Shower the people you love...

I'm on a break during orientation, and they've arranged an impromptu wifi connection for us here, so a handful of us are strewn along the floor in the hallway outside the library catching up on email, skyping with parents in amenable timezones, tracking lost baggage...

So much to relate from the past week, here are bullet points for the time being:

• Contact info, including our land line number as you'd call it internationally, has been updated on our website for Anne and me. Same contact info for now, we'll likely update again when we get cell phones. Anything important, I understand it will be best to mail to us at the Lyceum, where we'll be teaching; I'll post that address when I've got the appropriate format and I've confirmed they have opened for the school year.


• Starting to feel comfortable with our new city. We've done the grocery tour with Carla and David, making note of lots of places of interest along the way, getting comfortable with the (very convenient and inexpensive) public transit system and some survival Slovak, and picking up the few remaining necessities for our place.


• From the “novel ways to meet your neighbors” desk, our shower has sprung a fairly major leak. The bottom has a long crack around the drain, which I'd thought nothing of up until yesterday. Since the shower is raised a few inches off the ground, I'd assumed there was a cement basin below it like I've seen on This Old House. I was disabused of this notion yesterday morning. Fortunately, the water into our downstairs neighbor's flat was fairly minimal and Reformata, the organization that owns the building, is already on the case. By the end of the day today or tomorrow we should have a brand new shower, and they gave us access to the vacant apartment across the hall for showering in the meantime.


• Spent last night with our colleagues touring around the old city and having some drinks. To us it was a maze of interesting art and architecture, with narrow alleys of historic buildings and shops winding off out of view. Larry, who's been here a few years now, assured me that we'll be able to get around comfortably quite quickly, but I can't imagine it could ever feel less, erm, wonderous.

My inbox is packed full at the moment! (Thanks by the way... it's a pretty cheerful thing to see.) Haven't had much opportunity to reply up until now. If I missed anything important, please just send it again.

We've taken a few more photos and videos over the past few days, but I was in a rush this morning and forgot to grab the camera cards to upload them. Stay tuned to this location for further updates tomorrow, though.