we'll be touring Cheb and they have to tell us things about the city. Then on Tuesday we'll talk about what they learned. Wednesday we'll go to Marianske Lazne, Thursday we'll review it some more and they have to work on creating a brochure about their city. Then on Friday we'll be going to Franiskovy Lazne. So basically I don't have to do any planning for my daily classes all this coming week. After having to come up with every singl lesson from scratch for the past couple of weeks it'll be really nice to have this break. And then the next week Tammy will take over all the extra classes I've been teaching, and soon we'll have books, and everything will be sooooo much easier. :) I'm really looking forward to it.
So that's pretty much the news from around here. I need to get a proper newsletter out sometime next week. I kind of want to wait until I have pictures from all the class trips as I think that will make it more interesting. So for now, just some sights from around this little town of mine.

There is a street down near the river, just below the castle, that seems to have been willingly given over to graffiti. I'm not sure if it's actually legal for them to tag here, but we have seen them working on it in broad daylight, so they don't seem in any way concerned about being caught. Laura gave her class a survey about themselves and one of her students even said that she likes working on her graffiti art. Who knows. But we kind of like this one that has Cheb. See, we're cool in Cheb after all :)

I feel a little bit like a copied this picture, because Laura took one first, but I had sort of been thinking about it, and so it's not just hers. Anyhow, this is the street I live on this year. I'm really quite excited about my new location. We'd been warned a lot about it being really noisy around here at night, but I haven't had any problems thus far. During the festival there were people out fairly late, but other than that it's really not a big deal.

Here is our "new" building. It's actually a really old building, but the flats have been (and are being) renovated so that they're really nice inside. Being an old building it feels a little bit like a cave inside, and there is a lot of moisture so clothes take positively FOR-EVER to dry, but it's a great place. We're on the second floor, so you can see our two living room/bedroom windows.


This summer our big cathedral, St. Mikolas, went through some renovations as well. Before the war the towers were tall and beautiful, but it suffered some damage and the communists rebuilt the towers differently so this summer they restored them to their original splendor. I'm very impressed with what they've done. And here's an interesting piece of trivia, I know the nephew of the guy who ran the cranes that put them in place. That has to count for something, right?

This final image is of my drink a couple nights ago. It looks about the way my one today does as well. Just thought you might enjoy seeing what I'm drinking while I write this.
I really will try to be better at updating in the future. I have a feeling that the sunny weather is pretty much a thing of the past. I just hope it's decent for our field trips this next week!