Four Thanksgivings and a Christmas Market

A very common question we get here is if we are homesick. This question comes up most frequently during this time of year, especially with Thanksgiving, which obviously is not celebrated in the Czech Republic. And even though Thanksgiving here feels very different than Thanksgiving at home - working a full day on Thanksgiving day being one of the largest differences - we have been blessed with multiple communities who have helped it feel like a time of thankfulness in a place that now feels like home.
This year between October 24 & November 26, we were able to be part of four different Thanksgiving dinners with four different groups here in Prague.

Our first Thanksgiving on October 24 was with our Teach Beyond team (minus 3 people who couldn't be with us). These are all the Americans & Canadians who work with Teach Beyond & live in the Czech Republic.

Next, on November 6-8 we were on a retreat with the ESL teachers who work with Teach Beyond. There are 8 of us Americans who work in Czech & Hungarian schools, and we were able to have some spiritual rest & renewal as well as a delicious Thanksgiving dinner together.

On November 21, our friend Shara hosted and prepared ALL the food for our third Thanksgiving dinner. This meal was especially interesting & wonderful because there were only 4 Americans. The other 8 guests were all Czechs, and for some of them this was their first American Thanksgiving meal ever.

Finally, on Thanksgiving day, we shared a wonderful meal with our Bible study group (and some other friends). Countries represented: Czech Republic, USA, Scotland, Ireland, England, the Netherlands, Singapore, Kuwait, Honduras, and Ghana. It's a constant joy to be a part of such an international community!

Now that it is the first weekend of Advent, this also means that Europe's Christmas markets are in full swing! We were lucky enough to have a friend in from out of town this weekend as an excuse to head down into the touristy areas & soak up the festivities!

Prague's largest Christmas market is in Old Town Square

Our friend (and Teach Beyond teammate) Danielle was able to come to Prague for the Christmas market, so the five of us enjoyed some time in Prague's Old Town Square.

 

We are really looking forward to this Advent season, and our prayers are with all our friends & family as we REJOICE in what this whole season means!

30 Days Where We Live

For the last 30(ish) days, Brittany has been doing an Instagram challenge to take one picture each day showing everyday life where she lives. We thought we'd share that on here to give people a better idea of what our day-to-day lives look like here. So mostly you'll see a lot of school & public transportation :) Enjoy!

Day One: The view from our balcony

Day Two: Our local pošta (post office) - so if you ever get mail from us, it comes from here!

Day Three: 12 Czech weirdos led by 2 American weirdos = English Drama Club. Love it!

Day Four: The lane between our school & the metro. Beautiful on a wet fall day!

Day Five: Behind these willows is our apartment building. So this is literally where we live.

Day Six: Riding the green line metro - it's similar to an underground subway.

Day Seven: Our friendly neighborhood bus stop - about a 2.5 minute walk from our flat. Really all my pictures should be either at school or on/waiting for public transport. That's mostly all we do.

Day Eight: In the grocery store - how we buy our bread all out in the open. If we're lucky, it's fresh and warm. If we're not so lucky, it's been sitting out for a few hours & isn't so fresh and warm. This day we were lucky.

Day Nine: Sunset at the bus stop

Day Ten: Our favorite movie theater!

Day Eleven: Our street sign (and the fence it's on).

Day Twelve: This was on a Sunday afternoon that we spent enjoying some great orchestra music in this beautiful building, The Rudolfinum.

Day Thirteen: Once a week Brittany meets for English lessons with the manager of our local Starbucks. Aside from the obvious perk of making a new friend, she also gets paid in lattes.

Day Fourteen: Out near a favorite restaurant after meeting a friend for coffee & talks of travel.

Day Fifteen: Brittany's office at school that she shares with two Czech women who also teach English. Here we have offices instead of our own classrooms, and we change classrooms each period, so it's more like university than US high school.

Day Sixteen: Here we have Jadon at the main door of our apartment building. The window above the door is our bedroom.

Day Seventeen: The teachers' workroom at school. The big gray board in the corner is where schedule changes are listed. Our class schedule changes frequently. The week this was taken there was only one "normal" day. Every other day had at least one class time changed, a new class added, or a class totally cancelled. This took some getting used to, but now it seems totally normal.

Day Eighteen: Part of our walk home from the bus stop.

Day Nineteen: We were outside of Prague one weekend doing a retreat with the other ESL teachers in Central Europe. It was a wonderful time of rest & spiritual renewal!

Day Twenty: Cute little cabins at the retreat center. Beautiful warm, sunny day!

Day Twenty One: Pretty much what every evening looks like. Chicago hockey & kaiser roll garlic bread. Livin' the dream.

Day Twenty Two: The living room. On the left is how we dry our laundry (driers aren't a thing here) & on the right is one corner of our giant full wall book shelf. We are really fancy.

Day Twenty Three: Yellow school, yellow leaves, cloudy day.

Day Twenty Four: One of the best things about European living is the abundance of cafes. Spent some time relaxing at one before drama club last week.

Day Twenty Five: How we get around. To get to school we take a bus (bottom) two stops & then a tram (top) two stops. But the day this was taken we went two other places, so all together we ended up riding 4 buses & 3 trams.

Day Twenty Six: Christmas has come! Since there's obviously no Thanksgiving here, they're not skipping over any holidays, but it's still hard to believe Christmas is so soon! (This picture is of a mall.)

Day Twenty Seven: Always enjoy the services at our church here in Prague, Faith Community Church.

Day Twenty Eight: Three days a week we teach until 5:00pm, and it's always a bummer when you're still at school for the sunset, but at least it's a pretty view!

Day Twenty Nine: The Czech flag is not displayed nearly as often as the US flag, but November 17 was a state holiday. No work, no school, & flags on the trams. (Plus, as you can see, it was a very windy day.)

Day Thirty: We actually live pretty far from the center of Prague (which is why you haven't seen it in any of these pictures), and we usually only go to Old Town when we have visitors, but I thought I'd end with an iconic Prague picture. This is the national museum & St. Wenceslas on his horse in Wenceslas Square.

Now come visit Prague & you can see all this great stuff for yourself!

Christmas Cards

Hello Everyone!

We cannot believe how quickly Christmas is approaching!
Like last year, we would love to receive your Christmas cards this holiday! It was a fantastic way for us to feel more connected to friends & family last holiday season. We get our mail at school, so for us to have your cards before Christmas, they need to be mailed by early December. But if they are late, we will just as gladly open them in January :D

Here is our address if you need it:
Jadon & Brittany Huddleston
Gymnazium
Arabska 14
Praha 6 160 00
Czech Republic

Sorry we've been delinquent with our posts on here. We're hoping to get a few more up in the next couple weeks.

October Update

Well we used to do a good job at updating more frequently, but here's what's been happening this month for the Huddlestons in Prague!

SCHOOL-RELATED:
- English Drama Club has started! We have been enjoying time once a week with these weirdos playing improv games & getting to know the new members. We've also chosen the play we will be performing in April so it's exciting to have that underway.

12 of our crazy EDC students :D

- English Movie Nights! We've met three times so far with students after school to watch some favorite English-language films & have small discussions after. So far we've watched Oceans 11, Psycho, & Hocus Pocus. Our next film will be Monty Python & the Holy Grail!

- Brittany has been meeting once a week with a manager at our local Starbucks to do English lessons. She has really enjoyed making this new friend and being paid in coffee!

CHURCH-RELATED:
- We have been attending a community group Bible study each week at one of our pastor's homes. It has been a wonderful place to meet people & get to know them better. This has been a huge blessing to us this fall especially as we've missed a lot of Sundays at church.

- We were able to attend our church's first church-wide retreat last weekend! About 80 people from Faith Community Church went to a small campground about an hour outside of Prague. We left Friday evening & came back Sunday afternoon. It was a great weekend of fellowship and spiritual rejuvenation as we talked about the power & trustworthiness of scripture.

Most of our Faith Community Church group at the retreat

- Jadon has been attending a men's group every other week. They are reading through and discussing Timothy Keller's book "Every Good Endeavor" and getting to know each other over delicious Czech pub food.

EXTRA STUFF:
- We were able to go back to the USA the weekend of the 10th for our friend Rebecca's wedding. The trip was a bit of a whirlwind as we left Prague on Friday, and then left Virginia on Sunday. But it was such a joy to spend time with our friends Laura & Kayla as well as celebrate with Rebecca & Eric.

Enjoying some time at a pumpkin patch!

With the beautiful couple!

- This weekend we had our Thanksgiving meal with our Teach Beyond team. It was early for the Americans & late for the Canadians, but it was great afternoon of good food & time together.

Our Team Beyond team (minus 3 people who couldn't be there) at our Thanksgiving meal

- Yesterday we got to go to the Rudolfinum concert hall to see a fantastic orchestra concert featuring the movie music composed by James Horner. We've been to quite a few concerts in the past year, and this was our favorite so far!

Outside the Rudolfinum after the concert

 Prayer Requests:
- Health. Brittany has been sick this past week, and many people from our church have had the flu.
- Traveling. This week we're off from school for fall break & are hitting the road again, so prayers for safe travels are appreciated.
- Rest. This fall we have been SO busy doing so many fun things, so we need to make the most of time we have to rest.

Praises:
- We get to go back to Paris this week as well as travel to Belgium for the first time! We get so much joy from these travels & are so blessed with the travel opportunities we have.
- Getting connected with church family. We've loved the community group & fall retreat and hope to continue making connections with these great people.
- Prague friends. We really feel like we are making so many great friends in Prague, and are so grateful for the people who are investing in us & those that we are able to invest in.

Visiting Krakow, Poland

September 28 is a holiday in the Czech Republic, which means we got a three day weekend! When thinking of places to travel for this short holiday, we realized we had not yet visited eastern Europe and wanted to change that. Krakow is close to the Czech border and easy to get to via train or bus. So on Friday after school we got on a train to Ostrava, Czech Republic and from there took a mini-bus (which really turned out to be a mini-van. it was weird) to Krakow.

Our route from Prague to Krakow

We arrived late (and in the rain) on Friday, but found our hotel fairly easily. Saturday we planned to be our sightseeing day. We were armed with our umbrellas and Rick Steve's book on Eastern Europe which included a great walking tour of Krakow. It rained ALL day on Saturday, but that ended up working to our advantage. Even though it makes the pictures of such a beautiful city look a bit dreary, it allowed us to explore Krakow free from the press of crowds, which we really enjoyed!

The Barbican - fortifying Krakow's ancient city walls!

We began our day in St. Mary's Basilica which is famous for it's beautiful High Altar. Each day the altar is opened by a nun from the church, and many tourists come in to see this moment. The whole altar is made entirely of wood and is HUGE. The statues inside the altar piece stand over 8 feet tall! It was masterfully made and the opening was a beautiful moment.

St. Mary's Basilica

Gorgeous High Altar

Krakow is a city filled with churches. There are 142 churches & monasteries within the city limits, and 32 of those are within the Old Town. Churches are one of our favorite places to visit when we travel, so this was great! On Saturday we visited at least 5 churches within about 3 hours. We also were able to see both the church and home of Pope John Paul II who was from Krakow.

St. Andrews Church - and directly to the left is the Church of Saints Peter & Paul

Another thing we really enjoy about traveling is trying new foods, and perogies, we have discovered, are DELICIOUS. And we wish they were popular in Prague, though it's probably good that they aren't, because we had perogies for both lunch and dinner on our Saturday in Krakow!

YUM!!!!

Our day ended with a trip to Krakow's Wawel Castle, which was a gorgeous castle and one that really reminded us of castles we read about in books. When we pictures mythic or fantasy castles,

Wawel Castle is what we see. Outside the castle's walls there is a dragon which breathes fire! This was the end of our day and such a great little must-see of Krakow!

Entering the Castle grounds

With the dragon!

On Sunday we had the privilege to visit Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II - Birkenau. This was a difficult and sobering trip, but it was one that we believe is important. It is impossible to put into words what we experienced there, so we won't even try. We took only a very few pictures, but we encourage anyone who has the opportunity to visit and learn and remember.

Auschwitz II - Birkenau: train tracks & main gate

Auschwitz II - Birkenau: end of the train line

Arriving back in Krakow the sun was shining, so we did a bit more sightseeing in the sunshine! We spent more time in the main Market Square trying new foods and shopping for gorgeous Polish ceramics.

The Cloth Hall in the main Market Square

We were so pleasantly surprised by the beauty of Krakow, and highly recommend it as one of Europe's best kept secrets! We hope to be able to return there again some day!

I mean, how cool is this?!

To see the rest of the pictures from our trip, click here!