getting lost is the only way to find your way around

Note to self: Next time I'm on a tram, make sure that I get on going in the right direction, because I shouldn't cross the Vltava River, gorgeous as it may be, when I'm on my way home from class. That was an experience.

Orientation has been interesting so far. We went to Old Town Square yesterday, which is the big tourist center. Classes are in a building located just off the square, and that's really nice too. I seem to be learning my way around, but not knowing Czech is getting kind of interesting. Today we started intensive classes, but there's only going to be so much I'm able to pick up. At least now I can say please and thank you.

I felt particularly lost when Emily, Rachel, and I went food shopping yesterday at Tesco, a British import which seems to be analogous to Wal-Mart. I don't think I've ever been so excited to see American toothpaste and shampoo brands in my entire life, even if most of the labels on them were in Czech. Food shopping was a bit challenging, mostly because we didn't know enough Czech to tell what certain things were. Groceries are cheap here though, which is always nice.

On the same food note, I was super excited today to find Schar, this really good (and very European and not really available in the States) GF brand at this pharmacy near our dorm. It made me feel a little better about surviving in a country where everything seems to involve bread.

Today I finally got a hair dryer, which was a bit of an adventure in itself. I didn't want to get one at Tesco, where they were about 1000 crowns (roughly $50 American) so I went to this Radio Shack/Best Buy-ish electronics store next door. Nobody there spoke English very well, so it was a lot of pointing and sign language. Easy enough, until I paid and went to the back of the store with my receipt to actually pick up my hair dryer, where I proceeded to wait on a line for at least 15 minutes, while everyone else patiently waited for me (which I felt kind of bad about) with no one around to help the rapidly forming line of people waiting to get whatever they'd just purchased. It felt a little bit communistic, in a way.

I also got a phone, which I'm super excited about, because I feel a little more connected to the world. It was also cheaper than the U.S., which is a good thing, since I'm only using it for four months. It's with a company called Vodafone, which doesn't service the U.S., and all of the students on the program had cleaned the store closest to the Center out of the cheaper phones, so we went to Wenceslas Square (the center of the tourist area) to find another Vodafone outlet, and just took the metro home from there, after a detour to Citibank, because the other bank refused to cash my traveler's checks.

Tomorrow we have more intensive Czech, and I need to buy a metro pass, since I didn't get around to doing that today. Emily and I tried, but it didn't exactly work out, since the crazy lady running the booth tried to send us to a station that was on a different train line, and we didn't feel like heading all the way there when we'd been running around all day, and I don't think either of us were in any mood to find our way there after such a long day.