This week was harrowing. Project on top of project on top of what you should be doing with your "free time."
One of these projects involved three lessons with a student one to one. My student is a woman named Jarka (YAR-ka), who I thought was my age until she told me about her son who's in college. In Boston of all places! We'll have to make one of our lessons about the Sox :)
Jarka's amazing, and she puts a face on teaching English. I didn't ask, b
ut I get the idea she might be a single mom. One kid in college, the other elementary school. Her day starts at 6am, she gets home from work at 6pm. She cooks, cleans and helps her daughter with homework. And in the 20 minutes she might get to herself during the week, guess what she's doing? Studying English.
If she can become more fluent in English, it will open up doors for her with her career. If her son marries an American girl, she can talk to her daughter-in-law and their kids- her grandchildren. Jarka summed up her reasons for wanting to learn English in one word: Freedom.
The people in my group are a lot of fun. They're all eager to get together, explore the city and travel around and outside of the Czech Republic. There was talk of Oktoberfest, but the chances are slim with the work load we're carrying.
This weekend it started raining and hasn't stopped. But in Prague, they've learned how to cope. Hot wine for one thing. Trdelnik for another-- this is cinnamony, sugary dough spun into a hollow cone and roasted over open flames.
We ducked inside the ancient church that towers above Old Town Square: The Church of Our Lady Before Tyn. It shut us into complete awe. Built in the 1100s and renovated, burned down and restored multiple times, it is now a harmonious mixture of Gothic, Ba
roque and Art Nouveau. Gold adorns absolutely everything, huge doors hang on silver hinges and silver swirls its way down the thick wood. In contrast to the brightness are the paintings that hang throughout the church. The colors are so thickly dark it's difficult to tell what you're seeing. Then the light, airy windows soar at least 100 feet. I'm describing it because pictures are absolutely forbidden. If you pull out your camera, a little man in all black yells at you in Czech. They're very strict. I could only find one picture of the inside in all of googledom. We're going back for evening Mass tonight.
We were able to shoot everything we wanted of another nearby church. This one was smaller and seemed younger. I took a video that captures the church and the organ music, but it won't upload here. If you'd like to see that or other random videos in Prague, I'll post them directly into Facebook.
There are small reminders of Prague's history everywhere. The key statue spells out "Revoluce" (Revolution) in falling letters. If you look closely, the entire thing is made of keys, one of the symbols of the Velvet Revolution. Climbing up the hillside is a random white wall leading to what looks like a lonely fort. This is the Hunger Wall, one of the projects of King Charles IV (aka the Holy Roman Emporer). It was like an ancient New Deal-- his people were starving, so he handed out food. But they had to earn it. The wall was one of the projects his people built to earn their sustenance.
One of these projects involved three lessons with a student one to one. My student is a woman named Jarka (YAR-ka), who I thought was my age until she told me about her son who's in college. In Boston of all places! We'll have to make one of our lessons about the Sox :)
Jarka's amazing, and she puts a face on teaching English. I didn't ask, b
ut I get the idea she might be a single mom. One kid in college, the other elementary school. Her day starts at 6am, she gets home from work at 6pm. She cooks, cleans and helps her daughter with homework. And in the 20 minutes she might get to herself during the week, guess what she's doing? Studying English.If she can become more fluent in English, it will open up doors for her with her career. If her son marries an American girl, she can talk to her daughter-in-law and their kids- her grandchildren. Jarka summed up her reasons for wanting to learn English in one word: Freedom.
The people in my group are a lot of fun. They're all eager to get together, explore the city and travel around and outside of the Czech Republic. There was talk of Oktoberfest, but the chances are slim with the work load we're carrying.
This weekend it started raining and hasn't stopped. But in Prague, they've learned how to cope. Hot wine for one thing. Trdelnik for another-- this is cinnamony, sugary dough spun into a hollow cone and roasted over open flames.
We ducked inside the ancient church that towers above Old Town Square: The Church of Our Lady Before Tyn. It shut us into complete awe. Built in the 1100s and renovated, burned down and restored multiple times, it is now a harmonious mixture of Gothic, Ba
roque and Art Nouveau. Gold adorns absolutely everything, huge doors hang on silver hinges and silver swirls its way down the thick wood. In contrast to the brightness are the paintings that hang throughout the church. The colors are so thickly dark it's difficult to tell what you're seeing. Then the light, airy windows soar at least 100 feet. I'm describing it because pictures are absolutely forbidden. If you pull out your camera, a little man in all black yells at you in Czech. They're very strict. I could only find one picture of the inside in all of googledom. We're going back for evening Mass tonight.We were able to shoot everything we wanted of another nearby church. This one was smaller and seemed younger. I took a video that captures the church and the organ music, but it won't upload here. If you'd like to see that or other random videos in Prague, I'll post them directly into Facebook.
There are small reminders of Prague's history everywhere. The key statue spells out "Revoluce" (Revolution) in falling letters. If you look closely, the entire thing is made of keys, one of the symbols of the Velvet Revolution. Climbing up the hillside is a random white wall leading to what looks like a lonely fort. This is the Hunger Wall, one of the projects of King Charles IV (aka the Holy Roman Emporer). It was like an ancient New Deal-- his people were starving, so he handed out food. But they had to earn it. The wall was one of the projects his people built to earn their sustenance.
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