Czech Hockey Adventure

Jeret in Prague!

2009-06-04T07:44:00.000-07:00

So my brother made it safely to Prague thank goodness. He had a rough start as the night before he left he didn't exactly sleep since he was working his night shift as a firefighter. Then he flew overnight to Prague and missed another night's sleep. But he was a trooper and came to practice with us that same day...then slept for 14 hours to catch up.

Jeret hanging out on my balcony.

We had games that first weekend he was here, actually they were the start of our Czech Championship final series. It was awesome to have him there watching and taking pictures...he was the first family member to see me play overseas in about three years so it was really awesome to have him at the game. The year before I had given him a Slavia jersey so he was wearing it at my game and some other fans mistaked him for being a Czech and started talking to him...really funny situation as he knows zero Czech.

My superfan!!

My bro and I after the game.

The following week he was there we did a ton of touring around the city. Went on a couple of organized tours along with me showing him around as much as I could. Went to all our favourite restaurants, hung out with my roommates and of course Jeret being the wine lover that he is, went to the local wine bar a block from my house. The Czech Republic isn't really known for their wine, beer is their thing, but none the less we would head out to the wine bar and Jeret would try all the local favourites. The wine/beer is really cheap so Jeret really enjoyed that aspect. The guy who owned the store didn't exactly speak English so my Czech was really stretch as I was trying to translate for Jeret what he wanted and I don't exaclty have all the wine lingo down.

Teammates/roommates out at Posledni Mamut, one of our favourite restaurants.

Jeret and I with the dinner for two at Noi, one of the best Thai restaurants I have ever been to!

Jeret and I hanging out at the local wine bar.

One night I was able to get us tickets through our owner to a Slavia men's game. This means VIP tickets, aka all you can eat and drink. All the roommates went and we had just an awesome time, minus the fact that Slavia lost. But the game and atmosphere were great since it was a play off game, one of the highlights for sure.

Jeret left the following Saturday and missed the second round of my games, but it was still pretty neat as he was able to overlap with my parents since they flew in on Thursday morning, but that's a whole other blog...

Catching Up....

2009-06-04T07:39:00.000-07:00

I just saw that I haven't blogged since February, just before my brother was coming...wow that's a long time ago but my last couple of months just flew by! I will do my very best to catch up on everything that is if you haven't stopped looking at my blog competely. None the less I would like this for my memories as well. So here she goes...

My Brother is Coming!!!

2009-02-27T02:27:00.000-08:00

That's right after almost two season's here and three years in Europe my brother is coming to visit! Wasn't expecting him to come and I don't think he was either, but he booked last minute with a last minute decision and is on his way. He'll be here on Saturday morning and will be able to watch two of my games which is really exciting as I haven't had someone see me play professionally before! Then on Tuesday we're hoping to take a road trip to Dresden, Germany. Then on Wednesday I have an exhibition game and that night I'm trying to get tickets to the first round of playoffs for the men's Slavia hockey team. Then it's Thursday and my parents come! So for two days I'll have all my family here minus my sister-in-law, Amanda! Will miss her for sure! On top of all that we'll try and see as much as Prague as we can, but Jeret's never been overseas before so we'll see how well he deals with the jet lag! More to come!

Vysehrad

2009-02-27T01:48:00.000-08:00

Going on with my theme of exploring Prague, I went to Vysehrad the other day. It was actually sunny out which was amazing considering this is still February and we usually don’t see the sun until March. Vysehrad means high castle and during the 7th century Slavonic tribes set up camp on the crag above the Vltava River in south Prague. There was a town here by mid 11th century and a castle was built, then the basilica of St. Lawrence, and the church of Saint Peter and Paul was added. It was then destroyed during the Hussite Wars until after the Thirty Years’ War when the city decided to rebuild it. The Church of St. Peter and Paul has an amazing cemetery on the outskirts of it with famous Czech people burried there. Not sure if you have heard of the composers Smetana and Dvorak, or painter Alfons Mucha but their gravesights are there. It’s now an old fortress with a huge park and great views of the city as you can see from below.

Tabor Gate

Streets of the old fortress

Leopold Gate

Church of St. Peter and Paul...wasn't able to go inside as it was closed, bad timing!

The huge steeples of the church!

The cemetery.

One of the biggest gravesites I have ever seen.

Looking north up the river

The promonade along the castle walls.

Looking south down the river.

Adventures with Jeni on Petrin Hill

2009-02-26T00:55:00.001-08:00

So my time is winding down here in Prague and I'm trying to get in all the sights that I haven't seen already while being here. I would like to say that there are only a few things to go and see but actually there's quite a bit! This city is huge with a ton of history and things to see. We decided to head to Petrin Hill as it had just snowed the night before so thought that maybe there would be nice pictures up there.

Petrin Hill is 318m hill situated just south of the famous Prague castle and close to the river bank making it a great destination for picnics and walks. You can walk up it or in our case we decided to take the funicular up it and walk down. Yes I know I call myself an athlete. hehe. On the very top is the Petrin Tower which looks like the Eiffel Tower and was but in 1891 for the Prague Exposition. You can climb to the top of it for great views, but being it was winter it wasn't open. There is also a huge wall going around the grounds at the top of the hill called the Hunger Wall. It was built in the 1360s by the city's poor in return for food. Once again a ton of history. Here are some pictures of the day...

Jeni and I in the funicular on the way up.

Looking across at the city and the castle.

Huge church at the top of the hill...not sure what it's called.

Petrin Tower

A view of Prague...too bad it wasn't a more clear day.

A lookout tower Jeni and I found that is part of the Hunger Wall.

One of the paths we took down the hill.

My Last Road Trip...Thank Goodness

2009-02-22T13:13:00.000-08:00

Last weekend was our last road trip of the season and it was a memorable one for that matter. Not only was it our last road trip of the year but there were a couple of other factors that made it a trip that I will probably never forget.

First off we left on Sunday morning at 4:30am. Yes that’s right, my team was too cheap to leave the day before and drive the 8 hours, stay in a hotel and get a good night’s sleep before a very important game. How important? Well we had to win that game in order to clinch 1st place in our European League, as there are no playoffs. Let’s just say I was less than excited with the thought of leaving at 4:30am. That means we were up at 3:30am and out the door by quarter to as our rink is about a 20min drive away. And of course nothing is ever really on time here so our bus pulled up about 4:45am. So we load up and were on our way.

There’s another factor to this trip that I have not talked about and it’s the fact that I had the flu. As I had said in my previous blog, Thursday was my last day of school. For some reason after school I started to feel sick. That night I had to babysit a friend’s son and after that came straight home to bed. Didn’t get much sleep of course as I was in the bathroom most of the night with the runs. So Friday I laid low, didn’t go to practice that night, then Saturday started to feel better and thought that I was kicking it. I was being too optimistic. Did not get much sleep on Saturday night and it didn’t help that I had to be up at 3:30am.

I pretty much slept the whole ride to Maribor minus the times that we would stop for a bathroom break which in my case seemed to be needed every time. The thing with our buses is that you never know if you’ll get a bathroom on it or not. There is always a bathroom on the bus but sometimes it’s locked and out of service. Makes complete sense of course as everyone is trying to drink as much water as they can (well more like us Canadians are doing this) in order to hydrate for the game. Thankfully (I think) we stop almost every two hours or so because my coach/the bus driver have to have a smoke. Oh yes and you probably are thinking that we would stop for a pre game meal somewhere along the way. Nope that never happens, you just pack your own meal consisting of sandwiches and what not for your pregame meal. Basically anything that we have been taught over the years for preparation for a game is thrown out the window as soon as your plane touches down in the Czech Republic. The luxuries of playing college hockey seem so long ago.

We get to Maribor, Slovenia an hour and a half before our “big” game. We walk around the rink a few times to wake up, then start our warm up for the game. Surprisingly enough we came out hard and after the first period were up 2-0. I was hoping this could continue so I could sit out the third but unfortunately they came back and tied it 2-2 going into the third period. We fought back and won 4-2. On any other given day we would have killed the team but due to the circumstances that was not the case. I was extremely thankful when the game was finished. I had four points on the night which I was quite proud of as one time I scored a goal, grabbed the key to the locker room and went to the bathroom and was able to make it back in time for my next shift. Luckily for me that was the only time during the game that I needed the bathroom as by that point I had nothing in my system. At the end of the game my equipment wasn’t exactly wet as there was pretty much no water left in my system.

So after the game it’s back on the bus for the 8 hour drive back. Now back in college we would have pizza’s waiting for us on the bus, which at this point in my career would be like heaven but at the time I didn’t think much of it. But nope, refuelling the body after an important game isn’t exactly on the minds of our coaches. They said we would stop for supper later once we were in the Czech Republic. Humm...great that’s only two countries and 6 hours away. Like seriously could they not just go to the bank and exchange some Czech Krowns into Euros cause really it’s not that difficult or not to mention they have these plastic cards now and days called Visa’s and wow...they work in every country! So 12am we make it across the border and stop in the all night cafeteria where most of our team ate. Tea was of course all I could keep in my system as a few hours ago I had to have the bus make an emergency stop for me. Quite funny really. Finally we made it back into Prague at 2:30am. So 22 hours later my last road trip FINALLY ended!

Culture Day

2009-02-17T07:26:00.000-08:00

Last Thursday was my last day of school at Riverside and also happened to be culture day. Every classroom picked a country to learn about/display to other classrooms and I ended up helping the Year 2 class as they decided to do Canada. I actually don't usually go to school on Thursday's as that is not my day to work but I could not pass up the opportunity to help out representing my country. So I brought in as many Canadian t-shirts as I could, along with a picture book about Canada. I also made a ton of maple cookies for the year 2 and year 1 classes so they could try eating something Canadian. Then I made butter tarts for the year 2 class that learned about Canada. I have never made butter tarts before and they actually turned out really well, but were not that easy to make so I now have an even greater appreciation for those who go through the slow processes of making them.

I then brought in my hockey equipment to show the kids how you would get dressed for a game and what it looks like. Now if we were in a Canadian school this would be ridiculous of course as I'm sure over 50% of the kids would actually be playing the sport. But in an international school in Prague this was actually a good idea. The kids really enjoyed watching me quickly put on half of my equipment along with letting the kids try on my helmet. The year 1 kids just stared at me in amazement and didn’t say much. One kid told me I looked like a super hero, another a giant. I asked one class what they thought you called my shoulder pads and someone shouted out they were called a shield...ah not quite...but close.

Then in the afternoon the older kids put on kind of a fair for all the students with the country that they represented. So they had some games pertaining to their country along with food that you could buy. It was fantastic to say the least because the school has so many kids from different cultures, and of course the mom’s went to town on the food. For the Spanish pavilion we had a whole tapas bar, sushi for the Japanese one and hummus with the Jordanian. The kids had a blast the whole day and really enjoyed learning (and eating) about other cultures, especially when the school is very multicultural.

The staff actually had a send off for me which I was quite surprised by and gave me a sweet card along with a couple of pictures of Prague and some bath products from here. It was really sweet as I did not expect anything. I will truly miss the school and of course all the teachers there. I can honestly say that Riverside is a school unlike none other I’ve been to before. The teachers are all extremely hard working and genuinely nice people. I’ll miss them for sure, and of course my students that I worked with. It was a great experience for me as I have never worked with kids with special needs before outside of the gym. Most of the kids just needed a bit of extra support in one subject area or another, and hopefully they actually got something out of our sessions. Not to mention I taught swimming and never in my life would I have ever thought that would happen. Actually if you were to tell me ten years ago or even five that I would be teaching swimming lessons in Prague, I would have laughed in your face. But nope it’s true, I did that and made it through and actually enjoyed it...most days!

So now I’m off for the next couple of weeks until the season is over which I am fine with. It will be nice to spend some days at home planning my trip with my mom for March/April along with being able to get out and see the rest of Prague and the things I haven’t gotten around to yet.

Kids working on making Canadian flags.

Me with a student in my attempt to "quickly" get dressed.

The little guy with my helmet on.

Budapest

2009-02-06T13:30:00.000-08:00

So this blog is a long time coming as about two weeks ago I spent the weekend in Budapest. We had another weekend off from hockey so I of course look for somewhere to travel. I was looking around and thought that Budapest would be a great place to go. Not to mention I was able to get a bus ticket return for about $40 Canadian - steal of a deal, so off I went.

I arrived there Friday afternoon, thinking that maybe the language would be somewhat similar to Czech, um...not even close. I have to admit that my first impressions of the city were not that great. The bus station was really sketchy. Doesn’t help that it was a rainy cold day, but there were homeless people everywhere, sleeping in the metro station and quite a few sketchy looking characters. But of course I have traveled quite a bit so am to the point where that stuff doesn’t phase me anymore and instead is quite the place to people watch.

I was able to make it through the still communist inspired metro, and found my hostel alright. It was situated a block away from the Danube river so was a great location. The owners of the hostel were just great giving out tons of information about the city. Although I knew quite a bit going in as had read my travel book on the bus already...yes I’m a geek and love travel books! First stop was the Hungarian National Museum. Once again I am a geek and really enjoy history museums. More like information on the country. I had pretty much zero knowledge of Hungary or of any of its history so the museum was great! What did I learn...well to make a long story short the country has pretty much always been occupied or controlled by someone else. The main information that they want to leave you with is that the country was pretty much founded in 896 by the alliance of seven tribes called Magyar (Hungary). Their first king was St. Stephan crowned in 1000. Then in 1541 the Ottoman’s controlled the territory which was huge as in present day Slovakia and parts of Transylvania. Next were the Habsburg’s which is you live in Eastern Europe you know all about them as they were quite a dominate and influential empire in that came into power in 1686. They were in power for a long time where finally there was a duel monarchy Austria creating an Austro-Hungarian Monarchy until WWI. What I found really interesting is that after WWI the country was divided and it lost two-thirds of its territory. I can’t imagine that happening. Then of course came WWII and then after Communist control and finally back to republic in 1989. Such crazy history!

National Museum

Inside...pretty amazing!

After the museum I walked one of the main pedestrian streets and went shopping for souvenirs and finally ate at a traditional Hungarian pub/restaurant. They of course like in the Czech Republic serve goulash as well as make claim to the spice of paprika. You can buy paprika everywhere and it’s in tons of the dishes! I decided to go for the mushroom goulash instead of the gizzard goulash...was not feeling that adventurous that night, and had a great meal. Not to mention it was super cheap. Like Czech it’s a pretty cheap country when you eat in the local places. Oh and the money is quite different as well as it’s about 180 Hungarian Forint to $1 Canadian. So it’s really hard to convert. Not to mention that at night I was still thinking in Czech Crowns where I gave the waitress a really bad tip but if we were in Prague it would have been good. Didn’t realise it until I was a couple of blocks away. Whoops!

Then next morning I awoke to the sun shining. This was pretty much a miracle as in Eastern Europe the sun does not shine. I was expecting rain so needless to say I was extremely pumped as I had planned to do a walking tour. First up I headed out to the Nagycsarnok, or the main market for breakfast. This place was awesome with a ton of stalls inside a huge building consisting of two floors. They sold fruit, vegetables and really any kind of meat you wanted along with a ton of paprika. If lived there I’m sure I would be a regular at the market.

The Market

Inside

From here it was off to my walking tour. I’m a fan of the old walking tour as you can get a pretty good sense of the city after one of these. Our tour was supposed to be about 4 hours but ended up being 5 so was quite the tour. We saw a ton of statues as the city is littered with them. But I honestly can’t really remember any great stories about them. We were then off to Saint Stephan’s Bascilca the church that is named after their first king. It’s exactly 96m high which is after 896 when Hungary was founded, and there’s a rule in the city that no building can be higher than this point. So as you’ll see from my pictures, there are no skyscrapers in the city. Speaking of the city it’s actually two cities as well; Buda and Pest. Buda being on the west side of the Danube and Pest on the East.

St. Stephan's

Next it was a walk up to Varhegy or Castle Hill. Like in Prague there is a large castle on a hill beside the river. I have to say it’s not as nice as Prasky Hrad but it’s still great none the less. The views from the top are amazing of course as you can over look all of Pest and the huge Parliament building that they have. Along with the castle on top of the hill you have an old Medieval town that was built back in...It was awesome to walk the streets and look at the old buildings and churches, not to mention the awesome promenade that overlooked the city...just great views.

Walking up to the castle

The side view of the castle as I could not get far enough back to get the whole thing in a picture

Another view

View from the top of the castle...you can see St. Stephan's in the background

Another angle with the Parliment Building in the background.

An example of the Medievil Streets

Pomenade on the opposite side of the castle overlooking another part of Buda

There was a ton of information on that tour and I’d be lucky to remember half of it. The tour guide definitely loved his country and kept telling us stories on how they were the first to invent this and that. Apparently the telephone that Bell discovered was because of his time spent with Hungarian scientists and so on. They do have the oldest metro station in Europe as it was built in the 1890’s. Only some parts of it are still opened and I actually did ride it. Quite small but to be expected as people back then were not as huge as we are now. Also they built the first suspension bridge. I took a ton of pictures for my dad as I knew he would be interested in that. Although I did see pictures from WWII where I think most of the city was destroyed along with all of the bridges, but they did rebuild them back into their original state.

The suspension bridge

View from the bridge looking back at Pest

View looking at Buda

After the tour I headed to the House of Terror; a museum displaying information when the country was run by the Nazi’s and Communists. I found it really interesting especially all the information from the Communist time. What struck me the most or what I remember most vividly was a video I watch on the work camps they used to have. They documented survivors of these work camps and their stories. Everyone was always in fear of being sent to one of these and rightfully so as there was one story of a women who was found making out with her boyfriend behind some leaders house. Well she got caught and was sent to a camp. They also had about 6 women who used to be in one of these camps and showed them returning to the camp a couple of years later when the Communists had left. They also had their guard or Communist head lady (I’m not sure what you would call her) there as well. It was quite something to watch these ladies confront this lady who used to control their lives as she could decide pretty much anything for them...as in are they are allowed visitors, or scrubbing the toilet as punishment. It kind of seemed as those she didn’t think she was as harsh as what the ladies claimed her to be...I think she was in denial of course One of the ladies openly forgave her which was awesome to see and pretty big of her. I went for a walk that night and here are a couple of night pictures...

Agricultural Museum at night

View of the castle at night

Sunday morning I got up fairly early as I really wanted to make it to the baths. Hungary is known for their thermal baths, a fact I knew nothing about until a friend told me about it before I left. So naturally I had to take that it in as well. I went Szechenyl Furdo a huge bathhouse in the middle of this beautiful park. I looked like I was entering a museum it was so big and old being built in 1908. I paid my entrance fee and was told where the change room was. Upon entering the change room I see a man in a towel blow drying his hair. Hum...they told me the wrong one. So I went back outside to ask again. Um...nope that’s the right one. They have little small enclosed change rooms where you can change into your bathing suit and then lockers on the side where you can put your clothes. Like I said the place was huge as I had to ask in order to figure out how to get outside to the thermal pool. Granted inside the place was filled with pools, saunas and places where you could pay extra and receive a massage. The water was about 35-37C so quite warm but not as warm as the Moose Jaw Spa. Or maybe that’s just because the temperature there was probably only about 0C compared to -20C so maybe that’s why it felt hotter. I don’t have any pictures from the inside of the pool as I kept all my stuff in the locker but you would have seen a huge outdoor play with statues everywhere and water pouring out of them into the pool. You kind of felt like you were back in the days of the Romans at one of their bath houses. There were a ton of local people there as well just hanging out for a Sunday swim, along with lots of large men wearing speedos (this is Europe!) playing chess in the water too.

The Bathhouse...as you can see it looks more like a museum.

Side profile

My last big sight to see was the Parliament Building. It’s the third largest in the world so I really wanted to take a tour of it and was not disappointed. It took about 9 years to build and was finished 1905. They have 20km worth of hallways in it along with Hungarian crown which was stolen in the past and then found and now displayed in one of the main rooms. They also house parliament there two or three times a well. It’s really quite amazing as you can see from the pictures.

Outside the Parliment

The roof of one of the many hallways

The Parliment seats

All in all my time was awesome and I think I learned more in regards to history than I did all through my high school years so the $40 bus ride was definitely worth it!

Hotel Prague!

2009-02-05T05:41:00.001-08:00

Things have been pretty crazy around our house this last month of January. We kind of have started our own hotel at Pplk. Sochora 35, byt 10. We don't charge, so if any of you would like to come and visit, feel free!

It started with my friend Corrin Bredin coming for about four days back in January. She had some time off from hockey as she is playing in Russia, so she was able to make it over to Prague. We had an awesome time with her and she even watched a game of ours. I toured her around Prague, eating at all our favourite restaurants and even walking around Prague at night. Prague at night is pretty spectacular as the castle is all lit up and nothing beats the view from the Charles Bridge. Not too mention it was snowing that night so even better.

Then lucky for us, like I said we've had Jeni's friend, Kelly, staying here for about a week. It's been great having her, kind of like another roommate in the house, and a fun one at that. Then Arielle's friend, Damian, is here for about 5 days. So lucky for everyone we have a closet, or as we like to call it, a guest room, where people can stay. It's a large walk in closet attached to the main hallway in our house and acts as a great extra room. So far we've had no complaints from people staying there. Oh and did I mention Damian is a professional poker player. He does have a real job of course but has entered in the world poker championship and placed 230th in the world. So I thought that was pretty amazing. Better yet is that he went to the casino the other night here and won 2 grand Canadian. He paid for supper that night so he can stay as long as he likes!

Then on top of that my aunt Myrna came to town this past weekend. She didn't stay at our house which was probably a good thing as we're pretty maxed out. I was able to spend the afternoon with her on Saturday and the whole day with her on Sunday. She treated me to a Prague tour at night on Saturday with the tour ending in the Krosovice brewery with a free drink and accordion (sp?) entertainment. It was great as Prague is always awesome at night and I learned some new facts about the city. The accordion player was pretty entertaining as well playing all the old classics and some traditional Czech folk music.

Then the next day I met up with my aunt to go on a lunch boat cruise down the Vltava river. It was really great! I had never been on a cruise on the river before so had a great time and of course learned more about the city. The food was all traditional so it was great to introduce some of the native food to my aunt. From there we went shopping for anything and everything looking for presents for all of her family members. I think we were successful as I took her to a crystal shop mostly only known to locals so she was able to find things in there. It was pretty funny as we were looking for jewellery as well since Prague is known for it's garnet and amber. Well of course I try and help her out in the shop by speaking a bit of Czech to the manager of the store. Well he's all pumped that I speak czech, or really quite little at that and just goes on and on in czech. I was like "Um...could you repeat that and slowly, please." It's funny how sometimes people hear you speaking czech and just go on and on and really fast. Little do they know that it would be best if they were to pretend that I was a five year old and talk to me that way, then I would understand everything. hehe.

Next at Hotel Prague we'll be having one of Arielle's friend, Ashley, come and stay with us for a couple of weeks at the end of the season. Afterwards they plan on traveling around Europe together. But of course there's always room for one more so feel free to come and stay with us at Hotel Prague!

Roommate Night!

2009-01-31T07:46:00.000-08:00

On Thursday we decided to have a little roommate night supper, or family night as we like to call it. We haven't had one in a long time so it was nice to just sit back, eat and relax with one another. Jeni's friend Kelly, who plays in Austria, was here for the supper as well. I think we all consider her as our friend as well, and one of the family as she's made quite a few trips to come and visit us in Prague.

I made my "famous" honey almond chicken for the meal. It's not really my recipe as I got it from our church's cookbook back home. But since I made it quite a few times last year for the girls it's now known as mine. Chelsa helped by making a salad, and for desert I made my mom's homemade chocolate pudding. It was an awesome meal and we had such a good time sitting around the super table taking and such, just like you would at home. I think we'll be trying to do more of these in the future. Here are some pictures from the night...

Chelsa did a great job of setting the table as she has the eye for those things.

I'm just cooking away!

Kids will be kids...

2009-01-26T13:26:00.000-08:00

Last week I had an interesting day at school. If you remember or need a reminder, I work at Riverside School, a private Christian school here in Prague. To many it simple I work with kids who need a little extra help in different subjects. Well the other day working with one of my Year 3 students I had the funniest conversation. His teacher told me that we were going to be reading through a book and then writing down words that he didn't know. Then the following session together we would look up the words in the dictionary and figure out what they mean. Well upon hearing this the little guy told me that it wouldn't be necessary as he knew every word and that he studied the whole dictionary. Oh really I asked "the whole dictionary?" Yep all of it. Oh okay...well we were stuck on the second page with what rope meant.

Then later that day I was taking the Year 3 kids swimming as I do every Wednesday afternoon. Well one of their teachers has just recently announced that she is pregnant and the kids can't stop talking about it. So on the bus ride home they were discussing it again and one little girl asked the teacher if it hurt when she swallowed the seed. Ah...hum...what parents tell their kids I don't know.

Last weekend Moose Jaw, this weekend Fussen

2009-01-15T13:02:00.000-08:00

It’s funny how the other weekend our family took the “big” trip to Moose Jaw to go to the spa and then the first weekend I’m back in Prague, Chelsa and I decide to head to Fussen, Germany. What a contrast of places, granted nothing knocking Moose Jaw as I had a great time there. So the reason we decided to head to Fussen was because the U18 Women’s World Championship was taking place there. We have three girls from our team on the Czech National team, and then along with that my old coach from Wisconsin, Mark Johnson, was the head coach for the US.
We drove there on Friday morning to catch two games, the first one being the semi final of Canada vs. Sweden. Then the second one that night with the US vs. Czech Republic. The drive there was awesome to say the least. It’s been cold here (well for this region) and there was hoarfrost all over the trees as it was sometimes quite foggy. Then as we started heading towards Fussen, which is southwest of Munich, you get into the wine region of rolling hills and cute little renaissance looking towns.

The first game we watched was fairly interesting until the second period. Sweden scored first to scare the Canadians, and then the Canadians answered back with 8 goals. So they took it to them. Then the second game was so hard to watch as the Americans annihilated the Czech’s 18-0. There were a couple of problems with that game. One the Czech’s only have two lines so were double shifting those girls and they had zero energy left. Second, they had no goalie and I mean no goalie. The poor girl got just lit up on every shot taken. It was a great time as after the game Chelsa and I were able to head out for pizza with Mark and his staff and catch up. I also met a friend of his who was coaching in Switzerland, well actually he just got fired and is now the head coach of the Slovenian team and is about to try and qualify for the Olympics. So great stories coming from both of them.

Saturday morning we had time to tour the Neuschwanstein castle. Stunning is all I can say. It is the castle that Walt Disney modeled the Disney castle after. It’s a romantic medieval castle that King Ludwig II built. The crazy thing about it was that he only spent 170 in residence and it was never completely finished. Really crazy as you can see the enormity of it. It’s also a fairly new castle as it was started in 1869. The tour was great, granted we had a really weird tour guide, who was fragile as Chelsa described him. I could just imagine as a squire back in the day living in the castle, although we had our own theories that he still lived there. The inside of the castle was amazing with this one particular room standing out to me with all the wood carvings in it. I was told that it took 14 carpenters four years to finish it. Unfortunately we could not take pictures inside the castle as I would love to have put the picture on it.

So after the castle we watched the bronze and gold medal game. The Czechs were blown out of the bronze medal game losing 8-0 to Sweden which was too bad. Then there was the gold medal with Canada vs. US. It was an awesome game with the US taking the lead going up two goals then to have the Canadians tie it up to force OT. Really exciting, but the Canadians took a penalty while playing four on four and the US scored on the power play to win. It was a great goal and shot which was nice to see instead of some little weak shot going in. Of course I was happy to see Mark win gold but of course deep down wanted Canada to bring home the gold.

The hoarfrost from our drive down to Fussen

On the walk up to the castle

Pretending I'm a photographer

The castle

It's quite big!

Chelsa and I

View from the castle

Streets of Fussen

Canada vs US Gold Medal Game

Back to Prague and back to salads!

2009-01-04T11:30:00.000-08:00

I just arrived back in Prague yesterday after being at home for about three weeks. Yes I know that was a pretty long break from hockey at Christmas, but for some reason our coach was feeling nice and decided to let us go home early. We did have some games but were able to miss them. One of them was a Euro League game but since only three of us foreigners can play in it we were okay to miss it as the two Slovak girls on our team were still around.

For some reason I had this idea in my head that when I was going home that I would have all this time to relax and catch up on emails and so on. Well nope that wasn’t the case or never really is the case so I’m not sure what I was thinking. I did have a bit of time to relax but that felt funny as I was usually on the go. I did have an awesome time at home hanging out with family and friends and with that mostly my friend Andrea who was back in town from Australia. I hadn’t seen her in a year so we spent as much time together as possible and even at that I’m not sure when I’ll see her again. I had an awesome Christmas day which was spent at home but unfortunately my brother was sick with the flu so he pretty much stayed on the couch the whole day and luckily he didn’t give it to me. Then on the 27th my family headed out to Moose Jaw for my cousin’s soon to be wife’s bridal shower. Had a great time at that, and then my dad booked us in for two nights to stay at the Mineral Springs Spa. That was just awesome as there is an outdoor part to the pool so you can sit in the hot water outside when it’s about -25C. Kind of like a hot tub outside but only bigger with salt water. Then from Moose Jaw we headed up to the farm for a few days to spend some time with the Willms clan. This is my first year without a Willms family Christmas as my grandma died last year. So it was a bit different but was still awesome to get out to the farm for our annual wiener roast. Then it was back home to head to my cousin’s, Mel, 30th birthday party which was a blast! Finally I spent New Year’s with my friend Chan and her fiancé, Mike, and had an awesome time with them going out for super and then hanging out at their house ringing in the New Year. Granted we found it strange as Saskatchewan is not lined up with any of the major time zones, aka the eastern time zone, so there is no real “ball” drop when it hits midnight, you just kind of celebrate it on your own.

So now I’m back in Prague and like I said back to salads as I sure ate a ton over the holidays! The constant eating was topped off with my going away five course meal that my sister-in-law put on! It was amazing to say the least. My brain hasn’t quite turned on the Czech yet but I knew I was back when the customs agent smelled like B.O. and when I went to the grocery store today all they had was beef, no chicken. Yes, back in the strange but never dull ways of the Czech.

Here are a couple of pics from my time at home...

Out for supper with the family for my mom's birthday

What I woke up to almost every morning while I was home.

Me standing on what will eventually be the front of my parents new house in Deer Valley!

The Valley at sunset.

Amanda and I shopping in Moose Jaw.

Scrappy and the cats, along with my two cousins starting a fire. Within 5 seconds of your mitts being off your hands were frozen so hats off to them for getting that fire going!

Me and Scrappy.

Off roading with the Hummer.

Making our own trail through the snow.

About to start our five course meal...not a bad going send off!

The Christmas Market

2008-12-19T15:12:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago, I know it's been a bit since I've updated things, a couple of my teammates and myself went down to the Old Town square to hang out at the Christmas market. One thing that Europe knows how to do well is Christmas markets. The ones in Germany are fantastic and Prague has a pretty good thing going on as well. We were able to spend some time down there just looking around at all the little shops set up for the occasion along with eating some of the Czech traditional food that they have for Christmas. The weather was really nice as it was only 0C so it was perfect to be outside drinking svarak, which is hot mulled wine and eating kolbasa's. They also have this traditional pastry/cinnamon bun type of dessert that they bake over a fire called trdlenik, so I was pretty excited to eat that. I'm pretty sure I blogged about it this time last year. All in all a great afternoon/evening hanging out with the girls and getting in the Christmas mood!

A view of old town square with the Christmas stalls

More stalls...the big roll thing that you see hanging from one of the stalls is called a trdelnik - my favorite!

The huge Christmas tree in the square - it's actually real!

Hanging out with the girls

Passionate for Pivo!

2008-12-10T12:59:00.000-08:00

Well it's Wednesday and I'm of course procrastinating packing as I leave tomorrow for Regina for the Christmas break. We're currently sitting around, talking about what Czechs love most - beer - also known as pivo in Czech. They're not just passionate about beer but they perfer it in the purist form possible. If not directly from the brewery tank, then from the tap. Case in point...it's not uncommon to go down to your local pub with plastic pop bottle in hand, requesting a fill of whatever they have on tap. We've seen teammates do this on many occassions and thought we would try it out tonight. "When in Rome" I guess... make that Prague? So Chelsa went down to our local pub - or more like a small one room pub that is underneath our building of flats - and proceeded to fill a 1.5L water bottle with Gambrinus...so Czech. Well the beer was pretty good, slightly flat, (even though I'm not a huge beer drinker) but when you pay $3 for a litre and half of beer you can't really complain!

Losing Sucks!

2008-12-09T13:24:00.001-08:00

There’s really no other way to put it but that losing sucks. So as you can tell we didn’t fare so well in our tournament on the weekend. We gave it our all, or at least I did judging by the fact that it’s Tuesday and I’m still sore, and we couldn’t quite get it done. Our first game was against Finland which we suspected would be our hardest and it definitely was a hard game. The first period we did not play well at all, mainly due to the fact that I think our bodies and minds were just trying to get adjusted to the speed of the game. Luckily for us our goalie kept us in it and we were only down 1-0. We were tied 1-1 in the third period thanks to a great goal by our captain, but unfortunately they scored with about 10 minutes left to go up 2-1 and we just couldn’t recover. The game was really bitter sweet because we were right with them and really could have won the game and on the other hand I think we did better than anyone expected coming so close to beating them and playing right with them. So that made the next game super important as we needed to win the next two.

Saturday was then our game against Kazakhstan and we knew it would be another tough game. After the first period we were tied 1-1 and I was pretty pumped as I scored the goal while we were on a 5 on 3 thanks to a sweet pass from Jeni. Then in the second period we had a defensive mental break down for about five minutes and they scored two goals within that time. It was really bad! So going into the third we were down 3-1, which a comeback from that score is quite doable. Our coach finally and I mean finally put all of us Canadians together on a line along with Sonja, our American/Czech teammate, and we started a comeback. I was able to pass it out front to Jeni who had an awesome tip in for a goal, so now it was 3-2 but it was too little too late. Our line dominated them but ran out of time for putting the puck in the net and we ended up losing 4-2 as they scored with a horrible give away at the end of the game. Therefore with that loss it meant that we would not be moving on to the next round. Disappointing? Very to say the least considering last year we lost in shoot out to go to the finals and now this year we come up short again. The next game we played Denmark and killed them 10-0. Where were those goals the day before? I’m still pretty bummed about the losses but definitely know I gave it my all as after the Kazakhstan game as I think I sat in the dressing room without moving for about 30 minutes partly due to shock that we had just lost but mostly because of exhaustion as I couldn’t move. There’s of course always the should of and could of’s that you think about after the game. But I guess losing is part of sports and something you have to live with if you play any sort of game...but it still really sucks!

Hockey...

2008-12-05T02:32:00.000-08:00

I just realized that I haven't exactly blogged anything on how hockey is going over here. Well I guess to me traveling is just so much more exciting and interesting to talk about. So hockey is going pretty well. We are undefeated in our Czech League games and have two losses in our European League games. So we're doing fairly well. It is frustrating although as only three foreigners can play in those Euro League games and those are the best games of course to play in. So that means that there are usually three of us sitting out as we have four Canadians and two Slovaks on the team. Of course there are the usual ups and downs that go along with any hockey season especially when playing over in Europe. Our coach is not the greatest and doesn't exactly have a wealth of knowledge on the game. He tends to yell...alot really and then doesn't exactly correct the girls on what they have done wrong. So really frustrating on both parties. The girls over here have quite good individual skill just have no coaching to help make them better and therefore have no hockey sense.

About a month ago we played in the first round of the European Cup. We played teams from Turkey, Hungry, and Slovenia. We killed all of them as all of us imports can play making our team much stronger. Then this weekend we're hosting the second round of the tournament. That means we play Finland, Kazakhstan and Denmark. We play Finland today and it should be a really good game. We'll most likely struggle in our defence zone as that's our weakness. But it comes by honestly as we usually kill the teams in the Czech league so are never in our own end and then we never work on it in practice. So how are you supposed to get better or have any sense of what to do? Let's just say our goalie needs to be on her game. We need to be one of the top two coming out of the weekend in order to make it to the finals which will take place at the end of January in Sweden. I've always wanted to go there, so hopefully that will happen! I'll let you know how we do at the end of the weekend!

You Never Know When...

2008-12-04T07:39:00.000-08:00

The title of my blog should really be the title of my life here in Prague and playing for HC Slavia. Why you’re wondering? Well basically playing hockey in Europe or at least for a women’s team in Europe requires you to be flexible, super patient and being prepared for the unexpected. I have a million examples of this but these last two weeks has provided me with a few I’ll tell you about. For one you never know when your schedule will be changed. Now we do have a hockey schedule, I guess a rough one at that with no times of the game on it. So we have no idea what time we’re playing at when we play away games. But usually with home games we know in advance what time our games are. So to start with this example I found out the weekend of Champions league had actually been changed from Nov. 29-30 to Dec .5-7 only two weeks before. Hum...now this normally would not have caused me any grief but this time it did as my parents had booked plane tickets and were on their way to come out and watch the tournament. Let’s just say I was very frustrated with my team management as they had known weeks before that and had not told anyone on the team. Now how are you supposed to plan for anything...or do people do that in this country? So of course my parents did cancel their trip as we only had one game this past weekend, a Czech game at that so not a very good one and not worth the flight out when currently my dad is extremely busy at work. So they’ve postponed their trip and will hopefully be flying out here sometime in January or February.

Like I said before you never know when...you’re going to leave on a road trip. We found out last weekend Friday night at practice that we were going to leave at 7am to head to Salzburg the next morning. Ouch so that means we were up at the crack of dawn as we had to drive out to our rink pack up our stuff and be on the road at 7am driving there. We then had a game on Sunday as well and just assumed it would be in the afternoon or evening as they usually are. But nope, the game actually started at 11:30am. Normally not a bad time but of course since we were playing in Salzburg that night we figured we would not get home until 2am.

Well you never know when...you’re going to hit a snow storm. That night we drove through a storm for most of the way back to Prague. It was the first snow fall of the year and we got dumped on. Therefore we got back to the locker room at 4am, which leads me to my last one...you never know when...you’ll sleep in the dressing room. Yes that’s right I did sleep in our dressing room, along with about 2/3’s of our team. We arrived at 4am and were told that we had to be back in the dressing room ready to leave at 8am to travel to Beroun where we were playing our game that day. So we did that math and figured we’d get more sleep staying overnight in the locker room as it’s about a 25min drive home to our house, so that’s close to an hour of sleep that we’d be losing. Other girls felt the same way so we found some of our stretching mats and camped out in the locker room. Now this brings me back to the whole scheduling aspect and lack of communication as if we had known we were playing that early in the morning then we could have brought stuff to sleep on at the rink, or even a change of clothes. But I guess playing over here is all about the experience right? Although this experience I could have done without.

Terezin

2008-11-30T12:42:00.000-08:00

Two weekends ago, yes I know it’s been a long time since I’ve written, we took a day trip to Terezin. Jeni, Arielle and I decided to take a trip there as it’s only about 45mins away from Prague. Terezin is a town of currently about 3,000 people and I have to say a super dead one at that. There is a huge fortress surrounding the whole town that was built in 1780 by Emperor Joseph II, and it could accommodate up to 11,000 soldiers so that just tells you how big it was. I guess the fortress was never used during a war but ended up being a prison and as a side note for those history buffs out there (Jim) Gavrilo Princip, the man who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 to start WWI died in the prison there. That wasn’t the reason we decided to go there. The main reason was because the town became a transit camp for Jews during WWII. In 1940 the Gestapo created a prison in the lesser fortress and then later the whole town was evicted to create a transit camp for Jews. It said that more than 140,000 Jews passed through there with 33,000 dying in the camp because of the terrible conditions and then 88,000 were sent to Auschwitz. What’s really crazy is that now the town is about three thousand people and at the height of the camp they had 58,419 people living there. Pretty awful to say the least. The Nazi’s also used the place to cover up what they were really doing as when the Red Cross came to visit they displayed it as a Jewish refuge when in fact it wasn’t. They even made a movie to show the Red Cross how great the living conditions were.

So we started off the day by going to the Museum of the Ghetto which was really good. We were able to watch that original movie that the Nazi’s had made for the Red Cross as I had mentioned previously. I took us about two hours to go through the museum and even at that we did not read every single detail. From there we headed over to the Magdeburg barracks where they had a reconstructed prisoners’ dormitory which was really cool to see and of course makes you appreciate the space that you have. We walked around the town somewhat as the town is pretty much one big historical sight as all of the buildings were used during the time of the camp. The town has a really eerie feel to it when you’re walking the streets, as some of the buildings were really run down and we hardly saw any people out on the streets, kind of strange for a Saturday. So we explored some of the streets on our way to the crematorium and also the walls of the fortress. You could walk up on top of the walls which were really neat as you got a better view of the town and the moat that ran along it. We also went to a memorial along the side of the Labe River. I guess they had thrown the ashes of 22,000 people into the river during the time the camp was running. That really hit home for me as the river and area around it was so beautiful so to imagine the Nazi’s throwing the ashes into the river was really disturbing as of course was everything they did during that time. Finally we did a quick tour of the lesser fortress as we were running out of time. They had the prison barracks here along with some workshops and out in front they have a National Cemetery for those who were buried in mass graves. All in all a great day that was very informative and I suggest to others who are going to Prague to make a quick day trip out there as it’s worth it!

The Magdeburg Barracks

The eerie streets of Terezin

The town square

Standing on top of the fortress or the wall that runs around the city, looking down into the moat

Overlooking other areas of the fortress

Crematorium Memorial

Arielle standing along the Labe River where they dumped the ashes

The Memorial

In the Lesser Fortress going into the Jewish Prisoner's quarters with the typical German sign saying "work will set you free"

Courtyard in the prison

On the left are doors to the prisoner's cells where they held some of the "bad" Jews

Outside the Lesser Fortress, another memorial

Copenhagen!

2008-11-17T04:19:00.001-08:00

Last weekend, I was lucky enough to have no hockey as pretty much our whole team was in China besides the foreigners. Why you ask? Well they were there trying to qualify for the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver. Unfortunately they didn’t make it but in the other qualification tournament two of our teammates were playing for the Slovak national team and won, so they’ll be in the Olympics. It’s a pretty big deal as they have never even been in the A pool of the World Championships. So we’re all really excited for them.

Anyways, like the title says, I took a little trip to Copenhagen. I found a sweet seat sale and was able to fly there on next to nothing, which was a good thing cause it is not a cheap city! The main reason I wanted to go there was because a former teammate and friend of mine from Switzerland is now playing hockey and going to University there. Helga was an awesome host and we had the best time together. I hadn’t seen her since I was last in Switzerland so we had a lot of catching up to do!

I flew there on Thursday morning and was able to hang out with her for a little bit before she had to take off that afternoon to go to Sweden to watch a play for one of her classes. That’s right, Sweden. I had no idea but there is a bridge that connects Copenhagen to Malmo, Sweden. I guess it’s a really nice city but unfortunately I didn’t have enough time to explore there as well. She left me downtown which was awesome! I had so much fun shopping on their main street, as well as looking at a bunch of amazing buildings. The shopping was great as aside from Italy the people there are super stylish and dressed to the nine. So I finally found my pair of boots! It gets dark there around 4:30 so I spent most of my sightseeing that night in the dark. But the city is beautiful at night so had no issues with this.

On Friday we started by going to Helga’s gym, which is really nice. Way nicer than anything we have here in the Czech, so it was great to get a work out there. It was a good thing we worked out because after we had an amazing buffet at this Mediterranean restaurant. It was some of the best food I have ever had. Not to mention it was a buffet, as in all you can eat. They have not heard of such things here in the Czech Republic, or free water for that matter. Afterwards we did more shopping and sightseeing, going to some really old University buildings along with the old stock exchange, city hall, central station and Tivoli. For those of you who don’t know, Tivoli is kind of like a carnival/exhibition of sorts that is opened mostly throughout the year. But of course I was there when it was closed as they were getting it ready for Christmas. That was really disappointing as I had heard so much about it and how every Dane loves going there so I’ll have to go back. We also went to some really cool cafes and drank amazing cappuccinos. Helga is a coffee lover like me so every afternoon when she was like...you want to get a coffee? I couldn’t resist. Cafes in Europe are pretty amazing and everyone has a different feeling or ambiance to it. The ones in Copenhagen were pretty great as well.

On Saturday we started the day touring through the area called Fredieriksberg. This place was full of cool shops and cafes, kind of the artsy area. From here we had to make it over to Amalienborg, a castle where we saw the changing of the guard at noon. We went there by water bus which was pretty cool. It was a pretty good show, kind of the same feel as the one in Prague. Demark actually has a monarchy with Margrethe II as the queen at the moment. It’s crazy as they have a ton of different palaces throughout the city and they live in all of them throughout the year. From here we saw the Marble which is a super nice cathedral and then moved on to Nyhavn Street, the famous harbour street. This is one of the most beautiful streets/cannels I have ever seen. The street was lined with seafood restaurants and cafes so of course we had to eat there. Luckily for us we found a herring buffet. That’s right, I ate about 9 different kinds of herring. If you like herring this is the place to go. Thankfully Helga was there so she could tell me the different kinds of herring and what I was eating and how to eat it. We also had to have a small little glass of this herbal alcohol that I guess goes along with herring. I had no idea that’s what you eat with it, but it did taste good with the herring. My favourite kinds were the smoked herring and the dill sauce one, but I think I’ve had my fair share of herring for awhile.

After, I made Helga go with me to see the little mermaid statue from the story “The Little Mermaid” by Hans Christian Anderson. I took a Hans Christian Anderson class way back in college where it was a video class. So the guy teaching it filmed it while he was in Copenhagen. It was a pretty interesting class and of course we read that story so naturally I had to take a picture. Helga warned me that it was nothing special which is kind of true but it was a great walk along the harbour to get to it and we were also able to see the Gefion Fountain along the way. That was pretty much it for the day as it started to get dark by this time.

All in all it was a great trip of course. It was super cool to be able to explore the city with someone who actually lives there, not to mention Helga is half Danish, and she was a great tour guide. The city is full of museums as well and only having about three days there doesn’t do the city justice so of course I’ll have to go back!

City Hall

Streets of Copenhagen

More streets, this time by the water.

Standing in front of one of the many statues in the city. I think this is of one of their former Kings...Fredrick but am not sure.

Changing of the guard outside one of the castles.

The Marble, a really nice cathedral by the castle grounds.

The Little Mermaid

Nyhaven Street

Helga and I

100 Years of Czech Hockey

2008-11-12T23:45:00.001-08:00

Last week we were asked by our owner if we wanted to go to the 100th year celebration of Czech hockey. Naturally we said yes as free tickets to any event is always awesome, not to mention that when receiving free tickets from our owner it usually means VIP seats! I had no idea that the game was being played as it's hard to keep up with current events here in Prague when you don't have cable and can only read a bit of the langauge. We were even more excited for the game when I went online to find out more information regarding it and saw that Jaromir Jagr was going to be playing in the game along with Martin Straka. I've never seen either of them play so was super excited for it!

We were at the rink about an hour before game time and met our owner outside to get the tickets. We then found out that he had two extra ones and asked us if we knew anyone who could use them. Well I had been bragging that day at work about those tickets to Jen, a collegue who hails from Sask and is a hockey fan, so knew that if I told her she would love to come. She also happens to be dating our Vice Principal, a Scottsman, and strangely enough an avid hockey fan. So perfect, two tickets for the couple. It worked out great as they were able to come to the game and had, I think at least, an awesome time. I have a feeling a good reference letter is pretty much a guarantee after hooking him up with those tickets!

The game was pretty good to watch, with the Czech's beating the Slovak's 7-0. Jagr even scored so that made it even better for the sold out crowd who would continuously chant his name. As soon as he touched the puck, no matter where he was on the ice, the volume level in the rink increased ten-fold! After that game was finished they had an oldtimers intersquad game with ex-players of the Czech and Czechoslovakian national teams. I recognized a few names but didn't really know who the players were.

Of course the buffet was amazing and I paced myself this time making it more of a marathon event. hehe. Also before the game we saw our owner's daughter who just happened to be hanging out with Jagr's girlfriend. So naturally I was able to chat it up with her for about 10mins seeing how life was for them in Russia. Looks like he's having a good season and they're liking Russia. Kind of neat talking to her but would be even better if I had met her boyfriend!

Chelsa and Sonja before the game

A view of the rink before warmups

Ceremonial puck drop

Sold out crowd

Jagr!

Again!

Hasek was there as well.

We're having a great time as you can tell!

Oldtimers lining up for the second game of the night.

Sunday Drive to Dresden

2008-11-05T23:35:00.000-08:00

We had this past Sunday off from hockey so decided to take a little drive to Dresden, Germany. We were laughing in the car how my parents will take a little drive out to Moose Jaw, or on their bikes out to Lumsden on a Sunday, but nope we drive to another country!

I had wanted to go to Dresden for a little while now to look for shoes. Crazy I know, but they seem to have more shoe stores and bigger sizes in Germany so I’ve been pretty lucky finding shoes there. Well I didn’t exactly plan this out very well as we went on a Sunday and low and behold every retail store was closed. I had no idea as everything stays open in Prague so figured it would be the same there. Well nope, that wasn’t the case. No problem though as Dresden is a beautiful city and there was a ton to see and do while we were there.

The funniest thing happened to us when we first got there. We were looking for a place to park down town and saw a bunch of parkades but decided to look for something on the street that might be cheaper. We found a side street right close to one of the main squares and was about to park in the spot when we saw that there was a no parking sign. Well low and behold this guy gets out of his car and moves it forward a couple of spots so he can park there and us as well. It was hilarious! I guess that’s what you get for not having the no parking sign cemented to the street.

Like I said the city was amazing! I didn’t know this but apparently it was bombed during 1945 by the Allies in WWII. Most of the city has been rebuilt and you can see with some of the churches on the inside a fine line as to what was left standing after the bombings and what has been rebuilt. It was actually really sad to see all the pictures of the city just devastated and rubble everywhere, can’t imagine really. The city is cut into two parts, one part being on the north side of the river and the other on the south. We walked all over the place as you can see from the pictures and stopped for an amazing lunch at a Canadian Steakhouse. Pretty funny to be in Germany and come across a restaurant called Ontario, but we were pretty pumped to find it and each had huge buffalo burgers! I think those burgers were worth the drive!

Jeni and Arielle standing beside our movable parking sign

A statue of Martin Luther by the Frauenkirche

Streets of Dresden from the Bruhlsche Terrace

Arielle and I on the Bruhlsche Terrace

View of Old Town from across the river (would be a better picture on a clear day)

Love the self timer!

A really cool mural

Schloss (Castle)

Arielle and I in the gardens of the castle

The three of us

Frauenkirche at dusk (finally no clouds)

Happy Halloween

2008-11-03T12:26:00.001-08:00

Halloween is not exactly celebrated here in the Czech Republic - unfortunately. It would have been great to have kids come to our door trick or treating, granted it could have been a little hard as we live on the top floor of a five story building and our whole area is wall to wall apartments. I’m not sure how that would work with kids trying to get candy...not too well probably. Actually there is an area in Prague called Little America where there are huge houses with big yards, kind of what you would see in the suburbs, so all the International kids that celebrate Halloween go there for some trick or treating. I guess it starts at 6 and usually ends around 7 as it’s a mad dash to all the houses. Talking to one of the moms on Friday night, she told me that a lot of the houses ran out of candy, so looks like they were busy!

Luckily for us our friends, the Stewarts, had a Halloween party at their apartment so we were able to dress up for it. We had a great time figuring out costumes and hanging out at the party. Chelsa went as a girl from the eights, and Arielle a Roughrider, sporting her jersey of course. And then Jeni and I decided to go as a tomato and a rohlik. Why you ask? Well I’m not sure if you remember my blog from way back in August when we were at training camp and as one of our snacks we were giving a tomato and a rohlik (rohlik’s are little hot dog like buns that are a staple to any Czech person’s diet). So Jeni was the tomato and I bought about 15 rohlik’s and taped them to me. Pretty funny!

Arielle and Chelsa

The tomato and the rohlik

Roomies!

Two and Half Months without a Microwave...

2008-10-29T08:39:00.000-07:00

Well yes it can be done, you can live without a microwave, or maybe I’m the only one that thought you couldn’t do that. That’s right, the furniture that we had did not include a microwave. Therefore I lived without a microwave until last week when finally...we got our furniture! Yeah!!! We have furniture, or more like a couch, kitchen table, tv and coffee tables. We were pretty pumped when the Ikea truck pulled up with all our furniture last week. Granted we’re still stumped as to why it did not come sooner but none the less we’ve moved on and are happy that it’s here. But all is not perfect as we’re still waiting on cable and WiFi internet. We do have internet but it’s just plug in with a cord therefore only person can be on the net or be using our vonage phone, so not ideal. Hopefully we’ll be getting the router by the end of this week. But of course you never know. You can now call me on my vonage phone (306-546-0740) whenever, and if someone is on it or on the internet, just leave a message, as we’re always checking it. But please remember the whole 7 hours ahead thing! Thanks and will try and post pictures of our new furniture soon!

Canadian Thanksgiving...Czech Style!

2008-10-26T02:52:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday we decided to host a Canadian Thanksgiving inviting our entire team over to the house for it. Crazy idea, yeah kind of considering I haven’t exactly had any experience cooking for 20ish people, and neither has Chelsa, who was the one behind the idea! But why not try? So first off this is a little difficult as you can’t exactly buy all the regular “Thanksgiving” type food here. Chelsa was able to order a turkey from a specialty store and we did find some instant stuffing (yeah I know the real stuff would better, but this is our first massive dinner), and have been on the lookout for sweet potatoes, which we did find.

It was a really fun and interesting experience to say the least. Chelsa did a great job preparing the turkey, thanks to some instructions from our friend Erin (she’s a veteran cook!) Although it was pretty funny watching Chelsa give herself a pep talk before working with the turkey as she’s not a fan of working with raw meat. We were just barely able to fit our 8kg turkey into our small European oven and found out that because it was a convention oven you don’t need to cook it as long. We were watching that turkey like hawks and were able to take it out before it was over done, and it turned out great!

We made stuffing, mash potatoes, sweet potatoes, gravy and had our friend Adrianne bring over some vegetables and Erin was amazing making three homemade pies! She even had a can of pumpkin filling and made pumpkin pie. That was unbelievable as you can’t by pumpkin filling here! Definitely a highlight for me! It was really funny as we had no idea when to start things as with our lack of let’s say zero experience of making big meals, we had no idea when things would be ready or if they would be ready on time. But we pulled through and had everything pretty much ready on time and just had to reheat a couple of dish.
The girls loved it and had a great time! We kind of had to force them to try some of the new stuff, like sweet potatoes but once they finally tried it they were hooked.

They really enjoyed the pies which many of them had never seen before. All in all a success! The night ended with some interactive games including charades and a massive game of hid and go seek in the dark. This ended with 9 people “hiding” on Chelsa’s bed and the bed breaking. So Thanksgiving ended up costing Chelsa a little more than she expected!

The girls gathered around the food

Enjoying the food!

Digging into the pies!

Arielle after eating too much!

Christmas is here...?

2008-10-26T02:49:00.000-07:00

This past week we were out looking for a turkey as we had the whole team over for Canadian Thanksgiving on Thursday (will write more about that later). We went to a huge Tesco, equivalent to a Superstore over here, looking for that turkey, will didn’t find one but being that it was attached to a mall, noticed that there were Christmas trees everywhere! Then looked through the store and saw all the Christmas candies, chocolates and cookies out. Wow, so crazy! It’s not even November yet. My dad would love this as after Halloween he usually starts up the Christmas songs, so here he could be singing them for two and half months. I think part of the early start is that they don’t really celebrate Halloween here, so why not start with Christmas early? We’ve been invited to a friend’s Halloween party on Friday so maybe after that I’ll be able to start thinking about Christmas.

Stromovka Park

2008-10-24T02:14:00.000-07:00

The amazing thing about living in Prague and the location I am at is that we are about a ten minute walk from two amazing parks. Actually we are right in the middle of the two. The first one you have seen pictures from, Letna Park, a park perched up on a hill overlooking all of Prague. The second park is called Stromovka Park. This park is even bigger than Letna and has a couple of ponds in it along with a waterfall. It’s actually really beautiful with trees everywhere, my favourite being the willows which run along some of the paths making it a great place to go for a run. When you’re in the park, you actually feel like you’re not in a city of close to two million people and feel like you could be out in the country.

So this past Friday Arielle and I went to the park to explore around as I had only ever run through it and Arielle had never been there. We had a great time walking through the leaves and feeding the ducks at the pond. Granted I couldn’t believe how friendly the ducks were and had a couple of close calls where they almost pooped on my shoe! Here are a couple of pics...

A glimpse of one of the paths

Me hanging out by a tree

Arielle, actually hanging out on a tree

The duck pond

Arielle and I using her self timer

Feeding the ducks and trying not to get pooped on

Pretending we're photographers and trying to take cool pictures...turned out not too bad.

An Update for “One of Them Weeks”

2008-10-14T23:58:00.000-07:00

I thought I should post an update to a couple of posts ago where I was having a really bad week. So to start with that update...I did finally receive that package from my mom from DHL...a month late of course. It was an amazing package! If you’ve ever lived overseas, or away from home you’ll know what I’m talking about when I say that getting packages in the mail from home is more exciting than Christmas morning. The package made my week! Granted I’m not sure if I’ll be receiving any more because of the problems we were having and if so don’t think my mom will be using DHL again.

Regarding my job, I did end up getting a raise which is great, but...they kill you with taxes over here, so what I’m being paid is still not that great. At one point I was told by the financial guy at the school that if my team pays taxes on my salary then I should not have to pay taxes on my salary at school. Then talking to him the other day it didn’t seem like this was the case, but I apparently should get some back at the end of the fiscal year. I am kind of having a hard time understanding him as he is Czech and can’t quite explain everything to me. But I have decided to stick with the job as I will be getting 5 weeks paid holidays...can’t complain about that! Things are going great at the school. I’m the Special Educational Needs Instructor so things are finally rolling along with that. I have a bunch of pull out sessions with kids working on anything from math to handwriting. It’s funny because some of the things I’m teaching, I really don’t remember learning and have to figure things out fast, aka sounds or different tricks in spelling, like why do you spell height with ei and how is it ei and not ie. Don’t worry though, I know the tricks now. Swimming is also going well. I’ve removed the water wings from one of my kids, and also had a student take off his life belt for the first time the other day. That was seriously a huge step because the first time he was in the water he was clinging to me the whole time.

Then with the whole furniture thing...well that’s still not exactly sorted out. We did have a meeting with our owner the other week and got stuff kind of hashed out with that. But we’re still waiting on him for the furniture as I guess he has to get in contact with our trainer/equipment guy who has a truck and can move the stuff to our apartment...we are hoping this will happen this week. Then for internet, well let’s just say we really need it! We are waiting for some sort of thing to come in the mail from our internet provided. I guess when we have this “thing” (I’m thinking a router of some sort), then we’ll be able to set it up and have it! So I’m hoping that it will come this week as well, but then again you never know.

So things are getting somewhat better, but I will let you know when we have this whole internet thing figured out so then I can be online more than once a day or every two days and will also be able to use our Vonage phone!

An Interesting Situation

2008-10-10T04:14:00.000-07:00

We had an interesting experience/situation come up the other night after practice. To set the back ground of the story I’ll have to give you some information of our rink. Hockey rinks in the Czech Republic are not like those back in Canada. Pretty much all of them have a restaurant inside. Granted some hockey rinks in Canada do as well, but they are usually more like canteens. These are actually restaurants. Along with this there is in most cases a hotel attached as well. By our standards it would be about a 1 to 2 star hotel, so not very nice, but practical to hold teams for camps and tournaments. So the rink itself is quite a big structure.

So after practice on Wednesday night we were running around the rink on the outside doing our cool down when we turned the corner to the back side of the rink and saw an elderly man face down on the ground, half of his body still on the one step and half inside the door to his room. Oh boy! So we run towards him and Chelsa’s asking him in Czech if he needs help, what’s wrong and so on. He mumbles a bunch of stuff in Czech which we can’t understand. Finally Chelsa is like “can we help you up?”. That gets a “ano” out of him and so Chelsa and Arielle start lifting him up. They get him to his knees back inside his one room closet which smells just rancid by the way. They thought they had him balanced enough so he could hold himself up, but then he starts to tip over again...yep he’s drunk, if you didn’t figure that out already. They are trying to get him onto his bed somehow so he can pass out there. At this time I’m like, I think we should go get the rink guy. So I run into the rink and find the rink guy finishing up shovelling the snow off the ice, and in my best Czech say something like “there is an old man who needs help outside, we need you to help us”. So he finally comes with me back outside, but by this time Chelsa and Arielle have gotten in back in to his bed and shut the door.

So come to find out from the rink man that he’s pretty much just the local drunk, and that he starts drinking when he wakes up. Okay what a weird situation, for one who knew that there was this little closet room at the back of the rink where this guy lives, this is my second year here and I had no idea! Two who is this guy, how did he come to live in that room, and by the looks of it he can’t afford to buy alcohol, so how does he get it. All these questions, not sure if we’ll find them out, but there is never a dull moment over here that is for sure!

Salzburg and Oktoberfest

2008-10-10T03:51:00.000-07:00

Last weekend we have off from hockey, so in my world as you probably know by now that means I’m traveling somewhere. This time it was Oktoberfest. We had talked about going awhile back in September on this weekend, but as we started looking most things were completely booked up or the hostels that were left were a little too expensive for our tastes. We talked about sleeping in the car, but then when Adi and Marie were here they other weekend, they offered us a place to stay at their house in Salzburg and suggested that we just take the train up to Munich. It’s only a two hour train ride that cost 10 Euro each there and back, pretty much the right price for us!

The drive to Salzburg was pretty nice, granted it rained most of the way so you could not see the mountains. Luckily the drive home on Sunday was sunny and the views were just amazing, with mountains and rolling hills everywhere! Upon arriving at Adi and Marie, we hung out with them in their flat for awhile and then went on a little tour of Salzburg in the rain and cold. Even though it was raining, the city was beautiful. It’s pretty picturesque almost fairytale like in the setting. There is a river running through town with old buildings lining it and on top of a hill overlooking the whole city is an amazing castle! You can see from the pictures below how beautiful it is!

A park in Salzburg where they filmed the Do-a-Deer song in the sound of music.

Roomies on the step...this is after Arielle and Chelsa renacted the song from the movie.

A view of the city on a Sunday, when it was not raining outside!

So beautiful!

Hanging out in the park

Picture of the scenery on the drive home.

After walking around for awhile, we then headed to the St. Augustine Monastery to eat and try some of the best beer there is, according to our friends. It was a pretty cool experience as the place is like an original beer hall. There are a couple of huge rooms full of tables, then outside a couple of hallways where you can buy different types of food, mostly Weinersnitzel and Knudel type of foods. Upon coming in you pick your size of glass...1 litre or half litre, then rinse it out from this big tap and then get it filled up from one of the many wood barrels full of beer. I’m not a beer lover at all, but mixed with Sprite or lemonade, also called a Rattler, I don’t mind it. And yes this was really good! Afterwards we took a long walk through the town at night looking at all the sights. It was pretty awesome at night as everything was lit up. Unfortunately I didn’t see everything in the city, nor explore all the places but I’ll definitely be going back.

The girls picking out their cups...

Hanging out at the beer hall...I woke up with an eye infection that morning - awesome!

A view of the beer hall

The next morning we took the train to Munich. Pretty much our whole train was full of people heading to Oktoberfest wear all the traditional garb. It was pretty crazy to see people drinking at 9am, but then again that’s normal on football game days in Wisconsin. We got to the Oktoberfest grounds at about 11am and things were pretty crazy by then already. It was a Saturday and the second last day of Oktoberfest so things were packed. We walked around for awhile taken in all the sights, then tried to head to a beer garden. Well they were all full, only a couple of areas outside were open. Would not be too bad if it was a nice day, but it was raining on and off all day, so we were looking for someplace with shelter. I ended up finding a side gate that was open so just walked right in to an area outside one of the beer gardens, with a bunch of tables and heaters set up outside. We found a table and sat down only to look back at a huge line of people lined up just to get into the overflow area where we were. We were all pretty excited to be in that area under some shelter and enjoy some beers, or rattlers, and German food. I really enjoyed meeting other people, mostly a German guys that we talked with for a long time, who enlightened us on the beginnings of Oktoberfest and all the traditions. It was a pretty awesome day hanging out with Chelsa and Arielle (Jeni was in Vienna) and enjoying the festivities, and eating the German food as you can see below...

An example of a beer hall

Hanging out with some German guys

Arielle and I eating 1/2 meter long bratwursts!

Arielle and I - would be a better picture if that guy wasn't in the background, but it was pretty much crowded everywhere you went!

House Guests

2008-10-01T13:39:00.001-07:00

This past weekend we were ask by our friend Dot to babysit her dog, Maysea as she was out of town for the weekend. Of course we said yes as our whole house has dogs back at home except me. But I am a fan of dogs so had no problem having her stay the weekend...granted I forgot how much they smell, and the shedding that happens. She is a black lab and very well trained, kind of reminds of two amazing black labs Mac and Riley) that I used to babysit back in high school. After this weekend I think it's hands down that if I were to get a dog it would be a black lab...but maybe they would be and outside dog. It sure was fun to take Maysea on walks and we even took her to practice with us where we had her running alongside for our warm up and cool down. Let's just say she was pretty tired that night as when I was petting her later on and she couldn't even keep her eyes open! Too funny! I must say that we all had a blast taking care of Maysea, and hope she comes to stay again!

Rebecca,me, Jeni and Arielle with Maysea at Letna Park

The other girls with Maysea, notice the beautiful background!

Myself, Arielle and Maysea...I'm trying to get her turned around for a picture, as the background is super beautiful. Of course that never worked!

The background I was trying to capture...with Maysea and myself in it.

Then on Sunday it was Jeni's Birthday...the big 2-5, she's now a quarter century like me. Kind of scary really. After our game on Sunday we headed off for some North American food at TGI Friday's. It was sooo good and worth the expense! Then after we had a party at our house to celebrate. It was the first party at our new flat, and the last. Kind of funny as most people were hanging out on the floor or one of the four lawn chairs that we have because of the lack of furniture. Pretty much our whole team came, along with two of our friends from Salzburg. We just played them that day and they ended up spending the night and a couple of days touring around Prague. Chelsa and Jeni tried to organise some games to play, but the Czech girls weren't quite having it. But we did end up convincing them to play Chubby Bunny...hilarious! Jeni, myself and three other teammates played. I haven't heard some of the Czech girls laugh like that before!

It was also super funny to watch how awkward it was when Jeni received her gifts from some of our teammates. I can't remember if I've mentioned this before or not, but it's normal here for friends to kiss on the lips when greeting each other, or for special occasions. As in if you haven't seen a good friend for a long time, you would say "Ahoj!" and then give them a quick peck on the lips. Yes, very awkward to see that if you have no idea what's going on and of course the first kiss you receive from a friend is also awkward. Granted that kind of means they've accepted you and you're one of locals. Well Jeni's not really a touch/feely person. So this was super funny. Chelsa and I knew it was coming, so we pretty much lost it when all the girls lined up to give her gifts and birthday kiss. Chelsa got it on camera so it was even better! But Jeni was a great sport and it now just like one of the Czechs.

Marie, Adi (Salzburg friends), myself and Rebecca

Chelsa, Arielle and Jeni

Some of the girls hanging out in our living room.

Chelsa, Eva and crazy Bara

Sonja, Jeni, and Vay Vay

One of Them Weeks...

2008-09-26T04:54:00.000-07:00

Have you ever had one of those weeks where previously things were just going along great, life was going by with not a care in the world...well maybe a couple of minor issues here and there...then all of sudden...BAM!! Everything is going wrong all once and you’re like...what happened?

Well, this past week has been like that for me. Where do I start...hum...first off I’ll start with DHL. My mom sent me a package, about three weeks ago through DHL and I still have not received it yet. The kicker being that it has been in Prague for 2 of those weeks stuck at the customs office. My mom did receive a message saying that customs had opened the package, taken everything out, and made a list of all the items in it. They then wanted her to email back with a value on all the items in there...probably for tax reasons. Okay well this happened two weeks ago. Two days after my mom sends them the list I call the DHL office here in Prague wondering why I haven’t received it yet? Oh yes, well you have to fax me a copy of your passport in order to claim it, and then we’ll send out your package. Great...when were you going to tell me this? I fax a copy of my passport out that day. Two days later...no package...I call again...what’s the status of my package? Oh well we have to send you a copy of a power of attorney statement that you need to sign, give the power of attorney to DHL so they can get the package from customs. Okay...great why didn’t you tell this to me on the phone two days ago? So I receive the email from the lady with the documents, call her the next day as I had some questions regarding it. Okay I’ll have my colleague call you back in two hours. It’s the next day and I still haven’t talked to him. I did end up sending in those documents to them yesterday so in a perfect world I should be receiving my package today...but that probably won’t happen. Moral of the story, I would caution anyone from using DHL when sending packages to the Czech Republic as their office here is not exactly the swiftest that I have seen.

Next up...my job. First thing that went wrong was that I started working this past month without a contract. I did get hired two days before school started so I understand a slight delay in the contract. And I did ask what my pay was going to be but they kept saying that they had to write up a job description for me first. Okay well, the waiting is over and I just received my contract on Tuesday, and let’s just say it’s less than stellar. Basically if I had known I was going to be paid so low I would have not have accepted the job and would have looked elsewhere. I realize the pay scales are lower here than they would be back in Canada, but when I was making slightly more per hour last year working at a Czech daycare with little responsibilities at a job that requires hardly any qualification, I feel we have a problem. The work I’m doing now requires a bit of planning and a ton of responsibility as I am working with Special Education Needs students in pull out sessions and am working on their IEP and am writing assessments at the end of it. On Wednesday I had a talk with my principal regarding a raise and she was going to take it back to the finance board. So we’ll see where that goes, and if it goes nowhere I think I’ll be moving back to my old job or finding babysitting jobs where the pay is just as good. Really disappointing to say the least!

Then there’s the whole fact that we still haven’t gotten our furniture or internet yet for our apartment. We really do appreciate living in a lovely big apartment, but we honestly need furniture and more importantly internet. We have been lucky enough to be able to steal a very weak wireless signal when we are in Chelsa’s room. This has been our saving grace as we are at least able to check internet once or twice a day depending on how strong the signal is, otherwise we would be spending tons of money on internet cafes. We feel like we’ve been super patient in regards to waiting for our furniture but on the other hand we have a contract that both parties have signed stating that we are provided with a furnished flat that includes internet. The hard part about everything too is that we’re always told that it will be coming soon. As in two weeks ago we were told that the stuff will be there that weekend, well that never happened. Then we’re told that everything is waiting for us in a warehouse but they’re just waiting to find a time when our manager can come bring it to our house. Then talking to our manager he said he was never told this information. So it’s been frustrating for sure. We’ll be taking our contract with us to practice tonight and showing it to our coach to see if he can have any pull as we think we’ll be starting to give them deadlines as we have been upholding our end of the contract by producing on the ice!

So as you can see it’s been a frustrating week for me, but I’m hoping things will get better. It’s Jeni’s birthday on Sunday so we’re looking forward to that as we’re having a bit of a party at our apartment after the game that day. But granted life isn’t all that bad as I’m still living in Prague and playing hockey!

Slavia vs. Sparta Hockey Game

2008-09-19T04:17:00.001-07:00

On Tuesday we were told that Mr. Kott (our owner) was giving us free tickets to the Slavia vs. Sparta hockey game. We were pretty pumped to go because for one...free tickets are always a bonus and two, it’s a rivalry game as they are the two hockey teams from Prague. So we received our tickets at the rink from a teammate who was also going to the game. Upon looking at the tickets we saw that they were 1Kc. Okay that’s like about maybe 5 cents. Hum...what kind of nose bleed section are we going to be in?

Well nope they weren’t. After asking for some help we were directed to the second level, through extra security, where we were going to be sitting. Now this isn’t any regular second level – it’s more like a whole mezzanine full of seats, bars and tables overlooking the rink where you can sit, eat and drink. That’s right I said eat and drink. There was a huge buffet full of amazing FREE food along with a dessert table and free beer. I was pretty much in heaven as most of you know how much I love to eat. But also the dessert table was amazing. I’ve had some cakes here in Prague for teammate’s birthdays and what not, and have to say that they were less than stellar. Well on this table were some of the best cakes I have ever had! Needless to say we were all in heaven and I stuffed myself full off the amazing food. Oh yeah and Slavia won 2-1, so it was a great night!

Arielle and Chelsa

Chelsa and Jeni

The buffet

The dessert table

Me enjoying the free food

A picture of the rink

I forgot my camera that night, so a big thanks to Chelsa for letting me steal her pictures!

Krakow, Poland

2008-09-19T04:17:00.000-07:00

We had last weekend off from hockey as the National team had a training camp, therefore pretty much taking our whole team away. So for me that meant I could go and travel. I decided to head to Krakow, Poland for two days. Random you might think, which is what my mom said, but actually it’s not really. A bunch of my friends here have been to Krakow and have said nothing but good things about it and how awesome it was...kind of like a smaller version of Prague, so I decided I should check it out.

After practice Thursday night I took the night train there. I pretty much stepped back in time to the 60’s or maybe 50’s as the train I was on was super old and loud. I had never been on a night train and after that ride, I don’t think I would do it again. The quarters were cramped and the fold down bed was more like a piece of plywood. I was lucky to be riding in a compartment with a couple from Toronto on a tour group, so it was good to chat with them a bit. I arrived in Krakow at 6:30am and found my hostel. It was actually a great hostel, free internet and super helpful staff. The lady there informed me of a tour leaving at 8am to go to Auschwitz and Birkenau that morning, so I thought, hey what the heck. So after a quick breakfast and shower, I was off on the bus to Auschwitz.

The tour was amazing. I had already been to Dachau which is another concentration camp just outside of Munich, so knew what I was in store for. It was about an hour and half bus ride there and along the way they showed a video on the bus about the liberation of the camp and some other informative information. After that I pretty much passed out on the bus due to the zero sleep I got on the train the previous night. The Auschwitz concentration camp is about 30 long brick buildings (original) with 12 or so set up with museums inside. It was actually built to hold Polish prisoners but obviously was turned into something else. We went through I think close to all of them was given a ton of information. A couple of things really stood out to me. First how they had a whole building where they conducted experiments on some of the prisoners, as in infected them with certain diseases to see how they would react and other things that were pretty horrible. They had pictures displayed on the walls showing some of what went on. Second on how much stuff the Nazi’s took from the Jews. They were told that they were being relocated and were going to start a new life. So naturally the Jews took all their prized possessions. They had rooms in the museum full of suit cases and possessions (hair brushes, shoes, prosthetics, etc. ) that they had took from the prisoner . I guess they housed all of this in a big warehouse called Canada and Canada II which the prisoners had named because according to them Canada was a rich country. Thirdly they had a room that had on display a ton of human hair which was behind some glass. This was pretty powerful...upon arrival at the camp the prisoner’s hair was shaved off because of chance of getting lice. That hair was used to make socks and blankets...pretty gross. Finally they ended the Auschwitz tour with a look at one of the gas chambers. They had a bunker and inside it looked liked a big shower room. Well of course that was not the cause although they lead the prisoners to think that was what was going to happen to them. You were not allowed to take pictures inside of the buildings, just on the grounds outside as you can see below.

Entrance into the came where is says "work will bring freedom"

Streets of Auschwitz, and the big brick buildings.

The side of the camp...as you can see with the barbwire fence escape is not really an option

From here we took the bus on to Birkenau, another concentration camp that was only 3km away. This place was absolutely huge! It had more than 300 prison barracks that could hold 200, 000 inmates at one time, along with four gas chambers. Not all of the barracks are still there as much of it was destroyed by the Nazi’s. You can really get a sense of how huge the place it from the top of the watch tour.

Entrance into Birkenau

Barracks where the inmates lived.

Inside...cramped quarters.

Overlooking the camp from the watch tower...you can get a sense of how big the place is.

That afternoon and the following day I toured the city and did quite a bit of shopping which was awesome. Old town Krakow has a huge square in the middle that’s 200m x 200m. Lining the square are a ton of cafes and restaurants and in the middle of the square is Cloth Hall. On the main level is a souvenir market and on the top is an art gallery. On the side of the square is St. Mary’s church. This looks quite nice from the outside, but just like your typical European church. I thought, hum...okay I’ll tour the church. Well it was absolutely amazing inside! There was so much going on inside the church with the sculptures and altarpieces that I didn’t know where to look. Definitely worth the visit! On the outskirts of the Old Town there is the Florian Gate and the Barbican, which were defensive bastion built in 1498...very medieval looking.

Florian Gate

St. Mary's Church

Inside

Streets leading up to the Old Town Square

Cloth Hall in the middle of the Old Town Square

Cafe's lining the square

Town Hall Tower

Church of SS Peter and Paul

I also toured around Wawel Castle and Cathedral which was situated on a hill overlooking Krakow. I wasn’t able to take a tour of all the castle but did manage a one hour tour of the royal apartments. I was pretty disappointed that we couldn’t take pictures so I can’t show how amazing the rooms were decorated. I really enjoyed looking at the wood work of the ceilings and the doors, pretty intricate. There was a church on the grounds as well that had a bunch of famous Polish kings and diplomats buried down in the crypt. No pictures were allowed to be taken in the church...of course.

Castle grounds

Wawel Cathedral

Overlooking Krakow from the Castle

Finally I have to talk about the food there. I was super pumped to be able to eat perogies two days in a row. They were fabulous for sure! I also had some borscht which I can’t believe I did as I hated it as a kid, but have grown to like it and the stuff I had in Krakow tasted close to how my mom makes it. All in all it was a great time and I highly suggest to anyone coming to Europe to go and check out Krakow!

Rachel Visits Prague

2008-09-11T01:51:00.000-07:00

At the end of August my friend, Rachel Wild, from Switzerland came and visited me in Prague. We played together back in Switzerland and lucky for me she had some holidays and decided to take a bus out to Prague and visit me. We had a great time walking around the city, going to the Jewish Getto, an area where I hadn't really explored and eating some Czech food. We also went up to the Castle and took a tour. That was awesome as we were able to skip the crowds, and go to areas that were usually off limits, as in the crypt underneath the church that I didn't even know about. Unfortunately we did not have our new flat at that time so space was a little tight, but she made it through...in the cramped quarters with four Canadians. Hopefully on one of our weekends off I'll be able to take the bus and go and visit her in St. Gallen as I never made it back to Switzerland last year. Here are a couple of pictures taken of Prague while we were touring around. Thanks for coming out Rachel!

Rachel and I in Old Town Square

Another view of Old Town Square

Astronomical Clock

Hanging out by a huge fountain in the Castle Gardens

Changing of the guard at the castle...way too many tourists!

Inside St. Vitus Cathedral, the church on the castle grounds

View from the Castle overlooking Prague

Side view of the Castle

Full view of Prague Castle taken from the river...kind of shows you why I live in Prague...so beautiful!

My New Address

2008-09-04T09:00:00.000-07:00

So here's my new address just in case you feel inclined to send me a care package, letters, or anything of that nature (wink, wink, Jeret). haha. No, I'm just kiddn', but I have been asked by a few people what it is, so here you go...

PPLK. SOCHORA
CP. 732/35
170 00 Prague 7
Czech Republic

Quick Update

2008-09-02T01:58:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to write a quick note with an update on things here. Currently we're still without furniture, TV and most importantly internet in our flat. So if you email me, please be patient as I'll only be checking my email about every other day time allowing. Not to mention if you try calling our Vonage phone that won't work either. We're not completely settled in our new flat yet, as we've all been pretty busy starting work this week, but hopefully will have everything finished come the weekend. I'm starting to get really sick of living out of hockey bags, not to mention I can't find anything!

I started work yesterday and had a pretty great day. Things are a little interesting at the moment as I'm waiting on the teachers to assess the students who I'll be working with as my title is Special Education Needs teacher. So probably sometime next week things will get organized with that and I'll start working with the kids. I also don't start teaching swimming lessons until next week along with helping out in the preschool on Tuesday afternoons. I'm currently aiding a grade 1 class or as they would call it year two. The kids are from all over with a couple of diplomats children in my class and it's pretty cute to hear the British accents in the class. I need to run and head off to work for the afternoon, so once again I will try and post pictures of the new flat soon...hopefully by the end of the week.

Our New Flat!!

2008-08-30T04:43:00.000-07:00

I just got back from our new flat and WOW!! We are pretty pumped at the moment with our new place. It's on the top story of an apartment building about 10mins away from where our current place is and is two stories. I think the whole living room area is about as big as our current flat. There are three rooms on the top floor along with a bathroom. Then on the first floor we have a large kitchen, living room, small dining area, pantry and a bathroom. Not to mention we have two balconies! It's pretty unbelievable to say the least, so much better than the flat we have right now. It's not brand new like our current flat but pretty close to. Oh yes and we have an elevator! How nice! I don't have any pictures right now but will take some soon and post them online so you can see. The only problem is that we don't have any living room furniture as in couch, table and chairs and a tv, internet etc. So we'll be waiting on that, not sure how long that will take but hopefully that will come soon. I need to sign off here and finish packing and head back over to the new place and unpack. Will write more later!

I Have a Job!

2008-08-29T14:11:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty excited to tell everyone that I have a job! Yes I know playing for HC Slavia Praha is my job, but as you know from last year we also had a part time job working at a preschool. Well I won't be going back there this year because I'll now be working at Riverside International School. I'll be working part time, full days on Monday and Wednesday and then a half day on Tuesday. I'm not a hundred percent sure all my duties at the school, but at the moment I'll be helping out with a couple of classroom teachers, doing some pull out sessions with special needs students, and then on Wednesday afternoon teaching swimming lessons. This is all in their primary school, so I'll be working with kids aged 5-11. My first day is on Monday so I'll write more about it later as I can only imagine I'll have many stories to tell!

Kutna Hora

2008-08-29T04:29:00.000-07:00

Jeni, Arielle and I took a little road trip last Saturday out to Kutna Hora, a town about an hour away from Prague. The reason for the trip was to see the Sedlec Ossuary or also know as the Bone Church. We had seen pictures and heard stories in the past on just how awesome it was, so figured it was a must see before we left, and we were not disappointed.

The Plague hit this area pretty bad and plots for graves started to increase in price, so the small All Saints chapel was pressed into becoming an ossuary. A large ossuary at that with the remains of around 40,000 people. Then in 1870 the Schwarzenberg purchased the ossuary and gave Frantisek Rint free rain to get creative with the bones. So this is now what it looks like...

Sedlec Ossuary

Graveyard around the church

Standing in front of the bone chandelier

A closer look

Schwartzenberg family crest, made of bones of course!

Jeni and I by some skulls

Next stop was St. Barbara's Cathedral, another super nice huge church. They started building it back in 1380 and then was finally completed at the end of the 19th century. There's also fresco's inside dating back from the 15th century. So pretty old if you ask me. So all in all it was a pretty great day of sight seeing and exploring the town of Kutna Hora finished with a Czech meal. Here are some more pictures...

In front of St. Barbara's Cathedral

Some random stone sculpture

Inside the sanctuary

Stained glass window

Sky view of the church

Overlooking Kutna Hora

The Zoo

2008-08-23T14:57:00.000-07:00

On Friday Arielle, Jeni and I decided to spend the afternoon at the Prague Zoo. Chelsa was there last year and had mentioned it was a good time so we thought hey, why not? I went to the zoo with little knowledge of it whatsoever and upon entering it found out that it was ranked 7th world wide for zoo's. So not too bad! Our first mission was to find a map of the zoo and when we saw it we were slightly taken aback by the size of the zoo. I guess I now know why it's ranked 7th in the world. So for the next 3 and half hours we power walked through as much of it as we could.

It was pretty amazing as I haven't been to a zoo in about 8 years with the last one being the Calgary Zoo. I couldn't begin to tell you all the animals I saw or the all the strange looking birds that I saw. The highlights of the zoo for me were seeing the polar bears playing in the water, watching the tigers eat their lunch, looking at the African safari containing zebras and giraffes, and then finally staring at a gorilla for a good 10 minutes trying to figure out what the heck it was doing - throwing up it's food and then licking it up again. No joke, never seen anything quite like that before. I have no idea if he was sick, or if this is normal. So if you know anything about gorilla's please inform me as this was super strange. Here are some pics...

The polar bear

Some strange looking two hump camel, I rode the one hump camel back in Egypt.

Looking at the African safari in Prague.

Jeni and I hanging out on a lion, granted we never did see any at the zoo...only tigers...

The tiger

And finally the elephants and me.

Good News!

2008-08-21T07:11:00.000-07:00

We just found out today that we'll be moving to a different flat! You're probably wondering, well aren't you in one already? Well yes we are but are in one with little space. We currently have our old flat (or apartment) from last year along with a new flat about a 10min drive away. This "new" flat is really nice, granted it's missing a kitchen, and only has a fridge. Hum...kind of a problem as it's not really livable at the moment. So we've all been bunking in our old flat with someone sleeping on the mat on the floor. Needless to say the living quarters have been tight and we're still all living out of our hockey bags/suitcases. So it would be really nice to unpack and get settled.

Well today our agent met with our owner and we were told that we have a new flat and we can move into it next week! So excited! I'm not sure what it looks like of course but was told it has two bathrooms, is two levels and has a garage. So looks promising. I'll of course post pictures and write more when we move in next week!

Karlstejn Castle

2008-08-20T03:22:00.000-07:00

Two Fridays ago we actually had a day off so we decided to be tourists and head to Karlstejn Castle, about a 30min drive from Prague. It was an awesome drive out there, very pretty country side. The castle dates back to 1348 and housed the crown jewels for the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles the IV. The castle then fell during the Hussite War and was restored back in the 19th century. It was pretty amazing as you can see from the pictures below. We took an hour long tour through it, which was really the only way to see inside the castle. Unfortunately we were not allowed to take pictures inside the castle so I only have pictures from the outside. Enjoy...

On the walk up to the Castle

The Castle

The side of the Castle overlooking the country side.

The tower

Me, the tourist

Pictures from Training Camp

2008-08-18T13:39:00.000-07:00

Here are a couple pictures from training camp...

We were given Roliks (a Czech type of bread/bun thing, it's their staple over here) and a tomato after practice...as in eat the tomato like an apple...I was so hungry I actually did it.

Eva and I before our "warm up" of American football which was more like rugby/football kill anyone you see type of game.

Jeni looking fierce!

The Canadians after the football game.

After practice with Jaromir Jagr's Czech trainer.

A couple of the girls hanging out after going to the pub...our coach encouraged us to go out for a beer one night...only in Europe.

At the Chinese Restaurant where we snuck out for a meal

We Have a Phone!!!

2008-08-17T03:06:00.000-07:00

Finally we have our Vonage phone installed! That means that you can call me any time on this Regina number...546-0740, just add a 306 if you're calling long distance. Please just remember that there is an 8 hour time difference from Regina to Prague right now. Feel free to call anytime and leave a message if I'm not home as I'll call you back as soon as I can!

Training Camp...

2008-08-16T08:29:00.000-07:00

We just finished a week long training camp in Stakonice, a town about an hour away from Prague. It kind of reminded me of my younger years when I used to go away to camp in the summer. Unfortunately this wasn't the type of camp where I could call home and my parents would come and pick me up if I wanted them to...cause believe me I would have called!

Needless to say it was a long, trying week. We had an exhibition game last Saturday morning against a team from Berlin. This was the same team that beat us last year in a shootout in which case they went on to the European Cup finals. Unfortunately we didn't redeem ourselves and lost 3-2. But I have to say that we did out play them and had a great game. So right after our game we headed out to a small town where our owner lives, had a good meal (last one for a long time), and then proceeded on to Strakonice where we had practice that afternoon. I was pretty dead tied for practice that afternoon after just playing a game - still not quite in game shape. For the next 6 days we had two a day ice sessions along with "aerobics". I knew that I was in trouble when I heard that Petra (our aerobic lady) was coming along. She's the same lady that killed us back in Croatia.

Lucky for us our day started with about an hour of "aerobics" with Sargent Smiley (Petra). These aerobics sessions basically consisted of a ton of jumping and hopping, not really pertaining anything at all to hockey training. From there is was on the ice for an hour, lunch, a break which we always slept, back to more aerobics, finally an hour and half ice session at night and then last but not least supper. Speaking of supper the food was horrible to say the least. I have no problem with Czech food, most of it is really quite good, but the stuff we had at the dorms was more like prison grub or worse. So I bought some peanut butter and jelly and lived off of that and fruit for a week. I think I lost weight. On our second last night there we snuck out and went out for Chinese food...it was heaven!

The on ice sessions were the highlight of the camp. One day we had Jamoir Jagr's personal trainer come out and run a session too. He gave the team a huge motivation speech before hand and I caught probably about five words out of the whole thing...great speech! Then on Thursday night we had an exhibition game against a boys team who were about 15-16 years old. Pretty good game actually as all the kids were about my size or bigger and there were some decent hits in the game. Then Friday night we were finally able to go home, and I don't think I have ever been so excited to get back to my apartment in Prague!

New Look

2008-08-07T06:17:00.000-07:00

Thought I would change the layout of my blog for this year. I'm not super computer savy and would love to make a header and add a couple of details but haven't really figured out how to do that yet, so this will have to do.

My Birthday in Prague

2008-08-07T05:53:00.000-07:00

It was my birthday on Aug. 4th here in Prague. This is only the second year that I have celebrated my birthday away from home. Last year I was in San Diego surfing so that wasn't really a hardship. I was able to celebrate my birthday with my family before I left with an awesome supper at the Teyapenaki (sp?) Kitchen.

Basically I was super jet lagged that day as it was only our second day in Prague and the first full one. It was also our first day of practice on ice with the team. After practice I got a cute little gift bag from one of my teammates with some Czech wine/champagne and treats inside, along with a Czech hat which I claimed as my birthday hat and wore it all night. After practice we went out to a local restaurant by one of my teammates house to eat and celebrate. Because it was already 9pm the waitress only let us chose one menu item that we could have. So the consensus was chicken but I was able to have a bowl of soup as well (special treatment for the birthday girl of course, hehe). It was pretty funny to say the least. So all in all it was a pretty good birthday...different of course but very memorable as I was in a real Czech restaurant with the locals! Here are some pictures from the night...

Standing outside our rink with my Czech gift bag

Jeni and I enjoying our soup

Jeni, Chelsa and I - gotta love the birthday hat!

Made It!

2008-08-05T02:08:00.000-07:00

It's funny how the more I fly the more I hate it. I'm not sure how many of you know that, but I really don't enjoy flying at all. You would think I would since I do it so often. Well nope, I actually hate it and definitely have high anxiety before I leave or while I'm on the airplane. But to go along with this, it seems that more recently I've had bad flights. I flew all the time in college for games and just there and back and I really don't remember having bad flights, I think they just started as I have moved to Europe. Case in point...on the way over to Frankfurt from Toronto I think we had turbulence for about three of the seven and half hours we were on the plane. Not earth shattering turbulence, but enough to make you feel it and shake your drink glass.

But with all that said. I did make it to Prague, actually all three of us made it there together...Chelsa, Arielle and I with all our bags, which is pretty amazing. We were greeted by our agent Michal, owner Mr. Kott, and team manager Mr. Nemec with roses in hand for us. It was pretty sweet. Great to see them of course. Jeni is a whole different story though. We went back to the aiport to pick her up at 11:40am which was when her flight was supposed to arrive, but she never came. To make a very long story short we found out that she wasn't arriving now until 8pm that night, so back home to sleep, eat and then back to the airport. Finally Jeni came in at 11pm with no luggage of course. I have had troubles and problems flying but after Jeni's story she wins for missing two flights first one due to a late plane and the second one due to a ticket agent telling her the wrong gate and then having to spent 12 hours in the Paris airport! She definitely beats me out for the worst story/flight experience.

From the airport we took off in Mr. Kott's nice Audi SUV and were off to see our new flat. We were told back in June that he had an extra flat downtown that could hold all of us and we should be moving in. Well nope that's not the case any more...but really why am I not surprised. It's a flat on the top floor about 6 I think and is being totally redone, just like the one we moved into last year. It's got one bedroom again, but is fairly large and is currently missing a kitchen counter and all the appliances minus a fridge. It's quite nice but is unfortunately about a 10 minute metro ride from our previous flat or about a 7 min drive. So not as convenient as we would like. But it's in a good area. So once again like last year we were given a bunch of money and were told to take it to buy all the stuff we needed for the kitchen and bedding and all that jazz. (Ikea here we come!) It's supposed to be finished within two weeks...so I really hope that happens as we leave on Saturday for Strakonice for a week long training camp and it would be perfect to come back to a finished apartment. But of course we've learned that things don't exactly happen fast around here, so I'll let you know how it goes and will post pictures when things are finished.

Leaving on a jet plane...

2008-08-01T14:00:00.000-07:00

That's right tomorrow morning at 10am I fly out to Prague. Finally I'm leaving! I say that not because I'm eager to leave Regina and my family/friends but because I was originally set to leave on July 17th. But of course that never happened due to our Visa's taking longer than expected. Why you ask? Well I mentioned it a little bit before in a previous blog back in May. So to fill you in a little bit...Chelsa and I had to have our passports sent back to us here in Regina back in May as we were both traveling down to the States. As you know...they never came. So we had to get new passports with new passport numbers therefore having to start the whole Visa application process all over again. So Chelsa and were not able to leave on July 17th to go and work Jagr's hockey school and instead were told we would be leaving Aug. 1. That was a little bit disappointing as I really would have loved to work that school, but more time at home with the family is always a good thing! So we received our plane tickets the other day telling us we're leaving Aug. 2 and will get there Aug. 3. And if you were wondering I finally received my Visa just two days ago (you might be able to hear a sigh of relief coming from me)!

So that's it - I'm off, and will of course keep this blog going throughout the year as I really enjoy writing on it and I know for sure that my brother reads it! hehe.

Off to Vancouver

2008-07-31T14:46:00.000-07:00

So continuing on with my busy summer, I came home from Croatia, went back to work for a couple of weeks, and then headed off to Vancouver for a friend's wedding. It was for Shankari Venugopal's wedding, good friend from high school. Actually there was four of us that hung around quite a bit during those years and still manage to stay in touch some how. Shankari is now living out in Vancouver finishing up her master's in Architecture. The other two girls, Erin and Ashley, also flew to Vancouver. Ashley flew from Regina with me, whereas Erin met us there from Saskatoon.

It was just a blast! We were able to rent a car and stayed with a close family friend of Shankari's right in Vancouver. Luckily for us we were there about 5 days and had enough time to take in quite a bit of the sites, spending time on Grandville Island, shopping on Robson street and walking around (almost) Stanley Park. I hadn't been to Vancouver in quite a few years and forgot how beautiful it was!

The wedding and the events leading up to it were just amazing! We were invited to all the family functions in the days prior to the wedding where we were able to meet both sides of the family as well as eat some really good Indian food, although a tad spicy! Shankar's wedding was spectacular to say the least. It was outside at a country club out in the mountains near Port Coquitlam. I have never seen such a fancy club house as you'll see from the picture below. The reception was held on the second floor at the country club overlooking the golf course with the mountains in the distance. Shankari of course looked beautiful in her Indian dress! Did I mention that throughout all her events I think she had 6 or so new sari's that she wore!

It was such a great time being back again with the girls from high school and just hanging out. Kind of felt like old times as really none of have changed minus a couple of weddings, kids, degrees and so on. It's pretty awesome to have friends like that and really amazing that we've still kept in touch all these years...and miles apart.

Ashley and I at Granville Island

Part of the wedding ceremony (Shankari is the one sitting down in the middle of the picture)

The country club where the wedding and reception took place

Erin, Ashley and I at the wedding

The newlywed couple the day after the wedding

Training Camp in Croatia

2008-07-23T09:20:00.000-07:00

From June 5-17, Chelsa, Jeni and I were able to take part in our team's training camp in Croatia. That's right I said training camp in Croatia...my owner flew Chelsa, Jeni and I over just for the week long training camp in Croatia. Pretty crazy if you ask me. It was awesome to have Jeni along as it was her first time spending time with the team. We had quite a few hours on the plane to try and get her ready for the culture shock or the city and more so the way our team operates as it's much different than back in North America. Upon leaving June 5, we arrived there June 6th in the afternoon. We were able to make it to our apartment, which we still have, then took a phone call from a teammate saying that we were leaving that night to drive to Croatia. Um...excuse me...driving through the night? For some reason they enjoy driving through the night to get to places...I'm not so much a fan. After a 14 hour bus ride, which could have been done in 10 hours (they stop wayyyy too much!), we made it to Croatia. Not such a great start to a week long training camp with one night spent on a plane and the other night spent on a bus.

We were put in groups of four and shown to our apartment like rooms. We have a new Slovak girl playing with us called Martina who stayed with us and speaks great English, so that was awesome to have her around! We stayed in these older 2-star apartment style complexes. The area where we were was really quite large with a couple of hotels, camping area, and these apartments. We were right close to the beach, where it also had a ton of tennis courts, and not too far from where we were there were outdoor soccer fields, which is where we did most of our training. The style of everything was older...probably built in the 70's or early 80's. It reminded me of Dirty Dancing where Baby went with her family to that family camp for the whole summer. For food we would go to one of the hotels for breakfast and supper with some all inclusive deal, and then had lunch as a nearby restaurant.

The apartment complex

View from the hotel where we ate

Jeni, myself and Chelsa at dusk

The training part of the trip was definitely interesting to say the least. I guess our team was doing aerobics once a week with an instructor before the camp. So they decided to bring her along. I have no problems with doing aerobics but the stuff we were doing was not exactly hockey specific exercises or training. They would tell us that we would have a "stretching" session for an hour. Great, sounds good, I like to stretch...well this was not the stretching I was used to. The first full day we were there we had a marathon aerobics session lasting about 3 hours. My calves were shot from then on as I was not used to all this bouncing up and down and being on your toes most of the time. The sprinting part of the training was great and was hockey specific and I really enjoyed it, with the hardest day doing 15 hill sprints up some hill for about 20sec. It was good though and hockey specific. Our weight sessions were also very interesting with our weights being more of a circuit type training. We didn't have any free weights to use, just cut off re bar, and handles for raised push ups. These sessions were not all that intense minus the last day where I we did a push pyramid and I think I did close to a 100 push ups...I hate push ups too. It was interesting though as one day our coach came to us and asked us to come up with a training session for the team. That was really fun to do as we incorporated as much North American exercises as we could with the little equipment that we had. The girls really like it and it was a good chance of pace from the rest of the stuff.

Us Canadian girls at the back doing aerobics

A good example of why my calves were shot with all the jumping we did

The whole gang

Luckily for us our time spent in Croatia was not all training. One day our owner rented a boat for us to go over to the main town of Porec. We had a couple of hours to shop/look around the streets. Along the way our strength coach had us stop at the ice cream store and told Jeni to stand outside the door. From here the guy in the shop threw a ball of ice cream and tried to hit Jeni's mouth. He got it in on the second try! It was pretty amazing. Next he made a ice cream cone pyramid for both Jeni and Chelsa as you can see from the pictures below. It was pretty fantastic! Later we met up with the rest of the team and had supper on the roof of this medieval tower. The view was great and the food was all seafood making it probably the best meal of my life! There were three courses with the waiters bringing out everything on huge platters for everyone. It's funny as you don't exactly know what your what you're eating or really how you're supposed to eat it. For example they had dried meat like prosciutto over top of cantaloupe. I thought that that meant you ate them together, which of course I tried and it tasted not that bad. Afterwards they told me it was just for decoration and you didn't have to eat it like that. Oops.

Waiting for our boat to take us to Porec

Hanging out on the boat

Porec from a distance

Streets of Porec

A very pretty building

Ice cream creations Jeni and Chelsa got

View from where we ate

Not a bad set up at the restaurant

Along with going to Porec we were able to have a couple of fun days just stretching on the beach and one afternoon we were allowed to take out some jet skis. That was a complete blast. It was really windy that days so there were some huge waves on the water and I think we were completely airborne a couple of times. The last few days there were not very nice with it raining quite a bit, so that kind of sucked, as we then headed home that Friday night...and drove through the night again of course. It was nice to have a couple of days in Prague, just hanging out and showing Jeni some sights. We were there during the European Cup, so that was exciting watching the Czech's play while being there...it was pretty crazy but unfortunately they didn't make it past the round robin. Then that Tuesday it was back to Canada for us, and back to work for me that Thursday. By that time I was definitely missing Croatia aerobics and all!

Coastline by our apartment

The three of us after jet skiing

Back to Madtown!

2008-07-15T09:59:00.001-07:00

Back at the end of May...I know this is long overdue...I was able to fly down to Madison for my old assistant coaches wedding. Old as in previous coach of my University it team. I had not been back there since June 2006 when I graduated so it had been awhile! But of course, if you know me, then you know that a simple trip and flight down is really not that simple.

I had been in the process of obtaining a Visa for the Czech Republic for the upcoming season and had to have the Consulate in Toronto mail me back my passport as the Visa had not come through yet, but of course I needed it in order to fly down to Madison. Well it never came...was lost, or I think stolen in the mail. It was sent by Express Canada Post, so I definitely would think twice before I would use that service again. Okay so what do I do know...the only thing left was to drive. So I started that Tuesday night to drive down to Madison. Luckily for me I have a smart brother who came up with the idea of me flying out of Minot (in which case I do not need a passport, just and ID). Well that's a great idea and all, but how much am I going to have to pay for a new flight the next day? This is where my dad comes in and somehow talks to a representative from Northwest and is able to change my flight for only $50. Unbelievable I tell you!

So instead of driving all the way to Madison, I only had to go to Minot and was able to make my flight, then catch up with my friend Carla in the airport in Minneapolis airport and continue our way down to Madison.

I had a fantastic time being back. Obviously a ton had changed. There was always construction going on with the campus when I was there, and even more so now that I was back. New dorms were up and a whole bunch of other buildings where torn down. Not to get sentimental on you or anything but of course a ton of memories came flooding back especially seeing old house on Orchard St. with the slanted floors. You kind of forget how amazing college was and the life that we lived as a student-athlete, and I have to say that those five years were truly an unbelievable time in my life.

Carla and I were fortunate enough to stay a Phoebe and Tyler's house for the weekend were able to catch up with them along with Molly and Bobbi Jo who came down for it as well. I had a blast hanging out with everyone, going to all my favourite old places, which was basically consisted of all the restaurants that I have missed over these past 2 years.

Tracey's and Darren wedding was amazing as well. She looked like a million bucks of course and had a great reception with an awesome dance to follow!

It was great to be back in Madison and hopefully I'll be able to visit it again soon! On Wisconsin!

Bobbi Jo, myself, Carla and Phoebe at our golf outing.

The happily married couple outside the church

Carla, Molly, Bobbi Jo and I outside the church

Carla and I with the bride

Egypt!!!

2008-06-23T20:43:00.000-07:00

Wow, so really where do I begin...humm...many people, or those of you left still reading my blog are probably wondering, why the heck did you chose to go to Egypt? Well there were a couple of reasons. First it seems to be the hot spot of the Czech Republic, as in people go there like people go to Mexico in Canada. So really why not? Second, the prices. We got a stellar deal through a Czech travel agency on a last minute deal. Taba, Egypt ended up being our destination. It’s a little area right beside the Jordan and Israeli border located on the Red Sea. It wasn’t really close to Cairo where the pyramids are but we figured we would try this spot this year and then head to a spot closer to Cairo and visit the pyramids next year.
So Chelsa and I headed to the airport early in the morning to catch our flight to Egypt. Like I said before we went through a Czech travel agency so it was a little bit interesting as we were the only non Czech people on our chartered flight to Egypt. I thought it would only take us about 2 hours to get there, and of course I was completely wrong, four hours later we arrived. We flew over desert which was pretty cool and then landed in the middle of nowhere and I mean nowhere. All that was there was a little airport amongst rocks and desert. Hum...at this point, I was kind of like, what are we doing? But amongst the ways and whistles from the airport workers, we boarded our little bus and off we went to our hotel. There were three buses for all the people on the plane and as you can see from the picture below we had a bit of a caravan going on to the hotel area. If you’ve ever seen the move Babel you maybe can make a bit of a connection to the terrain we were driving through. It reminds me of the same type of terrain that was in the movie when the lady got shot on the bus. That kind of crossed my mind at that point in the trip, but no worries, we made it to our hotel safe and sound.

Taba airport middle of nowhere

The bus caravan to the hotels...where is the water?

Found it!

Our hotel was call the Three Corners Hotel and it was located probably about a kilometre or so from the beach. We did have a nice beach area that was designated for the hotel guests along with a beach bar and swimming pool right on the beach. Not a bad set up. Between us and the beach was an 18 hole golf course which I never did end up golfing on. There were two hotels on each side of us along the beach. There was a nice little path that connected all the hotels to each that you could walk along and if you wanted to explore each other’s restaurants and bar. But not without going having someone check your bags that you were carrying before stepping foot on the hotel site. Secerity there was...let’s just say... heighten. On one of the last days we were there, we headed to the Hyatt to explore a bit and had one of those guys jokingly ask us if we had any bombs in our bags. Ah...nope...but glad you’re here checking for that. It was funny because literally upon arriving people were asking us where we were from and guessed that we were Swedish or German by the looks. Nope Canadian, that pretty much shocked them all and we were told that we were the first Canadian’s to come through that hotel, so that was kind of neat. Not to mention word got around and every time someone on the staff saw us, they would be like “Canada!” Yep that’s us.

Our hotel

View from our deck

Looking back up at our hotel from the beach, with golf course in front

A typically day for us pretty much had us at the beach the whole day! And it looked kind of like this...

The beach!

The beach under the hot sun!

Beach Bums!

We did manage to take a couple of trips though throughout the week. The first one we did was a shopping trip to Dahab, a city about 2 hours away. It was a really pretty drive going right along the coast. Along the drive you could see some abandoned hotels, or more like unfinished hotels in prime locations on the beach. I was wondering at the start why there were no workers there finishing them up as it was a week day. Come to find out that I guess some business owners took out loans for the construction of the hotels, started going on them and then once got the loan fled to Jordan. Interesting business strategy. Also there were about 3 to four stop checks along the way to Dahab. We would be in the middle of nowhere rounding a corner and all of sudden there would be a couple of little huts and blockades where we would have to stop and the bus driver would have to show the police his permits of some sort. The city of Dahab was fairly touristy with a ton of knick knack type shops but Chelsa enjoyed her time bartering down the guy in the store for a pair of shoes from $100 to $15. Shopping is quite the process.

Looking out the bus at one of the check points along the way

Dahab

Where do I start?

One of the highlights of the trip for me was taking our day long sail boat snorking cruise. We boarded this sail boat and headed off to two different snorkelling spots as well as being able to tour Pharroh’s island with the ruins of some Medieval castle. Our first snorkling spot was just off the coast of the main land. I tried to stay close with our tour guide in the water as he knew where all the good spots were. It was pretty awesome as many of you can attest to. I haven’t been snorkling since I was little in Hawaii and forgot how awesome it really was. But there was an interesting spin on the first leg of our trip. While I was swimming around once in awhile I would get a little bit of a sting on my arms and legs. The first one I got I pretty much jumped and got a mouth full of water thinking I had just been stung by a jellyfish. Come to find out after once we were sailing to Pharroh’s island that what was stinging me was something called Slep. They were longer string like things that were maybe a little thinner than spaghetti. So at the second spot there weren’t as many and I stayed clear of the ones I saw. Although I was a little surprised that they didn’t warn us about them the first time as us land folks don’t really know what we’re getting into. Pharroh’s island was the next stop and probably the better spot for snorkling. The island and ruins was pretty interesting but the tour guide that was there had a horrible accent and I really could not understand a word he said, so Chelsa and I did most of the exploring on our own. We were served lunch on the boat which was much better than the hotel food and on the way back they were able to put of the sails for awhile which was so relaxing!

Our sail boat

Pharroh's Island...second snorkel spot

Looking out from the ruins

Hotties again!

Our last big adventure was of course a camel ride. I had to take one of these before I left. We signed up to do a camel ride and supper with the Native Bedouin people. This was some adventure! Started off with getting on the bus and the introductions of the staff on board, this is Joe the tour guide, Tom the bus driver and Sam the body guard. Umm...the what? Okay should we be worried? We head off to the small town of to go where the Bedouin people live and where we will be taking the camel ride. Driving through the area is was probably comparable to a really really poor reserve in Saskatchewan. There were goats and chickens running wild and the poverity of it was evident. Our bus drives up to the coast, like literally and we get off and sit down under this tent to enjoy some tea before our camel ride. In the back part of it there are about 15 or so girls and women who have set out towels with hand made jewlery and also some wood carved camels (I of course bought one). I think the only English words they knew were “buy from me!” I shopped around a bit and ended up getting a cheap neckless and those wood carved camels. I went to take a picture at the end of some of the girls and one of them covered her face as she was made at me for not buying from her. I laughed aloud at that, nice one.

The town we were in...humm...

The little girl I bought my neckless from

So next up was the whole camel ride, wow was this an experience and a half. We went down the coast and turned the corner when there must of been about 20 or more boys and men with camels. Quite a chaotic seen as they our tour guide and kind of the chief Bedouin guy were trying to figure out what camels to use and who to put them with. Chelsa and I kind of stood back and watched the whole scene go down taking a bunch of pictures and videotaping the madness. It’s pretty much a collection of the the town folk and their camels to do this communal camel ride. I’m not sure how the whole money situation works, but it must somehow. I was happy with my guide as he looked to be about low twenties in age compared to the eight year olds that were leading some of the other tourists. Chelsa and I got on some of the biggest camels so we were in the front most of the time walking along the coast line. We stopped along the way to let the camels eat, or more so for us tourists to take a break from riding them. I thought it would be much like a horse. Ah...nope not so much, I was pretty sore the next day from my trek. Chelsa and I were stationed a little bit away from the group and had already gotten down from our camels and were taken pictures when all of sudden I hear a lady screaming “get me down from this camel!” Oh okay she must really need a break from the ride. Actually that was not the case. She was wife of the man who had just falling off the camel. I guess the camel was starting to sit down and if you know camels then know that their front two legs bend down and then their back ones. Well that started to happen and his saddle came lose in which case he just fell head over tea kettle. Ended up cutting his head and getting semi knocked out. I didn’t see this all happen, but did see him ride away in the back of a truck to the hospital. I think the whole group was a little shook up after that and many people decided to walk back. Chelsa and I went back to our camels and started checking the saddle to make sure all was tight. After we had dismounted our camel and were walking back to our camp for supper, I heard a bunch of commotion and looked back to see a couple of camels racing towards the couple of us that were walking back together. Well I pretty much jumped into the ditch with one leap to miss the herd of camels coming our direction. One of the little kids let go of his camel and caused a couple of them to run and fight/play with each other. So all in all it was a great way to end the trip on a camel right keeping us on our toes.

And the chaos begins...

The coast line where we walked with our camels

My camel

View from atop a camel

One of the guides

I am Alive!

2008-06-15T01:02:00.000-07:00

For those of you who still might be reading my blog, I just want to let you know that I am alive and doing well. I've just been a little busy as of late and have not been keeping the blog site up to date. After my last championship post, Czech Championships that's right! Chelsa and I spent two days in Prague and then headed off to Egypt for a week for a little fun in the sun, then I came back to Prague, headed home pretty much right after and started working construction again. That pretty much consumed my life through the rest of April and the start of May, as well as training for hockey and trying to hang out with my friends in Regina. I also was able to get away for about five days in May to go down to Madison for my old assistant coaches wedding. But I'll write more about that later. Then on June 5th I flew back to Prague and from there went with my team to Croatia for a week long dry land training camp. I'm currently still am in Prague and will by flying home on the 17th of June. But no worries I have ditched out on the idea of blogging about my trip to Egypt and everything else. Stay tuned and I'll hopefully have pictures of that up along with stories to go along in a couple of days. Thanks for the patience and I'll be more on top of things in the future!

Champions Once Again!

2008-04-08T10:07:00.000-07:00

Two Saturday’s ago are team played the final game of the season and were crowned Champions of the Czech league that we play in. Of course it was anti climatic like European league that we were in with the fact that there were no playoffs. The play off at the end of the year consists of a round robin play down and the team with the most wins coming out as champions, so of course that was it. We did get some pretty nice medals and a great team party afterwards to celebrate the win and the season.

For those of you who don’t know, I’ve decided to sign on again and will be playing another season here for Slavia Praha. Chelsa has decided to come back for another year but will be moving back to Regina and starting her career. But we will have two new Canadians with my friend Jeni Creary coming to play along with Chelsa’s friend Arial Shautty (not sure on the spelling of her name). So with those two new players we should be a stronger team. Here are some pics from our celebrations...

The Team

Canadian Girls - gotta love the Championship hats

Party afterwards sporting the championship Ts

Friesen Invasion!

2008-03-29T04:24:00.000-07:00

This past Tuesday I had my first visitor to the Czech Republic. My cousin, Greg, was here on a Easter break European Tour and just happened to come to Prague with it. Quite good luck actually as he signed up for the tour before he or I knew that I would be living here. It was awesome to hang out with him and his tour group for the day. We toured the castle and the bridge in the am with his class and tour guide. Then for lunch broke away and did little shopping and just hung out at my place for the afternoon until we met back up with his group for supper. I have to admit that I wasn't the greatest host as we could have went a hundred other places instead of my house, but he was sick and unfortunately it was freezing outside so it probably was the best idea. I did manage to show him the random little baseball store just down from my house (he's a huge baseball player) so that was interesting. It was super fun to hang out with him and show him a bit of the city! Thanks for coming Greg!

Riga, Latvia

2008-03-24T11:18:00.000-07:00

Part three of my trip was to head back to Riga for about a day of touring around. We caught the bus back to Riga and arrived there around 1ish that Saturday. From the bus station there was just a short walk to our hostel which was located in the Old Town of Riga. It's a beautiful area of old buildings, church, cafes and cobble stone streets everywhere!

You know you've picked the party hostel when you arrive at 1:30pm and people are still fast asleep. Oops...wasn't expecting that and wished we would have picked a different place, but I guess for the $10 a night price we paid it was to be expected.

After dropping our stuff off, we went to find some food and explore Riga. The first place of destination was the central market which consisted of five huge hangers and is one of the largest markets in Europe (according to my travel book). Interesting would be the best word to describe the market. It was pretty huge selling everything from fruits, vegetables, cheeses, meats, breads, candy and a ton of sea food. I saw a lot of interesting looking sea creatures and smelt it all. Outside there were more clothing stalls set up and a lot of interesting looking people to add.

From here we went to St. Peter's Gothic Church and saw an amazing view of Riga from the top of the tower. We also went to the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia. I'm sure to many this sounds boring but it fascinated me as I knew nothing about the history of Latvia other than that I thought it broke away from Russia. Boy did I learn alot. It became and independent country after WWI in 1918. Then was occupied by the Soviets in 1939. Next taken over by Nazi Germany from 1941-1945, and then back to the Soviet rule. Finally they had independence in 1991. An amazing history really.

After the museum we pretty much just walked the streets the rest of that day as well as Saturday morning. The old town in Riga is really pretty with cafes everywhere an a ton of shopping to be done. It's know for it's Amber, so I was able to buy some jewelry from there. Sunday morning we were off to go back to the Freedom Monument to take some more pictures when we came across a road block along the way. There were police everywhere...hum...what's going on. We found out through a couple of Americans who were working in Riga that there was a big memorial parade going on that day. Shouldn't be a problem right, well that's not the case. Apparently it was to remember those who died in WWII. Some people have objections to that as they were fighting with the Nazi's, but in reality they had no choice. So kind of a touchy subject and I guess in past there had been some problems. Well with all the cops that we saw dressed in riot gear, there were definitely no problems on that day. It pretty cool to come across that event while we were there.

So that was our time in Riga, we then flew back to Berlin. Got there around 6pm which left us a couple of hours to kill before we took a bus back to Prague at midnight. I was able to go back to Checkpoint Charlie and check out that museum which had a ton of information about the Berlin Wall and the efforts people made to escape under/over/through it. Another interesting museum.

Here some pics...

Central Market

Caviar

St. Peter's Church

View from the top of the tower in St. Peter's Church

Another angle - notice the four big hangers...site of the Central Market

House of Blackheads and the statue of St. Roland

Streets of Old Town Riga

Freedom Monument

Memorial Parade

Police in riot gear...just in case

Ventspils, Latvia

2008-03-22T09:54:00.000-07:00

Ventspils, Latvia was the second destination of our trip. Chelsa and I flew into Riga and from there we made our way to the bus stop to try and purchase tickets to Ventspils. It's a city of 44,000 on the North Western coast of Latvia right on the Baltic Sea. It's a huge industrial hub with a large harbour. I wouldn't say there is a ton to do or see there but it's a cute, clean city with lots of parks, beaches and brick streets which was pretty amazing. I'm sure it's pretty beautiful in the summer or when the sun is out as unfortunately it rained most of the time we were there.

So we booked our tickets from the sketchy Riga bus station and off we went on our 3 hour bus ride. The scenery is much like northern Saskatchewan minus all the rocks. Lots of trees where you can see evidence of selective foresting. We did make on stop along the way where we were able to get out and take a pee break in what had to have been one of the grossest outhouses I've ever seen. I would have preferred to just go in the woods. Finally we got there and found a taxi that could take us to our hotel, as we didn't exactly have directions. We stayed in a pretty nice hotel that was only a couple of years old. It was a fairly good location as well since we were only about 2km away from Olympic Center where the tournament was taking place. The Olympic center consists of an ice rink, basketball stadium, an indoor and outdoor track. I'm sure that's where their national teams have their training camps.

The first night there we were able find the hotel the team was staying at and hang out a bit with them. It was funny to see everyone and their surprise to see us. We had told them before that we were coming to Latvia, but I guess they didn't believe us or something got lost in translation. I figured that Chelsa and I would be with the other parents in the stands cheering on the team. Well actually not because there were no other fans there. As in no parents or family. That pretty much blew me away as I can't imagine being at a World Championship and not having some sort of family there to cheer me on. That kind of explains why the team was super appreciated of our presence there. We were able to get Czech team passes so we could be with the team and go where ever. Sound like we were all important and all, but in reality we weren't. We did get some Czech jersey's along with a huge flag and Czech clothes to wear while watching the games. It was pretty fun to be out in the stands just the two of us cheering on the team, trying to do so in Czech might I add. We were blown away by the Norway fans...all 30 of them. hehe.

Chelsa and I were in Ventspils for three nights and were able to watch the Czech's play two games. The first game we watched they played against Kazakhstan, and lost 3-1. They actually played not bad considering they rolled two lines and Kazakhstan was the clear favourite to win the tournament which they did. The second game against Norway was was super exciting as it went into a shoot out. The Czech's should have won it in regular time 2-1 but Norway scored to tie it with about 3 minutes left to send it into OT. It was very nerve racking watching the shoot out from the stands, but they pulled through and won. It was great to celebrate that win with the girls after as it guaranteed them a medal. With the World B Pool Championships there are not finals, just a big round robin with the team with the most points as the winner. The game after that was Slovakia vs. Latvia which went into a shootout as well. All in all Chelsa and I had a great time and experience in Ventspils hanging out with the girls and my coach (he's the assistant coach for the National team) and watching some international hockey. Oh and if you were wondering the Czechs actually placed third so not a bad showing by them. Here are some pics below...

Cool pictures of the tree lined streets everywhere and brick sidewalks/streets

Hanging out on the Baltic Sea, love the shipping dock background

Livonian Order Castle and Museum - also had an amazing medieval restaurant inside

Streets of Ventspils

Crazy Czech fan!

Chelsa and I with the Czech team

Berlin

2008-03-19T13:10:00.000-07:00

Like I said in my last email I took a little trip to Berlin and Latvia. Took the train last Monday after work to Berlin. Four and half hours later I arrived. Had all my hostel information with me and the directions on how to get there. I took the S-bahn (an above ground metro) two stops and then had to switch to the U-Bahn (underground) for one stop. It was around 10 at night by this time and I could not figure out why the gate was closed to the U-Bahn. Kind of earlier to close the metro down. Come to find out from someone on the street that the U-Bahn/tram/bus workers are all on strike. Great timing! Thank goodness I have my Lonely Planet Germany with me and have a map to find my hostel. Great start.

I just had Tuesday to look around the city so I did a much as I could in that day. Started off with a tour for tips walk around the city. Latest about four hours which was well worth it. I think I learned more history in that one walk then I did all through my high school social studies classes. You'll all from the pictures below. From there met a guy from Australia and hung out with him the rest of the day going back to Checkpoint Charlie and reading all the info on the old wall. Then we went to the Jewish Museum which is the largest of it's kind in Europe. I went through it all and read almost everything taking me almost three hours. Then for supper went to a random Thai Restaurant that was recommended to us, it was amazing. I parted ways with my Aussie friend and went to meet Chelsa at the train station where she was arriving as we were off to the next day to Riga, Latvia for the World B Pool Women's Hockey Championships. Here are some pictures below...

Bandenburg Gate

Hotel Aldon - where Michael Jackson hung his baby over the railing, very historical significance

Memorial to the Murdered European Jews - a ton of concrete rectangle boxes signifying graves

You know the city's old when there are still bullet marks in the exterior of the building from WWII

Berlin Wall - this part has been fenced off to keep people from taking the wall and selling it on eBay

Can't remember the name of this church but thought it was a cool picture

Bebelplatz and Humbolt University - the sight where in 1933 they burned about 20,000 books that didn't agree with the Nazi Party's ideology

Another Memorial

Berliner Dom

Check Point Charlie

I will post pictures of Latvia hopefully in a day or so when I get the time!

Going on a little trip...

2008-03-09T15:09:00.000-07:00

Just thought I would let you know that I am off tomorrow on a little trip to Germany and Latvia. I had mentioned before that the Czech National Team would be playing in the B World Championships in Latvia. Well Chelsa and I found cheap flights to Latvia from Berlin so decided to make a little trip there and watch a couple of games. I can't say I've had a desired to visit Latvia but with the team going there I thought why not?

I leave tomorrow after work and will be taking the train to Berlin. On Tuesday I'll have the day to tour around and then that evening will be meeting up with Chelsa at the train station. Wednesday morning we will be flying to Riga, Latvia and from there taking a bus/train to Ventspils, the city where the tournament is taking place. We'll be able to watch games on Thursday and Friday as the Czech's take on Kazakhstan and Norway. Then Saturday morning back to Riga for a day of touring until Sunday when we fly back to Berlin and then make our way home to Prague. Kind of a world wind of a tour but should be great fun. I'm excited going there to cheer on the girls and have some fun sight seeing! I'll post pictures when I get back.

Kudos

2008-03-05T03:24:00.000-08:00

A big kudos goes out to a couple of my bible study friends who attended our game last Saturday in Kladno. They were all attending their first ever hockey game. Dot hails from South Carolina, Karissa from Seattle/Spain and Julie and her girls from Scotland, so we had a real mix of people at our game. From all the pictures that they took at the game I know they had a great time. Even Julie from Scotland enjoyed it although she said at the end of the game that she couldn't figure out the rules. I really should have given her a quick run down. But thanks for coming out ladies!

Dot and Julie's girls

The Canadians

Never a Dull Moment

2008-03-04T05:30:00.000-08:00

We had a game this past Saturday in Kladno. It’s only about 30mins from Prague and the home of the famous Jaromir Jagr. In the rink’s restaurant there are jersey’s and pictures of him everywhere. As I have mentioned in a previous blog we have these intense super fans. Well they were of course on hand for this little road trip game along with a couple of new additions to the group. I guess that during the game they were shouting some explicit words towards the other team so the cops were called in (apparently it was the new super fans that were doing the yelling). At the start of the third period I see about four cops climbing up the stands to where our super fans sit. There were only two super fans sitting there. I guess the others were warned and were able to make a quick exit. I'm not sure if any of them were arrested or not but we didn't have any drumming for the third period. I found out after the game that there were three cop cars outside the rink along with a big police van. I’m not sure who called in the complaint and what they were thinking as we only had about 6 super fans there. The cops must have thought it was a men’s hockey game and therefore called in the reinforcements. So as you can see our games can get pretty rowdy with all the fans that we get!

First Storm of the Year

2008-03-01T01:09:00.000-08:00

Well it's currently March 1st and I've just experienced my first thunderstorm of the season. Woke up this morning to it raining with a little sleet, not quite as nice as the weather we were having a couple of days ago. The thunder and lightning storm rolled through our area this morning. Can't believe that has happened here already. I'm almost positive that this is the earliest in the year I have ever experienced a thunderstorm before, kind of crazy. And to my Wisconsin friends, yes I'm from Saskatchewan and enjoy talking about the weather! I promise my next blog post will not be of that!

Spring Fever

2008-02-24T14:22:00.000-08:00

I have to comment/brag about the beautiful weather that we had today and this past weekend. It was 14C and February 24th! Can't say I've ever experienced that before unless I was in Mexico or somewhere hot. Talked to my sister-in-law today in Saskatchewan and she was happy with the -1C weather they were having. Well this tops that! We had an away game today about an hour from Prague, so it was pretty fun to drive with the windows down. I was craving bar-b-que of course, but unfortunately we don't have a deck or a bar-b-que that we can use, so I'll have to wait until April when I get back to Regina. I'm not sure how long this nice weather will last but it definitely has me wishing for spring to come!

Czech Hockey Weekend

2008-02-23T02:53:00.000-08:00

Last week on Wednesday I was informed that our hockey game that Saturday was cancelled. Great, weekend off! Where should I go? Nope that wasn't the case. Instead there was going to be a Czech National Team training camp in Kralupy (the city we play in). We usually have practice Friday nights and if some of the girls are gone with the National team then we can practice with a guys team. But this time we were told that we could actually practice with the National team. It was kind of fun going out there with the girls and throwing on a Czech practice jersey. Yet it did kind of feel like a Slavia practice as there are only a couple of girls on my team that are not on the National team, minus some of the younger girls that play for us.

Then on Saturday and Sunday we were told that we were playing in games against the National team. They just threw together some players from other Czech teams and a couple of older girls who were not on the National team anymore. I actually played defence those two games with Chelsa, had a blast of course. Made a bunch of mistakes but was nice to play a little defence as I can't say I've done a ton of that this year.

We lost the first game 2-0, but played pretty well. Chelsa and I played first line with a couple other Slavia girls, one who is Slovak, one who used to play on the National team and then one who is not quite there in making it. We actually played really well and if we would have capitalized on a couple of opportunities then the score could have been closer. The following day we started out the same way as the day before. We scored on our first shift out and then on the second. So that put us up 2-0. They did tie it up so it was 2-2 going into the second. At that point we were switched down to the third line. I was okay with this as it was a fun game but our team definitely lost momentum and couldn't recover after that. So we ended up losing 5-2. I’m in positive that the National team coach did that in order to restore some confidence in his girls. Well hopefully they've gained some as they will be heading off to Latvia for the B Pool World Championships in March.

Here's a picture of Chelsa and I in our crazy uniforms that we wore for the game.

Love My Sugar Daddy!

2008-02-14T13:13:00.001-08:00

Pan Kott, or Mr. Kott is our team's owner and who I like to call my sugar daddy! Reason being is that somehow he funds our team, I'm sure through a bunch of other sponsorships, but mainly from his company and contacts he has. He had been so kind to us providing for almost everything we need here. But specifically this week was awesome.

In our contract it states that we get a car, and it's pretty much a necessity as we practice in Kralupy a city about 30min away from Prague, so it's our means of transportation there. We had a great car, used of course but nice and got the job done. Well on Sunday he came by with a brand new car for us. That's right a brand new car! It's not a Lexus or anything, more like a Ford Fusion, but I was pretty shocked that he would give us one. It’s bright red and kind of a wagon type of car. Sara has nicknamed it the Maple Loaf, and it's very suiting as it looks like a loaf. It drives very nice, not as much power as our last car, but I'm enjoying the new car smell instead!

Then to top it off, today, Valentine’s Day, we get another surprise. We had one of our teammates, Eva, and Mr. Kott's daughter, Bara over for supper. Bara doesn't play hockey anymore but is still very good friends with the team, and speaks very good English. So along with her came free tickets to Akon for next Friday. It was funny cause Sara, Chelsa and I were talking about going, but then decided not to. Well now we can! So I was dancing around the house with excitement and failed to notice that they were in fact VIP tickets. Not sure where that will seat us, but I am pretty pumped to say the least. Not a bad Valentine's Day.

Still Working...

2008-02-12T13:48:00.000-08:00

I haven’t talked much about the school that I work at in a long time. Well, yes, I still work there two days a week and usually every day is an adventure with something new happening. Since I’ve been back from the Christmas break the kids for the most part have been pretty good. It probably helps that for awhile we were down to about 6 kids a day compared to on average 16, as the school was hit with the chicken pox. Although, I have broken up a couple of fights, seen some great football kicks to the shins and an amazing hit to the head involving a toy tractor.

I did experience my first peeing of the pants the other day. Jonash, my favourite three year old terror was motioning to the bath room and saying something in Czech. I got out of him the word pee and was like “yes go ahead the bathrooms right there”. Well nope that wasn’t the problem, he of course peed his pants. So I proceeded to help him change out of the wet pants and underwear and into a clean pair of tights. Yes, I did say tights. It is normal here for little boys to wear tights in the winter for extra warmth. Kind of strange to me, yes, but in the end it does make sense. I then sent Jonash on his way and scrubbed my hands for the next 10mins. I am well on my way to motherhood.

Below is a picture of Jonas and his twin brother, Tobias. He wanted to wear the birthday hat the other day for some strange reason even though it wasn’t his birthday and proceeded to sing happy birthday in English for the rest of the morning...one of his cuter moments. The picture was taken on my cell phone so it’s a little blurry.

I have to confess that I messed up the other day at school as well. There were about 17 kids at the school and for the most part it’s my job to get them ready to go outside to play. Then on Friday’s we go out and play for awhile then take the local bus to the next town to go for pony rides. Well, it was pure chaos as usually with me zipping up coats, putting on boots, scarves and what not. Then asking them in my amazing Czech, where are you mitts, and everything else that they lost along the way from the boot room to the back entrance. Well poor Alesek slipped through the cracks that day and I didn’t check him before he went out the door to make sure he had everything on him. He ended up wearing his indoor sandals out to the pony rides. Good thing it was only about -5C so he survived. When I came back I just washed up those little sandals and nobody would ever know! I had to take a picture with my camera phone. He’s the kid second from the left with the bird toque (that deserves a picture in itself). You can see his one little sandal foot sticking out.

A Sad Reality

2008-02-10T01:27:00.001-08:00

Many people have asked me in the past as to how many fans we get out to our games. I would like to tell you that we get about 2000 out per game - you know pack the house. But let's be serious here, that's not even close to what really happens. We get probably on average 50 fans. Yep that's all, but it seems like more actually. There is this crew of guys, sometimes girls, of about ten or so. They come to every home game wearing Slavia hockey jerseys and a huge drum in tow. They are usually singing Slavia songs and chanting names and whatever else. Before the game they can be found in the restaurant drinking pivo (beer). The first time I saw these guys I thought...wow...they are really crazy/stupid for coming out to our games. They must be really die hard Slavia fans, or just here for the cheap beer in our rink’s restaurant.

Well truth be told, I'm almost positive they get paid for being there. How sad I know, but it's not uncommon in the professional world of women's sports in the Czech Republic. Our friend, Erin, is the head coach of the Sparta Praha women's basketball team and have about 5-10 crazy fans as well, who in fact are paid. I wasn't sure if this was true of our fans at Slavia, but have come believe that this could be the fact. After the game this past weekend I saw our manager, Mr. Nemec, with a bunch of money outside our locker room and our super fans around him. I was going outside for my cool down after the game, so I didn't exactly stick around to see what was going to happen next but could only speculate. That only left me to guess the inevitable.

Some of our crazy fans that even came to Berlin to watch us play

The drums

Prague in the Fall

2008-02-07T08:30:00.000-08:00

I realize that it is February and no longer fall, more like getting close to spring, but I do have some great pictures of Prague that I took back in the fall that I thought people might want to see. Finally you'll get to see pictures of Prague and understand why I love this city so much!

Wallenstein Palace, Prague Castle in the background

Sitting by the pond at Wallenstein gardens

Stalactite Grotto - a crazy wall made up out of who knows what with hidden faces and animals in it

From Prague Castle overlooking the city

Cool picture

Front of Prague Castle

St. Vitus Cathedral - a gothic church inside the castle grounds

Champions!

2008-02-06T07:57:00.000-08:00

Back in December I had mentioned in my blog that we had won the European Hockey league that we play in (EWHL). Like I said before it came down to the games on our road trip to Slovenia and Italy as to whether or not we would win the league. But we still had one more game left this past weekend against Bolzano. Because we had already clinched the league the game was fairly meaningless except for the fact that if we won, then we would have an undeafted season. So yes we did win 3-0, and I therefore participated in my first undefeated season of any team that I have ever played on. It was great to be part of that as it was the first year my team has played in that league. Granted it was fairly anticlimatic as there are no playoffs in our league, just whatever team has the best record wins the league. Pretty crazy. So after the game we received our little gold medals and a fairly large trophy. Unfortunately we were not able to celebrate the win and the undefeated season as we had a Czech league game the next day. The celebration will have to be saved for when the season is over. Here are a couple pictures from the weekend...

The Canadians

Team Picture

Mělnik

2008-01-30T05:47:00.000-08:00

This past weekend I actually had off from hockey. So that meant that I had some time to explore the beautiful little town of Mělnik. It's a town of about 19,000 that is situated 30km north of Prague. I have actually been their before but only for a couple of birthday parties limiting my site seeing to the inside of a restaurant. So this time I was able to explore the town mainly know for it's location and vineyards. It's situated on top of a hill overlooking the country side and the Valtava River. Along the slopes of the hill are a number of vineyards. Sara and I had a great time exploring the sights of the Namesti Miru, the Renaissance chateau, as well as the church of SS Peter and Paul. Here are some pics of the day.

The Musuem

Namesti Miru

How old do you think this arc way is?

Church of SS Peter and Paul and part of the Chateau

Courtyard of the Chateau (you couldn't takes pictures inside, too bad as it was really beautiful)

Overlooking the Bohemain country side and Vltava River

It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood

2008-01-27T06:39:00.000-08:00

These past few days in Prague have actually been sunny. Minus today that is as it has been raining on and off all day. Kind of put a damper on my plans to go and explore the beautiful town of Karlov Vary, but that’s okay as there’ll be more opportunities for that. So in honour of the sun shine we’ve been having, and hopefully more nice weather to come, I thought I would put up some pictures of my neighbourhood that were taken in the fall. Hopefully you can get a glimpse of the area I live in. Here they are...

View from my window

Looking down the street

Looking down the other side

Jaselska - my street

Cute little street parallel to mine

Dejvice, major street a block from my house

And finally Cafe Corso, one of my favorite coffee shops in my neighbourhood

Starbucks is here!

2008-01-24T10:16:00.000-08:00

Much to my delight, today while I was shopping I received a text message from Chelsa telling me that she was in Starbucks. Ah what? I had heard that there might be one opening up some time in February but didn't realize that it was actually true. I guess it just opened three days ago. Well I stopped shopping right then and there and took the next tram to Starbucks to meet Chelsa! You might be thinking why would that be so exciting when there are a ton of cute little cafe shops lining the streets of Prague where coffee is about half the price. Well yes I do love going to my local cafe shops and have acquired the taste of strong European coffee, more like espresso, but there is nothing better than a Mocha Frappuccino or Carmel Macchiato. Maybe it's just the reminder of home...something North American, but I must say it sure made my day!

Our Friends...the Policie

2008-01-22T08:47:00.000-08:00

Last Friday night Chelsa, Sara and I were driving home from practice like any other night when the unthinkable happened - we blew out our front tire. We were almost home, on the cobble stone streets of Prague when we heard this loud bang! Sara was driving and turned off at the next possible option which was the street leading into the T-Mobile Center where the Sparta Praha men’s professional hockey team play. So we hopped out and thought...humm...what are we going to do? I personally have never had experience changing a flat tire before but thankfully Sara has. So she got out and was already in the trunk about to get out the spare tire when low and behold our friends the police show up. They pulled up beside us and basically said that we were not allowed to park there. Well no kiddn’. Chelsa asked if they spoke English and of course they didn’t, but could see from the flat tire in the front why we were there. Amazingly enough they got out of their little police van and proceeded to change the tire for us. What nice gentlemen! I was truly amazed with this act of kindness. The one poor guy was reefing on the bolt for like 15min and was telling us that we were going to have to phone a tow truck who would be able to get the bolt off for us. Of course we had our agent on the phone at this time who was translating for us. But thankfully he got it off and he could change the tire. The situation was quite funny as we were just standing around doing nothing and were wondering if we should pay them as a thank you or something like that. Michael our agent said not to and was like “see not all police are corrupt here”. Thankfully that night we got to see the kinder side of the police!

I apologize that this picture is not very clear, but Sara just took a quick picture with her camera phone of the police van. Would have liked to take more but thought they might not appreciate it.

What Was I Thinking?

2008-01-20T11:49:00.000-08:00

Sara, Chelsa and I invited some teammates over the other night for supper. So I being the go getter decided that I wanted to make an apple pie to give the girls a little taste of Canada. When I was home back at the start of November my mom and I were watching Oprah and saw Cindy Crawford on there making a strawberry pie with her homemade crust. Well I needed a crust and thought “humm...that crust looked good on TV and seemed easy enough to make”. Okay that’s the first problem with my thought process. Anything that looks easy on TV is NOT easy in real life! Second problem, the flour in the Czech Republic is more like grainy type of flour than the light fluffy stuff back home. So needless to say the Cindy Crawford recipe did not work out, and I more of a crumble than a dough.

Round two...where would I go to find a good pie crust recipe as I didn’t have one in my cook book. That’s right I went to the women who makes her own marshmallows...Martha Stewart. I love her website and found a simple recipe for a pie crust and also some help tips for making them. Rule number one was to not work the dough too much. That went down the drain right away as I had to work it tons in order to make it all stick together. So no I didn’t have a nice flaky crust, but my apple pie with strussel topping worked out and was a hit with everyone. Thanks to Tilly Wiens for that recipe in the Parliament Community Church cook book. Not sure I’ll be making too many more pies in the near future here in Prague but I sure did have an interesting afternoon.

Back in the Czech

2008-01-16T07:37:00.000-08:00

Well after two weeks home in Canada I am back in the Czech Republic. I never mentioned before that I was going home for Christmas mainly because I was going to surprise my friend Andrea who thought I was staying over in Europe for the holidays. Well it worked and I sure surprised her Christmas day!

My time at home was great, but it of course flew by. I was able to get up to Watrous, SK a couple of times to see my family and my grandma. Her time was running short so I was very thankful to spend some quality time with her before she died this past week. Also on New Year’s Day the Czech National Under-18 Women’s hockey team came to Regina on their way to the World Championship which was held in Calgary. Chelsa, Sara and I had a chance to host them for those days which kept me busy as I had seven girls sleeping over at my house. It was great to show them a bit of our country and for them to see how cold it really gets in the winter time - now they won’t be wondering why we wear sandals until October. There are about 4 girls on that team that play regularly with my Slavia Praha team and our coach is their manager, so that is how we have the connection with the team. I have to brag about this team as they actually won bronze in the tournament. This is a huge step for their national hockey program as it’s usually Sweden of Finland winning the bronze.

So like I said I am back in Prague trying to back into the swing of things. I started to work again this week with the little kids and the first day definitely tired me out...16 kids hanging on you all day will do that to a person. I still have Czech classes twice a week until the beginning of February so I was back at it with that. I’m trying to switch the Czech back on in my brain as it was a struggle during that first class. Along with all these things, hockey’s in full force once again which is great. I can feel the all the food I ate during Christmas and will hopefully burn that off and get back into playing shape. That is all the news for now, Happy New Year and I hope that everyone had a fantastic Christmas!

Veselé Vánoce

2007-12-22T14:49:00.000-08:00

That’s Czech for Merry Christmas if you haven’t figured that out already. I should tell you a little about what I have learned and experienced with the Czech Christmas traditions. First off on December 5th an andel, čert, and Mikolauš come around to the children and give them candy if they have been good. In English it’s an angel, devil and kind of like a Santa Claus. The children believe in these three characters kind of like how (some) kids in North America believe in Santa Claus. It’s really funny though as the devil carries around a big sack and threatens the children that if they have been bad then he will put them in the sack, but he usually just gives them a lump of coal.

Now as for the Christmas Day celebrations here in the Czech Republic that actually happens on the 24th not the 25th. Why I’m not sure. They do give presents but instead of Santa giving them they are told that they are gifts from baby Jesus. They typically have a huge meal in the evening, open presents, and then head to a midnight mass.

Now here’s where it gets interesting...the traditional meal is fish and not just any fish - carp. Now from what I know I would not consider carp a delicacy or something that I would consider special. More like they are bottom feeders in lakes and contain many bones in them. According to what I’ve been told the carp here have been farm raised, I guess that should make me feel better. Now where would you get these fish you might ask. The grocery store? Nope, you can get them right on the street. That’s right, about December 20ish or so people come with big tubs containing live carp and just set up on the side of the street. People come pick out their fish or more like the weight they want and then they kill it and filet it right there on the spot for them. I was Christmas shopping the other day, and was walking down the street with my head down and all of a sudden I heard a big THUMP! What the heck...just a guy killing a fish with a mallet. Crazy I tell you! Here are some pictures of the process of it all, and a video of it. I actually can't get the video up and running at the moment but will try again later today.

There can be quite the line up

Notice the fish scales and "stuff" on the street

The Never Ending Road Trip

2007-12-16T10:30:00.000-08:00

Day 1:
My day started way too early at 5:30am. We were to be at the rink at 6:30am so we could be on the road by 7am. The destination for the day was Slovenia, not to be confused with Slovakia. Where is that you ask? Well it’s south of Austria and east of Italy if that helps you out. We were to play Maribor a team in our European Hockey league. After about 10 hours and a couple of bad Czech movies later we arrived in Maribor for our game. From the ten hours long bus trip I have to admit that my legs were in horrible shape, and I don’t think I have had a more terrible first period than I did that game. Finally in the third period I felt them come back to me. We ended up squeezing out a win coming from behind to beat them 4-3. From here we were off to Kranj, the site of our next game the following day. Why we just didn’t spend the night in Maribor I’m not sure. Kranj was where we were playing but not actually spending the night as we were to stay in the resort town of Bled. We finally get to our hotel at around 1:30am, but not before first going to the wrong rink to drop off our equipment, finally heading to the correct rink then waiting another half an hour as they forgot to bring the key to the dressing room. You would think this would be the end of our day but nope...apparently the hotel the Triglav team had booked for us was in fact a hostel. Our coach was not impressed at all, as this was way below his standards. I’m glad he has high standards but at this point I really didn’t care if I was to sleep in a 10 bed room, I just wanted to sleep. This was one huge mess to say the least. The people at the hostel spoke English so Sara did a great job translating in broken Czech between those people and our coach. After waiting outside for about 30min we headed inside with our stuff to spend the night. In the mean time Karl and Smarta, a girl on our team who speaks broken English set out to find another hotel for the team. The workers at the hostel had told us that we would not find another hotel anywhere at this time in the night. Well they were wrong as just up the street we found a great hotel that we moved to that night (morning). So after being up for 23 hours, we finally were able to get to sleep. I have to say that the funniest part of the night was when we were waiting outside of the hostel and the worker told us he had to legally close the hostel at 2am cause of some restrictions. This was relayed on to our coach, Karl, and he proceeds to pull out some card from his wallet, which saying it didn’t matter because of this. The guy was like that’s great, but you are dealing with different police here in Slovenia. So as to what Karl showed him from his wallet, I really don’t know, nor did I ask any more questions, but let’s just say my coach has some powerful friends.

Our coach and trainer cutting up salami and buns on the bus...very European

Day 2:
We awoke to some amazing scenery as we were staying in the pretty town of Bled, as you can see from the pictures below. Breakfast was at 10am and then we were able to go back to bed until lunch at 2pm. From there we were able to take a walk around the town, very picturesque. Then it was off to our game in Kranj at 6:45pm, which in fact we thought it was at 5pm. I should mention that this rink was still under construction and half built. The dressing rooms were mostly done but the stands and everything else still looked like a construction site. It was a terrible game as they are not very good but even with that we only won 6-2. After the game it was back on the bus for some more traveling as we were off to Italy for our next two games. We made it in to Bolzano at around 2:30am so it was actually an early night for us.

View from my hotel room

Hanging out on the dock with teammates

Beautiful Scenery
Day 3:
It was a pretty uneventful day as we of course slept in and just hung out in the hotel and had an amazing pregame pasta meal. We were actually not playing in Bolzano that day but instead Agordo, located in a tourist town in the Alps. It was only about 150km away but took 3 hours to get there cause we were constantly on switch back roads going up and down a couple of mountains. The view was amazing and I really enjoyed the scenery once my gravol (motions sickness pill) kicked in. We beat them 9-3 and continued the winning streak. The owner of our team drove out to the game and afterwards celebrated the win by giving everyone shots of pure Italian whiskey. I’m not quite sure why, as the next day was our big game, but it was pretty funny none the less as he was really excited and was even giving out small shots to the young players on our team. After a fantastic post game Italian pizza meal it was back on the bus for our trip back to Bolzano, another three hours on the Alpine road and home around 3:30am.

Day 4:
Finally we were able to sleep in until noon, letting me have the most solid sleep I had gotten since being on the trip. We checked out of the hotel around 2pm but not first before having a crazy photo session by the hotel’s pool. I guess the team is making a calendar and so we were to put on our jersey’s and pants for some random pictures. I can’t ever see this happening back in Canada. The game against Bolzano was pretty huge for our team. They are in second place in the standings and we are in first. There are no playoffs in the league, why I have no idea, so according the point totals if we were to win that game then we would win the league title. We ended up winning 2-0. It was a pretty good game, I’m sure the scored would have been more to our favour if it wasn’t the fourth game in four days. Chelsa and I both scored and Sara had the shutout, so we were pretty pumped with our Canadian connection. It was great to celebrate after the game with everyone and what would be a Czech celebration without our coach buying the team beers at the bar after the game. It was then back on the bus for another 9 hour trip home to Prague. The first couple hours of the drive was pretty great as we pretty much drove through all of Austria to get back to Prague, but by 5:30am we were pretty delirious. Sara, Chelsa and I thought it would be great to top the trip off with McDonald’s breakfast at 7am on the way back to the house. Currently I am super exhausted and have no idea what time it is as my sleeping patterns are way off but am happy as we are now the Eastern Europe Women’s Hockey League Champions!

View from my hotel of the Italian Alps

Christmas Market!

2007-12-08T00:19:00.000-08:00

Christmas time in Europe is just fantastic. They may not have the snow quite like in Saskatchewan or the cold, but they sure know how to do it up and make it festive. The big thing here is Christmas markets. Last year I was fortunate enough to head to Munich for a few days and partake in their huge Christmas market. That means tons of cute little stand selling all types of knicknacks and crafts along with all types of food and gluwein, which is hot mulled wine.

This past Monday on our day off, Chelsa, Sara and I headed down to one of the Christmas markets in Prague to do a little shopping and take in the festivities. The atmosphere is just fantastic and it was so much fun to eat hot candy covered almonds as well as different types of Czech pastries. Unfortunately it started to downpour while we were there - it's not quite cold enough for snow. So we took cover under an outside cafe where they have outdoor heaters and blankets. Really kind of cozy! Here are some pictures of the market. Enjoy!

Old Town Christmas Market

Chelsa and I eating traditional trdelik

Market at dusk

The market and I

I Hate Losing

2007-12-04T09:27:00.000-08:00

Well as you can tell from the title, things did not go as planned in Berlin. We played our first game against Lugano, last year’s champion from the Swiss League. Since I played in Switzerland last year I have actually played against their team before. We were tied 2-2 going into the third period and then I’m not sure what happened as we let in 4 goals that period for them to win 6-2. We could definitely play with them, and it didn’t really help that we had 17 penalties to their 7. It was a crazy game to say the least with there rarely being a full five on five on the ice. We were disappointed with the loss but I think it did give our team some confidence it was the toughest game we have played all year.

Then the next game we played against a French team, they were not all that bad but we came out flying and beat them 8-1. So that set the stage for our game on Sunday night. We played against the German team, Berlin. We had both beaten the French team and lost to Lugano, therefore the winner of our game was to go on to Sweden for the next round as the top two teams advance. It was a great game to play in, the type of games that I wished I played in every day...reminded me of one of my college games with physical back and forth hockey. We ended up with a 3-3 tie after 60min and from there went into OT. IIHF has a 5 minute OT with 4 on 4 hockey. After that we were still tied and then went into a shootout. I wish I could say I scored the winning goal and we are now off to Sweden but that is not the case. I shot first and didn’t score...my success rate in shootouts is terrible and I’d be just a-okay if I didn’t have to participate in another one. We ended up going to the fourth round of shooters...sudden death. Well they shot last this time and scored. So we are not going to Sweden. I’ve lost some pretty tough games before, but losing in a shootout really stinks. I’m not a fan of those rules and would have preferred to play OT until someone scored.

Now on a more positive note...I did have a great time in Berlin. We sure didn’t see any of the sights (I have to go back) but I did have a great time with my teammates and felt like I got closer to some of them even with the language barrier. Our team played really quite well if you take into account that we win most games by quite a bit and only have a couple of games where the score is close. We did struggle in the defensive zone but that is to be expected as we are hardly there during games and our coach doesn’t seem to see a need in practicing it. I think the weekend was a good eye opener for the girls and maybe gave them a bit of confidence in that they can play with some of the top teams in Europe but also see that there is tons they can work on in order to make it to the next level.

Crazy Game

2007-11-25T04:03:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I played in one of the craziest games yet. We were supposed to play a home game against Triglav, Slovenia which is a team in the European League that we play in. The starting time was set for 3pm but we didn’t actually start the game until 4pm. Why you ask, well the team apparently went to the wrong rink which was in Prague. We are affiliated with a professional men’s team which plays out of Prague in a beautiful new rink that seats about 15,000. Unfortunately our average of 50 fans a game wouldn’t really fill that stadium, so instead we play in Kralupy a smaller city about 30min outside of Prague. It actually suits our team just great as we have our own locker room and it’s a fairly nice rink. So upon Triglav’s arrival we find out they only have 8 players. Chelsa was not scheduled to play in our game because we are only allowed 3 foreigners to play in the game so she was sitting out and letting a Slovakia girl on our team play. Well little did she know but our coach offered her to go and play for Triglav. So what became her day off became probably the most defensive game she has ever played as we won 12-1.

We are to play Salzburg today and it should be a good game as we only beat them 3-2. Then this Thursday we are off to Berlin to play in the second round of the European Champions Cup. We’ll be playing three games Friday, Saturday and Sunday, with teams from France, Germany and Switzerland. The competition should be good so it will be a real test for our team as we have not been tested so much this season, so I’m really interested to see how we respond. The top two teams move on to Sweden where the finals will be played at the end of January. I’ll keep you posted on our results.

Czech Republic vs. Slovakia

2007-11-20T06:18:00.000-08:00

Last Saturday night Chelsa, Sara, our friend Erin and I were luckily enough to be able to attend a Euro 2008 qualifying soccer match between the Czech Republic and Slovakia. I had heard about the game and wanted to go but figured that the game would be all sold out. Well low and behold it wasn't and we got great seats the day of the game for only about $25 Canadian. It was being played at the home arena of Sparta Praha which is one of the two professional soccer teams in Praha, and only a 20min walk from our house. The game was fantastic to watch granted it was raining for about half the game and had about -1C temperatures. The fans were super crazy and chanted cheers the whole time. But that was to be expected. It was pretty funny as we had no idea what they were saying and we all ended up jumping up and down to this one cheer that they always sang. Come to find out, thanks to our teammates translation after the game, that they were chanting "If you don't jump then you're not Czech". Sounds awkward in English but has a good rhythm in Czech, but was a good thing we jumped along. The Czech's won 3-1 so it was nice to be on the winner's side. The game ended with a five minute fireworks display which I don't know was going to happen, so it was a great end to my first international football match.

National Anthems

Action Shot

Police in riot gear just in case

Super fans!

Budapest Road Trip

2007-11-13T10:40:00.001-08:00

Well I was back at it with games this past weekend after having the previous weekend off. We took a road trip to Budapest after practice on Friday as we played them on Saturday at 12:30pm. The road trip was pretty uneventful compared to other ones that I have been on. Granted I must say that I still have not gotten used to watching Czech movies. The Czech movies are pretty crazy, but they do throw in a couple of English movies dubbed over in Czech, and if we’re lucky we get English subtitles. It was a crazy road trip in the sense that we got our hotel in Budapest at about 2:30am, woke up at 9:30am then went and played our game at 12:30pm. Needless to say we did not get to see much of the city. It did look beautiful from the bus with a huge river flowing through the city. We won the game 4-1 which was good, probably could have won by about 10 goals but we were having trouble scoring. Then after the game I thought that we would eat in the restaurant like we have done in the past. Word had it that we were going to stop in Bratislava, Slovakia for super which was 3 hours away. Hum...that is totally different from any other team I have played on before where they pretty much shove food down your face after the game, especially when you play the next day. I had asked if we were going to stop at a gas station to get some snacks, our coach said we were going to, so I decided not to grab some food at the rink. Well two hours later we finally stopped for a “snack” at a gas station. Then we didn’t eat in Bratislava but in Brno which is only like 2 hours away from Prague. They must think we need to lose some weight.

The next day we played Kladno, a team that is in our Czech League. Back in October we lost to them in a shootout. It was our first and only loss of the season. Well we came out hard and beat them 12-3. It was pretty crazy and I really don’t know how we ever lost to them. Our coach was pretty pumped after the game and actually said some positive things which doesn’t happen very often. I have to mention also that we will not be going to Russia any more. For some reason we have switched pools and no longer in the Russian pool but the one in Berlin. I was kind of disappointed in a way cause I was pumped to go to Moscow and maybe get a chance to see a couple of sights, but Berlin is pretty great as well. Granted I’m not sure how much sigh seeing well get to do, but I guess we have a better chance in this pool so should be are going to be in a different pool of teams and instead we are headed to Berlin in a couple of weeks. Apparently we have a better chance in this pool of making it to the next round. So I can’t complain too much as the finals are in Sweden and it would be awesome to go there!

Short Trip Home

2007-11-06T10:55:00.000-08:00

Well it’s been awhile since I last wrote on the blog mainly because I was at home in Canada last week. My grandma has been diagnosed with cancer in her lung as well as a couple of places in her liver. So things are not looking too good. My parents were supposed to fly out and visit for that week but instead I came home to be with my grandma. I had a great week or more like 5 days hanging out at home spending time with my grandma and family. It worked out really well because we had the weekend off from games since most of my teammates were gone with the national team at a training camp all week. I did get on the ice a couple of times at home. A big shout out goes to my brother, Julie and Josh Horni for coming out on the ice with me, as well as my cousin Greg who skipped school to come and play net for me one day! It was really great to have that week off from everything and just hang out and enjoy what North America has to offer...I think I had Tim’s coffee every day! Now it’s back to the old routine in Prague. I was back at school today and I think I lost all brain power on the flight over. Not to mention I’m a little worried about practice tonight so hopefully that week off didn’t kill me too much!

Jackie...the Bum Wiper

2007-10-27T04:34:00.000-07:00

My job at the Puppies pre school has just added another dimension to it. Now I know in the past I have talked about helping the kids pee when they are outside and the fact that they just go anywhere. As in the other day a boy decided to go right where he was playing in the park and unfortunately one of the girls didn’t see the line of pee and turned right into it. Not a good situation. Well amongst other things the kids need help in the bathroom. Chelsa and Sara have been helping the kids out already with this but I have failed to help or even notice that my job includes this aspect. I worked with Sara the other day and she gratefully introduced me to this new fact. It all started when I heard little three year old Jonash shouting from the bathroom. Hum...what is he saying or what does he want. That’s right he wants me to come and wipe his bum. So I approached the situation very cautiously thinking “how am I going to do this”, “I can’t touch this kid, I’m going to get sued” and all of the above. Well no need to worry cause I got a huge, huge wad of toilet paper to prepare myself. Well he bent right over while sitting on toilet and braced himself by grabbing both my legs... I guess he has done this before. I wonder where “bum wiping” will fit on my resume?

Pre School

2007-10-15T09:20:00.000-07:00

I have had a couple of questions regarding what I actually do at the pre school that I work at. So I thought I would share what a day there entails for me...

It’s an early start to the day - for some that is. I have to leave the house by 7:15am in order to catch the metro at an early enough time. In the mornings it usually comes every 2 minutes so that’s not really a problem. It’s about a 35-40 minute ride by the time I switch lines and get to the end of the yellow line, Zličin. From here I take a bus out to Uhonisce, the town where the school is located. It’s a small town outside of Prague...like a suburb really. This hour and fifteen minute commute really makes me appreciate how close things are in Regina and how I can usually get to work in 15min tops.

I get there around 8:30am and then for the next little while spend time playing with the kids. This involves playing board games, computer games or really anything. There’s no lack of toys at the school. On average there is about 15 kids and at the most 20 kids. Around 9:30ish we have snack consisting of tea and a donut or something of that nature. It’s really quite cute as all the kids have their own mugs with their pictures on it-very good idea so as not to get their cups mixed up.

From here we move on to the Eclipse, what is that you ask? Well it’s where all the kids sit around in a circle and share with the group, if they want to, what they did the following night. It’s quite hilarious as many of the kids talk forever and could care less if anyone is listening to them, which is usually the case. After this comes a game of some sort involving English. We have in the past watched English nursery rhymes on video, read some English books and so one. Sometimes we even act out the rhyme or story. The kids just love this and it great time filler. It takes about 15 minutes to get the kids all organized with costumes or whatever before we start the story which is 2min at max. It’s pretty chaotic but quite funny to see the end product.

Next comes play time out side for about an hour or so before lunch. There is a fairly big back yard with a couple of play structures, a sand box and teeter todder. I spend about 20 minutes helping kids put on jackets/play clothes, taking of slippers , putting on shoes and throwing them out the door. Some days we take walk out to an old church with a large grassy area in the front. It’s really beautiful and a great place to play games. The kids love playing “red light/green light” along with “What time is it Mr. Wolf”. On Friday’s we head out to a small farm where the kids get about a five minute pony ride each. This of course is the highlight of the week.

After being outside things become very chaotic...it’s lunch time. Kids come flying in from outside and take off their stuff in record time. The older kids are pretty good and usually do not need help, but with the younger ones it’s a different story. We have 3 year old twin boys that go to the school, and I think every day we lose their slippers and regular pants in which I spend about 15min looking for them before lunch. Lunch is catered in and consists of some sort of soup to start and then a meat and potato or dumpling type deal. Next it’s quite time, where some of the little ones actually nap. If they chose not to sleep then they sit in a chair around the perimeter of the room and Iranka reads stories to them. Iranka is another Czech worker who comes for the afternoon. This is my quiet time as well once I have cleaned up lunch and eaten some myself. Katie, another Czech worker comes after lunch and does crafts with the kids. I love doing crafts so I usually try to get in on the action myself if I don’t have too many kids to help.

After some more play time, my time is up and I can head home. I should mention that throughout the day I am endlessly blowing kids noses...is this what I have to look forward to in having kids? I found out that this really disgusts me, but maybe it is different with your own kids. I also help the kids go to the bathroom, if they chose to use it. An interesting note about Czech culture is that it’s okay to pee in public. We will be in a park and the kids will just whip down their pants and go...I’ve seen it all over the city as well. I’m not a fan of helping the kids do this. I also break up mini fights between the kids and discipline them as well when needed. This usually does not go over well as of course the majority of them do not speak well enough English to understand what I am saying. But in any language a no means no. And of course picking them up under each arm always works as well. After this experience I will be ready for motherhood, or this will make me think twice about it!

A picture of Chelsa and I with the kids after a theatrical rendition of "The Gingerbread Man"

A picture of Zdaneka taken courtesy of Chelsa. Now you know what I do all day!

Going to Russia...

2007-10-09T06:34:00.000-07:00

Well it’s official...I’m heading to Russia at the end of November. This past weekend our team played in the first round of the European Women’s Champions Cup and won, therefore we are moving on to the second round which will take place in Moscow. This tournament faces off the champions of each European country. As in our team won the Czech league last year so we were invited into the tournament this following year. It is actually pretty interesting as countries have placed teams in the Championship Cup where I had no idea they even had women’s hockey...a.k.a Norway, Romania, Estonia and so on. We will now face a club team from Finland, Russia and Kazakhstan in the second round. I have no idea what Kazakhstan will be like but I know Russia and Finland will be tough as most of Russia’s national team plays on the club team we are to face. As a team we got flu shots yesterday after practice, so I am all set to head to the “motherland”.

Retirement is Officially Over

2007-10-03T12:22:00.000-07:00

Well after spending about a month here in the Czech Republic, I am no longer retired. Unfortunately my days as a 24 year old retire are now over! Sara and Chelsa have been working 2 days a week pretty much since I got here and I on the other hand have been playing the role of a retire. Kind of nice actually, as it’s amazing how you can fill your day spending time on the internet, shopping and playing hockey.

My job is the same as Sara and Chelsa and I am now working at that same pre school 2 days a week. It’s not exactly a pre school but more like a glorified day care. It’s a pretty nice place situated in a 200 year old farm house that has been redone where the first floor is the whole pre school area and the 2nd and 3rd floors are where the lady who owns the school, Hanna, lives. The back yard is huge and have been professionally landscaped, so it's perfect for the kids! The big novelty is that it is an English orientated pre school, hence where we come in. Hanna does a good job talking to the kids in both languages so they can start to learn English at a young age. I'm basically there to interact with the kids in English and help them improve. The older kids are pretty good and understand most of what I am saying, but the younger kids look at me like I have 5 heads. I’ve survived the first week and despite not knowing the language I haven’t missed anything too crucial and no children have gone missing under my care.

Along with starting the job I have also enrolled in Czech language classes. Chelsa and I go to class on Tuesday’s and Thursday’s for an hour and half. (Sara goes with a friend Mon/Wed.) It’s the perfect amount of time and things are moving slowly which is great as second languages are not my forte...probably due to the fact that I never took French in high school and did not take a second language in college. I did not for see myself living in another country at that time. I currently know numbers and how to speak a simple formal conversation consisting of introducing my name and telling people where I’m from. I’m well on my way to mastering this language!!

Slavia Praha Road Trips

2007-10-01T08:07:00.000-07:00

We took a road trip to Salzburg this past weekend to play a game against the Salzburg Ravens who are in the EWHL. The reason I am writing about this road trip is to tell you the difference between a road trip in North America and one here in Europe. We thankfully travel on a coach bus, slightly smaller than the ones back home, but big enough for our team. A bus trip to Salzburg only takes about 7 hours, probably about six or just under if you were driving in a car. Of course we have two bus drivers. People are not exactly troopers on the road like we are back in North America hence the two bus drivers. I’m just thinking about how many times I drove to Wisconsin by myself and did a 13 hour day in a car...they sure could not do that here.

To start the trip we almost rear ended a car while driving through Prague. Luckily the driver switched lanes at the last moment or I am sure that we would have gone right over top of that little car. Oh yes and last trip we took out a construction sign on the road. I have complete confidence in these drivers!! Our staff are all males including the parents, cause it seems that only the dads seem to come to the games. That might explain the movie choice. We have watched English movies before with Czech dubbed over them, but this road trip was the first time that we watched a real Czech film...that made things interesting as at one point I looked up and saw a bunch of naked women doing sexual things to a man in the movie. Oh my goodness! Imagine watching those shows on a bus trip back when I played for Wisconsin, that would not fly at all! Sara got up at one point and started shielding the eyes of some of the younger girls on the team. Our coaches/mangers got a kick out of that but of course did not stop the movie.

Alcohol is freely passed around the front of the bus as well. I’m sure our coach had a couple of beer before the game. Oh yeah and to make things more interesting when we stopped for a pre game meal along the way our bus drivers had a cold one as well! Oh wow!

We made it okay so no worries with that, granted we were super late and pretty much got off the bus and played our game. (Felt like I was in high school again) We came through and won 3-2 which was great because we are still undefeated in the EWHL.

An Experience I'd Rather Not Have...

2007-09-25T01:42:00.000-07:00

As I’ve said it before, “life is never dull living in Europe” and last Friday sure proved that statement. We were killing some time that afternoon before we were heading out to Melnik for a friends birthday party. So Sara, Chelsa and our friend Jason decided to go to this little flea market type shop not too far from our house. Jason and I were looking at some clothes up ahead of the rest of the girls when suddenly we hear Sara yelling our names really loud. I guess Chelsa had tried on a jacket and walked two shops down to show Sara. You have to realize that these shops are super small and are all attached so two shops down is like 10ft. The next thing Chelsa feels is a lady hitting her on the back. So Chelsa walks back and proceeds to say she’s sorry in Czech and she’s not trying to steal. That’s when Sara realizes what happens and we are called in to the picture.

You should know that the lady only speaks Czech so the whole communication barrier is a problem. I have no idea what she is saying and only understand a couple of numbers and “Policie”. Luckily Sara knows a bit of Czech and can figure out kind of what she is saying. The just of the conversation is that she want’s 500kcs which is only about $25. No problem, we’ll pay you that but then we want the jacket. Ah nope, that wasn’t going to work for her, she just wanted the money as a bribe or something for not calling the police. So Jason then gets on the phone and calls Billy. He is the head of Athletes in Action over here and is fluent in Czech. Meanwhile Chelsa is on the phone with Micheal, our agent and native Czech, trying to figure out what to do. They both suggest that we just leave. Well that is easier said then done. as the shops are packed tighly together with only about a 6ft wide walkway and a couple of exits to go to. So I’m in the lead and as soon as I start to go all the other shop keepers start swarming in front of me. Hum…I’m seriously thinking in my head that I’m just going to have to put my arms up and start plowing through. Well that didn’t have to happen because as I look back the lady has a death grip on Sara and wouldn’t let her get anywhere. It was quite a bit of yelling and commotion of course and I guess the lady had already called the police hence the fact that she did not want us going anywhere.

The police eventually get there and of course they don’t speak English. Luckily we had Billy who was on the cell phone to explain the situation to one of the officers. We get back on the phone and Billy says that we are to pay him 1000kcs. Okay no problem, we can do that and then get out of there. One problem...you have to have you passport on you at all times and since we were just going out for a walk/browsing only Sara had a copy of her’s. I had my driver’s license on me, so Sara and I were allowed to run back to our apartment and get both Jason’s and Chelsa’s passport.

What a mess! So by the time we got back to market, Jason and Chelsa were standing by the police car and had everything pretty much sorted out. At first I thought that the money they were going to pay was a bribe to the police but in reality it wasn’t. According to Billy we could have gone down to the police station and figured everything out or pay the fine…for what we’re not sure cause Chelsa is innocent and never stole the jacket…and just have things taken care of right there.

Needless to say we will be sticking to large shopping malls from now on.

House Pictures...

2007-09-21T02:26:00.001-07:00

Living Room

Living Room and Sara's make shift room

Kitchen

My bed in our room

Chelsa's bed in our room.

Big Game, New Car and TV Star

2007-09-18T02:09:00.000-07:00

We had our biggest game of the year so far last Wednesday against Slovakia. They are the defending champs of the EWHL and one of the best teams in the league. We played fairly well and ended up winning 3-0. It was a huge confidence booster to our team to actually play in a good game and come out on top. I found out after the game that we ended their 26 game winning streak. We then played Budapest on Sat. and still won 6-0, but played pretty ugly. According to our coach the whole game was “spatny” which means bad in Czech. He was yelling so loud and talking so fast that spit was flying out of his mouth. It honestly was pretty funny. We then traveled to Plzen on Sunday to play a team in our Czech league. Plzen is a really nice city home to the Pilsner Urquell Brewery which is a famous Czech beer over here. I’d love to go back and take a day trip there. We did win again, 5-0 to be exact, but more importantly I came out of the game with no injuries and only a few bruises. That team was so dirty that it was not a fun game to play in.

I am happy to report that we finally have a car! On Saturday we got a nice navy blue 4 door Skoda Octavia. We’re all pretty happy to finally have a set of wheels. We tested it out on Sunday as we drove it to Plzen. I have to admit that we bagged her pretty good and got it up to 200km/h, so no worries for us when we hit the German Autobahn. Driving in Prague is an adventure every time. Sara and I took the car out to the mall yesterday to try our navigational skills. We got there no problem but saw how crazy it is to drive here. Cobble stone streets are everywhere especially where we live, making the ride not exactly smooth. You also have to watch out for trams as they have the right of way. You can be driving down a cobble stone street and then suddenly the street runs out and all you are driving on is a tram land…so checking in the rear view mirror is key to make sure you are not going to run into a tram. Or in Chelsa’s first experience driving, she drove down the center of the road in a clearly marked tram lane. Thank goodness it was late at night and no trams were coming.

Then in practice last night I got interviewed by a Czech TV station. Channel 1 to be exact, It was pretty ridiculous actually as myself and Sara had to put on game jersey's for the practice for the TV footage. (Chelsa was sick so she wasn’t there). It was weird because the interview was during the practice, so I missed a good 20min of practice. The guy from the TV station spoke English so the interview wasn’t all that bad, although in usual interview cases the questions were pretty broad. I guess it airs tonight at 5:45pm so we’ll be going over to a friends house to watch it. Hopefully we’ll be able to tape it cause I think it’ll be pretty funny to see myself talking with Czech dubbed over top!