AK Monthly Recap: July 2024

3 months ago 54

Summer in Europe is in full swing — and did I ever take advantage of it this month! One thing I love about living in Prague is how easy it is to get all over Europe. Whether you’re looking for a seaside getaway or a mountain escape, you’ve got plenty of options.

This summer took me on seaside getaways to Italy and Croatia — in addition to enjoying the best of Prague.

Let’s take a look at this month — the last full calendar month of my thirties!

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Destinations Visited

Ponza, Palmarola, and Rome, Italy
Prague and Průhonice, Czech Republic
Split and Korčula, Croatia

Two beautiful crenellated yellow buildings in Prague set against a bright blue sky.

Highlights

The biggest highlight of the month is that my permanent residency in the Czech Republic was approved! Part of me is in disbelief…four years ago I was hoping and praying to be allowed to enter the country during that first COVID summer, and now I have permanent residency?! Life comes at you fast!!

Permanent residency is the equivalent of a green card in the US — the right to stay, work, and live here forever.

Usually it takes five years of residency and a language test before you can get Czech permanent residency; I was able to get it so quickly because people married to an EU citizen can get it after two years of residency and one year of marriage, no test necessary. I applied right after our first anniversary. (Charlie is still considered an EU citizen in the Czech system because he got his permanent residency here before Brexit went through.)

This month I have a meeting to get new biometrics taken for my new ID — which is great because I look like Buzz’s girlfriend in my current ID. Woof.

My July began on the island of Ponza, just off the coast of Lazio, Italy. Ponza is a nice, low-key island. There isn’t a ton to do here, but there are a lot of boat trip options, and we took a boat to the nearby island of Palmarola! (I think that brings my Italy island count to around 22, not counting mainland Sicily or Sardinia!)

Once again, staying at Grand Hotel Santa Domitilla was the big highlight, and we enjoyed a full day of lounging by the pool for the first time in…FOREVER!

On the way back, we had a layover at Termini Station in Rome, which allowed us to grab lunch at Mercato Centrale, right next door. We had to get the tramezzini with meatballs, and the spaghetti carbonara with truffles that we enjoyed in March! It’s actually a great, well-balanced combination!

Good times in Prague. July brings another of my favorite food festivals, the annual French market, now moved back to the Mala Strana side of the Charles Bridge. We enjoyed cheeses, saucissons, baguettes, and many French wines, and our picnic backpack came quite in handy!

We took our niece to Výtopna Railway Restaurant for her fourth birthday — a restaurant that delivers everything on train tracks that cross the restaurant! A cool place and we had a blast, though it seems to have been designed for adults who really like trains, rather than kids.

We also attended the annual American Party at Dva Kohouti, our neighborhood brewery, that came with red solo cups, beer pong, barbecue, a bluegrass band, and a mechanical bull!

Band members of the Smashing Pumpkins performing on stage.

Seeing Smashing Pumpkins in concert. Smashing Pumpkins was one of my favorite bands in high school, and this was my first time ever seeing them! I LOVED IT. Today, Ava Adore, Tonight Tonight, Mayonaise, Bullet with Butterly Wings, 1979 — ALL SO GREAT. I nearly cried at Disarm.

This was also my first concert using these concert earplugs, and I am SO glad I bought them. I could hear the music perfectly, and my ears didn’t ring at all afterward. They do make it a bit difficult to have any conversations with people around you, though, which I guess is the point of them!

Kate wearing a red and white patterned dress and standing in a park, a castle reflecting in a pond behind her.

A fun day in Průhonice. For my latest new Czech destination of the month, we headed to Průhonice, a small town outside Prague with a gorgeous park. Průhonice Park is massive, with ponds, all kinds of walking trails, and a castle-like building peeking between the treetops.

We enjoyed galettes and crepes afterward at a French cafe called U Slepiček.

View over a small marina with boats in the bright turquoise water, mountains rising on the mainland in the background.

The ultimate birthday trip to Croatia. For my 40th birthday this year, I wanted to celebrate with lots of friends in a place I love. I chose my beloved island of Korčula in Croatia, and seven friends joined me and Charlie for a week!

It was absolute paradise — a house perched on a gorgeous turquoise bay, a 12-minute walk from the downtown, and just kicking back and relaxing with my buds. This was the first trip in forever that I didn’t do any work at all, and didn’t bring my big camera or my laptop. The break was SO good.

We also spent a night in Split, and I think I need to update my Split guide with a wine bar we loved — Monika’s. The owner knows just the wines that will impress you based on your tastes (though I cringed every time he referred to mild whites as “ladies’ wines” and I ordered my usual spicy reds while staring at him, deadpan).

A long line of rowboats parked up against a cement wall in Italy, as the sun sinks into the sea behind them.

Challenges

Oh my God, COVID’s back again. There has been a huge wave of COVID around the world, and it made its way to us — Charlie tested positive for COVID two weeks before we were to leave for Korčula. I tested negative.

We live in a one-bedroom apartment, and it’s impossible to isolate from each other, so I left the apartment, staying away until he had tested negative for a few days. We did not want to risk me getting infected, then infecting our friends in Croatia.

Amusingly, I first stayed at an apartment one block from the church of St. Peter at Poříčí, near the Bílá Labut’ tram stop — then I learned that THAT CHURCH BELL TOLLS EVERY 15 MINUTES, ALL NIGHT LONG. It’s 2024 — who still does that?!?! The first night, I didn’t sleep; the second, earplugs saved me; and after a few days I moved to a hotel in my neighborhood.

We actually pinpointed where Charlie got COVID: Hooters, where we watched the Eurocup final, because another of our friends got COVID on the same timeline, and we only saw him there. Somehow it evaded the other three of us. (Hooters? I know, I know. It’s where we go for all the sports finals. We like the wings and the TVs at every angle.)

The good news is that Charlie’s case was very mild, and I had $300 of unused travel credit from my Venture X card that paid for nearly four nights of hotel.

Unexpected duties. My previous white sneakers were so worn out, one shoe filled up with water on a recent rainy day, so it was time to get a new pair! I have arch issues, so I ordered these cute sneakers from Frankie4 in Australia, which zip and have a podiatrist-designed footbed with good arch support.

Since I ordered them from Australia, I expected to pay the VAT of 21% on top of the cost. I occasionally do that and it’s fine. Boy, was I surprised when VAT plus taxes and duties totaled $100 for sneakers that cost $163!! Holy shnikes.

(One thing I didn’t know before moving to the EU was that you pay duties on all international purchases, but in the US you only pay duties on international purchases worth more than $800. I once had a book publisher in the US send me a free book, and I had to pay the equivalent of $10 to the FedEx guy. Bleh.)

For what it’s worth, the sneakers are cute and the fit is true to size. I feel like their footbed is a little too tall, though, so I might experiment with different insoles. But that’s the last time I order sneakers from overseas!

Charlie's hands holding two gray tabby cats facing each other on the bed.

Post of the Month

The Perfect Scottsdale Girls’ Trip in 16 Steps — The full recap and itinerary of my trip to Scottsdale! We had the absolute best time. Feel free to steal this to have your own perfect itinerary!

A table covered with several pieces of various French cheeses at a market.

Book Club This Month

Our next book club will take place on Sunday, August 18, 2024. We will be reading Dearborn, a short story collection by American author Ghassan Zeineddine.

“Spanning several decades, Ghassan Zeineddine’s debut collection examines the diverse range and complexities of the Arab American community in Dearborn, Michigan. In ten tragicomic stories, Zeineddine explores themes of identity, generational conflicts, war trauma, migration, sexuality, queerness, home and belonging, and more.

In Dearborn, a father teaches his son how to cheat the IRS and hide their cash earnings inside of frozen chickens. Tensions heighten within a close-knit group of couples when a mysterious man begins to frequent the local gym pool, dressed in Speedos printed with nostalgic images of Lebanon. And a failed stage actor attempts to drive a young Lebanese man with ambitions of becoming a Hollywood action hero to LA, but Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have other plans.

By turns wildly funny, incisive, and deeply moving, Dearborn introduces readers to an arresting new voice in contemporary fiction and invites us all to consider what it means to be part of a place and community, and how it is that we help one another survive.”

You can sign up here. Hope to see you there!

Kate standing on the beach at night in a long, bright purple dress, as a balloon of a kitty with a unicorn horn flies above her.

Fashion Find of the Month

This summer I’ve been obsessed with my new dress in the perfect shade of orchid — it’s this dress from Sézane. It’s stretchy with a tied waist band, and it has slits up both sides. There’s also a short-sleeved version that comes in different colors.

Also, this summer I bought my first pair of Birkenstocks EVER (yes, ever!!) and I ADORE THEM. Why did I wait so long?

At first I worried I had bought them slightly too small, but they molded to my feet perfectly. I am living in them all summer long. If you have bad arches like I do, you need a pair of these!

The US Olympic athletes on a boat on the Seine in the rain, LeBron James in front holding up the American flag with a deadly serious expression on his face.

What I Watched This Month

It’s been all about the Olympics!! And I have to say, this was my favorite experience of watching the Olympics yet. I’m not a big fan of what NBC does in the US, curating a set of events each evening, filling it with emotional special interest pieces and only focusing on a few popular sports.

This year, I watched via Eurosport on the Czech version of HBO Max, which was PERFECT. It had literally everything, live and repayable! (These days, you can do the same thing in the US, watching on Peacock.)

When my friends and I were in Croatia, we would turn on the iPad in the mornings and watch judo, horse jumping, fencing, surfing, and yes, gymnastics.

And I love all the Olympics memes this year. LeBron holding the American flag in the boat in the rain, deadly serious, looking like George Washington crossing the Delaware. Sweet Stephen Nedoroscik (a fellow Masshole!) killing it on the pommel horse. Simon Biles and Jordan Chiles bowing to Rebeca Andrade. Snoop Dogg, everywhere. Turkish shooter Yusuf Dikec looking like a hitman.

A few of my friends are at the games in Paris, and though I didn’t want to go anywhere near them, I would actually love to go to a future Olympics! Maybe Los Angeles? I wouldn’t if I had to drive in LA traffic, but the entire games will be accessible by public transportation!

A sun-dappled castle in the middle of a small Czech town with little buildings covered with orange roofs.

Coming Up in August 2024

Well, we’re already a week into the month. August began in Korčula, and on the second, I TURNED FORTY! And what a day we had. You’ll hear about it in next month’s recap.

Most of August will be spent in Prague, enjoying the sunny and sometimes stormy summer days.

At the end of the month, Charlie and I will travel to Moravia, the eastern part of the Czech Republic, to visit wine country! Turns out the Moravians keep the best Czech wine for themselves, so I look forward to sampling the wares. There’s even a place where you can sample 100 wines at your leisure!

The pretty town of Mikulov, pictured above, will be my new Czech destination for August.