church across from the rectorate. 

the view from my hotel window on my first night 

you tell me what you think this sign indicates. 

here is a brno sunset, ladies and gentlemen. from right off my balcony. 

o, the cursed foreignness of it all

woe is me.

I know it's frankly a little obsessive at this point that I'm in this beautiful foreign country and all I do is bitch about my computer, but I have a terribly one-track mind. And I make these feeble little stabs at progress that only frustrate me the more once I realize just how little they've helped me.

So I got my computer to work again. Joy!

for a moment.

Then it wouldn't fully start up, so I found a way around that.

Then I found this flyer with a web address and something about Internetum Registrary or something, so I went to the lab (read here) and went to take care of what I thought was a routine registration.

Perhaps it is a routine registration.

I
don't
know.

because it's all in czech and so I curse the foreignness of the land around me.

MUSIC: radiohead: lucky

the password is in

okay, so now I know the password for my laptop. I can get past the prompt for logging on to windows.

but that's it.

One time, I started it up not in safe mode and it actually fully started. Just once.

even then, however it does not connect to the internet. I can connect to other people's computers directly, which I've never been able to do before, but I cannot connect to the internet at large.

Imagine my surprise when I found that I could listen to Queen's greatest hits off of someone elses computer but couldn't check my e-mail.

So I'm back in the lab, having caught my pair of trams and ridden them illegally as I have yet to acquire a quarterly pass. You see, every international student here gets assigned a peer tutor to help them do things like that. My peer tutor has been terribly sick and, as far as I know, still isn't even in town. Of course I wasn't assigned a new peer tutor, I was just left on my own. So handy things like buying an alarm clock or getting a tram pass or registering for classes or LEARNING HOW TO ORDER FOOD have been neglected.

and now I sit here just hoping rather vainly, I think, that I'll get an e-mail from my advisors telling me which classes I'm registered for now. and, of course, which one's I've already missed this week.

I'm not a very good blogger

And I know this. I have created a total, including this post, of two posts.

I know.

sorry.

But here's my excuse. Ready? I killed my computer. Somehow I managed to make a perfectly healthy laptop decide that it wouldn't let anyone onto windows. It went from being my DVD player, stereo, and soon-to-be portal to the internet to being a big nightlight. So anything I post is posted on purchased time after a hike and rife with frustration.

Now that's not the kind of weblog (see, weblog, weBlog, Blog) I want to have, ladies and gentlemen. So I'll post once or twice more just to keep it slightly up to date, but don't expect this digital journal to properly bloom until I manage to get my laptop off the ground and onto the internet.

Saturday I moved into Vinarska, which is the actual residence hall for my stay here. The bus that brought us over stopped in the middle of a road, and the guy on the bus kicked us all off and left without a word. We finally figured out that we needed to go up a really steep hill with all our luggage, and I commented that we were the victims of a cruel Czechoslovak prank. Hah, hah, they said, very funny.

So we went into a building and waited in line to be checked in. When the first of our group got to the desk, which was after about 20 minutes, we were all told that we had to go to a different building to check in. So we all went to this different building and waited in line for a solid hour. It was only after we had been there for so long that we were told that we were again in the wrong place. Where was the right place, you ask? Why, the place we had gone to initially, of course.

So we all went back and waited in line for another 30 minutes or so. Most of us were then told that we were in the right place, most likely, but needed a yellow card to check in. And the yellow cards are distributed (you guessed it) back where we had just come from. So back we went, and another 40 minutes were lost in line. It took, all told, nearly four hours to get checked in.

I ended up rooming with Tom again, since I suppose we're more or less used to one another at this point. I won't say anything about the room as yet, because I do have pictures and they are worth a thousand words. Granted, I can't show them yet because of my computer ailments, but I will. I can't type all those thousands of words right now, anyway. I'm paying by the hour here.

Today is a holiday, which means almost nothing. It's the nameday of King Wenceslas (which is not his right name, but you know him, most likely, that way), so the czechs celebrate by being drowsy and not going to work. No parades or gifts or gatherings... just no work. So, it means I don't have class and I can relax all day, but I do that a lot anyway. It also means that I'll have a hell of a time buying something to eat. Bastards.

So I promise I'll be better about this whole blog thing. Hell, I'm already better about it, somewhat.

MUSIC: crooked fingers: a little bleeding

(the sing along part, mostly)

not relaxing. not at all

You know what? Maybe all those close-minded assholes are right. Maybe being foreign is somehow inherently wrong. I'll tell you one thing, it's certainly inherently a pain in the ass. Let me just say that the number of people who speak English in the Czech republic has been grossly eggagerated.

Feh. This will get better when I have my own computer up and running on the internet, but for now, it'll be just this little bit of bitchy text and then me leaving. Must eat gravy covered food.