Sunday Adventures - To Mustek to ICP to Ladronka Park to Tesco to Home

We spent another very interesting day in Prague. We awoke to a lovely day with bright blue sky and temperatures in the low 70s. We of course start the day with coffee and looking at email, hoping that some of you have sent us a newsy letter. Then a quick load of wash that will run for about two hours, so we will hang it indoors on a drying rack when we get back home.

At 9 o'clock we set off on foot for church. We like to walk to the metro stop Mustek which is about thirty minutes from our house. However, today we were a little ahead of schedule and decided to stop at a McDonalds on Wencelas Square for another cup of coffee. This McDonalds has a nice restroom, so we make stopping there on Sundays a family tradition! So we jumped on the yellow metro line and headed to Andel stop where we caught the bus to the International Church of Prague. We arrived just as the service was starting and set in a row of CISP people. It again is a great little church with really dedicated leadership.

After church and a bit of chatter with other parishioners we headed out in a group to Ladronka Park for a church picnic. About one hundred people showed up for the picnic. We basically had two little tables for food to be set up on and a table for drinks. The park was quite impressive. It was about one mile long and a couple hundred yards wide with a long inline skate track. You can rent inline skates at the park. We spent the afternoon talking with others, sitting in the sun and eating. The two pictures below show Liz's first grade student Molly Waldrop with a dog someone brought to the picnic. Dogs can go anywhere in Prague. They can ride on the metro and tram as long as they are mussled. The can go in restaurants and grocery stores. Their only problem is that there is not enough grass for them to do their business on however, so you have to be careful walking on sidewalks.

The picture on the right (or above perhaps) shows part of our group lazily spending the afternoon in fellowship and food. We had a pleasant time and met a few new people. After the picnic, we walked to a tram stop and headed to Tesco for a shopping trip to the Tesco at Narondi Trida again - same as yesterday. We went to the school supply area and I picked up spirals for each class and some graph paper. I checked out in one of the slowest lines I have ever stood in as scads of people were also buying school supplies. Liz went to the lower level to buy some curry powder and a chicken. She was a very bad girl as she got in the wrong check out line. She was told that she was in the "dry line" and should not have been there. However, as being mildly chastized, she was allowed to pay and we met up again. We still are not quite sure what the "dry line" really is and will ask one of the Czech teachers at the school what the situation really was.

We went home on the 9 tram, got off at the correct stop, walked the correct direction to our apartment and were so proud of ourselves that we had not gotten lost at all today that...whoops...we just realized that we actually had walked past our apartment about a block and a half back and had to sheepishly turn around and walk the other direction to get home. Well, we did really well navigating and going new places today with that minor exception.

One interesting tidbit about TV here. Last night we found an American football game between Virginia Tech and East Carolina on our television. We assumed that it was a tape of some Thursday night game or something so Liz called her brother in Virginia and we found out that we were actually watching a live game. We get live English soccer matches but had no idea that we could get a live American football game.