The apartment is a small two bedroom dwelling with a kitchen off to the side and a semi-private bathroom conveniently just outside the door. There is a washer and dryer on premises that is free. The washer takes 2hours to complete its cycle and the dryer takes probably just as long. Just another thing to get used to in this new land of ours.
Technical snafu #1- We brought two octa-power/surge protectors and two voltage transformers for two laptops, five external hard drives, five LCD/DVD players, one set of speakers and two camera battery chargers. Through my research I have found that surge protectors of the extension cord variety are not advised (read fire hazard) to plug into a voltage transformer as the surge elements conflict. The same goes for multi-voltage power cords like those of the laptop variety. For the first couple of days our apartment smelled of burning ozone as the laptops routinely flipped the breakers of the transformers after over-heating. In order to run one of the hard drives one laptop would have to be fully charged and running down in order to finish the work we had started on before our trip. Talk about a cluster fuck. Our mission became to find out as much info about our options and then solve our power conundrum. Incidentally using a normal extension cord or power strip would have been fine had we brought one. The first few days will be spent ultimately looking for plug adapters for all of our travel worth electronics. Could drawing be in our futures? Until this problem is solved the electronic surge has been effectively halted.
In the meantime we are adjusting to life such as it is. There is no Wi-Fi and there is one Cat5e cable to share. Oh to share the Internet! It is funny how a new instance changes the way we think of things as a possession versus universally accessible.
Wednesday comes and after a series of disheartening journeys out into the Krumlovian suburbia we return to the heart of our castle town victorious. In a very small electronics shop called “Electro” we found three plug adapters and quickly bought them up.
Its worth considering that somehow, even along the most obvious path to tourism we have firmly confabulated this possibility in seeking to stabilize our practice in art making which required us to forgo the prolonged indulging of the sights and temptings of the main thoroughfare and venture out into the most unassuming places following the paths of “local” people. But at the same time facing the frustrations of not knowing the language enough to avoid the traps the might normally be avoided by fluency, having to combat the eventuality of feeling demoralized by remembering the sheer fact that we are in another country, experiencing a new landscape, new sights and sounds and this is good. This opportunity even in the face of tribulation not be forgotten as anything other than special.
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