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.