Friday 6 July 2012

Day 2 – Poděbrady (3rd July)


Today I had my first Czech lesson. Our teacher is lovely, talks slowly (the only Czech I’ve meet so far to do so) but unfortunately I’ve covered nearly all the material in the text books she gave us today. In our lesson, we spent four hours going over greetings, the present tense of the verb to be, countries and gender. We did all of that within the first two weeks of learning Czech.
By we, I mean Jones, S , Mike (from Sheffield) and myself. So, we are planning to ask to be moved up to B1 tomorrow.

At lunchtime we went to a restaurant near the river that almost cuts Poděbrady in half, and around that time the weather started getting very strange. One minute, S (who is ginger) was worrying about getting burnt by the sun, the next we were legging it back to our dorm, getting completely soaked on the way! I have no avoid where that rainstorm came from, one minute it was sunny and warm, the next there was lighting and thunder! Running between the dorm and the admin building, where we had to take our laptops to get internet, the dye in my black pumps leaked, meaning I’ve got semi-black feet! 

I was feeling a bit down, as I was having a very common year abroad moment (according to Sheffield!Nick who has just finished hers) where it felt that no could understand a word I said. However, I cheered up after learning that the Czechs have the verb “googleovat” literally meaning to Google and learning some vocab. Language Note: The Czechs add –ovat on to an English word to “make it” Czech, e.g. studovat, telefonovat, googleovat. I wonder if they have wikiovat? 

Later in the afternoon, S, Sheffield!Nick and I did a Harmony Dance class. It was a bit like Ballet!Zumba, lots of fluid, graceful looking movements, but because you never stopped moving, before long my face was an attractive tomato colour! It was exhausting, but I really enjoyed it and think I’m going to do it again next week, especially as it only cost 80 korun, which is less than £3.

That evening we had dinner at a Pizza parlour, and just as we started eating our pizza, commenting on how nice it was to be eating outside, we heard the thunder. Cue all of five of us (Jones, Sheffield!Nick, Mike, S and I) scrambling inside, pizza in one hand, wine/juice in the other! Just beforehand we had been taken the mick out of Jones’ banana juice. It looked absolutely vile – an off-white colour and when he poured it into the glass I swear I saw lumps! However, if you closed your eyes, it did taste quite nice!

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