Sunday, August 26, 2001

Intro to Prague

Martin here, reporting from Prague. This is the first of my (hopefully) many newsletters I'll be sending out this year. I'd love to be able to send each of you personal emails, but it's not practical and this email alone will cost me the American equivilent of 3 dollars to send. Our internet connection at the school has not yet been hooked up so until it is email will remain expensive.

Many of you have been placed on my mailing list without permission, so if you'd rather not receive updates as to my progress here then let me know and I'll be glad to remove you from the list. I'm assuming, however, that most of you will find some interest in what my life is like over here. Also, my mailing list is incomplete at this point, so if you are a friend of a friend of mine who is not on the list, then please forward this email to them. I will have time later to finish the task of entering everyone's email addresses into my list. This newsletter will be equivalent to a journal of sorts, so you'll also be reading my philosophical ponderings upon various topics. Hopefully most of these will not bore you all tremendously.

For those who might not know what I'm up to now, I'm spending the next year teaching English in Praha (Prague), Czech Republic. I arrived here last Thursday, and am already enjoying it immensely. Jerry and I flew in from Atlanta. Upon arriving in the airport in Prague, after a layover in Amsterdam, we came through customs at which point I realized my passport was in my carry-on bag that I had been forced to check upon boarding the plane from Amsterdam. This was a problem due to the fact that I could not get my baggage until my passport had been checked. So I had to wait for around 30 minutes while Jerry went through customs and retrieved my carry-on and passport so I could enter the country. It was good to have a travelling partner, needless to say.

After that we endured a whirlwind ride through the city with the daughter of the school's director to our hotel where we'll be staying for the next year. It is called Hotel Dum (pronounced Doom), which means Hotel House. The accomodations are not bad, and it's more like an apartment than a hotel. We have a grocery store directly in front of the hotel, so food is very easy to acquire. I'll write more about it (food) later, as well as more about general things in the city, but I must go now.

I ask that you all keep me in your prayers, and would love to hear from anyone who desires to write me. I will definitely reply personally once the school's connection is running, and email becomes free.