Arrival:
We arrived at Prague airport very late in the evening, gathered our suitcases from the baggage claim, and went to go find the taxi stand that we were instructed to go to. This was a very simple process, everything that we needed to do was sent to us in very clear instructions before we left the United States. From the Prague airport, we got into a taxi who took us to the hotel Pivovar where there was an employee of TEFL Worldwide waiting for us to show us how to pay for our student housing and then take us there. He was very friendly, he showed us how to get to a few places around our house. for when we woke up, and also how to walk to the school which we would need to do for our orientation. We went straight to sleep as it was 1 am and we knew we needed to combat jet-lag head-on by sleeping when we were supposed to and going out to explore in the morning.
Day 1:
I woke up at 6 am and decided to unpack everything so we could easily find it when we needed it. The night before when we were shown our apartment we met one of our fellow TEFL students and got her contact information, so I messaged her and asked if she wanted to go to old town and explore with us. While we waited for it to be a decent hour to be awake, Jon and I decided we should go to the store and try to get some groceries for our house. At this point, we had not actually eaten in about 24 hours.
So we walked to the store and got just a few things, when we went to checkout we learned, the hard way, that you need to purchase your bags in Prague. We had no idea and the cashier didn’t speak English so she couldn’t tell us. We ended up walking home with our arms full of groceries up a giant hill. By this time our friend had gotten back to us so we all headed to old town and explored for a very long time, everything that is in the main town square we covered and even went into one of the towers on Charles Bridge. We went back to the villa, made some frozen pizza and called it a night early.
Day 2:
Jon and I had been pretty active in the TEFL Facebook group which allowed us to chat with our fellow TEFL students. One person had asked what everyone was doing on this fine day (it was the Saturday before our class started). I suggested we all meet up in the Metro and head to the castle as that was something I wanted to do but did not get a chance to the day before. Everyone agreed, while it wasn’t the whole class that came, we had about 12 of us all together and the friendships we established on that day took us all the way through our course.
We were able to see the Castle, St. Vitus Cathedral, walk over Charles Bridge, and we went to a cute little Italian place that had a great balcony. We also drank. We drank quite a bit, from Becherovka to Absinthe to Pivo, it was a great day overall. This group definitely had a lot in common, and spoiler alert I live with five of them right now!
