"Čas Jsou Peníze"

(Translation: "Time Is Money")

There are several different meanings to the title of my post, but I feel like it ties together the last few days pretty well.

"Čas jsou peníze" happens to be one of my Czech teacher's favorite phrases. Along with "To je fajn," ("It is fine"), we hear this at least ten times a class. I will probably forget what I learn in these classes within the next year, but those phrases will always stay with me. It terms of learning the language, it is much harder than I had expected. Czech is a very fair language-it seems to me that most words were a lottery and they just picked letters out of a hat to form words. Never have I seem a language that uses letters like "k," "z," and "j" with such frequency. Take for example the word for ice cream: zmrzlina. Who would choose to put that many consonants in a row? Sometimes all you can do when you see a word is to laugh.

Now that only dealt with the complexities of pronunciation. Grammar is a whole 'nother obstacle. As much as it kills me to admit it, but the grammar lessons that I learned from a certain, um, interesting elementary school teacher have actually come in handy. As a Slovak language Czech has cases of the nouns. That means that even though "Prague" in Czech is "Praha," if it is the direct object of the sentence it becomes "Prahu." (If you don't get it, don't feel bad-neither did half the class.) Thanks to that teacher I know my parts of speech, so that has made it easier, but it doesn't mean it has made it easy. I know it seems like I don't enjoy learning Czech, but I really do. The challenge is fun, and I like learning a language again.

"Čas jsou peníze" can also apply to my outside of class activities. I have Czech class from 1:45-6:30 everyday, but we don't really get much homework aside from writing a few sentences. This means that I have PLENTY OF FREE TIME! I love it. Like I said before, there is so much to do here that there is no problem filling that time. However, filling that time is taking a significant chunk out of my bank account!

The last few days have been jam packed but enjoyable. When I got back from Cesky Raj we found the bar that played the Pats game. Not much good to say about the game, BUT I happened to run into Jenny at the bar, so that was a great surprise! It was also a bit nice to hear a lot of English after a weekend in Cesky Raj where no one knew English. Anyway, Monday was busy. Karen and I ran a bunch of errands before class and then we had a meeting afterward. Today was somewhat of an errand filled day as well, but tonight we went to a cinema downtown and saw the Indie film Cold Souls starring Paul Giamatti. The movie itself was pretty interesting, but the most interesting part had to have been the fact that the movie was in English with Czech subtitles. It was fun to realize that I actually recognized a lot of the words, and my Czech progress was definitely put to the test when we realized that the parts of the film in which they spoke Russian, where we would have normally read English subtitles, had the same subtitles in Czech. Therefore, small parts of the movie may have been lost on me, but my limited Czech ability did allow me to catch some pieces of those parts.

As a final note, I would just like to point out the fact that my post that drew the most comments had to do with bodily functions. Nice to see that the family has lots to say about that :) Thanks for the comments, and to reassure those that may have been worried, my roommate made a crucial purchase today:

(Don't adjust your monitors; yes, it is pink.)

Problem resolved. And just like I learned on the flight over, these minor problems can be very managable.

Pictures from my weekend in Bohemian Paradise coming soon!