Days of Exploration and Rest

Home sweet home

Wednesday, I decided to take a day of rest after my bike crash. I stayed home and got up around 8am. I got myself some breakfast and thought about what to do with my day. I thought it would be fun to see how long it would take me to walk every street to the boundaries of Lukovany. As I set off down one street I could tell it wasn't going to take long at all. I walked as far as I could down one street, then weaved my way back in the direction I had come from, using all of the side streets. Once I was about half way back I turned down another road that I knew had more side streets off of it. As I walked around in the beautiful weather, I only noticed one thing that I found interesting; there were a lot of brightly colored houses, especially bright green. I found my way to all of the places I knew in Lukovany quite easily. I also managed to make it to the two boundary signs in opposite directions, that I knew existed. By the time I got home after my walk I realized it had only taken me an hour and a half, and I was definitely not walking fast.

For the rest of the day I mostly just hung out and relaxed. I tried to get some rest and catch up with some friends on social media.

When my host dad got home I helped him put all of the feed for the hens into the containers. Once we had finished with the hens, it was time to get dressed in the all white outfits we use for when we go out to our bee hives. As I got dressed, I was a bit nervous because bees aren't necessarily my favorite to say the least, but I had never done something like this before. We went around to all of the hives and put in a medicine to keep the bees from getting sick from a certain kind of beetle. In the morning, Robert had found some of the songs we sing in the club sometimes for me to read during the day. Once we had finished our chores around the yard we took some time to sing a few of the popular Czech songs that he had shown me.

In the evening he made a new soup that he wanted to try making. It was quite good aside from the fact that we both immediately burnt the roofs of our mouths. Once we were done with dinner we went to the club for a few hours.

Today I went to Brno with my host dad again since we had to meet the head of the school in the morning. We went to his work for breakfast before heading out to the school. The school is 5 stories tall and has beautiful stair cases. The head of the school is a nice old man who also happens to be a part of the Rotary club that is hosting me. He speaks English and has a lot of experience with exchange students in general. He told me his one rule that he keeps for himself, he will speak English with exchange students until Christmas, but after that he will pretend as if he doesn't speak a word of English. I also met the head teacher of my class. She is really nice, and she seems like she will be a great resource for help in school. She told me that her class is quite nice and she has twice as many girls as she does boys. Most everyone in the class does a sport outside of school so I will most likely see some of them outside of school if I choose to do a sport, which I will.

After meeting with the head of the school we went back to my host dad's office and I spent some time just hanging out and relaxing. We ate lunch at his work with one of his bosses who was really nice, and spoke English quite well. After a bit more relaxing in the office, my host mom got back into town from her work conference. So I decided to take the bus and street tram to her office so that she could take me home. I took the bus to Mandlova Square like I had done earlier in the week. Once I arrived, I looked for the street tram #1 that my host dad had told me to take. I ended up taking the correct number, but I took the one going in the complete opposite direction that I wanted to go in. I of course didn't fully realize my mistake until I was at the end of the ride, and just about as far away from my host mom's office as I could get. I quickly got off and called her to tell her where I was and that it was going to be awhile til I made it back. As I walked across the tracks to where another street tram comes back through going the other direction, I was a bit frustrated that I had another long ride ahead of me. I finally made it to the stop right in front of my host mom's office after another 30 minute tram ride across town. I was happy to have seen another side of Brno even though it wasn't quite the adventure I had had in mind for the afternoon. Once I got to my host mom's office we went home, only stopping at the store briefly for some more bread.

When we got home she started some laundry, and then we went outside to go pick all of the pears off of one of the trees. As we picked the apples, Bert (the dog) kept sneaking over to the bins we were putting the pears in, and taking one pear at a time for a little snack. We finished picking just in time before it started to rain for a little bit. We had a simple but delicious dinner before some more down time for me to use to update the blog!