September 12

It's difficult to know where to begin with this one.  I've been in Prague for about two weeks, and I want to tell you everything about everything (the city, the school, the flat, the war with the pigeons at the flat).  But let's see how far I get.

The city is just as beautiful as I heard it would be.  On my first day here, I saw many of the big tourist spots downtown with my roommate Caleb, who taught here last year and knows his way around.  We went to Wenceslas Square, Old Town Square (featuring the Jan Hus monument, the astronomical clock, and tourists from dozens of countries staring at the astronomical clock waiting for it to chime the hour) and the Charles Bridge.  And I have been to each of them at least a few times since, so I have been able to appreciate them much more than I could on the first day in my jet lag-induced stupor.

Our flat is on the sixth floor of an apartment building in Prague 10, which is in the southeast part of town.  The view looks out onto a square, Cechovo Namesti, where there is a large modern church with a yellow cross (which lights up at night) on the tower and bells that chime every hour.  But there is no rhyme or reason to the amount of chimes, and I have yet to hear it chime the actual hour that it is.  At six p.m. it sometimes chimes for about five minutes straight.

The school, Gymnazium Nad Aleji, is in Prague 6, in the northwest part of town.  It takes me about an hour to get there by tram in the morning, but I'm hoping that the commute will be lessened when the metro begins running again.  Until then, it's pleasant to do a lot of reading along the way.  Classes start on Monday the 16th.  I'll discuss the school more later.

We've had a few problems with pigeons at the flat, but it was mostly one pigeon, and I think he's dead now.  Maybe I'll discuss that one later, too, once time has given me a better perspective on the incident.

Last night, several of us met at the school to have a Bible study and a time of prayer about September 11.  I was glad to be away from America on the anniversary of it; the constant media attention there might have made me cynical.  Here, while I did listen to some coverage of memorial services in New York on the BBC, I was blessedly removed from it all and allowed to think soberly about our world and what it has done to itself.