Why I Dislike the Number Four

I thought I would try to post a few more pictures this time around....

This is the market we bought fruit at a couple of days ago (called a “potraviny”) Looks delicious, huh?

This is all of the interns (minus me) at the metro station we frequent the most, Hradcanska. In the middle is our friend and language teacher, Lenka.
She is a fun young Czech woman who makes us laugh constantly through our language lessons (mostly at ourselves). We have discovered the absolute worst thing to try to say in Czech (well, thus far). Are you ready? It's the number four. Four is “ctyri” (with little marks and squiggles over it I can't type). This may look easy to say, but in Czech, none of those letters make the same sounds they would in English. The closest phonetically I can come to sounding it out is to say something that sounds like “sh-tear-gee.” (the letter "r" is horrible. you have to roll the r and then make a sound kind of like a "j") After discovering how incapable we were of saying “four,” Lenka decided to make us say “one hundred forty-four” which was far worse and more hilarious. We walked down the streets that afternoon all pronouncing the number, and realized how funny we must sound to the Czech people. I can't imagine someone walking down the streets in America saying the number “forty-four” in a horrible broken accent over and over again!

This is my new best friend Sasha. I got to babysit him yesterday and we had fun playing a game I invented called “Kick the Bottlecap On the Sidewalk" (my ingenuity is amazing). He also told me lots of stories about Frog and Toad (one of my favorite childhood books). We had several elderly men stop to talk to him, and I just smiled and nodded because I had no idea what they were saying past the normal greeting of “dobry den!”

I should note that people here never stop and smile at you. People sometimes give me very strange looks when I smile as I pass them on the street. You rarely see people laughing or joking or being loud on the street. However, this is an extremely dog-friendly culture, and I've heard that if you walk a dog around, you will make tons of friends. People just stop and talk to dogs like people would stop and talk to a child or a baby in America. There are so many people with dogs here- most dogs don't wear leashes, and you're totally allowed to take them on the tram or the metro.

I asked Lenka yesterday what Czechs think about Americans. She laughed and said “True?” I answered, “Yes, true! You can be honest.” She said hesitantly, “Well...we think they are a little stupid. And very loud.”

Truer words were never spoken!