Last week was pretty hectic. It was the week of completing our documents and registering us into all the online systems.
On Monday, after our workday we went to the bus station to get a subscription for the bus for three months. It was already four o’clock when we arrived there and we still needed to get our passes. Then we found out that the person behind the desk wasn’t that strong in speaking English, but she managed to get us these subscription passes for only 10 Czech Crowns. We were amazed how cheap this was. Only 10 Crowns, that’s 37 Eurocents! Later that week we discovered that this was the price for the plastic map and the picture, and that we still needed to get our official document at another bus office. Woops…
Tuesday was an important day at U5, Faculty of Applied Informatics, our place of work. We had a small meeting with our mentors about our project here. This was the day we finally would be informed about the project. We already finished the preparation work of our assignment for that week and they were impressed by our small program.
During the day we brainstormed a bit more about our project ideas. Later that day our mentors came back for the second meeting about our project ideas. When they entered our room, they were even more impressed. We had written some great ideas on the whiteboard. They asked if they could take a picture of our scheme, because they wanted to show it to our supervisor.
The other day we needed to choose a final idea from all our great ideas. You can find a couple examples of our ideas in the picture above.
We have chosen to build an automated order and pick-up system. More information about the project itself will be available in another blog post!
Then we started to brainstorm about what functionalities we should implement into our project. Angelo suggested that we could use the MoSCoW method to determine the importance of each item. In the afternoon we improved our plan of action.
When we arrived at the TBU dorms were asked to pass by Ms. Kratinová’s office to complete our registration documents of our dorms at U12. But unfortunately, one week later, she was still sick. The person at the reception of U12 told us to go visit Ms Mališková of U7 to complete our registration documents and receive a green card. Thus we decided to go to on Thursday, after our breakfast and morning run. When we finally arrived at the building U7, we went to the reception and asked for the accommodation officer of U7.
We thought it would be easy to get these documents and complete this part of our “paper hill”. We were wrong.
When we arrived at the office, we told Ms. Mališková that we were interns from Belgium and that we arrived last week and still needed to be registered into the accommodation system of Tomas Bata University. She told us to go back to U12 to complete the registration with Ms. Kratinová, so we told her that she was sick.
Then she asked for our white card in order to get the green card. We told her we hadn’t received a white card and we had no idea what it even looked like.
She seemed already a bit frustrated and that wasn’t even the beginning. She asked for our pre-registration files and began looking for our names in the computer. She was surprised when she got a result. Normally you are not in the system if you are not yet completely registered.
At this moment she started to speak more loudly and with even more frustration. “How did you get into the system? No, no this is not correct”.
“What do you do when you go into your building?” – We told her we just enter the building without showing documents (because we don’t have any). Now you could see by the look on her face that she was really annoyed by the situation and told us it was stupid and not possible to even enter the building without showing any documents.
Well it’s pretty difficult to show your green card if you are asking her to make a green card for us…
After a couple minutes of misunderstandings, yelling and shouting and asking for a white card, she showed mercy, gave us the green card and even signed it. We not only need this card to enter the building (officially), but also to do our laundry, so this piece of paper is quite important for us, if we want to stay here three months.
Friday we decided to go to U5 and work on our project. But before we could go to our Faculty, we needed to go to the bank and open up a Czech Bank Account. Therefore we went to the nearest bank to our dorms and explained that we needed to open up a bank account as Erasmus Students. Luckily the people at the bank could speak some English and this was the only document that didn’t take a whole day to complete.
Afterwards, we searched for some documentation and libraries for our project and then we called it a day.
On Saturday we went to Hostýn, a small pilgrim village on top of a hill. And about 30 kilometres from Zlín. The trip was arranged by the Erasmus Buddy System. It was the first time here that we joined an Erasmus trip. And it was cold, snowy but great! I will tell you more about it in another post.
And on Sunday, we did the laundry, which was a first! But luckily none of the clothes were ruined. And we even found a little surprise between our laundry…
