Welcome to Frydek-Mistek!

I've seen so many amazing things in my life, sometimes I worry that I'll never be able to appreciate them all properly. Who thought I would get to do these things in my life? To eat pasta in Rome and email friends in Seoul. Even the ordinary day to day of my life as a teacher is made more exciting by the fact that I live abroad. I'm not just grocery shopping, I'm grocery shopping in Czech. All this can be rather exhausting, but in the end the challenge adds spice to my life. So, I'm going to try to be better about recording it all, so that later when I look back on it I'll have another chance to appriciate just how fantastic it's all been.

So, to begin, life in Frydek-Mistek.

yep, this is where I live. well, not on this nice hilltop or exactly on the train tracks, but you get a sense of the scenery.

pictured here is my desk at work (well, one of them. more on that later...) and below is my "commute".

In the morning, on my way to the IT School, I cross the river into Mistek. Walking across the bridge, seeing the mountains in the distance, I catch myself smiling even though its 8am and not an hour for civilized people to be awake. We'll see if my spirits remain high through the horrible cold and snow of winter here, but for now I'm grateful for the amazing scenery. I mean, look at this.

That would be the castle park (although a few benches in front of the old manor is probably a more accurate description) where I used to sit with my burcak and books when the afternoons were warmer.


 So, this is my town. For the moment.

 

We've got impressive old churches and unsightly communist housing blocs.

 

 


We've also got South Park graffiti....

   and sweet old ladies (whose only desire is to feed me cake and booze)

and just about everything in between.

more on the bounty of the only Czech city to have a hyphen in its name in my next post. look forward to it. ^^