Prague and sick bags
Last week wasn’t a typical week in the life of this webmaster because I went to Prague for 4 days with my family. If you have never been there, go – It’s one of the world’s most beautiful cities imho.
Taking a short break (with or without la famille) always presents challenges for me. The ones that came up this time round were:
- Having to make a lesson for both my BreakingNewsEnglish and NewsEnglishLessons sites the evening before we flew AND deal with Etihad Airways’ online check-in site that didn’t work and their “Guest Affairs” hotline which was stone cold for 2 hours. Having to do this and wake up at 5.00am the next morning for a flight wasn’t the best preparation for a holiday, BUT…. it meant I didn’t have to make any lessons for two whole days.
- Wondering what kind of Internet connection there’d be in my room. I’ve never had any problems here, although I did begrudge having to pay for wifi in my room in Cyprus this summer and in a London Heathrow hotel last summer. They charge around $10 a day, which is an extortionate and wholly unjustifiable $3,650 a year – a major rip-off. I guess I’m spoilt as wifi is generally a given in UAE hotels. Anyway, my wifi in Prague was fantastic. We stayed at the wonderful Arcadia Residence in the Old Town Square – highly recommended. The apartment owner had written down the wifi password and left it on the dining room table for us.
- How to survive without Twitter for large parts of the holiday. I don’t have an Internet-enabled mobile phone (keep that one quiet) and so have to rely on waiting my turn for the kids to finish playing on the computer after a day’s sightseeing.
- Fitting in making and uploading two lessons while in Prague. I always hate this part of a “holiday”. Luckily this time round, my body clock was on Abu Dhabi time every morning in Prague, which meant I woke up at around 4.00am. This gave me enough time to get most of a lesson done before everyone else woke up three hours later. The tough thing about doing this is that it’s dark in the room and I can’t turn the light on (to avoid waking the family) so I have to lean the laptop screen forward to be able to see the keyboard – slows you down a bit. Of course, the fun bit is finding your glasses in a room you’re not used to and cannot see your way around. I managed to do the bulk of two lessons before breakfast on two different days and upload them after coming back from the 8-hour hike around the city.
Prague Castle from Charles Bridge
So Prague was outrageously pretty and sophisticated. The plane for the six-hour return flight had no TV screen so I couldn’t watch any movies – boo!!! Which meant I had lots of time to make some notes on a new project. Thank goodness for sick bags as I didn’t put a notebook in my computer case. Couldn’t use the computer because it only has 30 minutes of battery in it. Managed to fit quite a lot of thinking onto the waxy bag.
And so back home. Spent half a day catching up on mail, tweets, Facebook comments, etc. and then it was time for another Breaking News lesson (they come around quickly every three days). Also tried to move forward with the new website I’m hoping to upload at the end of this month. This site hijacked an earlier site I was working on, which I’m very excited about. That one should be online in early 2012.
Added the notes I made on the plane to the lengthy to-do list on my desk that grows faster than I can tick things off on it.
And then it was time for another weekend.
If anyone out there wants to share a week in their life, I’d be happy to put it here as a guest post.
Love the fact the museum is above McDonald's.
