I've been getting asked by the 2 or 3 people who still remember us, what life is really like on a daily basis and how has everyone settled in. Well, for me there really is no change. I am still flying all over Europe only the trips are of shorter duration and I am home on the weekends plus on the odd day during the week. I've officially flown over 100,000 miles this year which equates to an awful lot of time spent both in the air and in airports. The Prague airport is small at least and is precisely 30 mins from home so I can leave for some flights as late as 1.5 hours before hand and still have time to go to the lounge. I've also made Diamond level at Hilton which really only means that I get free internet and that the dude at the front desk is slightly more polite to me.

At home, I've figured out how to drive by myself to a few places without a map or a gps and can actually get to the kids school without getting lost. I can also walk Bailey the dog in the local park and can leave that map at home. I've got about 100 words in my Czech vocabulary and can actually ask someone how they are and would they like some butter. Progress by anyone's standards.

As for Stu and the kids, there has barely been a hiccup. Both kids have settled into school and have made some really nice friends, most of whom live in the neighbourhood so they can get on their bikes and go and fetch them. The weather is getting pretty crappy now so we find they are in the house more often. I say its the weather as I'm sure its got nothing to do with the fact that we actually have English television now. School is going well for them and they've both just received their mid term report cards. We are very pleased with their marks and their teachers comments.

As for Stu, he has turned 884 Pod Valem into a social hub with the usual 'come for dinner' or 'stop by for a beer' kinda stuff going on. He has managed to make friends in the neibourhood and has gotten heavily involved in school activities. Some things haven't changed. One thing different seems to be that both Stu and the kids have been sick with colds which they almost never were at home. We think it is the change in diet (for example we don't drink much orange juice any more) so we've started to supplement our diet with vitamin C pills and cranberry tablets. I've been lucky so far and I chock it up to just not being around as much.

We are very much looking forward to Christmas with both sets of parents arriving in about 3 weeks. We will spend some time in Prague and have then rented an apartment in Val Gardena, Italy where we will be for Christmas. The kids and Stu will ski while the rest of us will wander the villages and I'll do some snow shoeing. We'll go to Salzburg on the way through and see the city in the winter which is supposed to be spectacular. We'll then have some more time in CZ before they all go back to Canada. I'm just looking forward to being in one place for more than a day and actually relaxing, as much as I know how to any way.

I must say it hasn't been the easiest transition, especially for me, but I think for the most part we are pretty much there now. We know how to get groceries and how to visit a doctor. We can buy clothes if needed and have discovered the local Home Depot. We found pumpkins to carve at Halloween and Caroline went trick or treating. Haircuts are being dealt with and we can find used ski equipment. Things we would all do in Canada. Finally, we've got friends in the neighborhood that we can count on in an emergency and can always find someone to share a glass of wine with. We miss many many things and people from home but after 4 solid months of being abroad, we are finally settled.  There is a matter of the over the counter drug thing so if anyone wants to reach out and help me get some Advil Liqugels, Gravol and Benelyn ... please do so!  You can get an aspirin and chicken soup without a prescription and thats about it.

Finally, we can sleep 4-6 guests, in case anyone wants to visit and we've already had 4 sets of visitors from Canada who can attest to our tourist skills – so just drop us a line and let us know when you want to come!

And let me leave you with one last piece of advice from my travel experiences: never, and I mean never, have a meal that includes Brussel sprouts and then get on an airplane. It is hazardous to the environment. Just sayin.

Entertainment

Over the past couple of weeks we've managed to take in a bit of European culture. Culture, in my opinion, is like a garage sale – one man's junk is another man's treasure.

A couple of weeks ago I had work in Madrid, home of The Bernabeu. The Bernabeu is the 90,000 seat stadium home to Real Madrid who just happened to be playing AC Milan in a Champions league game. I've never seen a professional football match – unless you count McMaster playing U of T in girls undergrad play in 1984. So the opportunity was not to be missed. The internet was the source of the tickets so as you can imagine there was a bit of a premium attached to them. Like a 130 Euro worth of premium, but that's a story for another day. I had to go.

So off we trotted, me and 2 workmates in our freshly purchased Real Madrid gear. There is no way to describe what 90,000 screaming, whistling, drum banging, foul mouth, smoking patrons of the Bernabau are like. LOUD and LOUDER come to mind. The whistling in particular is something to experience. Its like having 90,000 traffic cops stopping you at an intersection by all blowing their whistles at once. However, now that I've gotten my hearing back, I recognize it for what it was: a fabulous football match with the opportunity to watch Ronaldo, one of today's greatest players, weave some magic on the field. He was really something to watch and I'm glad I went although from what I understand he is a bit full of himself; I can totally relate to that and am not nearly as critical as others might be. After all, if my football career hadn't have been cut short due to injury who knows what might have been. Alas....

Sports in Europe is very different than North America on very many levels. For example, in the Bernabeu spectators from the visiting team are limited to one tiny section of the stadium. There might have been 500 fans come in from Italy and they were all dressed in red and sitting away from everyone else in their own section. So what you have is 89,500 Real Madrid supporters dressed in white and 500 AC Milan supporters, dressed in red, all sitting together in their own little corner of the world. So you can imagine that they hardly stand out at all. And at the end of the game, regardless of who wins, the visiting team fans are made to sit in the stands for at least an hour while the home team fans clear away. Very wise me thinks.

Also different is that almost everyone pulls out a sandwich wrapped in foil at half time and sits in the stands and politely eats their snack. No popcorn or ice cream or nachos. Just a sandwich from home. The NFL and all their tailgaiters wouldn't know what to do.

And then there are the super fans. They sit behind a goal and create their own equivalent of a sports mosh pit. They spend the whole game, and I mean the whole game chanting God Bless Real Madrid, etc... all the while banging a thousand drums and tossing each other in the air. Again..very similar to the platinum seats at the Air Canada centre. Its uncanny really.

Also the same is the lineup in the mens and womens bathrooms. There was me in my bathroom. That was all. Just me. While next door, 5000 men did a happy dance in line while waiting for their turn.

Oh and as for the game, Real Madrid won. 2 – Nil. Yippee.

Now, while that was on Tuesday, Friday back in Prague we all went to watch the Czech Sparta hockey club take on their arch rivals from Pardubice. I'm not sure what the Pardubice team nickname is but the Czech dude beside me assured me that it was Scum Sucking Pig Dogs. Contrast the Tesla arena with the Bernabau: maybe 3000 people sitting in a barn, politely eating bad sausage and drinking beer. No foil wrapped sandwiches. And not nearly as noisy, although the people tried really hard. The only reason the kids agreed to go (other than the fact that we've told them that they need to experience stuff with us at least once and then if they don't like it, they don't have to go back) was for the food. But, OMG was it bad. The only thing recognizable were the chicken sandwiches from KFC and how bad is that when you are dining on KFC and thinking man, this is good.

However, the price was right. For 4 of us including parking, tickets and dinner...any guesses on the cost? Under $50. All in. And all for the privlidge of sitting on very very hard benches in a freezing cold arena and watching the home fans scream at the visiting fans. As for the bathrooms, again there wasn't any lineup but I did have to play, find the toilet paper. Looking for toilet paper after you sit down and start doing your thing is not a very good strategy. And it gets worse when you find out that there is one common toilet paper dispenser for all stalls and its on the outside by the sinks. Of course it is – totally makes sense right??? It especially makes sense when you come out of your stall to find the other two stalls occupied with men who haven't bother to close the doors and are just standing there doing their thing with their back to you.

The kids, of course, were bored out of their minds once the food was gone but Stu and I enjoyed it.

Now onto Act III. Czech television. We finally broke down a bought a TV. We had not had one up until a few weeks ago and even when we finally bought it, we could only get bad english shows from the 80's dubbed in Czech or we had to watch straight up Czech television. This is a story from Czech TV and I didn't even see it but Stu assures me that it happened.

There is a version of America's Got Talent in every country that I visit and there is one called Czech's got Talent. Here is a sample (remember I am apparently not making this up):

Week 1: Czech lady in lovely red dress shaves her head on national TV. Thats it.

Week 2: Same Czech lady comes back. Different red dress. Very revealing. Slits all the way up the thighs. No bra. Low plunging neck line. Does a wrigley kinda dance thing and pulls off her panties. ON NATIONAL TV. 8:00PM. ON CZECH'S GOT TALENT.

She's not done.

All to stripper kinda music, she pulls a whistle out from between her boobs and THEN ... and I can't believe I'm writing this..she puts the whistle between her thighs, makes sure its, um, inserted all good and tight like into the netherreaches (cause I don't read harlequin novels, I'm not sure what the right term for netherreaches really is) and proceeds to blow the whistle 3 times. ON NATIONAL TV. 8:00PM. ON CZECH'S GOT TALENT. I don't know if she won or not, but I think Stu voted for her.

The moral of the story: we now have satellite with full Sky TV programming at a cost of $1500. Caroline is no longer allowed to select the programming and we only watch things with the Disney logo.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving in another country

Then more things change, the more they stay the same.

 I haven't been in Canada for a Thanksgiving now for a number of years due to business trips so it was good to keep that consistency.

According to the local Expat community Thanksgiving is an exclusive American only holiday.  It was quite funny watching the looks on people's faces as we told them that we would be shopping for a turkey on the weekend.  A turkey? they would cry in unison while quickly scouring their mental calendars to determine, if indeed, they had missed October and most of November.  In some cases the mental calendar already had them into December, having completely bypassed Autumn altogether.  

So our mission this past week was to educate the neighbor folk on the fact that we Canadians have something to be thankful for AND to find a turkey.  Hard to say really which was going to be harder.  

We'll start with the education piece...mainly Aussies and Americans in this category.  The Americans couldn't get over the fact that Thanksgiving is actually tied to the harvest and not to shopping and football.  The Aussies, more in tune with America than us colonial cousins, seemed to be on the late November program as well.  As for the Czechs, they apparently have nothing to be thankful for despite the plethora of beer, cheap sausage and size 10 bodies.  No Thanksgiving for you!  (At least I  don't think so anyway.  There was a national holiday on a Tuesday in September that no one was able to tell me what it was for.  It coulda been Thanksgiving or  "Take Your Dog for a Walk Day".  All I know is that the Metro was empty and lots of people were walking their dogs.)

Now for turkey. Getting a whole turkey to roast at any time of year is a challenge.  You either have to order it ahead of time from Robertsons Butchers or you have to hope.  At the time , hope seemed to be a good strategy, so we ignored Robertsons and instead went to Macro - the local Costco equivalent.  Macro on a good day is a challenge; anyone who owns their own business shops there so it is always crowded, noisy and scary.  Scary cause you don't always know what you have to buy in bulk or what you can buy just one or two of.  For example, you are ok if you want one roll of paper towel, but God help you if you try to buy anything less than a crate of eggs.  And I mean a crate -as in hundreds.  If you approach the cash with the wrong number of eggs, the cashier lady will just look at you with venom in her eyes for a few seconds before she launches into her "not enough eggs" tirade ..... all in Czech of course.  We have learned to smile back in Anglicky and say 'pardon'.  Which makes her even madder cause she knows we will leave our 10 eggs with her to put back.  

On this trip however, the eggs were the least of our problem as we couldn't find a turkey. If only tradition called for a juicy pig's knee or lips and assholes (better known as sausage) then we would have been all set.  As it was, nary a turkey to be found.  Goose, duck, pidgeonski - but no turkey; at least not an intact one.  We did manage to find legs and a breast which is good cause I think deep down Stu is a leg and breast man.  That he is a leg and breast man just went horribly wrong for him when we got married.  But thats a story for another day.   

So that is what we went with.  OMG.. (Thats oh-em-gee if you are not from the Facebook generation).  It is sooooooo not the same.  How do you stuff a leg? Or a breast? Or make proper gravy? Or pull the wings off and eat the crackled skin?  The short answer is that you can't.  But it was ok.  It was turkey at least.  And stuffing cooked in the oven, and brussel sprouts, and carrots.  

And us together.  Which I think was the whole point.        
   

   

 

Buying a car: Buracracy Part II

So here we are - a family of 4 including 2 kids with pretty healthy appetites. Which is fine by me cause I'd rather have them eat than not. So you can imagine my discoOmfort as a mother when I had to sit down and tell the kids that we would be moving to a system of eating on alternate days.  Girls on Tues, Thurs, Sat and Boys on Mon, Weds, Fri. Sundays, Bailey the Dog will eat. True to form, Caroline immediately started a list about what meals her days should include and Jamie just stared at us and uttered 'macaroni and cheese'. I realize that this seems like a harsh policy but it is the reality when you need to walk miles for your food, slay it in the grocery store and then bring it back in your knapsack. If we were anything but suburban, white, Torontonions with big butts and an appetite for computer games then this might not have been such an issue.  Mighty hunters we are not - except maybe in a virtual world.

The Albert Hypermarket is a 15 minute walk from our house. Well, 15 minutes for most people; 20 for me. I have bad knees you know. The daily walk to Albert was fun at first, but then the operative word became 'daily'. Fun quickly becomes drudgery when you need to walk every day in order to build up any kind of inventory in the fridge or the cupboards. Keeping food in the house when the only vehicle you own is a vintage '64 FEET, is a challenge - volume is simply not doable and deciding who gets to eat the 1 yogourt you could carry home, is no fun at all. Well, who is kidding who, it was fun when I won the yogourt. - especially blueberry. I like blueberry. It didn't take long to figure out that the alternating feeding schedule and yogourt contests simply weren't working. The kids were whining about how unfair it was that the other kids got to eat everyday. And I totally got their point. I was cranky too as hard as that is to imagine. It was time to buy a car.


Except, in the Czech Republic, unless you are an EU citizen, you need to have a long term visa in order to buy and register a car with the SFPD (Secret Foreign Police Dudes) and of course, we only have a short term visa for now. So out on the internet I searched on 'cheap porsches, Czech Republic, 500ck, low mileage, driven by old lady'. While that search didn't yield much, it did lead me to Ciarnan Kelly, or 'just call me Kelly', for short. Kelly is an American living in Prague who has been selling cars there for years (at least that's what it said on the internet so it had to be true, right?). I decided to email him first as I didn't want to appear too eager. He replied immediately with the information that we wanted - and a solution to our problem; I couldn't believe our luck. Because he was so helpful through his emails, we asked if he would send a car to come and get us so that we could look at cars on his lot. Kelly works for AAAAuto and immediately cause of the name I got this whole image in my head of Herb Tarlek sitting behind his desk - which would be situated outside on the car lot - and who has trouble trying not to laugh at the rubes coming by to look at the crap he has for sale.

True to his word, he sent a car for us and after it was an hour late in getting there, we finally did manage to meet him. The image of the lot wasn't far off, but Kelly wasn't any Herb Tarlek; unless Herb is wondering around in Levis and a Red Sox t-shirt. Turns out that Kelly doesn't sell cars anymore, but is instead something much more important in the AAAAuto world but he had decided to take us on as a charity case. I knew the alternating feeding schedule would work in our favour somehow....

After looking at car on the lot which I had deemed as being 'cool' and pretty I was ready to buy. Stu however felt that perhaps we should do a test drive. Details details... At any rate, after 4 hours of backing and forthing and Kelly being very patient and us having endless discussions about what happens if the car we've chosen doesn't have cruise control, or brakes, would that be a problem...we decided to buy. (Its now 10pm and I'm glowing orange again because I am so tired).

But now comes the hard part. Paperwork. Turns out the contracts would be in Czech. The insurance would be in Czech and, this is my personal favourite, because we didn't have the right visa, we would have to register the car in someone elses name. So in essence, buying a car means that you sign a legal document that you can't read, deposit $20,000 into a secret bank account, and then hand the asset over to someone else. Sounds about right to me. So that what we did. Martin, whom at the time we had known for 2 weeks, 'agreed' to own our car. Kelly 'agreed' to keep our $20,000 in his bank account and the SFPD agreed not to arrest us for not having the right visa. Another tick in the win column












   

How do you spell buracracy

I have been told several times to expect bad service, long line ups and general disdain for my angliky-ness when ever you are dealing with the Czech government.  This past week was a total test of that theory and I was not disappointed.

First stop health care.

You need to first understand the sluzby (service) culture here.  Do you remember the lady who growled at me in the Kika when I was trying to get the Kika bus instead of walking home with unfinished furniture in my knapsack?  NO BUS FOR YOU!  Ya well, she turned out to be nice in comparison to many of the clerks, cashiers and other workers that we've had the pleasure of meeting.  I suppose if I were making the equivalent of $15 a day, I'd be grumpy too.  But these people take it to a whole new level.  Its funny how people adjust cause now we just expect it.  In fact if we don't get yelled at or ignored, we think we've done something wrong.

Just in case you thought getting OHIP ( ontario health insurance) was onerous, try getting public health care in CZ.  

Before you can get health care, you need to have a visa and an employment contract.  Imagine you are out for a country drive and you end up in a town that has a friend that you haven't seen in ages.  You arrive totally unexpected; you, the kids, the dog.  No car.  A bank account, but no paycheque.  A nice school for your kids, but no way of paying the tuition. You also have no furniture, but that is totally your problem.  Your friend, not knowing what else to do, ignores you for say, 2 weeks, despite your pleas.   And then after figuring out that you are not going away, scrambles into action.  For us, that friend was IBM Czech Republic.  

Despite the countless emails and meetings, IBM CZ seemed to be totally unaware that we were coming.  And what does this have to do with health care you are asking?  Well when you move to a foreign country and you trying to figure out who pays when you have your stress induced heart attack, health care becomes a concern.  It would appear that sluzby, or lack of it, begins at home.

Fast forward a few weeks and we have all the paperwork (as well as temporary health insurance) and I am now ready to bravely face the people at the VZP (which is the national health care program) in order to get full coverage.  On this particular morning, I take the kids to school with Stu and he then drives me to the address written on the piece of paper I've been given.  I'm not sure why I was expecting there to be a sign on the outside of the building but I was.  Clearly I was setting myself up for disappointment.  We are now somewhere in Prague where the only word I recognize is 'porn'.  No one speaks English and everyone is in a hurry.  I go into a lekarna, which is a drug store, figuring that they might know.  I politely point to the VZP words I have written.  I politely get ignored - that is until I step in front of clerk and shove my paper in front of her and dance the 'where the f*** is this place' dance.  Good news....she knows!

Turns out that the VZP office is a tiny hole in the wall on the first floor of a hospital complex.  As far as I can tell I am the only one who thinks that labeling or numbering the doors would be a good idea.  Actually, Stu thinks so too since he has been trying to find me since parking the car.  At any rate we are together now and we enter the waiting area.  There is a numbering system in the waiting room and this particular machine has 8 options to take a number, each labeled with the particular service you need.  None of them are labeled as 'porn' and as a result we have no idea about the services so we take one of each.   Funny enough, everyone in the waiting area is surprised when one of our numbers comes up first before all the others.  We totally march in ahead of everyone else having skipped the entire queue.  I am expecting to be tackled at any moment so as we walk in, I don't breathe a word of angliky and position myself strategically in front of Stu so that if something happens, he'll take brunt of it and not me.   Me so clever.

The lady expecting us is sitting behind a desk in a small open concept area.  Maybe 5 desks in total.  There will be no secret conversations in this room.  Every one will know who you are and why you are there.  We approach the desk, each with our great big Canadian grins on, and say 'dobre den' just like any average czech.  That, however, is the end of the civilities because the next words I use happen to be in English and that apparently is enough to send her into a not so happy place.  She looks at us with the same stare i've seen before - the kind that comes with an out of body experience that says this cannot be happening to me.  Usually though, they are reserved for things like car accidents and heart attacks and not because someone speaks English.  Fortunately, it only lasts a second before it turns into a rather large and somewhat exaggerated shrug of the shoulders accompanied by the word 'angliky' uttered in a 'you gotta be kidding me ' tone.  This is enough for the others in the office to peak out from behind their computer monitors and giggle in that 'ha ha, you lose' kinda manner.  

Going well so far I think.

I am now emptying my knapsack and producing every piece of paper I have ever received or signed with regard to our move.  This includes my employment contract, lease agreement and passport.  I even produce the last grocery receipt for recently purchased toilet paper.  My thinking here is that if I am buying toilet paper I must be serious about being part of the Czech society.

I am now expecting hands to be thrown up in the air and another shrug.  Instead another lady comes over and in very halting English asks for my name.  I show it to her on one of the papers (and no it wasn't the toilet paper receipt as it has been several years since you've had to provide ID to purchase toilet paper).  She types my name into the computer and prints a 1 page document, applies an official red stamp of some kind and that's it, I've got health care.  At least I think so as there is nothing in my language to indicate that this is really what I've accomplished.  She, however, is convinced that her job is done and we are expected to leave.  I spend 10 minutes gathering up my papers and she watches every move ensuring that we are actually going to walk out.  As if we were gonna hang.