“What people are bad robot.” That’s a translation we came up with tonight while studying Czech. It’s also about as clear as we are on this new language.
Tomorrow we’ll have our second formal Czech lesson and Jitka (our teacher) got us our new books and gave us a little homework. Czech is not easy. There’s no doubt in my mind about that. Just the basic greetings and salutations can be enough to make my head spin right now. There is a lot of formality to the greetings when you’re talking to someone you don’t know and if you use the informal and not the formal you can offend, so that’s a little tricky. I guess we’ll just have to take it step by step. See what I did there?
Even though there are no words, the IKEA instructions can sometimes be like learning a new language. I began building our wardrobe today and I’m just not in the groove of building IKEA furniture…yet. I messed up one hole and hammered something I wasn’t supposed to so I was little frustrated. In the end, I think I’ve got it right but I’m only half done. There’s another section to build and then I have to put the doors on. Hopefully I’ll have time this weekend to finish it off.
I’ve begun working a bit here in the Josiah Venture office and at home. My team (Creative Communications) has some big projects coming up and I’ve been helping with the discussions and starting to take a more active role. It’s been good to start slow here and get back to normalcy before diving head first, but I’m excited to get some projects going while we’re moving in and learning language.
Bethany made cookies tonight, but as she was about to put them in the oven I heard, “Oh no…” from the kitchen. Then I said, “What’s wrong?” Bethany replied sadly, “My cookie sheets don’t fit in the oven.” Welcome to Europe. Our tiny little oven/stove just doesn’t cut it with these big cookie sheets. Thankfully the oven has a few other sheets included with it so Bethany cleaned them and we used those. We got some great cookies, but I’m guessing we’ll probably have to get some cookie sheets that actually fit. Here’s a fun fact about Czech: you can’t really buy chocolate chips. Bethany brought a huge Costco size bag of them here, but if you want to make chocolate chip cookies without importing, you need to cut the chocolate chips up yourself! Oh the humanity!
I feel bad for Titus sometimes. These photos (above) kind of symbolize a little bit how his life is right now: upside down. Yesterday he said, “Dad, I want to go to In-N-Out.” Sorry, pal. Then tonight he said, “We go swimming there?” in reference to our friend’s house in California. Can’t do that either, buddy. I know this probably isn’t as hard on him as I think it is, but I also know that he understands our life is much different than it was before. We’re trying real hard to explain things to him like taking off your shoes when you enter someone’s house (cultural thing in Czech), and it’s going pretty well. It’s just weird for me to be experiencing the change with him and not having the experience ahead of him. I guess it’s like language learning–we’ll just have to take it one step at a time.
One response to ““What people are bad robot””
Titus: “Dad, I want to go to In-N-Out.” Sorry, pal. That’s a little far for dinner: http://t.co/hPVYzNCvIH