operation box and other updates

When your like is run on a school calendar, June is usually a busy month. This year is no exception for us. But here's some quick news about us:

1. Last week we mentioned that we're moving everything out of our offices. It turns out that everybody's moving not just out of their offices, but the library's moving out, the computer labs are moving out, and so on. A monumental migration calls for massive moving management machines, including that so simple but so necessary mobile technology: the cardboard box.

So the principal cut a deal: last Tuesday, if you came to school with a big, empty box, you could go home. And yes, this post's title is accurate. It actually was called Operation BOX.

2. Last weekend we finally made a trip to the last country in this neighborhood that we hadn't yet visited---Austria. We joined our fellow teachers for an extended weekend bus tour of the Carinthian Alps in the Southern Austria. Our overall impression of Southern Austria is that these people are hardcore. They don't just climb mountains---they climb them and then they jump off the tops with parachutes. They don't just build roads in the mountains---they build roads through the mountains; the tunnels are miles and miles long, and when you're out of the mountains, where other countries would build over- and underpasses for their freeways, Austria builds another tunnel. It's a beautiful country, and it was a nice chance to spend time with the faculty, even if most of them don't speak very much English.

3. The good-byes continue. It's been a month already since we started, and we still have another week and a half. This weekend we're making our last trip to Sokolov before returning to Prague for packing, last visits, last meals and...ahem...getting up at the proverbial crack of dawn to catch a flight home. Please keep us in your prayers.