How do you say that in Czech again?

I am taking all my optional modules in second term (i.e. this term) as opposed to first term. These are Finance and Financial Management, Advanced Mathematics and a long-winded module named Aircraft Systems Design and Unmanned Vehicle Technologies. Therefore I have more lectures as well as coursework this term. The coursework includes for instance the design of a business jet, which we are conducting in groups of four, for a module named Aerospace Vehicle Design. In the coursework for another module named Airframe Design, the task was to design and create a computer model of an airframe.

Hence it can be seen that this year the emphasis is on synthesizing the knowledge obtained in individual modules studied in the previous two years and applying it.

Regarding sports, I continue to be active in floorball, ice hockey and triathlon. With the floorball club we are already planning to join a competitive league next season and are trying to build the core of our team. The biggest problem we are facing currently is finding enough suitable indoor court venues for training and matches. In ice hockey, it seems that you can indeed take almost 10 years of floorball experience and successfully capitalize on it to get a couple of goals and assists even if you are not an excellent skater but you know where to stand at the right time. In triathlon, I am mainly focusing on my swimming, which is my weakest discipline, and am perhaps making more progress than I would have expected.

Besides sports and university work, I continue to aim to be as financially independent as possible (whilst still receiving the generous support from the Foundation). I currently work part-time as a tutor in Maths, Czech and even English. Apart from being quite well-paid, the work is really enjoyable for me and I get great satisfaction from helping people learn something new.

In my concluding paragraph, I would like to philosophize a little bit about what it feels like for me to live abroad for a longer period of time. Every time I come back to the Czech Republic, I feel a little bit more alienated. It seems to me that the more you get acclimatized to the culture of another country, the more you lose touch with your native environment and the harder it gets to talk to people from that environment. For instance, I find it quite difficult and sometimes outright impossible to explain aspects of my course, my university or my life in London in general to friends and relatives back home so we would rather avoid the topic. I believe that the reason for this is that most of the people I meet will not have had the same experience of living abroad and hence we find it difficult to understand each other sometimes. I would therefore recommend it to everybody to go live abroad for a while because that’s the only way you truly learn to appreciate another country’s culture, language and really dramatically expand your horizons.

It is true what Mark Twain said: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”