New Apartment

Nearly a week ago, we moved into a new apartment with our roommate. After what felt like weeks and weeks of apartment hunting and planning we were down to the last 12 hours before we needed to move out of our old apartment. Stress levels were high and none of us felt like staying in a dingy hostel with all our lifelong belongings nestled under the bed of some stranger. We managed to view a beautiful apartment in an area called Liben, in Prague 9 with fantastic access to the city by both trams and metro. This was at 5pm on the night before we all had to leave our respective apartments - so maybe decisions were slightly rushed but we weren't waiting around to find another option. We took it there and then! We moved in the next morning and were delighted to find cable t.v, internet AND a microwave. Doesn't get much better than this for the poor and desperate English Teacher :)

One thing to note about Prague is that until 1989, it was still under Communist ruling. Therefore the only languages that were taught were German or another Slovak language. English is not widely spoken, especially among the older generation (where there is next to none spoken). So, a bonus of our new apartment block was the "24 hour security". This consists of a rotational shift of 80 year old men who 90% of the time are asleep in their security room and the other 10% of the time are interrogating us (in Czech). I don't think we have earned their trust yet. It didn't help that upon moving in, Jon and I were stopped with our bags by one of the security 'officers' who begun questioning us and to this day I don't know what he was saying. We had to call our real estate agent and ask her to please speak to him! At least you can't say things are dull here, there is always something entertaining going on.