I've stayed in two consecutive nights, and I consider that an accomplishment. Prague is the drain to my life as I used to know it. But at least I can still string together mildly comprehensible english sentences right?
I'll tell you what kind of comprehensible sentences I can't string together, and those are Czech sentences. I royally fucked up my second Czech quiz today, and I was ashamed until I remembered that even the internationally respected academic father of a kid that I went to school with 10 years ago and who presided over a university in Prague for 6 of the past 10 years explicitly told me to give up on learning Czech before trying. Thank you, Mr. Joe Drew, for consistently making me feel better about myself over the past three weeks.
After I foofed that quiz, I ventured up the hill to the CIEE study center for some self-management activity. I'm not sure if it's because I'm getting unforgivably slammed 5 nights a week or its because I'm trying to handle biz in a place that is inherently foreign to me, but the self-management I usually breeze through in NYC is getting exponentially more daunting by the minute here in Eastern Europe. And I haven't even smoked any weed yet.
But I handled biz despite the pressure. I'm now officially enrolled in two EU economics classes, and 3 FAMU (Prague Film School) classes. Let it be known that I am so god damn giddy about these film classes. I haven't been this excited and apprehensive about school since the night before my first day of K-1 when my little, curly-haired ass stayed up past 10p feverishly fantasizing about what this "school" thing could possibly be like (needless to say I was serverely disappointed, although 14 years later I still have a crush on Ms. Mahoney).
I'm taking "Producer's Craft," "Editing - The Realm of Montage" ("Show a lotta things hap'nin at once, remind everyone of what's goin' on..."), and "Introduction to Soundtrack." I have no idea what to expect --someone sorta famous (David Carr) told me that he thought the CIEE-FAMU curriculum was bullshit -- but I will provide detailed updates as they develop.
In other news, I STILL HAVEN'T GOTTEN MY FUCKING DEBIT CARD. Are you serious, TD Bank? Standard Mail my fucking ass. I know you duct-taped my new debit card to 97-year-old Phillipino sex-slave and told her to start swimming. It's been FIFTEEN DAYS since I've had access to my bank account. I'm starting to lose friends over this shit.
I'm gonna eat stawberry yogurt and paper towels for only so much longer before I report your slow-asses for only hiring semi-attractive, pretty-incompetant, very-below-the-legal-age-of-employment Puerto Rican girls to man the front desk at your Fordham Road branch. I bet if I talk to Fox 5 first your asses are grasses.
But I've got way too much self-management to focus on before I can make any more 2 dollar-a-minute phone calls to 1-800 numbers in the US. Let me divulge here for a moment and explain what's been going on with my cellular status these past three weeks.
In March, when my father proposed our family swap our reliable Verizon cellphone service for T-Mobile because they had a good promotion going on and T-mobile is rampantly established in Europe, I was almost totally on-board. Plus they carried the bold, which I currently own and which is still a fantastic little piece of personal-communication-technology. My beloved father and I spent 3 hours at T-Mobile Chevy Chase with Jose the eager, frost-tipped sales clerk before we finalized our contract and walked out of the mally-smelling mall feeling consumer-victorious. That's because Jose-the-yes-man with gelled hair (I'm actually not stereotyping here. Even though the majority of cellular-phone distributors in the US predominantly employ latino dudes with gelled hair, this particular gelled-out, latino employee was actually named Jose), told me, verbatim, that I would be able to bring my Blackberry to the Czech republic, go to a T-Mobile location, and, "no problem" set my phone up for the exact same capability and cost I was accustomed to in the states.
Well Jose, you were wrong. There have been innumerable problems. You could have told me the moon was made of fucking cheese and it would have been more of a truth than what you talked out of your ass that fateful day in March. Not only does nobody at the T-Mobile Prague location speak any english, but apparently there are set-in-stone rules that explicitly forbid any T-Mobile American plans from having any applicability in the Czech Republic.
When I arrived, working off of Jose's good word, I made a stubborn point of not taking advantage of any of the CIEE loaner phones and instead waiting two days until I got clear directions to a T-Mobile hotspot, where I ventured with two peers at our earliest convenience. Between the 3 of us, it took 140 minutes to surmount the language barrier and discover that American Blackberrys cannot, in fact, be used as fully-functional smart-phone devices in Prague.
So I bit the bullet and stuck a T-Mobile CZ sim card into my shit and used my Blackberry as just a voice/text machine for the first two weeks here. No BBM, no browser, no email, no twitter, not even fucking competative-online soduku. Just the meat and potatoes of the mobile device family. And you wanna know what those meats and potatoes cost me over the course of 14 days? 3600 crown. That's roughly $180 (drop a zero, divide by 2), and that's a positively ludacris amount of money to spend on half a month's worth of cell-phone use. Granted, I made a couple calls to the states, and I'm a dumbass for doing that, but still. (In case no one has picked up on it, this is lesson #3)
It doesn't seem unreasonable to me that my Blackberry couldn't just work in another country. Time travel, teleporting, playing in the NBA, not staining something every time I wear it -- I've accepted all of these things as impossible farces that will not ever be achieved in my lifetime (though if I hit the gym hard for a year and work on my mid-range game, I think I'd have an outside shot at the league). But free-trade international phone use? That seems like a pretty achievable thing to me. But one man's achievment is another Czech entreprenuer's goldmine. Any whoever it was that milked me for $180 of prepaid cell phone credit during the first 14 days of my sojourn here, touche (and fuck you).
Two days ago I finally set my shit right and activated an international data plan (to all future study abroadee's, I beseech you to do this before you leave). Now I can BBM, but it might be costing me the proverbial arm and leg. We'll see when the bill comes.
pin: 21BB3101.
Holla atcha boi.
Also, I am indescribably jealous of anyone that got to the hip hop pantheon show at yankee stadium this past week. Who the fuck put that together, and does he need someone to get him coffee and compliments next spring?
Czech out a dope cover of "Seven Nation Army" by Ben l'Oncle Soul. Great tune, and I really like this dude's style.
Martin
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