Domestic Disasters

I find my memories of my first few months here in Prague quite amusing. I got my mother's obsessive-compulsive nature especially when it comes to cleanliness but she never had the chance to prepare me how to be a domestic goddess without having a single strand of my hair out of place (She died when I was 15.) so the outcome was, I had my share of domestic disasters for several weeks after I arrived in Prague and assumed the role of a wife.

The washing machine in our first rented flat became useless as I didn't know how to use it. A was equally as clueless as I was. We couldn't find its manual so I had to wash clothes by hands. Thankfully the huge bathtub provided a convenient place to do it except that my feet had to be soaked all the time I was doing the laundry. No amount of lotioning can rehydrate them after each session in the tub.

Next to doing the laundry, the dilemma of where to hang the dripping clothes came in. There was probably a way of letting them drip in the bathroom but I wasn't using my head then. I devised a plan of wringing the clothes so well though common sense told me not to do it. Common sense neglected, I wringed them up. I then covered the living room floor with a gazillion plastic bags before covering them with a gazillion copies of old newspaper and hanged the worn out-looking clothes on a rack above them. The clothes dripped anyway, of course. The next day my stupidity came crashing down on me with a vengeance when what supposed to be a sturdy parquet beneath the plastic bags and newspapers curled up like mini waves after the water seeped into it. When A saw it, he went ranting and raging at how much we might have to pay for the floor to be redone......Okay, I tend to exaggerate, hehe.

The worst performances of my life happened in the kitchen. Several times I stood infront of a stove with a growing sense of panic. How to use it, which knob to turn, which way to turn?.... extremely easy stuff which a three-year old can probably figure out but which left me close to tears. How to use the stove was just the tip of an iceberg, the ultimate question was, how to cook? A was of no help. The only thing he can cook is porridge, which I love, by the way. But porridge is just porridge, it has no soul to keep your body going for long. As for me, eggs were my only specialty-- hardboiled, scrambled, sunny side up-- you name it, I can cook them anyway you like. We ended up alternating eggs with sausages, salami and ham between trips to several fast food restaurants. After weeks of eating killer foods I suddenly declared to myself and to A " I'm having enough of this!"

My first attempt of cooking an adobo was a complete disaster. The meat turned black, apparently from too much soy sauce. A ate it but I think he was gagging behind my back. Then came my very pale-looking pork and beans. I was traumatized at how much damage the soy sauce brought on my adobo that's why I deprived my pork and beans with even a single drop of it. It turned out edible but if I'd cook it again I'm sure I would be reminded of those days when I was chanting this question in my head ---why oh why did I leave my life in Cebu?

It took me a year to gain confidence in holding any cooking utensil. I still have my awkward moments now in the kitchen but I don't get paralyzed by the mere sight of a stove anymore. I comforted myself in this mantra before that not all women were born to chop onions and grate cheese and I was one of them. Then I realized I wont lose anything by learning how to chop, grate, slice, drain, and everything else that concerns cooking. Now my greatest challenge is to include "bake" among the growing list of things to do and accomplish.

Wish me luck. I will need a lot of it.

Grand Homecoming Reunion

Attention: CCES Batch '87 Graduates. You know who you are. :)

The committee, chaired by Floriza Estrada- Cuadrillero, is still finalizing the activities though I think the dates are definite. It will be on July 17-18, 2007.

Some activities planned are:

1. Tree Planting-- still to be approved by and coordinated with DENR.

2. Gawad Kalinga Housing Project-- if funds wont be raised to cover the expenses of one house for one family, our batch will shoulder just the labor.

3. Ukay-Ukay galore/ Feeding -- please bring home clothes that you or your kids wont use anymore. Some people will be happy to have them. Other suggestion is to have a bazaar two days before the fiesta. Clothes will be sold at a reasonable if not really cheap price. The proceeds will be used for the feeding of children (place still to be discussed and coordinated with DSWD.)

For comments, suggestions, confirmation of attendance and even violent reactions, please call/ text Sharon Roy- Arreza at 0910-6039174. I shall be posting updates about the reunion here.

Cheers!

Flying high

Today is such a great day to remember. My friend Eva passed her final interview at an international company. She will soon be its QA Auditor. A Filipina QA Auditor in an international company here in Prague. That's grand! I'm so proud of you, Darleng.

While we were out enjoying the feeling of Eva's success, someone left nasty messages on my blog today. I actually have a bitchy post ready in my draft but really, what's the point? It's a waste of energy to deal with people whose insecurities and nastiness they can't contain. I just want to tell her this: I know who you are. It was a waste of effort signing in different names when your IP address pretty much gave out who you are. If you wanted to mess with me but didn't want to in person, you should have covered your tracks well. But you didn't. Now let's see if you'll have the nerve to look at me straight in the eyes when I see you again.

CNN's story ends and a blast of a party

CNN (Cat with No Name) left us the way he came to us--- through our skylight. After five days of being confined in a small flat, he probably had enough and last night he made it pretty sure we'd get the message that he wanted to go up and out. A helped him reach the skylight.

Either he just wanted to roam around or he decided vacation is over for him and that he'd like to go home, we left the skylight open just in case he'd decide to come back to us at dawn. He didn't. Now we are left hoping that he is back home at last.

On the lighter side and on a completely different topic, I had a great time partying at Novy's bar in Mala Strana. The party was my friends'-- Eva, Lillian, and Jeanette-- joined birthday celebration. I've never been out dancing for ages (been there, done that, I thought) and to do the usual moves on the dance floor last Friday was grand. Anyway, I think my darleng Eva will post about the party on her blog soon so I wont rain on her parade with my inanities. I will just post one picture of the gorgeous celebrants and their gorgeous guests for my gorgeous friends in the Philippines to see how gorgeous my new friends here are. Talk about redundancy at its best. :)

Eva, in a black scarf and Vogue-like eyeglasses; Jeanette, holding a wineglass and Lillian next to her, the one in white sweater. These are the birthday celebrants with their guests at Novy's bar, another Filipino here in Prague.

Sleepless

I've been sleep deprived since Tuesday. Been groggy and cranky and grumpy and sometimes depressed since. Funny how one little feline can be such a culprit of these mood swings. Yes, it's all because of a cat.

We found one, or rather, he found us Monday morning while I was about to go to work. He was perched on our skylight meowing like it was the end of his world. I always have impulsive tendencies when it comes to cats so thinking only that he must be freezing outside, I opened the skylight and let him in. It was only later when I realized we have sort of adopted him and the dilemma of what to do with him slowly sank in.

What would you do if you've always loved cats and wanted one but you know you can't keep one? Our flat is so small it's not possible for humans and animals to co-exist in peace. I would love to keep him but being cramped out in a small space is not a healthy environment for him. It's also not doing us any good since he is nocturnal so he always crashes on mine and A's slumber party, sometimes biting our toes or jumping on our bodies in the middle of the night.

We posted a notice around the building right away on Monday for whoever it is who might be looking for him to call us. Nobody did yet. So now I'm guilt-ridden for letting him in and thus depriving A of his much needed sleep, at the same time knowing that I would be hounded by guilt as well if I left the poor cat alone for fate to decide what to do with him.

Now it's up to us to decide. I don't know if there was a law about adopting animals in this country but one thing is sure; we can't keep him. This leaves us with two choices at this time: if S's ( our headteacher) Mom would like to adopt him we will give him to her early next week. If she wouldn't, our second and last resort is to hand him to a center which takes care of stray/ unwanted animals. Either way I will be a basket case for weeks missing him and thinking how he will like his new home.

This is CNN (Cat with No Name). I don't know what breed he is but he surely is beautiful. He pees and poops only in his litter bin but at night he goes in his business of being a cat.

I need a personal shopper!

I'll have one maybe only in my dreams because I could not or probably could never afford one in reality. If there was one thing that I really hate doing, it’s shopping. I’m not trying to be cute or to be different from the rest of the female populace. I just hate it with a passion. I'm the kind who wants to get things done right away and to spend so much time looking for something that in the end would nowhere to be found is a sure way to ruin my day.

Last year I had to scour several stores for a pair of winter boots. The quest for the ultimate pair lasted several weeks. When I'm in dire need for something but have no patience to go through the painstaking way of looking for it, things mostly end up in disaster. One example to this is the pair which I ended up buying last year. There was actually nothing wrong with it except that the moment I wore it to school the next day I realized I didn't like it at all.

This year I told myself I had to stretch my patience a bit. Then again it was impossible especially after spending hours and hours trying on several pairs and still nothing struck me as something like "this is it." The thing is I went straight to Andel after work when all I wanted was to zonk out. I probably wouldn't bitch about the time wasted if only I had the luxury of time itself.

To make the saga of shopping short, I finally found one pair I like last week. I just hope I wouldn't change my mind about it soon. God knows how much calories I burned walking to and fro Centrum Chodov only to again realize I don't like it at all.

Left: a disastrous buy last year. I find them too big, too "manly." Right: hopefully I will still like them till end of winter this year. :)

Really, to the shopaholics out there, why do you like shopping? Calling Becky Bloomwood.... answer me, please.

Losing my cool

I can be very patient with kids but I have zero tolerance with adults without manners. The following account happened last Thursday and is in no way embellished. It was also one of my most embarrassing moments. One way to exorcise my own ghost is to talk about it, so here I am. I have to say though that Czechs are generally polite and friendly. After all, I am married to one. This post is not intended for the readers to have a generalized view of how the people here are.

Prelude to Thursday.
We share the school building with a Czech preschool. We also share the huge playground behind it and mostly kids from both schools have the same playtime in the garden. It's a common knowledge that they are fond of toilets as dictated by their overactive bladders so there's one outside that all of them can use. There's also a huge shower smack right in the middle of the garden that kids can use in spring and summer.

Scene 1, Mid Spring 2006.
My co-teacher and I were sitting on the grass enjoying a beautiful sunny day while our kids were frolicking in the shower just a few steps from where we were sitting when suddenly one teacher from the Czech school passed right by us and unceremoniously herded our half-naked pack out of the tiles. She then told her kids to hop into the shower while ours stood bewildered on the side. J, my co-teacher, and I felt utterly stunned by the blatant rudeness but a few seconds later J snapped back to earth and tried to confront her in his broken Czech. He was completely, absolutely, rudely ignored.

Scene 2, Late Spring-Early Summer 2006.
One day we found the outside toilet locked and we still didn’t have a key. Our headteacher had to seek the same angst-ridden teacher to ask why it was locked. Her reason: because our kids only made a mess inside, e.g. didn’t flush it, made the floor wet, etc. Our point: it wont take up all her time to tell us to remind our kids their toilet manners, right?

Anyway, the outside toilet again made headlines when they didn’t want us to use it for a week during our school’s summer camp. Their reason: Nobody would clean it because they wont be there. Did I say we’re talking about 40-something women here?

The day I threw away my Ms. Congeniality crown.
Thursday was a freezing day. Winter has arrived very early. We were outside around 11am for less than ten minutes when one kid asked me to go to the toilet with him. I was standing by the door laughing with him because the toilet cover kept falling down when from the corner of my eye I saw the same teacher marching towards me, screaming with all her might at me. Yes, screaming at me as if I had done a terrible crime. She was livid, screaming smack into my face in Czech about the toilet not having water.

Honey, first of all I didn’t know about that. Second, nobody has the right to scream at me. With these in mind I screamed back at her. "Stop screaming at me!. Don’t you dare scream at me! If you have a problem, talk to our headteacher!" She went on in her rat-ta-tat Czech anyway so I marched away from her to S, our headteacher, who was talking to my other co- teachers several meters away. By this time I was furious at having been screamed at for no apparent reason at all. I yelled at S, "This woman is screaming at me! I don’t know what her problem is! Get her!" I marched back to the toilet to get the kid but he was already running back to play with his friends. Still raging from the woman’s rudeness, I ran back to where she was screaming also at S. S walked out of the whole scene since it was useless trying to put sense into the demented woman's head. The woman went stamping towards the other direction but this time, I had no intention of letting her get away from it all.

Picture this: she’s around 5'9" and I’m a midget next to her in my 5'2" height. She was already a few steps away when I yelled at her and was half-running to catch up with her. " Hey, I am not done with you yet!" When I finally caught up with her I went wagging my gloved forefinger up to her nose and screamed at her for all I care. " You are very rude! And you call yourself a teacher? Next time you should teach yourself some manners first!!!" Having said my piece, I stamped back to where my stupefied co-teachers were standing. I was always the Ms. Congeniality among us and to see me absolutely lose my cool was a shock to them.

When the raging inside of me died down, I regretted screaming back at her infront of a kid. The only consolation I had was the rest of the kids were too busy playing and running around to notice what was going on. It was also embarrassing in the sense that people I work with learned in such a way that I wasn't as laid-back as they thought I was. But I don’t regret fighting back. Sometimes you just have to or people will step on you.

I don’t know if this teacher understood a word of what I said. One thing for sure, I know she got the message. Nobody is going to let her get away with anything next time. Not me. Not anymore.