Where did he go? Part 2.

Well, I've gone and done it again. I haven't been posting for quiet some time.

I'm doing quiet fine, but a lot of things have changed. In that time I was in a funk of sorts. I just couldn't write.

As with all things, it's best if I try to summarize from the beginning.

Four weeks ago I realized that I really didn't want to be abroad. I love Prague and I love traveling, but I was missing a certain girl that I had left behind. Every time I saw something interesting I would think: "Gee I wish she was here to see this."

We talked over the Internet nearly everyday anyways. Long distance had put a lot of strain on how we felt about one another. She was a beautiful girl, I figured she'd find someone new and it would end. But it didn't happen like that. So I was resolved to move back home and continue my poker work there.

Three weeks ago, while I was traveling in Berlin. The US government passed an obscure bill that basically ended my career for poker. While it's still legal to play, it made it a lot harder for people start up play. This meant I was often playing with more pros at the average table then rookies. So my already minor profits shrank to almost nothing.

I'm good, but I'm not that good.

So now I face a situation where I have to join the job market again. I was bummed out for a week, felt like I had failed at a dream.

Still many positive things to look forward to. I have many of my friends back home that I will be able to see again and the certain girl I had mentioned before. I look forward to a new career and after a while I might try a different job venture instead.

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!

Sick in Prague

After a ten hour train ride, with us hopping on five different trains, I'm finally in Prague. There was some small difficulty on the last train when the conductor tried to tell us in halting English that our ticket purchased in Germany was no good for the ride from Chem to Prague. Balx and I held our braced for a large fee as he grumbled for a very long 5 minutes before producing the number 26 on a piece of paper. 26 Euros per head? Nope. That was the translation rate of Euros to Czech crowns, our total fine for not purchasing a ticket turned out to be 150 Crowns for the both of us, That's roughly 6 Dollars! A victory in a stresful situation.

Today though, I feel sick. My nose is stuffy and I sneeze every 20 minutes, my throat is constantly dry. We walked around the city for a bit (which is amazing in every way that's been written) before I had to go crash and sleep for most of the day. It's the off season for the Hostel, so that means Balx and I get a full dorm room for a the price of a double at around 7 bucks a day. It's no place to raise children, but it's clean and safe, with an abundence of English speakers form all around the world to share stories over the communial dinner table.

Tomarrow, we're off to take our first look at some apartments to live in about 15 minutes walk from Old Town, the major tourist area. Hopefully it will be all that it's been advertised on the interent and I can have a new place to call home.

When I find some internet that I can connect to with my laptop, I'll see what I can do about posting pics from the last couple of days. I'm taking my vitamins and I've located a nice fuit stand near our Hostel, so I hope to better in few days.

First Arrival on Foreign Ground

After a painfully long time, our plane finally arrived in Frankfurt, Germany at 3pm their time. The international airport there also doubles as a train station which resulted in the place being massively huge. Balx and I changed a couple hundred dollars into euros and then proceeded to buy a train ticket to our first stop in Heidelberg. As I was to learn, almost everyone in Germany speaks English. So our progress with any questions of where we were, what to do, and how to do it became a simple task. The train system in Germany is so much better and cheaper then in the U.S. but they also suffer from thin corridors which made the baggage very hard to handle.

At this point I’ve had a few spurts of three or four hour naps over the last three days, I’m now in a new country dragging all of my prized worldly possessions, following Balx around who is only a tiny bit less lost then I am. So it was unneeded stress when Balx made an attempt to call our contact in Heidelberg to come pick us up and the phone numbers did not work. One number resulted in an error, and the other only got his message machine. So it goes.

With no way of reaching him, we stopped for some food to try and wait it out and see if Yurgin, our contact, would get the message at his house. Just outside the train station I found my first photo opportunity of the Heidelberg Running Horse sculpture. As I was to learn later, this massive statue caused a controversy when someone did the calculations on how much energy it took to melt all the steel used in the statue’s construction. It would have been enough energy to heat the entire town for a year. The horse stood in front of an equally impressive building whose outside walls were constructed entirely out of glass. I also found out later that the train station was nicknamed the bicycle graveyard. It was where people would leave their bikes locked up if they didn’t want them anymore, until either they were stolen or the state removed them from the massive lot already filled with hundreds of bikes.

All theses facts came from Yurgin, who did eventually pick us up and then proceeded to take us on a walking tour of his town. He seemed to know the surrounding history for every building in the area. We walked down the cobblestone streets of downtown while our host and guide pointed out each of the attractions. I know that skyscrapers are much bigger but they tend to be so big that you just ignore them. The old buildings around here managed to do the reverse, making all their height and girth as noticable as possible. It was like being surrounded by sleeping giants. At the end of the street we came upon a fantastic view of Schloss Castle. I’m afraid the camera pictures will never do justice, the way the sunset splayed itself across the broken down castle on a hill from our perspective was quiet fantastic.

Despite being worn out by all the aformentioned activities, we then proceeded to climb all the way up the hill to go see the castle up close or at least as close as they let tourists get. Not much to mention about the trip that wouldn’t already sound the same: We went, we saw, it was good, I took pictures.

The next day Balx and I went in search of breakfast and electrical plug converters for our laptops. Breakfast was a shared bunch of raspberries and red currents from the local morning farmers market. There was little more done that day as we were both still exhausted from our travels beforehand. Our current task has been to locate a living space in Prague. This is difficult, because it’s been rather tricky lately to find some solid internet connections (As you might have noticed my posting are a bit behind real time, that’s because I write them down at the end of the day but I cannot post them until the next time I can connect.)

In the meantime I’ve managed to read Brave New World; a crappy book on great philosophical concepts. I give the book an ‘A’ for ideas and slick concept of a human utopia but I think it utterly fails at being well written. No one likes a character who quotes Shakespeare. Yes the man was good, there is no need however to cut and paste his lines to make oneself seem deep. In short the content of the book was powerful but clumsy in delivery. Give me Dune or Animal Farm any day.

Travelers note: If you want to be able to tell which clothes you’ve already worn, and which are still fresh, I’d recommend turning one set, clean or dirty, inside out. It’s easier to turn the old stuff inside out after a long day, but if you’re a smelly person it might be better to have the new stuff inside out instead so the oils and sweat are less likely to mingle.

P.S. I’ve noticed when I do a lot of walking I start to get a sharp pain right where each of my shoulder blades stick out of my back. It’s not a terrible pain, just the sensation like a bruise being pressed down upon. The pain grows in intensity when I inhale deeply and cause that part of my back to stretch across the shoulder blades tightly. (Try it and you’ll see). The pain does not affect me in any other situations and it seems to only crop up after I walk a long ways, I remember having the same problem a couple years ago but I walk a lot at work and it’s never affected me there. I sometimes think it might be walking in public perhaps is stressful at some level and the muscles tighten up? Does anyone know what is happening?  

Unable to update

I am stuck somewhere with very limited internet. I am fine, but it'll be a bit until I can post something lengthy. Look forward to some massive posts. Now I'm off to the Black Forest.