Czech and Date

I first used Tinder in 2015. I had just moved back to Seattle from Minneapolis and I wasn't really sure of my relationship status at the time, so I hopped on the app with a notoriously simple UI. After a few cautious swipes I got a match! My first match! What should we name our kids? What will he think of a color scheme containing seafoam and taupe?

After some further investigation, I discovered my future husband and I had around 60 friends in common from Facebook. Of course, he was a comedian.

Tinder is such a mystery to me because I've seen people use it like a sperm donor donation guide but also in a hot-or-not rating system way just to innocently pass the time. None of the matches I ever made came to fruition. The furthest I got was moving from the app to text messaging with our real phone numbers. No movies, no dates, no walks along Alki. A daily "hey how's it going" turned into a weekly "what are you up to this weekend?" I wasn't crazy determined to meet anyone every time I've used Tinder, and I spent most of my time swiping left to find people I know and giggle over how they chose to represent themselves through six Instagram pictures and their recent Spotify artists. 

Honestly, meeting someone from Tinder sounded like a lot of work.

Are they going to like me? I'm leaving the country soon so I could ruin his life. I'll ruin his life. I'm running out of foundation. Is this guy worth scraping the bottom of the tube with a q-tip just to give off the illusion that my skin is decent?

I'd rather stay home and watch Brendan Fraser movies with my cat (this ended up happening a lot). 

For the first three months I was in the Czech Republic, the only person I thought of was myself. Initially this idea is selfish, but when transitioning to a post-communist country with a lot of people who have been through some shit, I had to make sure I was doing okay before I even considered romantically invited someone into my life who may have very different societal ideologies than myself. I redownloaded the app and edited my profile with more recent pictures and a few notes about my eating habits (cheeseburgers), my drinking habits (there isn't one), and my love for sitcoms (not that there's anything wrong with that). But even after ten minutes, I could tell my main issue would be the language barrier. 

Most people here who are under the age of 30 speak English to some degree. It is now taught in primary schools as opposed to German or Russian. The more profiles I went through, the more I realized that I'm either going to have to find someone who speaks English or I'm going to have to learn Czech very quickly. I'm very sparing with right swipes, so any dude who I became interested in superficially had to meet a certain set of criteria: not all of their pictures should be of them drinking, they need at least one photo someone else took of them, no gym selfies, and they had to indicate they spoke at least some English. After a few minutes on the app, I saw a popular pattern emerging among Czech men:

(I accidentally swiped left on a couple of these goobers so I'll update if anything happens.)

If you guessed "men on vacation wearing sunglasses," congratulations! Most of the profiles I saw had an absurd amount of men traveling and being active. If you swapped all of these pictures out with American girls who recently studied abroad for all of two months, there would be zero difference. I shied away from making contact because I think I was intimidated. I know myself well. I don't surf. I don't mountain climb. I don't go to places where I can't at least buy a snack. I like being comfortable and where there's no threat of large crowds or riptide or bees. There is a residual fear of not being able to connect with any of these people because I like movies and writing and typically things that involve being indoors for an extended period of time. What am I going to talk about? How I found a good Russian cam rip of Isle of Dogs or what subreddit deserves more attention?

I only had one successful match where the conversation lead to WhatsApp and eventually a date at a teahouse. He looked like a young James Spader and majored in astrophysics. In his spare time, he's working on getting his pilot license and spending time with his family. English wasn't his first language and my first instinct was to correct his actually pretty decent grammar, but it was so harmless and cute I almost couldn't take it seriously. And that's why I think I'm largely unsuccessful with dating apps: I can't take them seriously. 

Every profile becomes a joke to me. By the end of my perusing I've given half the guys ambiguous Slavic accents and butchered their English while they talk about the differences between good and bad dinner rolls. Tinder has now replaced Reddit as the "hmm what else can I do" entertainment portion of my evenings. It's incredibly mindless and I only login after I'm convinced I've read the entirety of the internet. I forget I have Tinder. I open it maybe once a month, and each time I open it I have to reacquaint myself with the conversations I left dangling or the five guys named Martin and the three guys named Ondrej or the couple of guys named Pavel. I'm also convinced there's only seven Czech names for men and that's why I can't keep any of them straight or differentiate them from one another.

I wonder if Tinder is worth my time because it slowly came to feel like a chore. I became more content with continuing to spend time with myself than muster the effort to meet someone who may not understand me, both emotionally and linguistically. James Spader understood my jokes and we texted a few times after our date, but we haven't talked in maybe two weeks. Things fizzled out and I think neither of us saw the point of carrying it out any further. I also have my own suspicion he lost interested when he found out I don't drink or go clubbing. The only thing in common was our age. It was tough to build a cultural connection in such a short time, but maybe it was for the best. I always feel safer when I'm alone. The act of procreation is really popular here, and I don't mean the euphemism for sex, I mean actually procreating to make children, so the older generation urges the younger to make offspring. I can't even start my job, let alone a family. What I'm getting at is that I don't know how I'll measure up to Czech expectations of how life is supposed to proceed. I'm on a very different unpaved road and I'm not trying to rush into anything. For now, Tinder is only a source of entertainment, a digital carousel of traveling millenials and Adidas tracksuits. I'm not desperate. I think the only person I need right now is me.

Ahoj, Bratislava

Soooo it’s been a while, maybe even longer since the release of that shitty song by Staind. The New Year has produced multiple job opportunities, never-ending Central European bureaucracy, comedy shows, and my first jaunt to Slovakia.

And I'm still waiting to hear about my visa.

But during this seemingly infinite waiting period, I’ve taken two teaching jobs that are happily withholding my pay until I can become a legal Czech employee. They don’t have to pay me until further notice so I’m basically working for free, and hooooo boy do they know it. My schedule went from sleeping most of the day and going down a rabbit hole of late 90s Saturday Night Live videos to mapping out an entire timetable of trams and busses for my assignments all over Brno and its dingy yet incredibly charming suburbs.

I’m traveling to different companies in the metro area to help employees with their conversational skills, business English, and strange grammar unique to my native tongue. Most of the students I encounter are very intent on the idea that their English isn’t great but really it’s the opposite. I swear I had someone tell me, “My goodness, I am astonished at your surprise because I do believe my English is quite terrible!” but they aren’t speaking like a Soviet caveman. They’re actually speaking very well, better than me in some cases. I usually spend 45 to 90 minutes trying to produce some semblance of a lesson plan that revolves around discussing current events, politics, movies or other popular American media, and common dialogue from their place of work, but also HOW we discuss them. But what surprises me is that during every lesson, my students become so curious how a thirty-something woman from a booming yet not beaming country like the United States ended up in a place like Brno.

Brno has roughly 400,000 people. It’s been described to me as St. Paul without Minneapolis. There are enough people here to cause a very slight delay during morning traffic or a decent back up in any store in the mall on Sunday. Trams during peak hours are full and standing room only. This city as a pulse, and the only thing that would for sure kill it or at least slow its resting heart rate is something like Amazon becoming a budding and brooding feature. So when students ask me, “Why here?”, I usually respond with something that promotes the differences in cost of living while not having to live somewhere like Terre Haute, Indiana. I also explain that I’ve been through the Czech Republic before and liked it enough to move my life here. I’m not sure I have the balls (I don’t) to throw a dart at a map and expatriate to places like Kiribati or Lhasa or Ushuaia in Southern Argentina. But here I can live inside former communist architecture while practicing peaceful democratic resistance. Oh and that whole health insurance thing, too.

So right now, even though I come prepared each week with a loose lesson plan that can often derail like it did today when I had to explain the origin of the phrase “don’t drink the Koolaid,” my students are vastly interested in me and what I’m doing in the second biggest city in the Czech Republic. They also tend to ask me, “Why not Prague?” Prague seemed incredibly romantic at first. If I was going to write my own Eat, Pray, Love bullshit novel, my journey would probably start in Prague. The city (and most of the country) has amazingly preserved architecture. It wasn’t destroyed during the Second World War so a lot of the streets and flats and businesses are decades old and still in seamless operation. Prague carries a lot of the business in the Czech Republic but it isn’t all smokestacks and concrete. When I think of people in Prague, I imagine a woman wearing a silk bathrobe looking out her tall windows, tall windows that are emulated in the US because we can’t have things that are genuinely old so we destroy new places to purposefully make them look old. She has one of those stupid chunky blankets with the giant yarn draped around her. It’s snowing. There’s a dog outside leaving tiny footprints on the cobblestone sidewalk as a young boy chases muž’s best friend. The woman in the window snuggles her face into the giant yarn catastrophe while her gorgeous husband swoops in from behind her while carrying the smallest fucking espresso cup you’ve ever seen. She receives the bright white cup and saucer from within her Pinterest cape as they giggle over the idea of reading Faust in their giant sleigh bed in front of an exposed brick backdrop for the rest of the day. That’s Prague.

Brno is much more industrial, as are other cities here like Ostrava, Olomouc, and Plzen, so it leaves people wondering why I chose cooling towers over historical bridges. In short, it’s cheaper. But most of the expats in CZ are based in Prague, yet out in Brno it feels less like a vacation and more like an ongoing journey. If you live in Prague, you can go days without needing to speak Czech because everyone in your bubble speaks some derivation of English. I wanted to be around Czech people, not people who want to be around Czech people. I feel like a resident here. Somedays in Seattle I felt more like a tourist due to barely leaving the house during the throes of depression and anxious bullshit.

Teaching currently has me busy for roughly four days a week. I have some breaks midday and some downtime before hustling across town with a different set of folders for a different set of students. The nice part being is that if I notify the schools far enough in advance, I can take time off for comedy. This past weekend I ventured to Bratislava, Slovakia for a comedy show, my first time to the other half of the previous state of Czechoslovakia. Bratislava is a grungier version of Brno that could stand a good pressure washing. The city of 420,000 people is the largest in Slovakia and it is proving to be somewhat of a booming new metropolis. Slovakia is also on the Euro which catches people off guard. Surely the Czech Republic is on the Euro if Slovakia is, right? Wrong. CZ is on the Czech Koruna (crown) while Slovakia became a loose cannon and confused the fuck out of everyone by switching over to the popular Westernized currency. I exchanged money at the train station before I left, and two hours later, I walked off the train and onto a movie set designed for Liev Schreiber or Elijah Wood to extract their vengeance on the surrounding community for a betrayal of past generations. People think CZ is in Eastern Europe when really it’s in Central Europe, but Bratislava flirts with that misinformation much more, especially when people are confusing it with Slovenia.

Every European city east of Berlin has a section commonly referred to as “Old Town,” a four or five block district in or near the city center. At least one large church, forged statues and sculptures, and outdoor markets are picturesque both in person and on the overpriced postcards sold within the area. Bratislava’s Old Town is a nexus of hidden passageways featuring popular pubs, souvenir stores, flower shops, and coffee and wine bars. I’m not using the Oxford comma between “coffee” and “wine bars” because they are constantly featured together under one business. There’s a good intermingling of the old country’s hardened Slovaks enjoying their nightly pinot noir with younger travelers who wanted a piece of cake and tea (me). Since I arrived in the city at 4pm on a Sunday, a lot of businesses were closed and I only had roughly an hour of daylight remaining to take pictures, so I walked around and got lost in the caverns of brick and doors that weren’t rectangular in shape.

A few photos from my visit

The comedy show I was in took place at Goblin’s Pub, a dungeon-esque pub with plenty of beer and zero cell service. Upon arriving, I encountered a group of Irish dudes who were actually swinging their beer mugs from side to side with their arms around each other while they sang/yelled old Irish folk songs. Groups of football clubs, rugby teams, and bachelor parties will often come to Central and Eastern Europe to get their drink on because it’s so much cheaper. I was an economic drunk and 40 cents for a beer was nothing to sneeze at. I wrote out a setlist, similar to the setlist I was working off of the night before in Brno. I’m having a tough time deciding when to compromise my comedy. When I say that, I mean I don’t know whether to give the people what they want, which happens to be easy stereotypes and blanket statements, or do the comedy I really want to do and know I’m capable of. I want to have some measure of integrity without leaning towards an entire setlist of Blue Collar Comedy style jokes and tag lines. My set at Goblin’s was like most of my other sets in Europe; people like me and my enthusiasm, but if it’s not slightly off color in a way they want it to be, they’ll smile and have this sort of Resting Czech Face that I proceed to pander to for the remainder of my stage time. Doing 25 minutes is incredibly easy for me. Being confident in the jokes I’m telling to an audience expecting a certain style of humor is difficult.

I left the venue and hopped Bratislava’s tram back to the train station, took the train back to Brno, missed the night bus home, and called a Liftago, our version of Uber. My driver seemed happy I was communicating in broken Czech and he compromised with me by speaking some broken English in return. I checked my blood sugar when I got home realized my levels weren’t as predictable as they usually are. If I ever get sick or stressed, I can usually see it in my blood sugars before I actually feel or sense the onset of it coming. And by the time I had woken up a few hours later after falling asleep during an embarrassing Vikings loss, I was definitely sick. I had mono at 16 and ever since then I’ve been prone to sinus infections. I maybe get two to three a year where there’s a tremendous pressure in my sinuses, I feel and sound like I’m underwater, my neck and shoulders ache a bit, and I can’t focus. On Monday this week I was supposed to start at another school but had to defer my start since a) I’m not an asshole and don’t want to get other people sick, and b) talking for six hours a day while running all around the city by public transit wasn’t an option. I pretty much slept for three days and ended up being really hard on myself. I was supposed to start a new job and my body let me down, thus letting my employer down. I want to be ready and capable and worthy of work but this stupid sinus business wasn’t exactly allowing me to do just that. I felt worthless, not working and wanting to get better while trying to simultaneously practice the act of patience. And I fucking hate being sick. I turn into a swearing three-year-old sailor who has seen some shit, so much shit they can’t even drink anymore. Kitty and I slept and drank soup and as much water as we could, and today I’m almost back to 100%.

Today was my first day back teaching in four days and I learned that I was not the only teacher who was sick this week. Classes were cancelled, moved around, delayed, and rescheduled due to most of us combatting some type of a pseudo-plague. My Thursday class is my favorite. They’re a bunch of young dads who understand my puns and are eager to talk about politics, current events, traveling, and generic smalltalk used in getting to know one another. The 90 minutes goes by quickly and I don’t feel like it’s work because I’m learning, too. The second round of the presidential election in CZ is tomorrow. People throughout the country will pull their little grocery carts behind them while seeking to uphold the tenets of democracy or bring the country down to the level at which I left the United States. They told me about their candidates and the voting process. Brno (and the rest of the country I’m assuming) has a system that is similar to precincts, districts, and counties. People vote on a Friday by using paper and pen at a polling station, most often located in a school, and the results are then tabulated until the next morning on Saturday. I told them about the US having fifty different states, which means having fifty different sets of laws for how people vote. I explained the mail-in process for the state of Washington and how ballots are tracked and counted before the election. The two countries honestly don’t seem that different, and there has been an overwhelming turn out to support the guy who is more like a combination of Hillary and Bernie than President Fuckface (fingers crossed). One of the main areas of debate right now in CZ is the issue of "immigration." One tough thing about understanding the accuracy of politics and political views here is that the terms “immigrant,” “migrant,” “foreigner,” and “refugee” are all used interchangeably, so I went over the differences with my students and they agreed with their correct usage:

foreigner:

anyone who is of a different nationality or ethnicity than the place they are in presently

immigrant:

a person of a different citizenship or nationality legally seeking rights and citizenship in another country

migrant:

a person who is moving to a new country in seek of work, can be done legally or illegally, and is an economic based decision

and

refugee:

a person seeking asylum by escaping their country of citizenship due to political reasons (war is most common).

This class has been fun and valuable to me. In some ways, it feels like I’m getting paid to learn about my new home and the varying political climates by age group and geography.

My little victories are important here. I’ve had a master list of things I’ll eventually need to take care of, and today I got to cross of a major one: open a Czech bank account. Two banks have turned me away because I need to bring a Czech interpreter with me, even though I was told this in English. From my understanding, they don’t want to have a foreigner (refer to the above) signing a document if they can’t fully understand it. So today I went to a bank whose website is in both Czech and English and not by way of Google Chrome. It took about a half hour and the Czech banker was patient with my English and we both used Google Translate to ensure our definitions of terms were the same. Victory! I’ll get my “contactless card” in about two to three weeks. I’ve seen the magic of the contactless card at various stores: you’re supposed to hover the card over a hub and it will register as a physical swipe, but people end up needing to tap the hub numerous times and sometimes outright slam on it in frustration for it to register. Contactless!

So it’s after midnight. Tonight I had the energy to cook so I made this eggplant tomato basil…mash. I don’t know what to call it. Half the time I cook I’m coming up with something where all the flavors and textures are good but it doesn’t have a real name. I also put pepitas, capers, and cranberries in it and I shredded super good gouda on top. I’m going to be super farty tomorrow. Hopefully next week will be better than this week. I’m excited to officially have employment and an actual schedule. It will take some time to adjust and I’m just happy I don’t have to watch the fucking Pro Bowl this weekend at an absurd hour to distract me from doing great things. Oh yeah, and speaking of which,

Fuck you, Tom Brady!

“So you're a Lebowski, I'm a Lebowski.”

I’ve been having trouble starting these blogposts. It’s unlike me to struggle saying anything that’s on my mind, but for some reason when I begin this first paragraph, it has become difficult to relay my thought process. Perhaps it’s because this is THE NEW YEAR’S EVE POST but when you’re sober, you don’t really take these "holidays" seriously. So maybe it’s the residual pressure of having to report on 365 days of…whatever.

This year started off with a relationship I wasn’t expecting myself to get into. It’s incredibly easy to date comedians, which is why I dated yet another comedian later in the year. It’s like when smokers go out to smoke but they don’t know each other. They immediately have a sense of camaraderie because they’re smoking anonymously. It’s the same for comics as any other artistic form of expression, I imagine. But it’s hard to not shit where you eat when all you’re doing is comedy. Like let’s not pretend I don’t know about it, because I do. I’ve dated a few comics. Some of them ended in a real Hindenburg type explosion but others softly glided down to an even relationship homeostasis. For a real paycheck, I was labeling, measuring, describing, and slinging mid-century modern furniture to people who had never been exposed to the design form everyone over the age of 50 is relatively sick of. The consignment shop was reminiscent of a pawnshop owned by Don Draper, but most of my time was spent listening to Creedence and try to upsell people on the experience of a reversible sectional sofa versus a love seat with no accompanying ottoman. For forty hours a week, sizing up furniture and thinking of ridiculous names that had significance to me but was beyond imagination for anyone else visiting the vast array of uneven concrete floorspace.

March rolled around and life’s challenges became unusually stressful both mentally and emotionally. It was around this time last year I was having conversations about wanting to better myself in terms of what I ate, how I exercise, and what I deem a healthy amount of sleep. And in the new year, I became obsessive over numbers: units of insulin, calories, carbohydrates, minutes spent expelling energy, low blood sugar, high blood sugar, pounds on the scale, inches of my waist. I unknowingly started to go through something called “diabetic burnout.” At some point many diabetics will experience the notion of feeling like they can’t go on because of their disease. They become tired over the mathematical labor it takes to act as your own pancreas, so their diligence becomes lazy and worn out. Except my burnout was the opposite. I was overzealous with my equations in the kitchen that doubled as my laboratory. If you take one pound of cauliflower rice with X ounces of protein over four days divided by Y sodium preservative sauces from Trader Joe’s, how many times will Liz cry by the end of the week? I wanted to be accurate and exact. I couldn’t turn into the diabetic person who is the case for the misinformation most people receive about the disease. I didn’t want to lose my toes. I didn’t want people to see me as someone overweight and finding out I had diabetes and saying “Oh yep, that makes sense.” I even pulled out of a comedy show that required me to strip to my degree of comfort. “Comic Strip” looked fun and exciting and it was refreshing to see a comedy show that didn’t involve smoking weed or drinking, and at the time, it felt like most of these comedy shows weren’t for me at all. My self worth was at an all time low and I couldn’t get a break from the autoimmune disease taking up so much of my brainpower.

I started contemplating killing myself. There wasn’t a cure and there most likely won’t be, so why slog through the next 40 years at limited capacity? At first, I didn’t know how I’d go about it, but I narrowed out things like using a gun. I didn’t even know where to get a gun. Knives seemed drawn out and painful and the IKEA brand stainless steel edges weren’t going to be effective. I thought about using medication but I didn’t want to have my last experience in life be that feeling where you take mushrooms and then just sit there idly waiting for them to kick in. I was too short for the rail in my closet. This insanity in itself was exhausting, and I ended up mentioning it to my endocrinologist, who submitted me to the ER when I told her the ideations I was experiencing. I was crying a lot, tired, dragging my feet. I was at my appointment in sweatpants and the slippers I wore to rehab because I stopped caring about my outward appearance when I wasn’t on the clock. I looked like I had a drug problem with all the drugs I wasn’t actually on. I was losing my hair from being stressed, I stopped wearing make up, and I rarely responded to text messages.

My endocrinologist walked me to the ER where my mom met me. I’m the only one in my family with diabetes so before my diagnosis, no one had any familiarity with the disease, and a lot of my stress manifested through having to explain to everyone around me why I couldn’t have dinner yet, why I was sweaty and clammy behind the wheel of a moving car, why I’m eating dessert after dinner before everyone else, why I needed to stop at the 7/11 for extra Skittles to keep in my glovebox. I explained to the ER social worker person (I’m clearly still unsure of her exact title) who met with me that I wasn’t in danger, I’m just tired and frustrated I can’t have a break. I told her I’d rather have cancer since I’d maybe have a chance to beat it. I told her that my life was narrowed down to prescriptions and the fear of President FuckFace ultimately making it so that my life would become completely unmanageable while living in the expensive, Amazonian oasis that is Seattle. I spilled out all of my fears, frustrations, all while trying to stay sober at the same time. I went home and called my boyfriend, who scolded me for not telling him of my ideations sooner. I had spent six hours under the care of medical professionals and when I finally returned home to the small closet I was renting on Alki, I was essentially shamed for having any kind of emotions. It was a real “I’m not sad, just disappointed” kind of vibe. Looking back on it, I understand his concerns. But at the time, it really wasn’t what I wanted or needed to hear.

I returned to my job at the consignment store the next day and was promptly laid off. The store had been hemorrhaging money to make it a competitive environment for people who wanted to buy and sell furniture. But with the economy the way it was, people were more interested in receiving money for their flatpack crap they had lying around for months in a damp garage than spending money on a cosmic shaped couch dubbed “The Jetson.” This was the third time I had been laid off in my life and the only one where I remained sober of the rest of the day. I was becoming overwhelmed, aimless, and unclear about how to proceed, so I ended my relationship, deleted Facebook, and I wish I could say I hit the gym and lawyered up, but instead I resorted to eating cereal twice a day and sleeping through the literal days of my two favorite seasons. I quit comedy for roughly six weeks. The last thing I wanted to do was present my unpresentable self in front of a bunch of my peers and a bunch of strangers. My sense of routine was demolished, but finding a routine elsewhere and doing the research to find some structure wasn’t completely out of reach.

90% of the time before I go to sleep, I’m on Reddit with my phone three inches away from my face. I scroll through the qualms of history and Seinfeld gifs retrofitted to current politics. The expat subreddit came up, r/iwantout, and I looked at the kinds of questions people were asking about moving abroad. I had wanted to move abroad for years but never did the thorough Googling it entailed, and since I had all the time in the world in the middle of the night because I didn’t have a job or a relationship, I slowly started compiling information about the former communist bloc country now known as “Czechia” except no one calls it that. Like I’ve stated in this blog before, the reasons I moved were preserving my quality of life and improving my cost of living. Being an insulin dependent in Seattle without health insurance was going to be a gamble. So I did what Reddit suggested. I got out.

At first my decision was met with extreme hesitancy. “The Czech Republic? That seems drastic,” my mom told me. And over the next few months, I completely inundated her with information about cell phone plans, rent, the language, transportation options, healthcare in the US vs public healthcare in what was going to be my new home, geographical points of interest, how far away I was from Russia and the Ukraine, and carb counting on the metric system. While my mom was concerned, my dad was pleased. I was almost 30 and reached a point where I was no longer clinging to anything in Seattle. No boys. No future in comedy. No job. I made a list of reasons I would return to the US; a family member getting seriously ill or dying, zombie apocalypse, or an outbreak of nuclear war were all reasons to book a ticket home. Some people estimate I’ll be gone forever. Others estimate I’ll be home by March.

And so here I sit on New Year’s Eve, in Brno, with the sound of rumbling and bumbling fireworks all around my concrete home. I wonder how bad the PTSD is here from the multiple transitions of power that took place in this country over the last 100 years. I’m finally living by my own guidelines instead of the false, fabricated, grandeur expectations of others. There’s a lot of verbs I could apply to my situation. I escaped. I failed. I lived. But whatever I’m doing, my ham of a kitty hasn’t left my side and I’m making new friends while learning a very difficult language and I’m staying in contact with my family at home. I’ll be going to a friend’s flat, another expat from the states for boardgames and home-cooked vegetarian food. I don’t know how to sign off on this, much like the beginning of all this bullshit regarding not knowing how to begin. So I’ll say fuck this year. Actually, no. This year wasn’t bad: it was just different. I’m assuming 2018 will progress in the same way. That seems like a good note to end on. Goodnight from Brno, Happy New Year.

Ich bin ein Berlizzer.

I've been extremely stagnant trying not to spend money, and it's been somewhat easy considering my seasonal depression kicked in as soon as it began to get dark at 3:45pm. I don't really have anything resembling a schedule right now; Monday afternoons are for hanging out with my nine-year-old Czech friend and the experience has been extremely valuable.

Alžbětka and I went to the library next to her school this past Monday. Most of the libraries I've been in are new or remodeled or have been demolished and rebuilt. But walking into the Brno library located near the center of town was like entering some kind of governor's mansion. The marble stairs, floors, and columns were stoic while embracing the new technology needed for navigating the various worlds of literature. They have a coat check and a few librarians surfing the web and awaiting for questions to be asked very quietly. When loud noises do occur, they echo broadly against the high ceilings. The experience was familiar but different. No one around me was speaking English except for Alžbětka and I, which was slow and rudimentary to accommodate everyone's skill level. 

She took me up three flights of expansive marble stairs to a Young Adult section where the walls were covered in remnants of Halloween decorations and DIY paper pumpkin projects. She gravitated towards a shelf with books for young girls, hardcover books with pink filigrees and a main character looking hopeful because she hasn't discovered the horrors of society yet on the cover. I assumed the content was about taming a wild horse or a gardening contest or a softball team full of tomboys or whatever else nine-year-olds are into. I wandered away and found a section for "komiks." The French comics from the Asterix series and Tin Tin weren't out of place but what tickled me was discovering Calvin and Hobbes and Garfield  in Czech. I became visually excited, much like a nine-year-old, upon discovering familiar comics with depictions of the Czech words. I flipped through a few of them to get an idea of what was happening and to see if I recognized any of them specifically, but focusing on my memory game proved to be difficult. I had to combine the minimal amount of Czech I knew with the illustrations as well as the context of the illustration. Sometimes Garfield was being a total dick, but was it about Nermal or the lack of lasagna? Did Odie say anything in Czech at all, or was it just the word "haf" ("woof" in Czech) repeated a few times? The Czech in Calvin and Hobbes was more difficult than the empty blanket statements made by Jon and his orange Monday hating cat. I needed to start with something basic. 

Over the weekend, I finally found a stationary store which carries flashcards, so I bought 200 of them to practice vocabulary, everything from days of the week, seasons, general salutations, numbers, food, and navigational questions. I'm confident in my ability to learn Czech, but people are right: it's difficult, on par with learning Vietnamese, Mandarin, or Arabic. I showed Alžbětka my flashcards and she was really eager to quiz me. What helped most was the pronunciation of Czech words. I'm often studying alone using Mango Languages, a Duolingo type website, or with a dictionary and Google Translate, so it helped to have a native speaker solidify the tones and inflections of a very consonant heavy language. We stood in the library and giggled at my horrendous pronunciation and Alžbětka's clues to words I had immediately forgotten upon writing them down. 

She brought me over to the reference section of the library. Each reference category was separated from language, biology, mathematics, science, music, arts, literature, etc, but they were all for readers at a similar level as Alžbětka. I found an encyclopedia and plopped down on a beanbag chair while Alžbětka started the most recent book in the series Diary of a Wimpy Kid. For an hour we sat in silence and occasionally asked each other if we liked what we were reading. I was going over encyclopedia entries for things like dinosaurs, Asia, photography, birds, the solar system, vegetables, insects, farming, robots, etc. I was mostly seeing which words I could point out that were obvious and that was borrowed from a Germanic or Romantic language. Having a picture and the title of the entry helped frame the context and from there I looked for articles and nouns I was familiar with. Some things started to click with adjectives and syntax and all of a sudden it didn't seem so crazy to learn a language with Slavic roots. 

I took Alžbětka home and went to a bookstore to see if I could find the encyclopedia I was reading at the library. The entire downstairs floor of this store was language texts, tools, study guides, and school supplies. I found an encyclopedia that was similar to the one at the library; the format is in alphabetical order, each entry comes with a graphic, and there are little sayings and rhymes peppered throughout to familiarize the reader with Czech quips and idioms. The illustrations are very new and not antiquated like Gray's Anatomy drawings. It feels very new, which is weird because I always imagine encyclopedias to be very old and musty. I also picked up a Czech-English English-Czech dictionary since I was mostly using a Czech phrasebook that is more meant for travelers and not actual residents. But I'm sure all the names of animals I'm learning will come in handy sooner or later... 

Very very early Wednesday morning, I left on a quick trip to Berlin for my visa interview, which sounds a lot more official than it actually was. With trains and layovers in the middle of the night, the trip from Brno to the bustling German city took roughly nine hours. The German countryside is lush and green and full of goats and hills and old cars no longer in production. While outside of Dresden, I saw these little "tiny house" communities as they're coming to be known. People retrofitted sheds and garages next to the train tracks. They even had little roads dividing them and clothes hanging up outside and small gardens and yards that were well manicured. It seemed cute and cozy. I started imagining a life where I had just a little bit of space with a brick chimney. And then I remembered that's why I'm here in the first place, to get away from closet sized dwellings and live according to my means. I saw a post on Facebook early this morning of a house for sale on Beacon Hill that was gutted from a recent house fire and the price tag was still above $500,000. Fucking ridiculous. 

So the train went on and I arrived in Berlin. A clean sense of German efficiency and production welcomed me to a city I've always wanted to go to but was reserved from my last experience in the country. I visited Munich in 2009 and left underwhelmed. A lot of the monotony surfaced from the Bavarian capitol being so similar to Seattle. While charming in some areas, there wasn't much there to soak in. Buildings in Germany may look old, but due to the massive bombing sprees by the Allies during World War II left multiple cities in Yosemite Sam-esque smithereens, so a lot of the new structures were modeled like the old ones they were replacing, producing a physically large facade of well cultured and experienced history. Now that skyscrapers and institutions of all kinds have taken over the skyline, a vast array of steel and glass protects the financial energy generated by the city. 

The one building I did see that was rather impressive was the Reichstag. One thing Germany is good at is producing large, fast, and efficient things, and this building was the pinnacle of cultured design remaining in Berlin. The structure had been remodeled and damaged numerous times, once by a fire in 1933 under circumstances which are still unclear. It was heavily bombed during the war and it changed names, ownership, and governments depending on who was in charge of the country at the time. Today it features a large dome where you can walk up and experience the inside offices, possible bunkers, and architecture no longer produced by the industrial city. 

I walked a total of about six miles over the course of my afternoon in the city, and I was coming upon sights by complete accident. I had my map from the main train station to the Czech embassy conveniently located four hours from the Czech capitol, but I hadn't really marked out anything to see since I didn't have the time. I successfully turned on roaming on my phone, which is now incredibly amazing for travelers. It used to be that every time you went to a new country in the EU, you'd have to purchase a different SIM card. Today you can buy one and tell your phone you're abroad so it will work in other places aside from your home country. I was stuck in the Apple orchard while navigating down busy streets when I looked up and saw these concrete blocks that were incredibly geometric and particularly placed. An entire square remained void of any tall buildings but instead was just a sea of gray concrete. I've seen pictures of this sea numerous times and recognized it as the Holocaust memorial, even though I didn't realize I would be seeing it on this trip. It felt strange meandering through all of the columns and rows knowing I had a time constraint, otherwise I think I would have been there for much longer. I took some pictures while trying to avoid photographing others taking pictures, and spent maybe 15 minutes imagining the pure size of the systematic operation represented by these individual monoliths.

Auschwitz is the toughest place I've ever physically had to be. I had been to the extermination camp a few years ago on an incredibly gloomy day. The days were getting dark in the afternoon and the people in my tour group remained huddled together like somber penguins when traveling from building to building. The tour started off in Auschwitz I, the site of the main camp and administration. All of the brick buildings are still standing. The barbed wire still lines the perimeter. A skull and crossbones with the word HALT are still written on signs before the previously electrified fences. Many of the buildings house what was turned into the museum. These buildings are currently holding the displays of the many suitcases, shoes, eyeglasses, crutches and canes, and human hair collected by the Nazis upon selection. They had small chambers for caning prisoners and even smaller chambers for solitary confinement, dark closets with heavy doors to ensure light and sound were subdued. Trees still line the pathways and promenades in and around the buildings. If you hadn't gone under the iron gate reading ARBEIT MACHT FREI, you might think you were in a gated community of sorts, or a university campus. The buildings and history within them were well preserved within the brick and design of Auschwitz I, but Birkenau was a different story.

Birkenau, or Auschwitz II, was roughly two kilometers down the road from the main camp. You've probably recognized the main train entrance in movies like Schindler's List and Sophie's Choice. The building opened up into a massive field containing the foundations for barracks. Hundreds of them throughout what must have been two or three football fields. Wooden watchtowers ran parallel to the tracks where the selections took place. Like Auschwitz I, the perimeter was still lined with electric barbed wire fences with these ominous looking poles, as if out of an industrial revolution Dr. Seuss tale. Our tour group went down the train tracks and through a few of the barracks and latrines that remained standing. A lot of dark, quiet wood and damp concrete made up the majority of these lingering barracks while the rest are simply cracked rectangular foundations, many of them with chimneys.

Birkenau may be the largest place I've been to. It seemed to go on for miles, miles of plots and death. After my visit here, I didn't speak much for the rest of the day. I almost felt guilty even though my family had no direct lineage either to the victims or the war criminals orchestrating the events. I started having nightmares of the place. They were always in black and white and from a first person perspective. In one nightmare I was running along one of the perimeter fences. I was barefoot and I could hear my heavy breathing in my dream, like a manifestation of my adrenaline. There's a dog barking a ways behind me, and it sounds big and focused on my capture. The ground was muddy and I struggled to not fall or clutch the electric wires next to me to keep me from falling. My other nightmare was me simply sitting in what seemed like a paddock but for women. Again the ground was muddy and thick with recent rain, and a woman with a shaved head was sitting directly in the mud across from me. She cradled a child in her hands and looked at me with a severely sunken face. Her bone structure was gaunt and seemingly made of clay. She adjusted the child once or twice before turning her face away from me, but displaying the starkness of her skull. Thinking back on it, I don't normally talk about this experience in much detail, but I can't tell if the child was dead or alive.

After my visit to Auschwitz, I spent the next two days in bed at my Krakow hostel. Plans to pay someone to go into the woods and teach my friends and I how to shoot assault rifles and 357s were put on hold. We'd go out to dinner but we didn't really say anything about the experience. It was sort of like we all felt the same way but didn't address it. 

But the memorial in Berlin was much different. It was daytime underneath sunny blue skies and next to a main arterial with heavy traffic. You could hear traffic and sounds upcoming appointments and cell phone conversations and tourists attempting to find their next sight worth seeing. I didn't want to rush my time with the memorial, but I myself had somewhere to be, and it felt strange leaving the experience abruptly after having discovered it by accident.

The Czech embassy in Berlin looks like it is modeled after 2001: A Space Odyssey since it was clearly constructed during a time where modular angles, shapes, and space age architecture was the new hot aesthetic. Full of brown glass and brick, it looks like Andy Warhol constructed an egg carton in the middle of a city block surrounded by a very Soviet style looking concrete. I arrived in the main office and met my visa person along with five other American women who are on the same path to Czech citizenship as I am. It felt reassuring to know I wasn't alone in this journey and it gave me more confidence in my visa person, as well. My visa person, the person who I paid to avoid fucking up any paperwork or bureaucratic business completed by myself, explained I would have an interview in regards to my job history, academic background, qualifications or completed certifications, and the means I have to support myself within the country. I imagined this 45 minute job interview that I had accidentally worn a BOMBING FOR PEACE t-shirt to stressing me out, but instead, I filled out a questionnaire with similar questions, turned over my documents for my bank account, proof of accommodation, my Czech trade license, and then I signed a piece of paper confirming my visa person had translated the documents for me and that I understood what I was signing. It took no more than ten minutes, and in retrospect, the nine hours of travel time for ten minutes of paperwork seemed...uneven. So now, I wait. When my visa gets approved, hopefully 4-6 weeks from now, I'll return to Berlin to pick it up, or my visa person will pick it up and I'll meet her halfway to exchange confirmation that I can legally stay in the country for one year :) One year from now, I will go through a similar process that will take much longer, but will approve me for a stay of two years. 

I spoke with the other girls in the lobby for a bit while I waited for my phone to charge. That's something else I don't think I've mentioned: there are no outlets. Anywhere. Gone, goodbye, none. So when you see an outlet in a building that's available, you lunge for it like someone is dropping the Spirit Stick. I left my phone in a potted plant for a bit while getting to know the other girls and how they were adapting to life in the Czech Republic. They were mostly all based out of Prague and so we exchanged a lot of questions about what it's like living in a very touristy area versus a city whose focus shifted over to IT and manufacturing. I got my phone up to a non threatening battery percentage and left to go back to the main train station for my train(s) home. I found a McDonalds for food and also an available outlet for my phone, and hopped on the train back to Prague, where I'd have another three hours to kill before going home. It was snowing in Brno when I arrived. At 3am I waited for a night bus outside the train station and arrived home at almost 4pm. I don't sleep on trains well so at this point I had been up for about 40 hours. I opened my door and I had a very loud and adamant kitty waiting for me to get into bed so he could crawl under the covers and sleep with me, a habit both of us have come to like in the cold winter months. 

Most of my time in Brno has been a waiting game, a waiting game where if I win, I'll be able to get a job, spend money, and live above my means, one of the reasons I'm here. I still don't have a direct answer to why I moved here, and it's been for a lot of reasons. For some reason, expats from other nations are somewhat standoffish when they find out I'm from the US. "You're just here for the health insurance and the cost of living." Yeah, we all are, dude. I guess I had this idea that as a whole, expats are all in this together, but based on me being a diabetic American, that places me in a different category because my pancreas doesn't work which means I'm obviously mooching off the system. As I explained to these idiots online, nothing I'm doing is illegal. There's some confusion here on occasion because a lot of folks will use "immigrant" and "refugee" interchangeably. I, Liz Donehue, am not a refugee in a xenophobic sense of the word of the word being used by some people here. But I do see myself as an immigrant, a qualification that supposedly places me with the nations and religions the Czech people fear, or have been told to fear. I've tried to tell them they should be more concerned about white guys with guns, but that's neither here nor there. I guess I am taking seeking refuge, but not in the sense where my home country needs a drastic humanitarian overhaul from the neighboring nations. I mean we do, but hopefully that will change.

Overall, I'm happy. Christmas is coming up and the Christmas markets have exploded here. Authentic cider, ceramics, candles, jewelry, steins, wind chimes, children's toys, leather goods, knives, and all kinds of pastries, meats, cheeses, and holiday centric candy are available until December 25th. There's constant chatter about which European cities have the best Christmas markets, and from my understanding it's between Berlin, Vienna, and Zagreb. I'm hoping to check some more of these out while sipping some hot cocoa and people watching while trying to understand their native language. Usually this time of the year really bites for my family and I, but since I'm without family this year, I'm going to attempt to brighten the next few weeks with merriment typically unavailable during other parts of the year on my own. Ciao.

Note: photos were pulled from Google Images. 

I Am Human

I went into Arrival not knowing much about the movie. I knew it had something to do with Amy Adams and aliens, but I wasn't provided with any context until actually viewing the movie itself. On my 29th birthday, my mom and I ate dinner at Palace Kitchen and went to the AMC theater for this mysterious movie about pods that may or may not contain extraterrestrial life.

The film centers around Dr. Louise Banks, a linguistics professor who had previous translation experience with the military. After 12 pod shaped spacecrafts land all over the globe, there's a worldwide race to decipher the intentions of the pods: curiosity or destruction. Contact between us and the beyond was surrounded by language and the components that were necessary to communicate effectively. Do the aliens understand the concept of a question? How is their sentence structure comprised? Is syntax relevant? Does the written version of their language indicative of what sounds are produced?

I'm not going to do a WhOa SpOiLeR ALeRt!!!11 thing here because if you're interested in language at all, I've probably piqued your interest in seeing the film and I'm not going to ruin it for you, but I'll offer up some interesting ideas. The aliens communicated with Louise and her fellow researchers by using curls, swoops, splats, and twirls measured out in a circle called a logogram, and the team finally breaks through with one word: human. Eventually, after some test runs and estimations were successfully executed with minimal clues or prior knowledge, Dr. Banks is able to not only see the language, but is able to visualize the language through time. I don't mean "well she had an hour so she understood it after a while" time, but actual time.

Arrival made me cry a few different places. It's a rollercoaster when you least expect it to be, especially when walking into it not having any frame of reference for the plot. Today I have the logogram for "human" tattooed around my pulse on my left arm. A lot of people think it's some sort of significant coffee stain when really it's a great example of what it means to communicate, and if heptapods do invade the earth in the name of curiosity and things which cannot be expressed in what we know as an alphabet, at least I'll be tagged and bagged when they get here.

I'm a language nerd. I excelled in reading, writing, and spelling, even though I still have a tab open to Google just for typing words I'm nervous of spelling wrong (maintenance, privilege, and indigenous are among them). I'd like to think most people enjoy communicating effectively in their native language or another they picked up along the way. Most bilingual people I've talked with in the Czech Republic have brought up the subject of language, whether it's asking if I'm learning Czech or asking how difficult of a time I'm having learning Czech. English is now a much more common language throughout the country. Lots of old timers speak a second language, but it most likely isn't English. If you lived in Czechoslovakia before it went the way of film and the VHS, chances are you were speaking Czech, Slovak, German, or Russian since that whole "we're gonna occupy the fuck out of you" thing really took off in the 20th century.

I've been in the country for about three weeks, and I've only had to use "do you speak English?" maybe once every other day, most of the time with people over the age of 40. These Czechs are hardened Czechs, as in they've witnessed power exchanges multiple times throughout their lives and endured influxes of languages other than their own, which I'm sort of experiencing in reverse right now. Czech is supposed to be more stark and halting while Slovak is more sing-songy and whimsical. But for now, I just hear a bunch of hard consonants with murdery letters and sounds. They even made up their own "r," which is a combination of the letter itself and a bit of both "z" and "j."

I met Lenka under a clock near the popular tram stop of Česka. She sent me exact coordinates on Google Maps because the Czechs have this peculiar habit of making the current time very public on multiple surfaces, so some clarification was needed about which historical timekeeping monument I needed to find. Lenka is almost 40 but when it comes to her age, she's ambiguous. She could have given me any number of ages and I would have believed her. Her dyed auburn hair compliments the highlights in her face and doesn't wash her out like many women I've seen here. She carries herself well and speaks English with a British accent from spending time in London. A few weeks before I arrived in Brno, she contacted me on Facebook about wanting to find an "adventure buddy" for her nine-year-old daughter. She explained how she wanted to have her daughter exposed to more conversational and non-traditional English rather than what was taught in school for someone her age, which is usually a verb and its relative conjugations, trying to figure out which adjectives are placed before which noun, and a vast array of numbers which might as well all be the same. I was excited to take on my own language while analyzing and using it from a beginner's perspective. And I could finally put my fucking Creative Writing degree to use in a vocal sense and not just...on here. 

Lenka explained that not only do I just get to hang out with her daughter, Alžběta, but her current best friend whose status will undoubtedly change three or four times before high school. Alžběta (the Czech version of "Elizabeth") and her friend Miša (I now have a sticky note open on my computer with all of the relevant hats and reverse circumflexes for the alphabet) are extremely bubbly and act like nine-year-old girls do. They met me in front of a church across the street from their school. Both buildings are incredibly expansive and are complete with ornate architecture and pumpkins cut out of construction paper placed neatly in the windows for the fall season. 

Alžběta was holding a huge Czech/Slovak/English (Anglicky) dictionary from the 1970s. It was almost comical to see a young kid carrying around such a ridiculously thick book that could have easily been mistaken for Moby Dick or The Count of Monte Cristo. We greeted each other in limited English but I was really blown away with the amount of English they've already learned just from being taught in school, as in it wasn't just pointing at things and knowing the vocabulary. The two girls had complete thoughts and sentences in English and a lot of giggling in Czech.

My memories of language learning at a young age aren't great. The teacher I had as an elementary school student was extremely selective and active with her favoritism while teaching my class. I had an easy time learning Spanish and all of the words to "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" in a different language, but if any sort of enthusiasm or humorous contribution was made to the class, you were linguistically shunned and given the silent treatment in both languages. 

When I entered middle school, I discovered I was to take Latin for two years in order to prepare me for the life or death decision of taking French or Spanish through high school. While I couldn't exercise my learned Latin in every day situations, it was during this time I figured out that I was a visual learner. Even today I'm seeing it in action. If I go to the supermarket (not grocery store!) up the street from my flat, I can remember the labels of food after I see them accompanying the appropriate food. But if someone were to stop me mid aisle and say, "the Czech word for 'butter' is ‘maslo,'" I won't remember it at all. And after using this sentence, I'll always know the Czech word for "butter." 

Alžběta and Miša took me around the center of Brno to a few different stores and coffee shops they find interesting. I tried to ask them as many questions as I could without seeming like a hipster version of the foreign police. If I asked them something and they didn't know what I said, they would either ask me politely "again" or all three of us would stop and huddle around the giant dictionary while we tried to find a Czech word and it's English equivalent. Some of these words ended up being "music," "pathway," "take," "late," and "decaf." Technology ended up saving us a lot of time because we all defaulted to Google Translate. We used my phone to type and pass back and forth, but this process illuminated the difficulties and vagaries of the English language. Words such as "take," "go," "set," and "be" have many definitions so zeroing in on the exact one to translate a particular thought effectively can take some patience. There were a lot of guesses as to meanings and estimations on which phrases were actually intended to be a question. In a lot of ways, I felt like Dr. Banks with her new alien friends except I don't feel threatened and I know why they're here.

After a confusing amount of time, Lenka's daughter led me back to their flat on Rooseveltova, about a ten minute tram ride from my flat. Czech flats usually have what Minnesotans would refer to as a "mud room." There's an entirely different room you go in prior to entering the apartment that is meant for shoes and storage and a place to kick dirt and snow off of your boots, which I'm sure I'll be doing a lot of but it appears Seattle and Minneapolis both beat me to it. Their flat is homey and well lived in. There's a small loft for a bed above their living room and their ceilings are very tall. Large double insulated windows let a lot of light in so the need for indoor lighting was minimal, even after dark. 

Alžběta's room is the perfect nine-year-old girl room. She has a stack of books on her nightstand for bedtime stories. She has little pink boxes that I'm not even sure hold anything in them; they're just boxes meant for buttons or small things magpies would pick up. There are plenty of small stuffed animals on her bed. Everything in her room has a label (in Czech) for which items go where. She has a hook for her backpack, a perfectly made bed with polka dot sheets, and picture frames with bright flowers around the edges. Her shoes are perfectly aligned underneath her steel coatrack and her white curtains are somewhere between doily and fabric meant for an American Girl doll. 

Alžběta and I played Bejeweled, Merged!, and Angry Birds and I realized I could use games to help with her English so we may be spending a lot of time on tablets in the future. I'm going to be helping Miša out as well and I hope her and Alžběta don't find new best friends too quickly. At some point Alžběta messaged Lenka and asked if I could stay longer because "Liz is really cool and we like her," and I have my Monday afternoons blocked off until further notice. 

While I've been writing this, I found out today I have a brand new niece named Emily November Vekich. She was born this morning and she's already smiling. I lost my favorite aunt this week but gained a little bundle who will make the family incredibly happy. It's times like this where I wish I was home, just for a hug and a warm exchange. Facebook is stupid for a lot of reasons but it's helping me connect with people back home so it's acting as my temporary portal. I'm nine hours ahead of most people I know, which has made communication somewhat easy due to me keeping weirdo hours but it's made watching football on Sundays rather difficult. I guess I'm still adjusting but I feel at home, but not home home yet. And I'm doing better than most of my league in fantasy football and I'm not even in the country. Two thumbs up for this human right here.