I Spy with My Little Eye

When you are first learning the bus system, here is my biggest tip of what not to do. Assume! We all know what that gets you in life. On the day that I took the picture above, my teammates and I made three major assumptions about public transit. One, that we were going to make it to the trolley bus on time. Two, that the coin machine would like our coins when we needed it to. And three, that the bus would go the way we wanted it to when we tried to go just one stop further than we usually took it. Why walk when you can ride right? It should make perfect sense! However, none of these things came to pass in the way that we wished. Instead, we missed the bus we wanted, the coin machine refused our money repeatedly and then proceeded to spit out all of our money back out at us (but why we voted me to do work with the electronic device I’m still trying to figure out and I think my roommates are learning that this is not a good idea either. Considering I have already had my computer break twice, my Ipod go haywire, and several other electronic things not work properly since we got here. They just don’t like me. Lol). Then we got on the bus finally and when saw where we wanted to go, there was no stop! The bus in fact turned and just kept going about 10 blocks in the wrong direction. In the end, we were about a half hour late to meet with the rest of the people we were to meet. I have to say though, I feel pretty blessed. That has been our only instance of being disoriented/lost/not on time and we weren’t really lost we just couldn’t get off the bus! Haha. Success has been the word of our time here in Ostrava so far! We have felt successful with each and every little thing that we have done. We have taken small steps to accomplish little things, and hopefully as the days go by, I will be able to do more than I dreamed I could here.

The picture above was taken just a few minutes after that story from the top of the city hall. You could literally see the entire city from there. Helena, a former Fishnet teacher, had met us and was showing us around the city that day. She was telling us where some of the different things were. To give you a little bit of a reference point, in almost the middle of the picture, there are two white and green church steeples side-by-side.  Although you can’t see it, right to the left of that church is my building. During my last video if I would have moved the camera a little to the right, you would have seen that big church right there. In the forefront of the picture, off to the right is Fishnet’s office and my other teammate’s flat. You can’t quite see either, but it is about a ten minute trolley bus ride from my flat to theirs. 

This is Ostrava. I hope you like it. So far I am really enjoying this city!