Living in the Czech Republic, not speaking the language, but sharing an apartment with an American teacher was a liberating but strange experience. Inevitably we fell into the habit of drinking 5 strong pints of Czech beer a night, then attempting to face a class of Czech students the following day.
The beer wasn't too bad, the problem came when people insisted on buying us spirits!
This continued unabated for the best part of six months. I may be exaggerating, I can't remember because part of my brain is still addled from the experience.
I even started writing a semi-autobiographical novel about it. This was variously entitled the Devonic Verses, or a Slow Train to....( either Postrelmov, Bruntal, or somewhere else; somewhere that didn't have a train station would be poignant.) The Slow Train novel would be a mixture of the train journey, and reminiscences of mine on our time there.
A great memory was spending the time writing various lists like 10 Reasons to be an Accountant, or 10 Reasons Why Computers Stink. This would make a good website on its own. Create loads of these nonsensical and comical lists & put it online. You could have so much available for free, then password protect the rest-- people would have to pay so much a month to access. Or, instead of paying to access it they could give you their email address.
Probably best to keep it free because there's probably other sites like this online, and if you ask them to pay they may just go elsewhere.
This was all written in a hard back A4 book, along with a draft of the Devonic Verses. When we left Bruntal to return home this book was left in our "apartment".
(to be continued...)
1 comment:
So would I. It could be at the back of a cupboard underneath all the board games that English teachers play. Some expat teachers in Bruntal have flicked through it and added their own comments to the book.
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