Apartment hunt and Dreams of Praha

Let me just start out with a giant thank you to Anette, a colleague who had the lovely idea to, rather than search a gazillion different real estate websites, post my own ad on expats.cz stating my budget, what I'm looking for, and in what area of Prague. I did this yesterday and today someone e-mailed me my dream apartment. It's in my budget, has all necessary appliance, and is close to work. There's also quite a bit of green around it, so while I'd be close to city area, it seems there will also be a decent amount of quiet. Let's all just hope and pray that it's not rented to someone else by the time I get there to see it.

Maybe I won't have to wait until September to get my place! It would be nice to be settled as soon as possible.

Now, as mentally prepared as I am for this move, I haven't even begun to pack. I still maintain that there simply isn't that much to do. The only thing I *am* worried about is coming up with 36000Kc right away - 11,000 for first month's rent, 11,000 deposit, 11,000 agency fee for finding me the place, 3000 utilties. What a pain. Oh well, so I sleep on the floor for a month.. good for the back, right? ;-)


The other day Farid, a work colleague in Prague, told me that I was in his dream the night before. He said that it was a very realistic dream in which he met me by chance in the street in Prague. He said, "Alia, you're here already?" and that I simply replied that I was. It was funny, but for whatever reason this triggered a lot of Prague dreams for me last night. I woke up several times, and each time I went back to sleep I swear it just brought on another one.

I don't remember too much, but I do remember that in one of them, I was walking around the city taking a lot of pictures with my new camera that I'm so excited about, and then Farid and Tiago passed me on the street. Tiago was friendly and gave me a hug, and Farid just said something like, "Alia, you take far too many pictures," and did this French finger-shake no-no-no motion and kept walking. Maybe it was payback for when I snubbed him in his dream. :)

In another, which was a lot less pleasant, something had happened that I wasn't able to find an apartment in the first month, and didn't have the money to pay another month in the Ariba apartment, so I was seriously homeless in Prague. The dream was like a movie, just a lot of flashes of scenes - one in which I was too proud to ask someone from work if I could stay with them for a little while, one in which I was sitting on the cement steps a bit down the street from Andel hotel where all the scary drunk bums congregate (except I was alone) and sitting there crying and a lot of people I knew passed me by without looking, and I remember wondering why nobody would stop for me. (Please don't worry about me on this one, it was just a dream, and this situation would never actually happen!)

The third one was by far the strangest - this is the one I remember in most detail, the others were spotty. In this one, I was in a place that looked like some Asian city (for some reason I "knew" that it looked like Singapore, actually, but in reality it was Prague, but everybody was Asian and most signs were in Chinese). Moff was there at the same time, and a lot of us from work decided to go to a movie. So the inside of the theater looked just like the one on Radlicka that I went to with Leila in Prague, but I wanted the colorful popcorn and Moff wanted some of the regular one. The regular one was there already, but when I told them I wanted the sweet one they said, "Oh we have to make a new batch." I asked how long it would take and they said 5 minutes, so I said I'd just wait for it.

Then somehow I ended up outside and I couldn't find the theater again. I was lost and alone, but then I saw Maira on the street (of all people to run into in Asia-Prague). She said she was on her way to the movie, too, but somehow we got separated. Then I got to this long series of outdoor shops and each one had a sign with the title of a different movie - every one but the one we were going to see. I ended up getting there when it was over, and Maira was already there and had seen the whole thing.

Who knows what any of that means.. probably just some apprehension rising to the surface. I feel like the last dream would be a scene out of Marzio's book.