Last night’s Pub Night at U Karla IV restaurant saw 12 of us teachers speaking English and eating Czech food – chicken breasts with dumpling; pork skewers with potato pancakes; gnocci with cream sauce – drinking good Krusovice “black” beer and huddled in a cold “non-smoking” room whose heat, we were assured, “worked last winter.”
Nevertheless, the snow fell outside, covering the cobblestone streets. Once outside, just a little more bundled up than some were inside, we found that the snow was perfect packing snow. We gathered snowballs and had a spontaneous fight outside the pub. Arnot (the school’s resident French teacher) lived just a five minute walk from U Karla, so several of us slip-slid over to his apartment (at one point we needed to walk down a wooded trail and beside a fast-moving stream, over a bridge, etc).
Arnot has a 300 sq ft studio apartment for which he pays 7,500 Kc a month (including heat & web), which translates to about $360 at yesterday’s exchange rate. (btw … none of us expats speak often in exchange rate lingo because we’re all paid in krowns, which is exactly how one should think, cuz making the change is often counterproductive). I mentioned to the group that Arnot’s apartment would cost about $1800/mo in NYC’s Hell’s Kitchen, and $2500/mo on the Upper West Side. Everyone gasped, but we realized the relativity of such facts.
I needed to leave the party before 11pm because the last bus from Dejvicka up the hill to Suchdol (last night I learned a 4th way to pronounce my neighborhood. Ugh!) is at 12:03. Luckily, the apartment was a few blocks to Palmovka metro, with a change at Mustek for Dejvicka. I was home in an hour, but I stood at the Dejvicka bus stop for 15 min with many others, in the freezing snowy cold. (where some drunken scumbag about 4 feet 5 inches tall wanted to start of a fight with a 15 year old boy, whose two girlfriends stepped in and yelled lots of quality Czech explitives at the drunken dwarf ’till he backed off).
And to this morning: lots of snow falling outside the window. I’m going to put on my boots later and take the plunge outside because I need to shop for many household supplies. I think I’ll go to Nové Smichov (at Andel), where the Tesco has my favorite Thai curry pastes and all kinds of goodies (except their wine selection sucks).
