The conquest came first-- that would be finishing the program. There are 30 more English teachers in the world today. We had a champagne social in honour of surviving a brutal workload. Our instructor kept pouring champagne, topping off every glass before you could even finish your glass. We moved into the city and ran around the streets looking for this place and that place. The month went quickly enough that I'm a little jarred at our being done. It was hard, but...that's it? Wow.
Now we set to work finding jobs and housing, those little details that crop up. Strangely, I'm not in the least anxious about those trivialities though the search has been more difficult than I'd hoped. Well, not anxious yet.
We went to the opera last night, Don Giovanni in the Estates Theatre. Getting there was a long process of losing people in a metro station the size of Prague and discovering that my heels, surprisingly comfortable for stilettoes, were no match for cobblestones. I won't bore you with those details, but when we finally hobbled into the theatre, I'd sworn off heels for my remaining time in Prague.
The theatre is beautiful, built small but high, with boxes surrounding the stage in a U and soaring up several stories. I was stunned by the sheer power of the human voice and felt a delicious shudder imagining Mozart sitting in that very theatre more than 200 years ago, watching Don Giovanni premier. It was sung in Italian with subtitles over the top of the stage in Czech and English. The English surprised me, but I'm finding it really does serve as a lingua franca for so many nationalities visiting the Czech Republic.
Afterward we found a set with a Czech crew pushing everyone out of the shot so they could film a Christmas scene. The entire street was lined in white lights and shoppers braving the gusts of fake snow billowing about. We don't know what was being filmed, we just saw a little old lady waiting to cross the street when a tall man picked her up and carried her across. Once again I plotted how to get a job on the set. This was even more intimidating that the MI4 set because they were all speaking Czech.
The daytime hours we spent exploring Vyšehrad, where the legends of the founding of Prague are based. It was established sometime in the 10th century and served Vratislav II, named King of Bohemia and Poland in 1085, as his seat of power. It was one of the most peaceful places I've yet visited in Prague, crowned with an elaborate Gothic cathedral (where again, photos were forbidden. I've searched google for that and found next to nothing of the interior).
A large lawn was furnished with dramatic sculptures which dwarfed us in size. As we were snapping pictures of the bright, sunlit fall, the church bells began to ring-- they were playing the Mouldou, a piece by Smetana that's haunted me for years.
Outside the Basilica was a cemetery. Always excited to read tombstones from ancient times, we wandered through and were surprised to find relatively modern headstones-- among them Dvorak and Smetana-- and some intriguing sculptures, including reaching hands and a soul I think was flying to heaven. It's curious how death is decorated, and so lavishly! The mosaics we saw were detailed and threaded with gold; the ceiling that covered the outer rim of the graveyard was built in Gothic style and painted with great care.
The small village surrounding the castle area was like something you'd see at Disneyland, I had to remind myself this wasn't built for tourists, that it was the real thing. Imagining people like ourselves walking down those street 1,000 years ago is almost too much to grasp.
Now we set to work finding jobs and housing, those little details that crop up. Strangely, I'm not in the least anxious about those trivialities though the search has been more difficult than I'd hoped. Well, not anxious yet.
We went to the opera last night, Don Giovanni in the Estates Theatre. Getting there was a long process of losing people in a metro station the size of Prague and discovering that my heels, surprisingly comfortable for stilettoes, were no match for cobblestones. I won't bore you with those details, but when we finally hobbled into the theatre, I'd sworn off heels for my remaining time in Prague.
The theatre is beautiful, built small but high, with boxes surrounding the stage in a U and soaring up several stories. I was stunned by the sheer power of the human voice and felt a delicious shudder imagining Mozart sitting in that very theatre more than 200 years ago, watching Don Giovanni premier. It was sung in Italian with subtitles over the top of the stage in Czech and English. The English surprised me, but I'm finding it really does serve as a lingua franca for so many nationalities visiting the Czech Republic.
Afterward we found a set with a Czech crew pushing everyone out of the shot so they could film a Christmas scene. The entire street was lined in white lights and shoppers braving the gusts of fake snow billowing about. We don't know what was being filmed, we just saw a little old lady waiting to cross the street when a tall man picked her up and carried her across. Once again I plotted how to get a job on the set. This was even more intimidating that the MI4 set because they were all speaking Czech.
The daytime hours we spent exploring Vyšehrad, where the legends of the founding of Prague are based. It was established sometime in the 10th century and served Vratislav II, named King of Bohemia and Poland in 1085, as his seat of power. It was one of the most peaceful places I've yet visited in Prague, crowned with an elaborate Gothic cathedral (where again, photos were forbidden. I've searched google for that and found next to nothing of the interior).
A large lawn was furnished with dramatic sculptures which dwarfed us in size. As we were snapping pictures of the bright, sunlit fall, the church bells began to ring-- they were playing the Mouldou, a piece by Smetana that's haunted me for years.
Outside the Basilica was a cemetery. Always excited to read tombstones from ancient times, we wandered through and were surprised to find relatively modern headstones-- among them Dvorak and Smetana-- and some intriguing sculptures, including reaching hands and a soul I think was flying to heaven. It's curious how death is decorated, and so lavishly! The mosaics we saw were detailed and threaded with gold; the ceiling that covered the outer rim of the graveyard was built in Gothic style and painted with great care.
The small village surrounding the castle area was like something you'd see at Disneyland, I had to remind myself this wasn't built for tourists, that it was the real thing. Imagining people like ourselves walking down those street 1,000 years ago is almost too much to grasp.
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