-
spring around here
officially, spring has sprung and since easter weekend, we’ve had a handful of gorgeous warm days here in south bohemia with highs above 22ºC! (although you wouldn’t know it by how bare most of the trees here still are!) i’m still not quite used to this continental european “spring”. it seems to come in mid-april, still with bare trees sometimes, and by early june, we are blasted with either heat-wave temperatures (or rain and floods, depending on the year). spring is a blink-and-you-miss-it affair, unlike western washington with our first cherry blossoms blooming in late february! i’m really trying to get into it this year, though… embrace those mild temperatures…
-
fancy day out in budapest
“i shouldn’t have this. it’s just too much! i’m not this kind of person. i don’t deserve this”words spoken by me in the late afternoon of our unintentionally decadent easter sunday. the evening before, we had opera plans which start at the awkward seven o’clock hour… too early to go to a big dinner, but dining afterwards would be too late. i wasn’t hungry anyway, so we popped into a fast-food imbiss-style wok grill down the street. as we were enjoying our thai noodles and coconut soup, “fancy” by iggy azalea begins to play and i just cracked up– we’re sitting here all dressed up for the opera eating fast…
-
budabest
hi friends! did you have a lovely easter? i just kind of peaced out of the blog for about a week… i actually did write an easter post but last minute packing took precedent. if you were following along on instagram, you might have seen that we took off to budapest for the long holiday weekend! this year was the first year that (finally!) good friday was a public holiday… which means now i don’t have to feel guilty for taking that and thursday off, heh. it is so difficult to write about this holiday besides saying that it was just magical… all of the heart eyes and sparkles come…
-
the world is bigger than you
with all of the american election news flopping around (flop seems like an accurate verb), tensions are beginning to run higher than usual with most everyone, i’ve noticed. it’s tough when the main ways that you communicate with your friends back home are through social media outlets, like facebook, which means that we don’t usually see all of the great things about those friends that remind you why you two are friends. often, we end up only seeing the ugly. sometimes, really ugly. this past week, a friend of ours asked my husband the following question on facebook… “if you live in greener grasses of europe, why does it matter who…
-
our little household
although i often scheme and dream about being back “on the road” (which we actually will be doing for a month this summer!), i can’t say enough about how much i love our little home here in south bohemia, a dreamy, slower-paced corner of the country near rivers, farms, and forests. i love our beautiful altbau-style building and flat that was actually built by my landlord’s grandfather in 1913, exactly one hundred years before we moved in. i love our big heavy wooden table, our kitchen full of light. our balcony, which i am dying to spend more time on and really create a special space with more plants than…
-
eye on the prize
living in central europe working as an english teacher, you can get by pretty well. i know you read a lot about the wages of ESL teachers in europe being basically enough to just slide by on, but that’s not necessarily true. sure, if we’re talking u.s. dollars, we are totally below the poverty line. however, if we’re talking about the average wages in the czech republic, we are doing pretty well! salary vs. cost of living results favorably. i have talked at length about how it’s possible that we travel a lot on a teacher’s salary. even so, when we live a life in which we should, for all intents…
-
gratitude
“so, when are you going back to the states?”well, we have some friends that are engaged, so probably whenever the weddings are.[laughing] “.. err… so, are you going to be staying there for awhile?”ah-hah, there it is. the question i get basically every time i talk to my dad on the phone. not that i want to get into what is happening in the united states at the moment, but i don’t really think i am a victim of the recession. well, in one way i sort of am, as i graduated college at the worst possible time in decades to try to find an entry-level position, even in a…
-
a weekend in “czech canada”
slavonice seemed like exactly the sort of place i’d want to spend a winter getaway. small, beautiful, artsy, it’s a borderland town right on the edges of south bohemia, vysočina (moravia), and austria (only 2km away). one of the greatest reasons to visit, its flanked on the west by the beautiful nature of česká kanada (czech canada), called this because of the rich swath of forests, lakes, and other natural sites that sometimes make it almost indistinguishable from canada. the short train journey (under an hour) from telc was pretty magical… to see names of towns and landscapes we didn’t recognize as we crossed from moravia back into the edge…
-
telč & its beautiful square
every year in february, excepting the year we had just moved here, we like to take a little february getaway. this is mostly because alex, as an english teacher of primary school aged children, gets a whole week for spring break! as a freelancer, i do not get a complete week unless it’s reeeeally important (berlinale!) but i can try to shift around my lessons in order to do something fun that week. this week, a sudden cold threatened my weekend plans. i woke up friday unable to speak with a normal human voice and having to cough and blow my nose every three minutes. but i have to tell…
-
contentedness
so far this year, there’s been no big milestones, or “lily-pads” as emma calls them. but even so, life “between the lily-pads” has been rolling along. i was so thankful just to stick around in one place in january, and although february brings even more travel scheming and dreaming, i have just been perfectly content lately. content to be here, with life… not in a “my life is so exciting!” kind of way but just a quiet sort of happiness. my instagram, usually buzzing with photos of czech architecture i pass on my day to day life has even been quieter than usual. no need to take photos or write…
