Very quiet on the blog front

I know it's getting cold down there but you must have some news. The weather is really starting to warm up here and we are contemplating buying a fan. The days are similar to Australian days...still, dry in the mid to late 20's...then a slight breeze before thunder and a 5 minute downpour in the late arvo...then still and hot again as the storm passes.

Congratulations to Michelle(my ex-expat friend from Colorado)& her mum on successfully completing the 2006 Chicago Avon Walk for Breast Cancer - all 39.3 miles of it! What stars!

Biology is going well. We did our first experiment last Thursday and it went off without a hitch - they were happy. Last Sunday the senior students headteacher and I did a risk assessment trip of the Staropramen brewery tour and it was dead boring, so I have to give the boyz the bad news tomorrow that the excursion is off. The highlight of the tour was tasting the different malts....and watching the stunned faces on the English bucks-night yobbos when I answered the tour guides question on the difference between top and bottom fermenting yeasts. We are looking into a trip to the Pilsner brewery for next term instead. The boyz won't be happy.

Finding everything I need for the experiments has been an interesting experience. My endeavours to track down nutrient agar petri dishes looked to be heading in the right direction only to end up with blood agar petri dishes (thanks to a chemist friend I have from my TEFL training days). Thanks to my Czech teacher, personally visiting her local pharmacy, I was able to get my hands on Lactose(Laktoza) which is coveted by the chemists here (I had to go into said pharmacy, look for the man with the glasses and use the code word 'laktoza', then he would sell me some of his stash). She also helped me track down Ammonia/Cpavek ..... which was kept in the back stores of a Drogerie shop on Ujezd. What fun!