Another life's goal to be fulfilled...

Yesssss! My public pleadings for Jessica to update her blog more often have been heeded. Or so she tells me. I can expect more from you now can I? Well, since you've kept your end of the bargain, I guess I can keep mine. So, I must announce to everybody that Jessica's flight is booked to Prague in February. Not just Jessica's, but also her friend Mandy's. So I'll have two ladies living out of my flat for a week in February. Let's up the ante a bit shall we? I'm also expecting a visit from my friend Murray Vanwyk during that same week. So four of us in the bachelor pad...plus Nikola makes five. Cooool. Actually, it is cool because Murray wants to teach here next year, and if he's lucky, then he just might be able to work at the same school as me next year, and live right across the hallway.

So, what major has happened in the past few weeks? Well, I went down to Moravia with Nikola, Tom, and Eva, for the Hody festival. More wine (both white and red) and slivovice for everyone. Plus we gathered walnuts and I saw the rabbit hutch (there used to be 40 rabbits-now there are 5...can you guess what they've been eating a lot of over the years?).

Last weekend I went with Nikola and her Mom to meet her uncle and aunt. Nice people both, but alas, my Czech is still limited. It's a difficult language right from the beginning of learning it, whereas English is easy to pick up, but gets progressively more difficult through the advanced lessons. Czech, I think, is probably the opposite. The system of grammar is so difficult, with different gendered nouns, complex verb conjugations, gendered adjectives, case senstive pronouns, and case sensitive nouns. As well, there are seven cases in Czech: nominitive (who, or what is it?); genitive (who does it belong to, or where does it come from?); dative (to indicate indirect objects); accusative (to indicate direct objects--usually); locative (where is it located? 'where is it going?' is answered with the accusative case); vocative (strictly used for calling somebody, or something. Thus, 'Jeff!' becomes 'Jeffe!'); and finally, instrumental (how something is done, or whom it is done with). If it sounds like I know a lot about Czech, I don't. I'm getting there, but I still don't. The good news is, once I've become more or less communicative in Czech, sooooo many other languages open themselves up to me, and will be easier to learn. I hope.

And finally, I'm going to be fulfilling one of my life's goals next week. I'm going to travel over to France and attend the Remembrance Day ceremony at Juno Beach in Normandy. Juno Beach is the beach that France gave to Canada in appreciation of the Canadian contribution of soldiers during WWII and D-Day. This became one of my life goals about three years ago, when I was speaking to my friend Heather Johnson, who had attended one several years before. They have a nice museum there too, so it will be a whole day's event on the Saturday. And of course I'll be taking the time to spend a few days in Paris as well. I'll be staying with a girl named Andrea who I met just before coming back to Canada this past summer, during my weekend in Prague with Sarah and Irish Tim. She was all by herself in Prague for the weekend, so we invited her to spend the weekend partying with us; as a return favour she gave us her address in Paris and cellphone number and offered to return the favour. Get this: her flat is right on St. Germaine street. Right in the centre of everything. Too cool! I'll get some pictures up of that for sure.

In the meantime, here are two pics that I like for your viewing pleasure:

The long awaited photo of me and Violet. This was about six weeks ago. It snowed today.

From about two weeks ago, this is a gorgeous shot of where the River Labe and the River Orlice meet in Hradec Kralove. You can just make out the White Tower from the Old Town Square in between the trees.