November...

Today is Thursday, 17 November, the anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, when Czechoslovakia broke from Communism. I'll probably seek to better inform myself about the event...later... Last night one of my students told me about her memory of it..being at school and people running in shouting about a revolution, but of course she thought it couldn't be true. But it was true, and the next day she was standing in the square, shaking her keys with masses of others.

I'm watching the 19:00 news as I write this. I understand about 2% of the words, but with the images I can gather maybe 30% of the general idea. Right now it says, "Pozor na smog! česi varujú, Slováci zatiel' nie." Something about smog and the Czech people being warned but not the Slovak people? (Thanks Google translate) But I wonder if their word for fog  is our word for smog.  Because this isn't really smog season, but the fog has been really remarkable! Last night it was so thick I could almost feel it touching my eyeballs. It was like walking through a cloud.

There was another story on the news about delinquents doing jogy (yoga) and art...
And I think maybe a rhinoceros escaped from the zoo in Prague because they kept flipping between footage of rhinos, and footage of police officers in yellow vests.
But my favorite so far was when they were talking about their paneláki (boxes of flats). They showed some older ones and some newer ones, and some that look really worn out with cracks in the sides. And the lady reporting from the street outside the flats looked so BORED. I couldn't help but laugh during her report. I imagined her to be saying, "People have been living in these things for a long time, but we're starting to realize that they're actually really old and ugly-looking. To care for this problem, the facades are going to be refinished and painted with bright colors and geometric designs." (..because that's what they seem to do when they refinish buildings here..)

Well, it seems my life must be getting pretty hum-drum if all I can think of to write about is what's on the news. All I do lately is go to work, hang out with friends, read books.. normal things, you know?

Oh! I just thought of something interesting!  This week I got a ride to work from my housemate's stepdad, Vladko. We don't share a common language yet, but it was really nice of him to offer me a ride as we were both leaving our housing area. I'm guessing he was offering me a ride from the hand motions... So I got in the car and expected he would just take me up the street to the bus stop, but we got to the bus stop and he didn't stop to let me out there, so I had to assume he would drive me all the way to work or hopefully somewhere nearby. It's funny because there weren't many moments of silence as we were in the car together, but I can't tell you what we were talking about. Mostly he was saying things and I was thinking really hard about what he could be saying, and repeating what I thought were the "key words" to practice my pronunciation, or at least feel like I was contributing something. When there was some silence, I constructed what was probably my most complex sentence yet, "Vite kde je moj školu?" There's no doubt in my mind that the sentence contains some grammatical errors, but I was trying to ask, "Do you know where my school is?" I think he understood because he said, "Nie" (meaning, "no"). So I had to "give directions" in Slovak, but actually I can't do that at all, and he had already turned off the main road and was driving in some area that I'm not familiar with. So I gave him some street names and tried to keep track of which way we came from in case I needed to backtrack by foot. But soon enough we came to a place I recognized and I was able to gesture out my idea of a logical path with the use of some spare words, and he eventually let me off immediately behind the building where I work. Whew!