update letter.

Hello friends and family!
I have now been in Czech for about 5 days, and they have been crazy.
Last Tuesday evening, Dad dropped me off in Philadelphia, and from there I proceeded on a 7 hour flight to Frankfurt in Germany. Thankfully I was smart enough to take a sleeping pill, and I was given the blessing of having NO ONE sit next to me, so I was able to "spread out" and sleep. I did wake up every time the cart rolled by, and finally at about 7am Germany time (1am PA time) I decided I should wake up and eat breakfast on the plane, because I knew that once I landed in Germany I would have no money to buy food, and my layover was around 4 hours. So we got into Germany, and for about 8 hours I hadn't said more than "Sprite, please" to anyone and was feeling slightly lonely. I wandered around looking for my gate, but they didn't post the gate until about an hour before the flight took off, so I wandered around the overcrowded airport half asleep, until eventually an American girl who had been on my flight to Frankfurt started talking to me, and we realized that we were both interning in Czech! So I finally was able to talk to someone, and on the flight to Czech I met another intern.
We landed in Prague and I was met by my team leaders, Jerry and Melissa, and a bunch of other Eastern European missionaries and interns. I also met Keith and Amanda who are also on my team. We sat around waiting for other flights to come in, and once all 65 interns had arrived, we began the Amazing Race. We were given a choice of 4 places to go, a map of Czech, and 6000 crowns (about 15 crowns to a dollar). Our leaders weren't allowed to help us, so we had to find our way to the bust which took us to a tram which took us to a train station. Once we were at the train station, I purchased tickets, and lo and behold as we sprinted up to the platform, the train began rolling away. We were all kind of frustrated, but decided to sit outside on the grass and eat "lunch" (at about 4pm Czech time). We hopped on the next train where there were four other groups and made our way to a small town that I completely forget the name of. There was a Skoda museum (Skodas are a kind of car, but the ironic thing is that the term "skoda" in Czech means "what a pity"), so our team took a picture in front of it and texted it to a Czech missionary, who then gave us a choice of four more places to go. However, there were no more buses going to the train station for an hour, so we decided to try to find our own way back to the station. It wasn't working too well, but suddenly an American man pulled up in a Ford SUV and asked if he could help! He told us that he had heard us speaking English and knew he had to help. He had a GPS and so we squeezed in the back and he drove us back. We found out the he married a Czech woman, and they owned a ranch where they raised horses. They had also started an organization to teach sign language to babies, so of course I thought about Julia and Grace! (my sister and niece) It was so cool to see God constantly blessing us with people to help, even people who couldn't speak English. So we got back to the train station and found that the next train to the city of choice didn't leave for about 3 hours. So we decided to head back to Prague where accommodations had been made for us (at the Hotel Krystal, which is a hotel I've been to many times!). But we were hungry by the time we got there since we hadn't eaten for about 6 hours, and so we ran to a KFC and ate some Czechified American fast food.
The next morning we were up by 7, and left for a castle in a small touristy town called Karlstejn (Karl-shtein). Of course, as everything in Czech is, we had to hike up to the top and were extremely sweaty and smelly with our heavy backpacks. BUT the castle was beautiful, and we wandered around for awhile, eating snacks and just taking our time - we had decided the night before that we didn't really feel like competing, so we were just gonna take our time. We then had to head back to Prague for the next place, and so got lost walking around, and I asked several more people for help. It's nice that generally the younger people understand Czech. There was actually another American man who helped us find our way. So we got to the top (it was too steep to walk up even for Czechs, so we took a tram) and the guys paid to go into a mirror labyrinth and take a picture. At that point in time we realized that Jerry's phone had a really bad battery and was just about dead. So we headed back to the train station and headed to Cesky Krumlove to see another castle. We got there at around 8:30, took a picture, and hung out at the bus stop until I talked to enough Czech people who didn't speak English but helped enough for us to realize that there were no more buses leaving that night. Jerry's phone was still dead, and we hadn't had anything to eat for about 9 hours, so we headed into the touristy town to find a hostel. The first hostel was FILLED, and an Australian resident tried to help us look up bus schedules. We realized that there was a bus heading for a bigger town, so we decided to get on the bus! So we headed back to the bus stop, and then had second thoughts and decided to try to find a place to stay that night. So we walked back into the town and no penzions (bed and breakfasts) were open. We found another hostel, but there wasn't enough room (there were two big American groups there, not related to our team - I had talked to some other Americans on an earlier train, and they had helped us find our way!). So we decided to try out a hotel, but it was half of our budget for two people to stay there. Hmm. That was a no. We were getting kind of frustrated, and were walking around until we found another penzion, and they had room for five! It was obvious that the two men who were renting out the roomwere discussing how much to boot up the price for us Americans, but we got it for 2100 crowns which wasn't too bad. And finally Jerry was able to plug in his phone. And the room was cute with a beautiful view over the river flowing past the castle! We decided to run out and grab some food while Jerry took a shower, and the place that was open nearby only had potatoes and chicken nuggets, so we sat there and wolfed down the potatoes and chicken nuggets, discussing how awful it would have been to sleep on the cobblestone and how nice it was to have soap again finally. We headed back to the penzion where Jerry had locked himself out of the bedrooms, so after laughing at him, we decided that since we had already lost the race, we would not take the 6am bus to the next city, but would just sleep in and take our time getting to our final destination: Malenovice.
So the next morning we took our time getting up, and we were ready at around 10. The girls ran out to a bakery and grabbed breakfast, and when we got back to the cute penzion, Jerry was on the phone with our leader (Nate), and he told us that we had to go! I really don't know what we were thinking - the deadline to Malenovice was 6pm, and it would take AT LEAST 8 hours to get there. So there was a bus leaving for Prague in 20 minutes, so we ran to the bus stop...but the train was full for Prague, so we could only get one to a nearby town. So we got there, and grabbed continuing trains until we got here. Praise the Lord we caught every train, but we cut it close. Everyone on my team but Melissa has allergies, and it was almost amusing to see our puffy eyes and hear all of us sneezing...we were miserable. At one point we had talked about different personalities, and as soon as we were done, our whole team fell asleep within 2 minutes. 9 hours after we started, we arrived (and hadn't eaten for 11 hours). We listened to the seminar after lots of applause for being the last team and 3 hours late, and then we gulped down lots of food.
So we've been here since Friday night, I'm still slightly jet-lagged, so pray that I can sleep well. We've been having training - teaching English, apologetics, team conflict, etc.
On Friday we're heading to Pardubice where we'll stay for a week visiting with the youth group and going into local schools to teach and promote English Camps. The next weekend we're heading to Bohumin for time with the youth group, and the to another place (I forget the name) to meet the youth group and go into the schools.
I am excited, but I'm taking in my relaxing time right now. It's gonna be a busy two months.
Pray for the youth groups that we're working with - not only are we here for the English camps, but we're here to build up the Czech believers.
I hope that all of you are doing well! I'm thinking of everyone a lot, especially my family as Dave Patty (the president of this organization) was talking about his children this morning :-)
Hopefully I'll be able to keep well in touch!
Love, Andrea