At 9:30 am, our first few moments in the Czech Republic were quite the blur since our bodies thought it was 2:30AM Iowa time.  Leah met us at the airport with a super large blue bag filled with water, snacks & 3 car seats (yes, in Czech all three kids had to have a car seat).  It was amazing to see my sister!  It had been two years too long!  Josh drove us the one and a half hours to Strakonice (while I dozed off for a few minutes*) so we could pick up Leah's camp luggage and have lunch at her favorite restaurant.

After a brief stop in Leah's apartment (and after I accidentally took a short little nap for a few minutes*) we headed to lunch where the kids snarfed down pizza.  It was there we learned all about the fact that you can't have any alcohol in your system while driving in Czech, not even 0.0000001.  If you get pulled over and have even 0.01, they take you to the hospital where you have to take an official test.  Crazy, but at the same time seems safer.

We went back to Leah's apartment where I fell asleep again for a few minutes*...

...then we drove the 20 minutes to the Strakonice English Camp at Chata Benesova Hora.  It was Saturday, July 3, and camp registration started at 3pm with dinner served at 6pm and the first camp meeting at 7pm.  As soon as we got there at 5 we started being introduced to all of Leah's friends.  This was really cool to be meeting people in 3D we had only heard about for so long.  It was also great to see again the Czech friends we had met 2 years ago.  In Czech a lot of people have the same name but they can also can then have a fun nickname to help distinguish them from the next person; one Martin would be called M. J. and the next Martin would be called Mister.  I was incredibly thankful for name tags!  :)! 

*Now you may be wondering about my super power of not needing sleep and the fact that I feel asleep 3 times since landing but even this ended up being a huge blessing for me!

The Strakonice English Camp had 10 classes of 10 people.  The way it worked out, Leah divided Josh and I into different classes; Josh was in a class lead by Ragu and I was going to lead my own class.  What that meant for our first night was it was ok for Josh to go to bed with the kids but I had to stay up late and have my first introduction meeting with my class kids.  By that point, except for the 3 snip-its of sleep, I had been awake for over 30 hours and had to stay up another 3.  See?!  Blessing my super powers seemed to have failed but in reality they were giving me that extra push to maintain through to the end.  Phew!

Speaking of bed...

For the 8 days of camp our family of 5 called a 10' x 12' room home.  Josh and I had two twin beds pushed together, the boys had bunk beds, and Miriam had a chair that folded out into a bed.  The beds were basically 4" thick cushions on plywood, each coming with a large pillow and small sized douvet covered quilt.  Thankfully, our room had its own bathroom, that although the toilet was broken for the first night, it was a huge blessing that it all worked for the rest of the week.

Even with states of being trashed to being clean, living in this small room with our whole family worked out surprisingly well AFTER we got rules laid out and got things organized.  The rules came AFTER the first day when our three kids invited an additional 4 little kids into our room and all of them were all jumping on our beds with sandy shoes, raiding our snack & candy stash, and being careless with Josh's electronics.  Sigh... live & learn... :)!

Our room, emptied, and right before we said goodbye to Chata Benesova Hora...

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