Ano?

Before I begin this post just one work comment, my stupid computer makes me very inefficient. It is the slowest thing known to man. If I could, I would bring in my 4 year old Mac from home because I guarantee it would do things faster than my 2 year old PC. I think I'm just going to start emailing the IT people once a week asking for a computer upgrade. It should be time, right? I can promise at least a few people here in the Czech think I am crazy because all I do all day is tell my computer how much I hate it. I glare at, I even try talking nice to it. Does any of that change the fact I wait 15 minutes for a 1 page word file to open? No! And don't think it's because my server is half way around the world. I deal with this at home too. I came to the Czech prepared, with all the files I knew I would be using on my own hard drive to prevent the transcontinental document opening. I can only imagine the hours I could spend waiting for that. Wow. I'm done now.

On to some Czech adventures? Honestly, nothing really exciting has happened. Monday morning my Taxi to take me to the plant arrived on time and got me there on time. I met the engineer I'm supposed to be helping and gave him the slew of parts I brought. (I'm really hoping to leave some here so my luggage won't be so heavy. Dragging it up the thousand year old flight of stairs my first night in the hotel was not fun.) We started working on the machine and made some improvements, decided to let the machine run the rest of the day so I went and worked in the office until the Taxi came back to take me to the hotel.

After changing out of my uniform, I went walking around town to find a place to eat. It feels so late when I get back to the hotel even though it's only 6 at night. It's dark and none of the shops are open in the town by then (luckily the restaurants are). Hopefully I'll get back before 6 one night so I can do a little bit of shopping.

Monday night I dined at a sports bar in the main town square. I had some really good pizza. In fact, all the food I have had here has been good. I was really worried when I read online that they have a hearty diet. In my mind that means meat, meat and more meat. So far it hasn't been that bad. At the sports bar I got to watch some weird hand ball sport. It kind of reminded me of water polo but on a court instead of in a pool. Anyone know what I'm talking about? After that they changed to snowboarding so at least I could tell what was going on. I did get a lot of stares in the restaurant. I'm figuring since it's not a big town, they don't see people eating at restaurants alone often or maybe I had something on my face. Who knows.

Yesterday was pretty uneventful. We made some changes on the machine that really seemed to fix the issues I came out to correct so I'm glad this visit was successful for at least one thing. There were some other people from my company visiting the plant yesterday too so I got to share my hotel with them back to town. They're all the annoying staff type people so I tried not to say much to them. They tried to convince me to go to dinner with them but I successfully declined. I doubt I will be so lucky tonight. The one good things is they go home on Thursday so I won't have to deal with them much longer. It was nice to speak English with people and not worry if I was using a word they understood.

Last night I took another nice long walk around town and after thinking about going to a Chinese restaurant in the town square, I decided it would be a good night to try the hotel restaurant in the basement. I'm glad I did. It was really good. I ended up having a ginocci with broccoli and cheese. I'm pretty sure that's not Czech food, but judging from the cafeteria at the plant all Czech food is a different combination of the following, meat (chicken, pork or beef), carb (rice, pasta or these really good potato dumpling things) and brown sauce. I'm not kidding about the sauce either, that's what the plant people call it "brown sauce." Maybe it has a real name in Czech. It tastes pretty good but there's not a lot of variety there. Hopefully someone can tell me the real name of the potato things because those are seriously so good. I would like to know how to make them.

Now that I've fixed the problem I came to fix, I'm getting really excited to go explore Prague on Friday. It will be nice to take pictures in the daylight.