Musings from Monday and Tuesday

It is late Tuesday night. We have had two productive days since our last entry. Monday we did some sightseeing in the tourist sections of town. We left home and walked to the tram stop and rode it to the Potter’s Gate which is a very lovely and impressive area of well maintained, old buildings. We then went to Old Town Square and saw the Astronomical Clock – at which there were hundreds of people waiting to view the clock perform on the hour. We saw some of the Jewish Quarter, but made some wrong turn and did not see all of it. We browsed in a few shops and ate our first meal out at a restaurant in Prague. We had a salad with smoked Norwegian salmon. Also we had our first taste of bread dumplings. They are not great, but everyone who comes to Prague must try them as they are a traditional fare.
It was surprisingly hot to us and we enjoyed sitting inside the restaurant to get out of the sun. We walked quite a long distance but passed on the Charles Bridge on the Vltnana River as there were just too many tourists on it – we will wait for September or October to go there again.
A huge (in my eyes) accomplishment early in the day was the successful configuration of our wireless router. Somehow I messed it up the first time and had to ask some questions on exactly what I should do next. I used our Skype phone in Prague to call on our 913 area code number to an 800 number and got to talk to a nice chap in India. Isn’t technology wonderful! When we were in Tanzania nearly forty years ago, our means of communicating with the world was the handwritten letter. Today we can talk to anyone in the world for minimal charge. We spoke with Gretchen for about twenty minutes today on the Skype phone. Our landlord lives in England and we regularly contact him by email or phone to discuss issues. Our school’s Director is still in the States, but it is no problem talking to her on the phone either.
We have been spending some of our time preparing for school. Monday that consisted mostly of trying to familiarize myself with the Physics textbook that I think I will be teaching from. Today, Tuesday, we ventured to CISP and met the Administrative Aide, Eva, a Czech who is very competent and speaks perfect English. She was getting ready to show us around when a young America lady name Rebeka came to the office and said she would show us around. Rebeka began teaching at the school last January. She is from Oregon, but did a year of university in Prague and is the perfect person to be teaching at CISP. She is vivacious and enthusiastic about teaching in a Christian school and about living in the Czech Republic. After showing us around the school, she took us out for heavenly pretzels that were freshly baked for us after we ordered them. We talked with her for quite awhile about how to live in Prague and how to function, get along, and go with the flow. She then took us to a small bookstore to get a better map book of Prague – one which shows great detail and has an index of all the streets in the city.
This morning we moved around slowly for awhile before going for a walk. Yesterday we rearranged the furniture in our apartment and spent considerable time doing so. This morning we mulled over what we had done and talked about further changes – which include undoing some of what we did yesterday. Also, the cable TV technician came today to install some English speaking channels. Now we can get CNN International and BBC World. And much to my surprise, I found we have ESPN along with about four European sports channels, but no Sky sports. Anyway, this is nice for us. We have a rather old TV in the apartment, but our landlord is thinking seriously about replacing it with a new model which will communicate with the digital TV better.
It is time for be now, so I will stop this without proofreading. Good Night