Hi Everyone!
The last time I wrote I was in the middle of registration interviews with some legal recruitment agencies in London. The interviews went well and I have currently got the recruiters looking for short term legal positions for me. I am also registered for temp work, and so far have worked half a day as a "paralegal" in a scanning house, helping a scanning outsourcing company scan documents in for importation into a litigation database. Sounds interesting, perhaps. However, it was work that a 3 year old could have done (removing coloured pages from batches of documents), so I am hoping to get something more challenging soon, otherwise I will feel that my 6 years at University had really gone to waste.I have not been much of a tourist in London.
After travelling the USA for 5 weeks, sightseeing every day, I wanted a bit of a rest in England. I went to a lot of pubs, caught up with friends, and just generally enjoyed some socialising, particularly with Rach and Stevo who were kind enough to put me up at their house and show me around London. Thanks, I really appreciate it.
I did manage to make it to one tourist attraction, the "British Airways London Eye" which is basically a massive Ferris Wheel with views all over London; that pretends to be a British Airways aeroplane by calling the ride a "flight". We went at sunset, so we got the best of both worlds - seeing the cityscape during the day and also with the lights on as it got dark. Unfortunately we couldn't see the sunset itself, through the clouds and smog.
On Friday I decided to go ahead fly to Prague in the Czech Republic, because, being so close, I was too excited to put it off any longer. So I headed off to visit my Czech family and friends and to return to London when work related matters required me to. That's the beauty of Europe - everything is so close!
So I flew into Prague to return to Czechia for the first time in 20 years (I originally left in 1986). Entering the country was an overwhelming feeling, a mix of feeling like I was in a foreign place at the same time as feeling like I was home. For the first few days and even now to some extent, every time I hear someone speak Czech it catches my attention the same way it would when I heard the language back in Australia (quite rare) but then I remind myself that its the just normal thing here.I was picked up at Prague Airport by my aunty and cousin and taken back to their house in the Czech countryside just out of Prague. Just seeing the countryside, the small towns, the roads, creeks and forests was an amazing experience for me. The landscape and dwellings are just so radically different to Australia that I really appreciate the contrast.It was really nice staying in a house in a country village in central Europe - a really cosy warm feeling. But I really enjoyed the trips to Prague! Prague is an amazing city. So modern yet so old at the same time. You travel around in a really modern metro system only to exit onto cobble stone streets with buildings that date back a long time before the First Fleet ever landed on Australian shores. It is a real city of contrasts. You pay the equivalent of $3 for a beautiful traditional meal and 80c for a 500ml beer, and then potentially pay more than what we would pay in Australia for a McDonald's meal.At the moment there are some pretty serious floods in the Czech Republic, Austria, Hungary and Germany but not as serious as the major floods in 2002. Luckily the areas that I am visiting are mainly unaffected, although some restaurants on the banks of the river Vltava here in Prague are well under water.
At the moment I am staying with a friend of my mum's in a Prague apartment for a few days to be closer to the city. A snake and a turtle also live in my room, so I am not lonely. They keep an eye on me. I have been feeling sick over the last few days so I have been resting, but my mum's friend has taken very good care of me here, so I have been lucky.I have a few more days to check out Prague, then on Sunday I'm catching a bus to the city of Brno in Moravia, from where I will fly back to London to continue job hunting. But I will come back to Prague again soon for a Longer time, there is still so much more for me to experience here.
Next week I will be living on campus at a London University. The halls of residence are public accommodation during the Easter Holidays. So that should be an interesting experience. After that, who knows what's next? I just filled out a volunteer application form for the Roskilde Festival in Denmark for June.
Ahoj
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