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we are permanent residents.
the reason we decided to apply for permanent residence is, simply, that it’s a longer visa. we have been on the two year freelance visa for ages and as many of you know, our last go-around was rough. it kicked our asses. after five years of residence in the czech republic and passing a basic language exam though, you may qualify for permanent residence. well, this was our first chance to apply (now having lived here for over six years) and the language test wasn’t so difficult, seeing as we have lived here long enough to soak up loads of language and had three full years of czech lessons by…
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february city hangs | prague & linz
it’s been such a great month so far! i thought january was good, but february seems even better and the fact that we just had our semester break and i enjoyed most of a week off work was just the thing. i was thinking i’d head to prague on sunday, the second day of the month, until there was a “severe snow advisory” (??!) warning and decided not to mess with that. (besides, a friend of mine had to spend the night on a train last autumn when she insisted on traveling in heavy winds! trains + inclement weather = not going there) instead we went on monday when there was…
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january lately
ah january, time to hunker down with a candle, cup of tea a stack of books and your favorite tv shows and films. or my favorite winter activity: i call it the ‘read-nap-read’ (or “the reading nap”) on a cold sunday afternoon with falling snowflakes outside the window. it’s typically hard to grant myself time to do those things, but winter does give me permission! what have you been enjoying? i’m making my way slowly through a little life (and all of its seven hundred something pages) as well as chunks of other books also on my nightstand. i’ve also been watching a bit of ally mcbeal season 4 (the…
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nyepi: a quiet new year
while i was at iceland airwaves, i managed to catch ólafur arnalds’ much-buzzed-about set on the first day at kex hostel in reykjavik, and he played a beautiful song called nyepi. while i enjoyed the song, the message behind it made much more of an impression on me: nyepi is the balinese new year’s “day of silence”. (have you heard of it?) arnalds explained that he lives there much of the year and had recently participated in this day of silence in which the city actually turns off the internet, no electricity is used, no travelling is permitted, no work, nor music or loud noises, and people generally just sit…
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year of life & travels: 2018
it feels cliché to start with “it’s been a year for the books”, but it’s true. 2018 has been my favorite year abroad since 2012, the year we started our adventure and moved to the czech republic. i touched on a few reasons why i thought that in a previous post but it’s mostly due to progress: progress with feeling at home here and building a life, huge progress in communication and language learning, and some of the best trips and memories to date. i feel like this is the year that living here, despite the trials we’ve gone through, has really clicked for us. all things coming together and…
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a simpler sort of christmas
hello all, i hope you have had a magical christmas wherever in the world you celebrated it, if you are in fact celebrating, that is. once again, we had a truly czech christmas here in budejovice. normally we get almost two full weeks of holiday for christmas, and we opted to stay put this year mostly because 1) iceland, which i felt was almost like a christmas in and of itself, but also 2) our visa issues (from receiving it to reapplying for our next) making us a bit lighter in the wallet this time of year. but no matter, we had decided to fully embrace a simpler sort of…
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december, lately: a lot going on at the moment.
whoa, what a big few weeks it has been! in the wake of receiving our visa extention in october, alex and i had been furiously studying to make sure we aced our elementary level czech exam, which is far too expensive to re-take (not that we even have the time to do so) but fortunately, three and a half hours later, we victoriously walked to the bus stop with our certificates! we did it! not going to lie, but this little (big?) victory has instilled some major confidence. i think it is deserved confidence, for all those times that i doubted myself and didn’t want to try speaking czech, or…
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expat thoughts on the bake off finale
a bake-off post! in case you still aren’t sure what i’m nattering on about, i’ve been baking along this autumn to the show, the great british bake off (series 9) which just had the finale this week. as i know this series will hit the states several months later, i just want to say: i will mention the winner of this series sometime in the post (spoiler alert!), so if that matters to you, go ahead and skip to my bakes (below) or click out. but something has been rattling around in the old craw about this year’s bakers that i just felt like i had to comment on. i…
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SEPTEMBER LATELY (& bake off week 2+3)
hi friends! some happenings of the past couple of weeks… SELF-STUDY maybe it’s the back to school fervor combined with more time than usual before all my courses start again, but i’ve been positively swept up in a very literary and studious obsession lately. between furiously reading the best book i’ve read in years and trying to finish my german course book from the summer before my lessons begin next week (with a bit of herbal studies sprinkled in when time allowed), september has been very scholarly for me. of course, the amount of language study still can’t compare with doing the intensive course and homework last month, but i’ve still…
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happy september, indeed! + bake along #1 (biscuits)
well, we’ve made it to six years in europe, y’all. i don’t know how it happened and this year, it was certainly against all possible odds, but it did. that’s right! our major visa issues have been resolved thanks to the wonderful people we know here in budejovice and apparently, they are the right sorts of people to know. i am ever so grateful. i’ve heard about others in the same situation as us not having quite the luck we did and that it had been the end of the road. but for us, not today. cynthia and alex are going to keep this crazy thing going into year seven.…
