Praha, Pivo, Prosim

My apologies about the smallness of the above video–it’s something I’m going to work on for future uploads. I had one hell of a time resizing it to something that wouldn’t take 4 days to upload. I’m a newbie at posting video this way. 

 Sorry, I don’t have any interesting food items to report eating today. Well, ok I retract that statement. But nothing in the realm of the horrible pork liver/hot dog food soup….

There is a bakery practically at the front door of the building so I went this down this morning. Since I still know squat as far as communicating in Czech, all I can do is point to what I want and say please (PROSIM). The pastry I purchased looked similar to some kind of Boston Creme or domestic US donut. It was small, fried, round, and topped with chocolate. The fried and chocolate covered parts are good enough for me. Alas, this was not really a ‘donut’ as a) it didn’t have a hole nor b) did it have some kind of custard or creamy filling. The chocolate top however, was delicious but it was rather unlike a chocolate topped donut that we are used to in the states. This chocolate was more ‘real’ and less from a ‘jar’ tasting. When the pastry was made, it was clearly dipped in melted chocolate and then the chocolate set. When I ate it, the chocolate crumbled off into bits. Oh and I forgot–the lovely woman at the bakery also sprinkled coconut on top, too. Hooray! I paid 10Kc for this. About a fifty cents. Nice!

Obervation–Czechs really love their chocolates and candies. Stores seem to have rather large displays of sweets–especially considering the size of the stores. To give an idea, I’d say a regular potraviny is about the same size as a gas station mini mart.

Oh, and yesterday at a Tesco Express, I bought a Milka brand chocolate bar. It was strawberry yogurt flavored. Not necessarily being one who goes through hoops for strawberries (I like them just fine), I thought I’d try it out. The actual chocolate bar part was rather standard but it had a kind of filling (not runny) that was the strawberry yogurt. It was actually quite good.

Tonight, I did just go to a (of many) corner POTRAVINY to buy some cheap local beer. I paid 43.90Kc for two so feel free to run that through any currency converter. Good deal. Shopping tip: lots of times you need to bring your own bags to the potraviny as many shops will charge for the bags.

Today, we got a mini Czech lesson–the typical introduction type stuff–Hello-My name is…–What is your name… etc. It’s hard to wrap your mind around alternate sounds for letters that essentially look the same as what you see in your native tongue. There are some accent marks that just make funny sounds and other ‘normal’ looking letters sound completely different. It’s gonna be a doozy!

Tomorrow, we do our first official (partial) lesson to ‘real’ students. Granted, these students pretty much get free lessons but nonetheless I just have to give out a big AHHH! I’ve even gone so far as to script what I’ll do for the short period I’m up there. Shit.