My Slovak Home

I'm sitting here in my little house on a Sunday, it's the first gray day in weeks, and I have a heap of projects that I don’t want to grade: these are the ideal circumstances under which to blog. And what better way to procrastinate than to tell you all about my Slovak house?

I began my 10-month residence in a place called OK Centrum. As the name implies, it was just OK, and calling it that may even be generous. It’s a building just a five-minutes’ walk from where I live now, that resembles a cheap motel. Dead-flesh pink and somber grey paint, it overlooks a building even more drab than itself: an abandoned mustard yellow building with broken windows all around and a large pigeon community atop its roof.

Now that I’ve painted a rather dismal picture of the outside, I’ll admit that the inside was modern and comfortable. Not the inside of the actual building, whose long hallways smelled of a combination of cleaning solution, cooked pork, and cigarettes; but my room itself was a great little home. A small studio, to be sure, but with more than enough space for one and just enough space for two (which we tested during the five weeks that Brandon came to visit in November). It was conveniently located near the supermarket and I was well taken care of by the sweet landlord and his two employees who came over for an assortment of reasons: a broken light bulb, washing machine delivery, finicky Wi-Fi, a clogged drain.

I was only supposed to stay there for about 2 weeks, as my school had promised me that I would live in the rent-free room on school property. In the meantime, I was paying about $330 per month, which I hadn’t at all budgeted. When I arrived in Slovakia, I was told that it was still being prepared (little did I know, they actual meant completely redone to be made livable) and I would have to wait a few days before moving in.

Four months passed, me asking every two weeks if there was any progress. The answers evolved from the house being almost finished, to there being no money to complete it.  At the beginning of December, my mounting frustration with Slovak time (which was beginning to rival the island time I had become accustomed to in Hawaii) led me to a new level of boldness. I asked the Principal to go into the house and view it. As we stood in the doorway of the bleak little room that I nonetheless wanted to call mine, the English-speaking teacher-translator explained that they were still waiting for more funding. In a tone that I would classify as desperate but was perhaps interpreted by the non-English speaking Principal as irate, I reminded him that I had been promised last May something that was not being delivered and that I had now paid over $1,000 more than I hadplanned. A moment later, he told me I could move in after 10 days. A little shove was apparently all that the situation required.

Michel taking a break from moving day with a book.

Perhaps intentionally, I invited Uncle Michel to come visit from Paris on the weekend of the big move. With the help of the most wonderful colleague (to be described in a later post), we shuttled my things from the OK building to my new home, which I officially moved into on the first day of the year. While no bigger than my previous room, the new place has 1,000 times the charm. My room is inside the little schoolhouse, which is 15 feet away from the main school. In the other two rooms of the house, there are occasional lessons, during which I get to witness which teachers teach and which do absolutely nothing (meaning that students play the piano, watch TV and draw on the white board during the entire 45-minute lesson). Though it can be a bit disruptive sometimes, I appreciate the company and like hearing these wacky kids, even though I have no idea what they’re saying, unless I pick up a muffled “Hallo, Anais!” through the thin walls.

My bedroom/living room/dining room is about 12 ft. by 12ft and includes a couch/bed that smells as though it has been locked up in a dark, maybe humid closet since it was manufactured in 1970. Somehow, I don’t mind it. On the glass cabinets that hold my clothes and everything else, I’ve taped wrapping paper and pictures cut out from a Colorado calendar, which has transformed the room from lonely to lovely. I eat meals and work at a colleague’s great-Hungarian grandmother’s table, which serves its purpose with a threatening wobble, as I don’t think I screwed in the legs correctly. My kitchen is the perfect size and the cupboards are filled with a few items purchased from IKEA, but mostly those lent by another colleague. So far, I’ve only managed to break one bowl and a Pyrex cooking pot that exploded due to the abnormally high heat of the electric hot plates.

Luckily, there is also a maintenance person here: a man in his mid-fifties with a big, bristly salt-and-pepper mustache. In only three months of me living here, he has already installed the heating thermostat, washing machine, and refrigerator, changed 3 light bulbs, greased the rusted keyholes that prevented me from re-entering my home, and tiled the entire bathroom. He also put up an IKEA mirror I bought, though he used tape, despite the fact that I gave him the special screws. Of course, it didn’t hold and after ¼ of the mirror shattered, I couldn’t see him for the following week without him reaching for his wallet and trying to pay for it. I wasn’t about to let him do that so when he offered (through simple Slovak words and body gestures) to what I believed was to have coffee next Monday at school, I agreed, thinking that it would finally clear his conscience for the broken mirror. When he arrived on Monday with a big, fancy coffee maker, I laughed at our misunderstanding and declined his offer, which I'm afraid may have insulted him a bit.

During the weekends, the alarm is armed at the school so I have to be careful not to walk too close to the main building but I can still hang around the garden and grassy areas on campus. I have a key that lets me out of the school grounds and I sometimes like to pretend that I’m coming home to my personal mansion. My students like to joke that I’m actually just serving as the school guard and if someone tries to break in, I’ll be the first to go. Hilarious.

Living alone and having seen the downstairs dungeon and creepy, locked upstairs rooms, I’ve already thought of all the possible break-ins that could occur. I’m pretty sure that my paranoid imagination has prepared me for nearly every possible scenario, so I feel pretty confident about my level of preparedness. I am, after all, my mother’s daughter. And that woman sleeps with a hammer under her pillow, lest she need to nail her door shut in the event of an intruder, I presume.

There’s no question that the school and my house are located in the most beautiful part of Sala. Just behind the building is the brand-new outdoor theatre that they built in order to hold outdoor movies and events during the spring and summer. Just beyond that is a small gym/beauty salon/photography lab combo where I sometimes do yoga or Insanity when I’m feeling motivated, and a bit further is the church and the main square of the town. In the opposite direction is the river and walking/bike trail that extend through all the other nearby villages. I’m really quite happy here; it’s much better than OK.

5 Months in 15 Pictures and a Poem

Since living in the Slovak Republic, I've gotten as good at blogging as I am at the Slovak language. In only my second post of the past five months, I will try to briefly describe what I've been doing here in Sala (said SHala). It should be noted that when I first told the Ambassador, "I Live In Sala", I had to repeat myself, as he was seemingly confused as to whether I was speaking Arabic. To be clear, I do also plan to survive here for the next 5 months In Sala, insha'Allah, if God wills it.

My town’s a quaint place, just east of Bratislava,

Population, 20,000, they have named it Šala

It’s not pretty to look at but there’s nothing to hate

The forest, the trails and this river are great

I’m lucky that B'lava is less than an hour away

A weekend spent there makes me feel A-O.K.

To first introduce myself at the start of the year

I announced my presence with chocolate, “Hello, I am here!”

(People are really into chocolate here and are constantly sharing it 

in the staff rooms and giving it as small gifts. It's a good place to be.)

Some colleagues, shown here are incredibly kind

We enjoy coffee while students shop and unwind

(we actually went on a field trip to Bratislava and the students 

shopped at the mall while we sat around and enjoyed the day in this cafe)

To be honest, at first, I felt a bit sad and quite lonesome         

I’d go to Kaufland to hear music and be with any person

I had moments of weakness, followed by remorse

After the purchase of Choco bobbles and Wummis, of course

But my students make everything fun and so worth it

Creative and smart, post-Kindergarten, it’s perfect!

Yet they still act like kids, love to act and sing along

They’re down for it all, even that Whole-New-World song

Turns out I’m not an assistant, but I teach by myself

Which I admit I like doing-- I’m not put on a shelf

We work hard to prep Maturita Test- they'll ACE it

But also have fun, like time for pumpkin mosaics!

I’ve had time to travel quite a bit since I’ve been here

Three day weekends give time to visit, both far and near

I thought, ‘It’s a ghost town! People have all gone away”

Then found them at the graveyard, celebrating All Souls' Day

Thanksgiving was fun, Fakesgiving in Banska Stiavnicy

Then with the ambassador, here slicing up a fat turkey

In December, Mikulas Day arrived completely unannounced

I entered the school: with glitter and coal, students pounced!

My school is shown here, not the real but the fake

We ate it for days, a delicious Stuskova cake!

Ah, stuskova, stuskova, how to describe Slovak Prom?

Can’t say much other than it was completely the bomb

My students like to party hard—it was total dance heaven

We didn’t stay until three, not just four but 'til seven!

  

I’ve been learning some Slovak from these little children

Always have a good time when I spend the day with them

We pretend to drive cars, one yells, “CERVENA”,  “RED!”

We wait until finally, “ZELENA!”, “Go ahead!”

In January, I began volunteering at a daycare of Slovak children whose parents would like them to be exposed to English. In the time that I have been there, I have learned more Slovak words and phrases from these four-year-old students than I have from any adult in the past five months.

How did I get here?

Already two months have passed since I first arrived to my temporary Slovak home, where I will live and work as an English teacher until July 2014.  Every day of these past two months I have woken up announcing to myself, "TODAY is the day I begin my blog!"  As is often the case with me, procrastination mixed with a dread of starting something for fear of failing took control and the blog was never--until this day!-- started.  After lying to myself consecutively for 52 days, I am finally in the right frame of mind to begin.  And, as is often the case with anything new, doing it the first time is the hardest part.

I have Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms to thank for this sudden burst of motivation, as it was while reading the following quote this morning that I was overwhelmingly inspired to start this project.

"It was a long time since I had written to the States and I knew I should write but I had let it go so long that it was almost impossible to write now.  There was nothing to write about."

Panic struck when I read this, realizing that if I didn't just do it-- write something, anything-- I would let this procrastination game continue all year until there was essentially no reason to begin at all.  At this point, despite having experienced two months of newness in this country, it is a struggle to know where to begin and what to write about.

I suppose I will just begin at the very beginning—a very good place to start, non?

The following was written on September 1, 2013 in collaboration with Lauren Brown, my darling friend who was kind enough to accompany me to Slovakia in August.  It describes the multi-day saga that transpired in our attempt to get here from the U.S.

Saturday, August 24th

An adventurous day of travel awaits! Our game plan is to get to San Francisco, then take the direct flight to Paris, where we will stay with Anaïs's uncle and take a cheap, direct flight the Bratislava from there. We happily make our respective ways from Denver and Seattle to our rendezvous in San Fran. Anais spends a lovely afternoon layover with Brandon in the city and everything really does seem well and good until we are completely denied seats on the flight to Paris. This is were we begin to get a taste for the icky-ness of checked luggage combined with flying stand-by internationally. The bags are left at the airport to fend for themselves overnight and Brandon swifts us away from SFO to his father's house in Livermore. Anais and Brandon attend a large 50th-birthday fiesta where she is introduced to his family for the first time. They dance and eat while Lauren sleeps like a dead thing for a while and then later steals a can of tuna, which she eats from the can.

Sunday, August 25th

Early morning start for the three of us, though it will later prove to be not quite early enough… Back to SFO to attempt a new strategy: San Fran to Newark to Paris. Our luggage is found, checked to Newark because checking all the way through to Paris is a no-no, an expensive airport breakfast is eaten, and we are promptly bumped off the flight to Newark. This little upset is quickly overturned by our triumphant seat assignments on the next flight to Jersey. We feel ecstatic, giddy, hopeful, like things are going more or less according to plan. Flying stand-by, small successes are amplified due to the frustration that clouds proper emotional reaction.

We arrive in Newark in time for the last flight to Paris and lo and behold, there are a ton of seats left a few hours before take off! But wait, now the number is shrinking. And look! There is only ONE open seat left after the plane is boarded. The ticket agent informs us that there was plenty of room on the flight to Paris earlier that day, but we had not arrived in NJ in time to catch it. If we had gotten our butts out of bed a bit earlier we would have made it. Ugh. Out of nowhere a United employee steps up to the gate and puts himself on the standby list a head of us. I glare. Some passengers are late for the flight and it looks as if they won't make it... until they come sauntering up to the gate at the very last second. Our emotions are being played with. 

In the end there is no space for two tired young ladies or that other guy ahead of us on the list, and we face (with fatigued horror) 24 hours in the kinda nasty Newark airport.  And this is where that United employee turns out to be our Jersey guardian angel. Seeing how distraught we are about our situation, he invites us to spend the night at his place. Or, more specifically, to "go the city and have a good time". He is gay. And he has braces. So this isn't at all creepy. After some weighing of our options we decide to take this beautiful boy up on his offer.

Monday, August 26th

His name is Sami, age 22, from Morocco, and he loves being a flight attendant because it has always been his dream job. We ride the employee shuttle to the parking lot twice because the first time we go he forgets to bring his car keys. He lives only a hop, skip, and a jump away from the airport, so we are back at his apartment in no time. We decide to stay in and get some good sleep in his roommate's comfy bed. We take hot showers in the morning and then take Sami out to lunch at a cute little lunch spot in downtown Newark. He graciously drives us to the airport and we say our good-byes to Angel Sami.

Back in the airport-hell, we lounge about for a good three hours until the first Paris flight. We are jaw-drop shocked when the flight fills up AGAIN and we are left at the gate to watch the plane take off without us. Fortunately, there is a very helpful ticket agent present with a sunny yellow tie who explains the situation to us and advises us to avoid the next flight to Paris because "it doesn't look good". It is clear now that we really just need to get to Europe and our Paris plan may have to be abandoned.

Here's the problem: we can decide to give it a go and see what happens on the next Paris flight which "doesn't look good", we CANNOT try the Frankfurt flight which is wide open because it is too close to departure time and the airline is not allowed to transfer baggage from one plane to another if they are destined for different countries (so says the helpful, friendly ticket agent who we trust at this moment). So it seems the best thing to do is fly to Edinburgh for two reasons: 1. we have time to go pick up our luggage and check it back through to the Edinburgh flight and 2. there are cheap-ish flights from Edinburgh to Bratislava. So we do it. We go to Baggage Claim and request our bags, which, as we have been told before, can take up to 3 hours to receive. 

The lady as the baggage center is cranky. She doesn't understand what we are saying. She asks about the "Brown bags" referring to Lauren's bags and questions whether the "Brown bags are black" which leads Lauren to describe the bags in question as being brown although they are actually black and everyone gets quite confused. Anais saves the situation with her teacher voice, sternly (and with a tinge of sass that rivals that of the woman at the counter) re-explaining the situation from the beginning, gaining some respect from the United Worker and reaffirming ourselves as apt travelers rather than two idiot twenty-something girls who don't know the difference between black and brown. We are told to wait at Carousel #9. We wait for over two hours, by which time we should be checking back in for our Edinburgh flight. 

Anais decides that it is best to go bug the baggage claim costumer service in order to avoid missing yet another flight. As it turns out, the bags were waiting for us in the baggage claim consumer service office for a good portion of that two-hour wait. And on top of the frustration of this new miscommunication, one of her bags has been lost.  And on top of THAT frustration, when asking the cranky worker if the lost bag can just be re-routed to Edinburgh, she asks, "Why didn't you just tell me that you were going there in the first place?"  That way, she could have simply re-routed all four bags two hours ago and we wouldn't have had to wait for them (not to mention that the bag surely would NOT have been lost).  We decide it is not worth explaining to her that a previous employee had told us that re-routing bags internationally is not possible and that we were required to re-claim them.  We have no patience left for trying to understand the obscure and inconsistent workings of the airport. Anais runs as best she can with two backpacks and a roller suitcase back to Carrousel #9 and retrieves Lauren. We race back upstairs to the Edinburgh check in, check our remaining bags to the flight (which we will kick ourselves for later), go through security for the fifth time in two days, and make our way to the gate.  Here's where things get really interesting.

As we trudge up to the Edinburgh gate, which naturally has to be at the very end of the terminal, we experience a small success--something we haven't tasted in quite some time-- seats on a plane!!!  The woman at the counter hands us our boarding passes for the flight and we shriek with delight.  Everything seems to be going okay now.  This was our last chance to get out of the country today and we made it!  Lauren goes to get a quick bite to eat to celebrate this victory and Anais sits down with momentarily relief at the gate.  Upon checking her text messages, she notices that her mother wished her a bon voyage just moments before we received our tickets.  She's momentarily impressed with her mother's ability to check the flight status and view the stand-by list online.  She quickly reassesses the situation and remembers her mother's sheer lack of computer skills.  Anais proceeds to call her mother, who explains that the computer system is showing both Lauren and Anais as having confirmed seats on the Paris flight, which is currently boarding just across from the Edinburgh gate.  Confusion, panic, then a suitcase-weighed sprint ensues. 

We pull up to the Paris gate as they say, "Last call for Brown, party of two" on the loudspeaker.  We announce our presence with winded affirmation, the ticketing agent hands us two seats to Paris, and we stare at each other blankly as our bodies pause and our brains process which emotion is appropriate to express at this moment.  After that moment passes we desperately explain to the ticket agent (the same one who saw us miss the flight the night before) that we (at the recommendation of his colleague with the sunny yellow tie) completely abandoned going to Paris and went for Edinburgh.  As the other passengers continue to board, he tells us that in this case he has to give our tickets to the next stand-by passengers. We are deflated.  We stand at the counter in exasperated silence that this man must feel. A moment later, he tells us to wait near the desk.  He may be able to do something.  We are elated!

Next, he asks about our luggage. We tell him that we checked it for Edinburgh.  That blows our chances, and he tells us it won't work after all.  "You should have just brought your bags carry-on", he says. We are deflated again. We don't even have the energy to defend ourselves for our seeming stupidity to explain that it isn't feasible to bring only carry-on luggage when moving to Europe for a year. He explains the situation to his yellow-tied colleague who, perhaps out of guilt for having told us this morning that we had no chance of getting on this Paris flight, gets on his walkie-talkie to speak to the luggage workers on the Edinburgh flight.  He announces (bless his heart), "I'm going to do this!" We are elated again as he confirms with the worker at the end of the walkie-talkie that they have located our bags and are putting them on the flight to Paris. 

He peeks over his colleague's shoulder with a sense of momentary success until he looks at the computer screen and gasps, "Wait--where are they?" "I took them off the list already," the other replies. "WHY?" Oh God-we have been denied. We are deflated again. And left deflated. Solemnly, we shuffle back to the Edinburgh gate with heads bowed in defeat. But the gloom passes quickly as we realize that we are not in such a bad position. Neither of us has been to Scotland before and either way, we will make it to Slovakia eventually!