trouble ohhhh trouble

yeah, i have cat stevens "trouble" stuck in my head. i'm down in the dumps today.

so... we went to bratislava, slovakia yesterday to pick up our visas from the embassy. woke up at 6am, got on a bus at 7am, got in at 11am... you can't go inside the embassy until 1:30pm... so we just walked around and then got a coffee in a cafe and read. finally we go to the embassy and wait an hour to get our visa sticker in our passports. we all applied for a long term visa which is for OVER 90 DAYS and assumed that it would go atleast until our contract for our work or our apt. lease(june 15th). nope. atleast not for  sara and i. she got 68 days, i got 103, and matt got 114. random. we all applied at the same time and we all live together. and sara and i work for the same school! why did she get such a short amount of time? who knows how the hell they decide these things. i'm just so pissed we have to pay our lawyer the full amount after all she's messed up. our school won't even help us when they are the ones that recommended her to us. 

(oh... and then we had lunch at 2:30, walked around some more, and then got on a bus at 6pm and arrived back in prague at 10pm.... got in the metro station to see lots of cops and chaos due to a woman falling/jumping(?)into the metro tracks as it was coming... therefore it shut down. as we were turning around, a bunch of ticket inspectors were checking for tickets... my opencard(transport pass)expired the day before, so i had to pay 700czk (35 dollars)!!! great ending to a long day of travel.)

europe makes you have health insurance. well, our school won't help us with it when they said they would when they hired us... so we are now getting another 3 months worth just to prove we have it. once you get your visa, they give you 3 days to go to the foreign police and register your visa with them. so that's where we're going tomorrow. not making any money. just spending it.

sometimes i don't understand this country. they denied our friend emily a visa and now she has to leave her job and her boyfriend behind within a week to go back home. 

i could go on a rant for a while, but i won't. or i will. haven't made up my mind. my fingers are doing all the work. 

AND i had a massage today! i didn't get to relax after it liked i planned, instead i had to run around town getting health insurance and spending money on an undeserving lawyer. sometimes we wonder is this all worth the stress? should we just go home now? i really don't know at this point. 

ok i think i'm done. look at pretty pictures in slovakia:

the chimbley sweep

hello. it's snowing in prague. a lot. i love the snow... i slip 'n slide all around and am always very close to falling on my ass. it can be scary.

no news on the long term visas yet. i think we may call around december 10th. by then it'll be a month since we've applied. here's to hoping!

matt and i are going to brussels for christmas. we're staying with my lovely friend megan(who i met in baltimore) and her belgium boyfriend, jerome. his family lives there and we will be going over there for deer and oysters! crazy traditions. and megan wants to make "glug" with me since we're both swedish.

for new years we are going with srew to italy. we got $44 roundtrip tickets to milan. we plan to take some trips while there... i want venice to be on that list.

visa update and such.

our lawyer applied for our long-term visas which will take at the most 2 months to process and receive. i am not thrilled about this, but apparently it was our only option since our 3 month stay was up. they didn't let us apply for our short-term visas because of this. atleast i think so. whatever, now we have a stamp in our passport that says it's in process, and i'm hoping that during any recent travel we won't get our passports checked(it's not often that you do when you stay in the schengen zone... 25 european countries) so we may be fine going to wherever we go during our holiday. i'm hoping to go to amsterdam, brussels, and nuremberg.... depends. gotta figure out what is best. it's that or poland, where some of sara's family reside.

today was a national holiday for the czech republic so we had off work. it was spent being very lazy for half of the day, and then we went and saw the social network, grocery shopping, and now? more relaxing.

x marks the spot

chemtrails are bad in prague(or in europe rather). i don't like. here are some photos i recently captured during the weekend.

melt is the word of the day

today we gave our lawyer our applications for our visas, the money, and passports. we signed some papers and things that were legit so all you worrierers stop your worrying. our only worry is that she'll go to bratislava tomorrow and something will go wrong. i hope not. i hope it all works out.

i gave a massage today. it has been about 4 months since i gave my last one. it was for my friend monicka. i teach her 2 little kids english. she does something called healing touch so we traded services. it was so relaxing. i need a massage though. my body aches and my feet hurt from all the cobblestone!

anyway. i seriously am so homesick it's awful. my sister mani is in florida right now for thanksgiving and whenever i call to try and talk to anyone i almost break down crying. i get all teary eyed, and it's hard to talk. i feel crappy. ugh. i'm in europe... what's wrong with me? 

no more meltdowns. these emotions need to leave.

dessert time at cafe louvre tonite

little draha gone wrong

my alarm wakes me up at 5am. i go to the bathroom, brush my teeth, put some clean clothes on, and blow my nose a thousand times. the three of us walk out our apt door, down 83 steps, and walk through the 40 degrees to tram 17. we get off and take our time to find our way to the metro to meet our lawyer, drahamira.

we arrive around 6:05, 5 minutes late, and there she is, waiting on the other side of the platform of the train. we walk underground to get to her. she says "my car is litt-ul because i am litt-ul". oh little draha stands about 4 foot 10 inches. we head to bratislava, slovakia. it took about 3 hours. we arrive at the embassy to find out that draha did not make appointments for us to apply for our visas. ugh. she argues to try and get us in, but it just wasn't happening. you could tell she felt bad. we assumed she had made appointments. now what? today is our 89th day here, and you can only stay up to 90 days without a visa. 

well, we're all hungry by now. it's about 11am and we go to a brazilian restaurant called rio. it was nice. she paid for our lunches cause she felt bad for messing up. we walked around the center for a few minutes in the drizzling rain... then headed back to prague. she found out she could only make appointments between the hours of 1 and 2, so at 12:58 she called and they turned her down. she giggled in embarrassment and then called a couple minutes later. she got an appointment on november 10th and told us she could go without us this time as long as we give her our passports and permission. phew, let's see how this will work. apparently she is going to fib and say we were in london with her which gains us a few extra days on our stay in the "shengen zone". i have no idea if that will work or not, but i just hope when she goes that we will get our visas without getting in trouble or whatever.

so, our day consisted of being in another country for approximately 2 hours. 

fun.

you can find a few photos of our failed trip on facebook.

composing

so i guess on monday we're going to the embassy in slovakia to apply for our visas. it's silly how they make you go out of the country just to do that. i dunno. i'm not a big fan of all these laws. it's going to cost a lot of money. somewhere between 800-1,000 dollars for all of this. the rules are strict, and there is a lot of paperwork involved. i just hope it all goes through without problems.


i am getting a bit homesick. i miss my family a ton and friends as well. i miss driving a car... and knowing where to find exactly what i need. i'm adjusting, don't get me wrong, but it's only natural at this point. it has been almost 3 months since i've been gone, and if i had the money to go to florida for a visit, i would, but i'm pretty sure when i buy a ticket to the united states- it'll be 'cause i'm moving back to the united states. there's no constant in my mind right now. i'm finding it extremely difficult to stay/live in the moment. i know it's important, but all i keep thinking about is what's next for me. what state?


i was talking with my brother iam earlier and said i am here to gain some experience outside of the box. i really mean that. i gotta stick with it, stick it out, adapt. i'm in europe and i know not everyone gets that kind of opportunity... or you do and you don't realize how crazy you are to pass it up! i am so glad i took this leap and i am here with who i am with.


listening to my boyfriend serenade himself on the guitar is rather distracting(in a good way), and i think it may be time to finish mad men season 4. it is just too good.


g'nite :)