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Prague by manu_cz
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People working in this dorm can´t speak English. The first days you have 1000 questions to do and all you get at Reception are shrugs. "Can you give me more sheets? Why don´t I have a reading lamp while many people do? Is it true I have to pay for the washing machine, the vaccum cleaner and the ironing board?" Just indifference and suspicious looks. So the first week you feel as a burglar tiptoeing at night, till one day you stop worrying, shut your mouth and use the washing machine only when your pants stock is out.
As regards problems with language, going to the supermarket may be pretty funny. Everybody fails when shopping, no matter how prepared you are or think you are: czech dictionaries, lists of czech food, consumer´s sixth sense… Nothing works. Everybody has his/her particular record of mistakes. For instance, once I was looking for parsley. Provided the vegs department was full of similar herbs, I had to smell every one. Finally I gave up when I noticed everybody was looking at me, so I took one at random. It tasted like petrochemical-plant product and ruined my dinner.
While such cultural shock it´s funny in shopping, at offices it´s most depressing. When going to ask for something, they usually send us to another office. Then we cross our fingers and wish it was the promised English-speaking desk. "Hello, I´m an Erasmus student," is a sentence that has completely lost its sense and spins in my mouth like a tasteless chewing gum. In addition, the timetables are always in Czech, even if it´s the English or the French department. We asked the secretary to translate them to us, but couldn´t cause they were in abbreviations. "Not even the Czech people can understand this?" Ana, my classmate, and I stood there astonished, staring the letters like if they were Egyptian hieroglyphics: birds, big eyes, or men in underwear frozen in awkward posture.
Generally these days you feel puzzled, foolish and like teleported to Uranus. The third say Ana and I got lost and couldn´t find our dorm. It was sunset, nobody in these silent, gloomy streets, only big dogs barking at us. When we finally found our way back, the receptionist´s wooden face seemed to us the prettiest image in Prague. "Home again."
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