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.