A Silent Worknight in Prague

It's a quiet night and I needed a bit of a break from poker so I thought about writing you.

It's been such a little amount of time since the last time I talked to you, so not much happened. I spend a majority of my time in my room (the living room) either sitting at my computer (working), or sleeping. It looks like that how it's going to be for quiet some time, until I go to Berlin in a week and a half.

Not that I mind to much. I get a little lonely from time to time, but I do have this huge compulsion to work. It's like a spring that slowly winds up and I can only release it by spending time working. I might not make enough to be super profitable, but I've got to try. The Internet is huge and vast and entertains me in the meantime.

I've been slowly watching the old MTV show "the maxx" I let myself watch one each day. It's free on youtube.com and kinda gritty but deep in thought. I also stumbled upon a web site that emails you pieces of books slowly. So every other day I get a small fraction of a book. Right now I'm reading a play called "The Importance of Being Earnest". I haven't gotten to far into it yet, it's a bit dry, but at least it's something new.

I go out to eat almost every other day, Prague has some many wonderful little cafe restaurants. The food is amazingly cheap and usually high quality. For the price I expect to pay at Denny's, I get meal of home cooked quality and a half pint of beer. Beer is cheaper here then soda and water, and they won't serve you tap so I usually get one. Today though, I opted for an orange juice. I really don't know what will happen when this place moves to the Euro, but I know I'll be sad I can never again get a $2 large gellato sundae.

Today I made it over to the Charles bridge. I had been there twice before, but at night when all the tourist stands were closed. By night the bridge looks better, old statues of saints line the sides are are lited in a dramatic fashion. The castle glows in the background. But during the day, it all looks worn down and the place is mobbed by tourists. My favorite street performer was still the guy who had about 30 Crystal glasses all lined up before him each a different note and he would play them like a piano, using all his fingers, and you would hear the soft humming of seven angel notes slowly mix themselves into the air. The notes are so soft it's hard to hear when they begin or stop, they just fade into and around themselves.

I bought myself my first keepsake. It's a leather talisman. The leather is folded into some intricate knots and then treated with something to make it hard and stiff with a lacquered shine. The result looks like wood that has been impossibly carved, but it's lighter then expected to the touch. The man told me that the leather would also absorb smells if kept with anything. I might later buy some vanilla or mint extract to soak it in.

The housing seach goes slowly. Places do not respond to my emails and when they do, they often offer me places without Internet even though I told them exactly what I needed. If we do not find a place by next week, we will continue to live here. It's not a bad place, but it's also not the ideal.

I need to get myself an alarm clock. My schedule has been all over the place recently, with me trying to jam work in when I can. I really need to make a set schedule. It's difficult, when the shops are open during the day the dance clubs at night, and the best poker at 3am. It's like I have to choice two of the three. Work and play, but no sunlight. Sun and play, but crappy work. Or Work from early morning til midday, eat dinner at lunch and sleep from afternoon to midnight.

I will figure something out. All I need to do... 100$ a day. I keep chanting that goal to myself. If I can figure a way to do that (preferably at 6 hours a day). It is possible in theory, but I am uncertain of the changing tides of casinos. I am by far not good enough to be playing for profit without the bonuses. Are there enough to sustain me for a year? That's nearly 70 bonuses a year. If I can find them all. I would be set for years to come. Hopefully by then I want to have saved up enough to move to something new. With each hour I play poker, I get better. It's still so risky, so easily I can not make it, but I have done so well this first month. *cross fingers*

Everything they tell me is that luck doesn't exist, it's all math, but still sometimes I look out my window on my left and I make a tiny fraction of a prayer to my statue of lady luck. It's a life size window-edge statue of a girl in a dress holding flowers.

I didn't die, I just got lazy

I apologize to my limited audience for not writing in sooner. I have several excuses and none of them really put aside the fact that I’m just lazy. But onwards to storytelling!

Prague has been a wonderful city to live in so far. The buildings just don’t get old, or rather haven’t had the chance to in the one week I’ve been here. It’s nice to be able to walk around and find new things to look at each day. My new job, professional gambling, is dull, but truly the easiest job I’ve ever had.

I’ll let you on to a little hint about how I sit in front of my computer for hours at a time: www.Pandora.com Oh what a wonderful device these people have created. It’s a free internet radio that lets me put in my favorite songs and artists, and they recommend/play me songs based on my selection of completely new artists! So I get to sit around all day listening to music, while I play out the days Blackjack, 3-card poker, or Texas hold ‘em. I recommend a new favorite song called “Pink Champagne” from the artist Venus Hum.

If I need a change up for my ears, I still have all my old Teaching Company courses, so I spend about an hour a day listening to some of the top college professors in the USA teach me things. Right now I’m listening to a course on number theory, sounds dull I know, but this one is about all the fun stuff. Instead of raw math, the course is all about those crazy patterns we find in nature that relate to math, like the golden rectangle or spiral patterns in a pinecone.

But hey, it was also my birthday on the 4^th! Balx and I, sharing a taste for curry, went out to one of the nicest Indian places in Prague. What they made for us was much better then the curry we can make at our place. I think that’s because half the ingredients we’re using we’re not really sure are actually what we’re supposed to be using. I guess that’s the problem when you go to a country and you can’t read the language, you also can’t read the labels to the product and you’re reduced to trying to figure out if that picture on the front of the can is actually what’s inside of it. Ah the wonders of visual marketing become so clear when you’re a forgiener who’s only clue to the product is the picture on the front. So when we’re in the supermarket looking for curry spices and we find three different spellings for it kury, chiry and kari then it become difficult to figure out which one is the right one. By the way: Kury is what you want, chiry is chicken bullion, and we still haven’t figured out what kari is; it tastes a bit asian.

Perhaps the only downside to living out here is the communication barrier. Back home I talked to the same number of people as I do now, so it’s not a major problem but the concept that if I wanted to talk with someone there would be difficulty weighs upon me a bit more here. We’ve only been here a short while, but it’s been long enough that when we go out to places I see the groups of people having fun together and I wish we had something similar, some crowd of familiar faces. Sometimes we makes friends with a small group of English speakers, but in aday or two they are gone. I guess it really teaches to enjoy life in the moment.

And wouldn’t you know it, I go to post this blog and the internet is down. Now it’s been almost a week since my last post, and I sit here unable to send word that I’m doing alright. We contacted EZ earlier, he was supposed to send a guy on Monday, but there’s been no word yet. In the meantime Balx and I have been hanging out over at a pub near us called the Wikiki. It’s very nice looking place that serves both Mexican and Italian food, we’ve been stopping in every third day or so and while the staff hardly speaks enough English to get our order, they recognize us and have always been super nice to us. Balx even helped them out just the other day, they were closing up and several burly Englishmen entered with the hope of getting something to drink. The staff as I said, had limited English and were having a hard time telling the tipsy men that the Pub was closing. Balx had a seat facing this conversation and stepped in to help to situation. The English men were sent off to an open bar and everything went smoothly.

Out of boardom, I’ve finally calculated how much I need to work each day. Warning! The following might be even more dull then most of my writing but then again maybe some traveler might find my chart of some use.

It cost me about $1,000 a month to live here: $500 for rent, $300 for food (at $10 a day), a $150 for my college loans, and $50 for random stuff.

That means I have to make $12,000 a year to break even. Lets say I work 300 days in a year (that’s about the same as removing weekends and having a little over a week’s vaction) and I make $50 a day. Then I’ve made $15,000. It’s a decent life, but I wouldn’t be saving up for anything. I’m basically broke if I ever have any medical, dental, or major computer problems, but if I save enough, I could pay for most things in an emergency. There’s no way a surplus of $3,000 each year would ever add up to anything, even at a compounded interest rate in a bank. Plus I know life, that extra $3,000 will find a way to fritter away; a little here, and little there…

So what do I do if I want to secure my future? Well I could work more. If I made $100 each day, that would give me $15,000 extra yearly to play with. I could pay off my loans in a year an a half and in another year I could easily be in a position to think about a Masters Degree. Or maybe I’ll get into the stock market, with the proper investing I could easily increase my savings to the point where I can look into buying a house. I’ve always wanted to build my own house, maybe I could do that. I’ve also toyed with the idea of buying a sailboat and living on that. Get a satellite internet, work on the boat, and sail around the nicer islands of the world. Maybe take up surfing on the side.

I’ve been thinking about starting up my own business, so maybe that comes before a house or maybe the house is my business and I’ll rent it out to people. Maybe I combine it all, build a boat house, and rent it out to private parties while sailing around. It’s gets fuzzy about what I really want. First I need to make the money I think.

In the meantime, now that Prague is finally starting to seem like a home, I’ve been looking at starting up my hobbies once more. I am infamous for plotting sudden bursts of genius, only to never start or even get halfway done with the idea. I really need to select one hobby, and STICK TO IT. I have been considering the fire staff idea. I’m really quiet good at the staff, it would be a rather small step to add fire, and with the proper safety precautions I doubt I’d burn my self. I’ll need to talk with the local police about places I would be allowed to practice. Then also comes the matter of preparation, I’m not sure if you can find Kevlar wicks cheaply in Prague. Or if the authorities don’t approve, then maybe I’ll really (really?) take up the guitar lessons. I would love to be able to strum out some Jack Johnson tunes.

Lately I’ve been thinking about hanging up flyers for English lessons in trade for some skill set. Like learning the guitar for example, we would meet two or tree times a week and the Czech would be able practice their English and I could learn a thing or two about some skill. Repairing cars or motorcycles, using advance parts of Excel Spreadsheet, or how they set up their little business. Anything of the sort would be an interesting trade off and I wouldn’t feel so secluded.

Life in Prague

OK, finally got settled in.

It was tough at first, looking for a place to live that has access to high speed internet is possible but not always cheap. Balx and I floated in purgatory at the Hostel waiting in line for time on the computer to try and find something that we wanted each day.

And there it was. A two bedroom place, for 1000$ a month, furnished, and with high speed internet. It seemed like a deal. Well you know how they say something too good to be true...

All over Prague there is the noise of city life, car thudding down cobblestone and tourists gossiping to one another. When, we entered into the ghetto of Praha 10, a hush of silence was the immediately present. It felt as like a forest where all the bird stopped singing in the presence of some hidden evils. Rusty steel bars edged about all the ground floor windows, and the surrounding building across the street looked as if a fire had burned a majority of it. Being that a great deal of it was crafted from pure communist cement, the blackened shell remained standing. We had arrived early as the walking time had been uncertain. It was there that we were greeted at the door by a Czech lost in the beatnik era in his English cap and black turtle neck. He was to be our guide around the apartment owned by his employers. He called himself E.Z. and hefted a large wood, African flute over to his other arm so he could shake our hands.

The tour led to a high ceiling hollowed out chuck of granite called a living space. Its edges were bordered with foot thick construction blue paint, giving the impression of a parking lot and the beaten wood floor creaked under the stress of our feet. The shower was equipped with an exotic porthole like would be found on a ship. Allowing passerby to look in upon those who wished shower. From the corners of the room, a single mother and her two kids glared at the foreign successors to her living space. The bedrooms consisted of a futon in the living room, and a separate room shut off by a curtain.

As with my description, the place was hardly ideal. But it was clean, and secure, and it did have internet. We decided it would be best to at least rent it for the month and look for other places from somewhere that didn’t resemble a frat party house every night. So here I sit, and I have to admit, with a little the love the place isn’t that bad. The walls are terrible but silence at night is nice. We are close to the old downtown, less touristy, which means cheap, dirt cheap. I can buy more food then I can carry home with just 20$. I did exactly that, moving in can make one very hungry.

During the communism phase of the Czech Republic the Russians displaced a lot of people from their homelands, mixing them into other countries within their controlled grasp. As such a small minority of Vietnamese now call Prague their home. It seems every food market down here is owned by them. They’re pleasant little fruit shacks, where one can enjoy a small selection of decent fruits. Alas, no avocado. I was hoping to find some for my omelets. I did however find out how Czechs do Mexican food. I received a burrito that had been baked whole leaving it crispy on the outside.

Now? I work my butt off at stealing from the rich. I have a lot to make up for if I want to keep up my income. I finished of a couple blackjack tours today, I’ll probably be moving into video poker within the week. Wish me luck!