The Zoo (Prague, Czech Republic)

So this past Sunday, one of my dreams came true and I got to hang out with some tortoises. Tom and I have been really lucky and found an incredible language school that is employing us to hang out with them, learn about their programs, teach a few classes, and write some blogs! All things we love to do! The other day they sent us on a mission to tour the zoo with one of their English students and report about it. Yes please! Turns out it was like a special backstage pass kind of tour that we got to go on the sides where the people FEED the animals and stuff. Guys this was incredible. Also, the Prague zoo is apparently the #7 zoo in the world (#3 in Europe). Way to go Prague. So I just wrote a blog for the school and it's on their website and I'm too tired to type the same words twice, so here's a link to their blog:

http://teachabroadtips.blogspot.cz/

Tom also contributed to their website a couple weeks (months?) ago. So if you scroll down you can see that too! :) Here's a little sneak peak to my zoo time. Love ya'll! :)

New Years and Friends :)

Meg:

So we got back from our incredible little Dresden stay on December 29th. We arrived at the bus station, wiggled our way to our LAST friends' place, picked up our stuff, and moved to our place for the month of January (only ONE move after this! woo!). 

So we were able to find this place on a Prague Expat Facebook Page. It's a one bedroom, with a lofted bed, shared kitchen and bathroom. We moved in with another married couple who ALSO had ring tattoos, she was from Texas and he's Czech. Because they're married and have ring tattoos, they're basically us, but they're models-real live models. Hehe...they weren't just models they were really cool too! And guys, the location of this apartment is, excuse me, KICK ASS. It would be hard to live here year round, just because of all the tourists, but we are so happy we got to stay here for a few short weeks. 

Here's if you are standing on The Charles Bridge looking down. We have a 3rd floor room in a building on the left:

If you're still standing on the bridge and you turn to your right, you see this! Just castles and crap everywhere! Oh, and a handsome man :)

Here's the view out the window:

Here's on your way to the metro station...not a popular spot or anything, just a quaint sight on your way to work...well, it's dark on your way to work, but ya know, on the way home-no that's dark too...on your way to the store or something on a Saturday...

We haven't shown you any of these pictures yet, but the metro stations are really cool!! Also interesting to mention, they are SUPER far down SUPER steep escalators, and we asked why they were so steep, we were told they were prepared as bomb shelters. Sweet huh!?

So in our unlucky-have-to-move-everywhere situation, we were blessed with an AMAZING view for New Years!!! 

I know some people say, we just wanted to stay in on New Years. Well we REALLY wanted to stay in. We had a better view than ANYONE (except for our roommates) and we got to clink our $0.25 beers and watch up-close fireworks that tried to come in our window! So cool. 

So, for some reason, everyone has a ticket to try to kill themselves on New Years. Everyone goes out and buys a gadjillion fireworks and sets them off wherever they want. So, I've tried to upload a video here we shot, there's one set of actual city fireworks and there's a buttload of everyone else, try to tell the difference, you can't. Here's the link on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8FixJeKEUQ

Here's another link of a firework trying to come in our window, excuse a tiny bit of language:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q98NwNumczc

Just after New Years, Dori, a GREAT friend of mine from Ghana, brought her friend Martina for a little New Years Prague visit!! Woo!!!!! Here's us by the Lennon Wall which is up and running again!

Martina and Dori have traveled a lot together, in fact, they had visited my family and I once in the US. And hey Mom, for some reason, Dori and Martina remember your Sloppy Joes and wish they could have more. So work on that will ya?

It was Martina's birthday the next day, so we celebrated with little dollar store cakes, big dollar store beer, and played UNO all night long. :) Happy Birthday Martina!!

Tom and I spent the next two days preparing for our first days of school. We'll update you on that soon!!! Lotsa love to all!!

Christmas and Dresden

Meg:

I'm gonna jump RIGHT into it! So, we finished class, and like I said before, I started my job, which I'm in LOVE with. It's an international school. I'm teaching 2nd and 3rd grade. I have a Czech co-teacher, and we split the days, so whenever I'm teaching English to one grade, she's teaching Czech to the other. It's an incredible system and I'm so impressed by these students who have been in this program through most of their school-lives. There are a couple new kids, but most of them are now completely bilingual because of it! It amazes me everyday. So I've got 10-12 kids in each class, depending on the day, and they already feel like a little family to me. My favorite part right now is that I get to teach art and music on top of the normal classes. Music is hilarious and fun and so is art, especially with the help from my live-in art teacher! :) Speaking of that art teacher, Tom did a helluva lot getting things ready for us to move again and running around the city, preparing things for our work-visa (there's like 5000 pieces of paper you need notarized and stamped and really just rubbed on so many butts to make them legal).

Then after that week, it was Christmas break! For the first time in my teaching career, I felt like I didn't need it, but I was of course, happy to have it. On the previous Thursday, Tom and I moved all of our things to an apartment of 3 of our new friends. Our time was up at the first apartment, and we needed to move out, but with no where to go just yet, our generous friends took us in. :) They live close to two churches. 

This church here, we call the toilet church because it does kind of look like a toilet. :)

 

And this one is in the middle of a square that is pretty central and has a cute little Christmas market in December.

So, we stayed for a few days until they needed the bed for other visitors, and hearing our plight, another teacher at my school offered her apartment, as all of her roommates and herself would be out of the country for Christmas. We still cannot appropriately express our gratitude to all of these people that so graciously took us in. 

Once we moved, it was just about Christmas time and we were leaving again for Dresden, so we didn't want to leave a living tree in our friends' apartment, so we went to the dollar store and picked up some green paper and made our own! We're not sure how long it lasted because the fridge is always a happening place, but it was perfect for our little first married Christmas.

When I posted this picture before, everyone tended to focus on the wine bottles in the corner, but believe me when I say, we only contributed one bottle of champagne which was one of the many gifts given to us from my new school. Christmas Eve we were able to skype with both sets of parents and some siblings. It made us feel so good but also made us miss home. I know we've said this before, but while we've been crazy, moving from one place to another, and working on crazy Visa-stuff and adjusting to a new culture, our families have been so supportive and encouraging. They hated the fact that we didn't have an address to send things to for Christmas, but somehow they compensated for that by sending a million hugs and kisses over Skype. For Christmas Eve dinner we made cheese fondue and meatballs and got packed up because on Christmas Day we had decided to take a bus to Dresden, Germany! 

It sounds yucky, a bus on Christmas, but ACTUALLY, this bus has video screens for each person, a free cappuccino or hot cocoa, internet, and a bathroom! Sweet deal huh? Also, we passed a castle on the way.

We arrived at the station and there was a huge tree. We meant to get one of the two of us, but got too busy meeting our CouchSurfing host and heading to the grocery store that we forgot. So here's one of my happy hubby.

I'm sure I've told you about CouchSurfing before, but if you haven't heard, a short explanation would be that it's like facebook, but for your couch/extra bedroom. Everyone has a profile, they have references that they can't take down (good or bad), and a picture of the place they have available for you to stay and it's location in the city. It's FREE and MUCH more enjoyable than staying in a hotel. We were lucky to stay with a guy named Alex who had a bunch of positive references. He picked us up from the station, took us grocery shopping, he bought stuff for dinner and we bought stuff for breakfast. For the next four days, we played TONS of card games, table soccer (they were so surprised to find someone who could actually play with them-and beat them), cooked all our meals together, drank lots of tea and wine, and looked out this window of the spare bedroom we got to stay in:

Alex also took us through town on a mini-tour (it was super cold so it was fast, but perfect!). Turns out most of Dresden was bombed, flattened, and burned in the war. They have been working SINCE then, to replace all the blocks right back where they should be. A lot of the buildings actually look speckled because they have rebuilt them, putting the burned ones in exact places and filling the rest in with new blocks:

You gotta read about this Frauenkirche church sometime, it's gorgeous. I think they just finished it in 2008 maybe? Check those stats.

We wanted to hang out by the Frauenkirche for a while, so we stopped for some Gluhwein in this cute little Christmas Market :) For the record, Tom's the one that called it cute, I just called it normal.

Apparently all the Dukes of Dresden are on this thing:

Here's a pretty theater :)

THEN....

We went to a cool coffee shop and later a pretty sweet "hole in the wall" bar to have Dresden beer (which was delicious-obviously).

I'm sorry this is so quick and just the facts! But I wanted to catch us up so that we could talk about what's going on LATELY instead of way back then!

Dresden was wonderful and we loved the look of the city. We were told it was very similar to Prague, and I think someone told us that they bombed the city thinking it WAS Prague (lucky for Prague). I'm so sorry if my facts are wrong, my brain was very cold and on Christmas break in Dresden. hehe

This is long enough...I'll send more later. We love you all tons and tons and tons. More updates are coming soon!

Catch Up: Weeks 2-4 (Prague, Czech Republic)

Meg:

So I'm squishing weeks two through four together, because that's how they felt. We spent almost all of our time either in the classroom, or working on something FOR the classroom. Besides shopping for groceries, we didn't get out much. This could be considered a shame, due to the fact that we are living in one of the most beautiful places in the world, but because we plan to stay for a while, we weren't worried. So here's what our schedule looked like for weeks 2-4:

9:30-1:00: In class learning a million things a minute with a half hour break in between
1:00-5:00: Get lunch, have interviews, check out possible apartments, grocery shop, prep for lesson
5:00-8:30: Teach 45 minute lesson and observe 1-2 of your peers teach a 45 minute lesson as well to real live Czech students usually between 20 and 70 years old. In 3 weeks we had 3 different levels and 3 different sets of students-it was incredible practice and we learned an insane amount from both our students and our observers
8:30-1 or 2am: Cook dinner, see more possible apartments, prep for lesson due the next day, study for upcoming grammar test, work on added homework assignments, try to hang out with equally stressed out spouse.

Insane right!?!? Goodness, we just felt like we were drowning in TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language). However, turns out, it was just one of the best classes either of us have ever taken. We went from knowing NOTHING about teaching English, to feeling confident in our abilities to teach our own class and perhaps help others with the process.

I am proud to say that both of us passed the course with flying colors and came out with some great references and FANTASTIC friends. Tom worked like crazy to find work, and came out with three jobs before the end of the course (well deserved). He's currently employed with a language school to teach a few evening classes and write a blog about his experiences on their website, he has a couple students lined up for private English lessons, and on top of those is employed full-time with an international kindergarten (http://dejvice.skolka-bambino.cz/en/homepage.html). I got super lucky and found that a friend of a friend teaches at an international school (http://www.beehive.cz/english.html) and they had a job opening (teaching 2nd/3rd grade)!

So, with our jobs and new certificates, we finished the program...PHEW! Our last Friday we had a fantastic party at the founder's flat with wine and cheese and a bunch of other snacks we all hadn't seen in a while. It was glorious and we were all so relieved that we couldn't help but show it...

This big bunch of goofballs did an amazing job of keeping us sane (so did our parents via Skype). We were incredibly lucky to end up with these 11 and we're so excited to have these new friends to take us into our new Czech lives.

Next up was a week of teaching for me and running around organizing our lives for Tom. We will catch up you on those in a bit. For now, we hope your New Years Eve was safe and wonderful, and you made some great wishes for 2015! Happy New Year's everyone!