Every fairy story needs a forest. It’s the untamed space, the protector of all possibilities and impossibilities. In Bohemia you really can ride through the forest and happen upon a castle; in spring every forest is enchanted. Birds, flowers, and hundreds of shades of green let you lose yourself, forgive the world a little for …
The Christmas holidays are long gone but I’d like to share a little about living with nuns. They really are great people, full of lovingkindness and mercy unto the stranger and alien among you and all sorts of virtuous stuff you only find in a King James Old Testament. I’m quite moved by how they …
At my first Toastmasters meeting a few weeks ago, I was asked to give an impromptu Table Topics speech as if addressing a personified version of my native country. Sappy as it all sounds, I was surprised to find I had quite a lot to say: Dear America They say that distance makes the heart …
Carnival doesn’t make any sense to me. It seems like the Catholic holiday for celebrating sin: if we have to be somber and penitent for 40 days we might as well throw a seriously secular party beforehand. Since most Czechs aren’t religious, they don’t recognize Lent or Carnival, but a Catholic school in an atheist …
Chipmunks are widely recognized among Czech teens as “the Hollywood animal.” Nowhere to be found in the Czech Republic, and too ubiquitous in America to acquire much zoological or cultural significance, their only blitz onto the international scene has been through striking cinematic performances. One never sees a film chipmunk casually munching acorns in a …
Wednesday was Liberation Day here in Czech, celebrating the end of World War II in Europe. The Czechs are not especially patriotic people, so there was no parade or any sort of pomp and circumstance. Perhaps end of war and start of communism make this particular victory somewhat less sweet for the Czechs. However, it …
[weaver_youtube http://youtu.be/SDOnrPjt6KU sd=0 percent=100 ratio=.5625 center=1 rel=0 https=0 privacy=0 showinfo=0] Maybe you’ve wondered what life is like as a Fulbright ETA but your attention span demands song and pictures and anecdotes of cumulatively no more than five minutes. Well today is your lucky day. For our Fulbright midyear conference, we were asked to prepare a …
I wrote this at the beginning of September, shortly after arriving in the Czech Republic. It seemed a little angsty to post at the time, but it’s interesting to read now. Maybe not everyone works like this, but it’s a pretty nice sketch of what happens to me when I uproot and start settling into …
I am rather ashamed of my blog sometimes. I write infrequently, I forget to take pictures, and the ones I do take rarely show up in my posts. In three months here, I have not given my followers much to look at. Now I get to brag about my students. My sixth graders have started …
Thanksgiving might be my favorite time to be an American. I can feel the MLK Day spirit, I get choked up at the national anthem on Independence Day, but how wonderful that before all this, before the United States of America was even a gleam in the Founding Fathers’ eye, there was a celebration for …