It's that time again...

So, this coming Wednesday our summer interns arrive. Very exciting! But this also means that in just a few days we start the JV Intern Race. For those of you who don't know, it's basically our own version of that show, the Amazing Race, where we have each JV intern team travel across Czech doing different challenges and what not until they reach the final destination, Malenovice, where intern training is. That was probably a run on sentence.

Anyhow, I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with the Intern Race. You see, 2 years ago, when I was an intern, I had to go through this, and lets just say I was the only one of all 50 or so people that cried during the race. Yep, I was that girl. The tears culminated after one unreadable astronomical clock, a twisted foot, us getting extremely lost, more walking than should be humane (on my twisted foot), a meal of grotesque cheese and onions, and me slipping down a muddy bank. Falling down in the mud is what pushed me over the edge... I was just done after that. And what is amazing is that I have my little breakdown caught in photos, thanks to the paparazzi, also known as Gavin Desnoyers.

Pre-Fall: Laughing it up with Amy


The Fall: Just before I had literally said, "I'm probably going to fall down this, and when that happens, I'm probably going to cry..."


Post-Fall: We had to raft down this river. If you look, you can totally see that I'm crying. Classic.



Earlier I wrote that I had a love/hate relationship because although I desperately hated being lost, and my feet felt like they should be amputated, I arguably laughed more during these 3 days than any other time in my life. So, I'm really hoping that this year I have all the laughs, minus the throbbing pain in my feet and the lame tears.

Oh, and just so you know, 2 years ago my team came in dead last by hours. Impressed? You should be.

Timing...

As I continue to live over here in SK, I'm becoming more and more aware of the fact that God really does have perfect timing.

Many of you know that these past 15 months have fallen very far from what my expectations of this life would be. For example, the day I moved to SK my closest friend here, Amy, told me that she would be moving back to the States in just 6 weeks. Shocker to say the least. And since then the hits have just kept coming. The most recent being the departure of Paige. Paige was not only a dear friend for me, but she was my support system, my family here in Slovakia.

Anyhow, I'm not trying to get into a sob story here. I actually want to communicate how amazing God has been throughout it all. I have been broken over here, broken and left to get completely real with God. And it has been phenomenal. I wouldn't change any of it. I've learned that no matter what happens, God will always fill what my true needs are, and that is something I pray that I never forget.

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A couple weeks ago we had the Josiah Venture Spring Conference. It was a week after Paige had left, and it proved to be exactly what I needed. At the conference I was able to connect with the other single females serving throughout Eastern Europe, which was such a great reminder that I am in no way alone on this journey. I have an amazing community that God has given me, and even if it isn't in my city or country, it is there. And it is very good.

My JV Family


Some of my girls: (L to R)
Leah (Czech), Brittney (Ukraine), Jaycee (Latvia), Katka (Czech), Me, DU (Romania)

It's a must...

Well, it's safe to say that somebody - me - has been a little slack on their blog. Actually, I'll be surprised to know if anyone is still reading this thing. BUT, for those of you who are, you'll be glad to know that I am determined to revive this thing! I must bring new life to LT in SK!!! So, here we go...

A little late, I realize...

So, I went to Paris for Christmas with, of course, my dear friend Katka, and life got too crazy for me to ever post anything about it. So in a few bullets I'll sum up our trip:

- It was great fun, but we both agreed going to Paris in warm weather would have been better. There are so many things to enjoy outside, and when you are freezing your butt off you don't get to enjoy them as much.

- The area of Montmartre was by far our favorite.

- The subway system there is amazing and makes getting around Paris extremely easy.

- Lemon tarts (or torts, whatever) are super tasty.

- Paris is freaking expensive.

- Beware of sketchy Frenchmen... they want kisses. Seriously. We got accosted twice. Gross.

Alright, now I'll leave you with a few pics from our time there. Actually, I'm just leaving you with a little montage we made when we were at the Louvre with the Mona Lisa. We took too many pics for me to weed through them all, so I figured I'd just leave you with ones that make me laugh. Because, as a guy I went to high school with said, "Laughter is the best medicine. Unless you are a diabetic, then it's insulin."

The lovely Katka:


I'm pretty sure if Davinci was living today that I'd be his muse...


What? This smile isn't mysterious enough? Fine.

Today I received a text message from my old Slovak tutor in Zilina. It read:

Hi, I just wanted to tell you that there was a research of almost 8000 languages in Berlin. The easiest was Spanish and the most difficult Slovak.

You can imagine my joy/despair from reading this! I felt joy because of the validation it gave me: "I'm not crazy, this language is freaking hard!!!" But I also felt despair: "Great. I'm trying to learn the hardest language ever. Yeah. That's going to happen."

Anyways, upon further research I found this:

On September 27th a linguistic consortium in Paris has come up with following results:

the easiest languages to learn:

10. mongolese

09. aramaic

08. greek

07. norwegian

06. italian

05. romanian

04. croatian

03. bulgarian

02. english

01. the easiest language in the world spoken by more than 300 million people is spanish

the most difficult languages: (linguists examined complexity of grammar, syntax, historical development, pronunciation, orthography, letter styles, signs, etc.)

10. german

09. french

08. chinese

07. japanese

06. korean

05. persian

04. arabic

03. finnish

02. hungarian

01. the most difficult language is Slovak

The most difficult is grammar structure. Slovak language is the only one with seven grammar cases (nominativ, genitiv, dativ, accusativ, local, instrumental, vocativ), exquisite words, soft and hard "i", declension of adjectives and verbs, in other words almost each and every word in this language is being declinated. There are many other characteristics which are not found in other world languages. It is said, or estimated, that it takes about 12 years to learn it completely, but the linguists say, that there is no one on this earth who can speak this language perfectly knowing all the grammar rules.

So, this new nugget of information comes to me at the perfect time. Today I start studying Slovak again. I've been on a break for the past few weeks due to moving, but tonight it all begins again.

Bring.
It.
On.

My first JV Thanksgiving

Why, you ask, do I have a photo of the Pirate's of the Caribbean in my Thanksgiving post? Well, I'll tell you. Our annual JV Thanksgiving conference is our most relaxed conference all year. It's mostly about fellowship and food and "family," with a few sessions of Biblical teaching mixed in. One of the activities we all take part in during this conference is the "Family Frenzy" time. This is an allotted time when there are lots of different games, sports and activities for us to sign up for and enjoy. Well, Katka (Yes, the same one who helped me move, and who is in the senior photo shoot. I know, we spend a lot of time together.) and I decided we wanted to find something low key so we could just chill during that time, and, sure enough, there was a puzzle to work on. Perfect. Or so we thought.

Above is the puzzle we took on with our bare hands that fateful day of the 23rd of November 2007. I'll tell you what. All that green mess = impossible. I became slightly obsessed once we began the project and found that it stole many minutes of my life away from me this past week. And I say stole because, you guessed it, it was never finished. NEVER FINISHED!!! You might as well tell me my dog died, because an unfinished puzzle sucks just as bad. Okay, maybe not just as bad, but it's not fun.

Besides the unfinished puzzle, the retreat was great. And so was the FOOD! Before we started eating on Thanksgiving day I started to get a little sad, not just because I was missing family, but also because I was missing good Southern cooking. You see, in JV, Southerners are a minority. In fact, besides my friend Brittany who is heading to Ukraine, I think Slovakia is the only JV country that has any Southerners! Such a shame! So as I sat there preparing myself for the feast, I started to miss 2 things that I know I would have gotten at home: sweet tea and cornbread dressing. Well, the sweet tea was unavailable, but my amazing teammate, Kim (from Arkansas), filled my need for cornbread dressing. She had made one and it just wasn't out on the table yet. And it was glorious. I don't know if many of you know the joys of a good cornbread dressing, but I know my brother does, and I hope he is delighted when reading this.

The Move

Clearly lots of things have happened since I last wrote on here, but I will simplify it greatly for two reasons:

1) I don’t want to bore you with tons of details.
2) I don’t want to bore myself with having to write those details.

So, here we go. Most of my October was spent trying to find a place to live in Bratislava, and, after finding one, the beginning of November was spent trying to find a way to move my junk there. And this past Saturday it finally happened! I moved my butt to Bratislava!

Here’s a little recap of how the day went:

6:00 am – Woke up to a bunch of snow in Zilina. Great. Snow + Moving = Gross
9:00 am – A few friends came over to help move stuff out.
10:30 am – We are already done, and (by the grace of God!) all my junk fit in the Kompas van and Mike’s car. Woot woot!
11:30 am – On the road to BA.
1:30 pm – Arrive in BA and begin moving my stuff up 4 floors, with no elevator. And what really sucks is that the building has an elevator, but you have to have a special key for it to work. Well, we don’t have a key, and it seems all of my neighbors decided to leave town the day I arrive with 2 car loads of heavy stuff. Thanks for the warm welcome guys.
3:00 pm – Finished moving in!!
3:30 pm – Katka comes up with the amazing idea to hit up Ikea since we have the van until the next morning, and there are lots of things my roommate and I need get soon.
4:30 pm – Arrive at Ikea. I could spend days there.
7:00 pm – Arrive back at my place with 6 heavy boxes and no guys to help us carry it up. However, after circling the block for 20 minutes, we have to stop in the middle of the road (with 3 cars waiting behind us) and “quickly” remove all boxes from the van and onto the side walk.
7:30 pm – Katka and I stare at what we have to carry up 4 flights and wonder what the heck we were thinking.
7:35 pm – All of my neighbors are still mysteriously missing/ignoring our knocking on their doors, so, yet again, no elevator for us. Curses!
8:00 pm – After 3 boxes I literally think I’m going to pass out. This is when a single girl wishes she had a husband to take care of the heavy lifting. We decide to open up the rest of the 3 boxes and carry the pieces up individually.
8:30 pm – With one box left I try to persuade Katka to just leave it down there and we will get it in the morning. Thankfully she smacks some sense into me. It wouldn’t be fun to only have half the pieces to my new bureau.
8:45 pm – We are finally done. We quickly get into our pj’s and reward ourselves for this impressively productive day with last week’s Grey’s Anatomy.

8:00 am – We both wake up feeling every muscle in our body ache.



Here are some pics from the day:

What I woke up to:


Friends that came to help. I was pretty excited everything fit in two cars.


All my stuff.




The four flights of stairs.


My new building. I promise I wasn't lying about being on the fourth floor, you just can't see it here.


The park across the street from my place.


A view from inside the park.


Ok, well I hope this was a sufficient update on my move. On another note, I haven't had internet at home for 5 weeks now, which is extremely inconvenient. I'm kind of going crazy. That's another reason for my lack of posts lately. Yep, I'm still giving you excuses, but this one is pretty valid. I'm hoping it'll get set up here on Friday. We'll see.