I have now been in Prague for one week and so far things have been going really well. Here's a quick list of my accomplishments so far:

1) I successfully navigated the Prague public transport system by myself, as of Sunday.

2) I also managed to find my way to church. The fact that I made it semi- on time is an accomplishment in and of itself. On the weekends the buses don't run as regularly, so my options for getting there were to leave the house at about 7:20 and catch the 7:35 bus and get to 9:00 church really early, or catch the 8:25 bus and run the chance of being late. My desire to be early to everything was warring pretty strongly with my hatred for mornings... in the end my hatred for mornings won out, but I was only five minutes late, so they hadn't even said the opening prayer yet.

3) I have been mistaken several times for a local, even when wandering around the super tourist-y areas. I feel like this is a success... even though it's probably not that hard. It's not like I'm in India where it's obvious I'm not from there. I'm white. I have brown hair and blue eyes. Czech's are white. BUT, it's not obvious that I'm from the States when you look at what I'm wearing, unlike most American tourists, so I consider it an accomplishment. I was asked on three separate occasions something in Czech, so I guess I looked pretty legit... although when I opened my mouth and said "English?" it became pretty obvious. I wish I knew Czech. This language is REALLY hard, and I say that having taken some Russian, which is supposedly one of the more difficult languages? Russian I could understand a bit of it when I was taking the class (granted, it was stuff like "How are you?" "I like to eat ice cream and read books."), but this is a whole other story. I ask Anna, the oldest, how to say something and when she tells me, it literally sounds like gibberish. I try to say it and I can't do it. Very frustrating. But I still want to try to learn at least a little bit.

4) I found several websites with cheap/budget airline tickets. A whole new world has been opened to me. Especially since I'm only supposed to be here 90 days, and I wasn't planning on leaving until about 120.... I'll just have to take some trips outside of Europe.... where to, where to? Any recommendations?

That's all I can think of right now, but I think that's a pretty good little list for my first week. On Saturday we went into the city for the day. We ate lunch at a restaurant that was on this little island between the locks/sluice gates and the Vltava. The river is on several different levels, so they have to have periodic locks/sluice gates throughout the city for the boats. Here's the view from the restaurant. That's the national theater in the background, and behind the island towards the left of the photo is the Karl's Bridge. You can't see it in the picture. But it's there.