Vizum!

So excellent news to report. Today I officially received my visa (vizum, knock that up to 3 czech words I know now!) to study in the Czech Republic. After the long process of collecting letter that say I'm not a criminal, I have a place to live, I have insurance, I'm not a hinderance to society, copies of passports, birth certificates, you name it. Followed by a few weeks of waiting. It's official now. I"m going to the Czech!

Lesson Learned: University Bureaucracies are so much worse when you’re dealing with them in another language.

So I’m not even in the Czech and I am already in over my head. I have spent the last two days (in between driving my sister around and doing yard duty at St. Pat’s for my mother) trying to put down my housing deposit for the University. Well, as simple as that sounds it was actually quite complicated for me. It started out when I got an email from the director of the program reminding us all that it was due by the 10th, I may or may not have forgotten it existed. Anyway, I go and log onto the student website, which is actually much harder than it sounds. First, I have to type out the whole web address because these Czech’s can’t seem to figure out hyperlinks. So once I do that I spent about half an hour trying to actually log into the site. That particular issue may have been stupidity on my part since I spent most of the time inputting passwords that I normally use only to eventually find out I never changed it since I couldn’t figure out how exactly to do that the last (and only other) time I logged into this site. So, I’m on the site, I find the place to put down the deposit, I get all the way to completing to order only to find that I need a SUPO account to put down the deposit. I had no fucking idea what a SUPO account was, where to get one, or why I even needed one. After searching through old emails I eventually found the steps for that got it done. By the way, they like to pretend these sites are all in English, there are still a lot of necessary things that are in Czech. I eventually got it all taken care of though there wa a valuable lesson learned: University Bureaucracies are so much worse when you’re dealing with them in another language.
On a brighter note, I now have my first Czech friend. The Univeristy sets the internationals up with a “tutor” basically an assigned friend to help you assimilate and get around Brno. So Josef, my tutor emailed me today and we are now officially facebook friends and I’m already bugging him about what I need to do for registration. I am sensing Josef and I are going to become very close.
On yet another side note, my mother informs me that I’m not actually very clear about where I’m going. She seems to think people are not very well versed in Eastern European geography, particularly Czech geography. While I informed her she was obviously misguided, she was insistent and I find life is easier when my mother thinks I think she’s right. So I will be in Brno, the second biggest city in the Czech, (more information included in this handy Wikipedia link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brno) studying at Masaryk University. Also the Czech is next to Germany and Poland, which is a piece of information both my mother and I had to look up after I decided to go there (see map).