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).

Oh Shit, How did this happen?

So, I’ve decided that my favorite pastime in life has to be getting myself in over my head. It has to be it, because I do it so damn often. All in all, things tend to work out in my favor and I forget that I was in over my head in the first place, but there are constantly those moments when I think…"oh shit, how did this happen?” For example, halfway through my first cross country race in high school, lungs screaming for air with no end in sight and looking up a 400 meter hill, I was in over my head. When the first cold front of winter happened in Pennsylvania my freshman year of college, I had already busted out my heaviest jacket, was still colder than I had ever been in my life, and I was told to expect it to drop another fifteen by the end of winter at least. Way over my head, and in need of a heavier jacket. Just this past semester when I took four upper level politics classes and a symbolic logic class (something I still for the life of my cannot explain), I was sitting there with forty-six pages of writing to get done, in not enough time, WAY over my head. Those are just the big ones that jump to mind. Oh…wait…of couse, the fact that I’m about to leave for the Czech Republic for a semester, and I don’t speak Czech, and I don’t know anything about the country (except for the 14 pages of writing I did last semester about its revolution away from communism, so I know its not communist anymore) and I don’t know if I will have anyone to run with, and I don’t know what the classes will be like, and I don’t know anything really, and most of the student website is in Czech, which once again, I don’t know. So. As I’m about to embark on this ridiculous adventure, I’m thinking, yet again, “oh shit, how did this happen?” I’m so in over my head, in a different language this time. However then I think about it, and I finished the race, and six years later am still running competitively. I survived the winter, with the help of a heavier jacket, and now exist fairly comfortably in the winter months, I can even walk on ice (debatably), and with a few sleepless nights, and more caffeine than I care to think about I finished the semester without too much damage to my GPA. I like to think at the end of the day, that these things also made me a better person, and I wouldn’t change those parts of my life for the world. Shmo said it best, any big decision, the person you are now might not want to do it but the person you’ll be two years from now will thank you for it. So I’m probably going to keep getting myself in way over my head, and keep being completely and totally thankful for it. So, while I may be wondering what the hell I’m going to do with myself in the Czech Republic, talk to me in two years, or even two days after I get back, I’ll be singing a totally different tune. But for now, this blog will serve to chronicle the many ways I will be getting myself in over my head over my semester in the Czech, or at the very least, keep everyone updated on my life while I'm gone. Speaking of that I head out on the 13th of February.