The last day part 2

During the castle tour I was surprised at the amount of Czech I understood. It wasn't that I understood everything perfectly but I could understand alot of what was being said and I always had an idea of what the tour guid was saying. I was actually hearing the czech words and sentence structure which I had spent a month learning rather than the words all smudging together to make one long incomprehendable mess of speech.

When the tour ended we were taken to an empty part of the castle not open to the tourists. There they served wine and champagne and we waited. The teachers started arranging us in lines according to our countries position in the czech alphabet and our own surnames. Being from Great Britain (in czech Velky Britannia) I was third last with the other two English people being after me.

When the Czech presidents wife arrived the lines, which we had spent so long forming, disintegrated and everyone began to produce a semi-circle around her. Apparently she is known by many czech people as the frog due to her appearance and people's general dislike for her.

As seems to be the norm for the course the meeting was being filmed (god knows who for this time) and one by one they made us greet the first lady, say your name and where you're from and if you were unlucky she asked you a question. Being 3rd last it took ages for my turn to arrive (there were 76 people on the course). I walked up to her, said dobry den (good day) and where I was from (ja jsem z Anglie). Guess who was unlucky. Yep she had to ask me a question. She asked me whether I study or work. I was concentrating on what she was asking and trying to pick out the correct answer from the question. Unfortunately, in concentrating so much on this, I forgot to conjugate my answer and just copied what she asked me. So I ended up telling her 'you work' (which at least provided some amusement for the other course members).

As soon as the greeting ceremony ended she told us she had another meeting she needed to get to and left (at this point it had also just started raining). So, in the rain, the graduating ceremony took place. One by one, again in alphabetical order, we went to shake hands with the teachers and receive our certificates. Again I was 3rd last.

And that marked the official end to the course. Some people (like me) were staying in Prague whereas others were returning to Dobruska. So we all said our goodbyes and some of us planned to meet up later that evening in Prague for one last get-together.