Departure Day Approaches!

After months of preparing in various ways, our adventure is nearly upon us. The house is all prepared for the family that will live in it while we are gone. Nearly all the paperwork related to the our residency permit in Slovakia is in hand. My state-side summer research projects are winding up. My books are on the way to Bratislava via diplomatic pouch. We are saying "dovidenia" to many friends, neighbors, colleagues, and students. All that's left is last-minute chores and packing the next 6 months of our lives into 6 suitcases.

I'm sure this is not news to the majority of folks who move their houses every few years, but even a temporary move is hard work! After 27 years in our house, a couple of pack-rats like us can accumulate a lot of stuff. Even though we are not getting rid of most of it, organizing it all and making room for new residents requires a lot of time and effort. (Mostly Suzanne's time and effort, of course, for which I can never seem to express my profound gratitude adequately. As she often says, she is the "default," and there's been lots of defaulting on these tasks.)

What have we forgotten? What will we realize a month from now that we really should have brought? (Or, more likely, what will we realize six months from now that we brought and never used?) All we can do is keep telling ourselves: "Be flexible. Everything is going to be different than we plan, but it will all turn out OK. There are stores in Slovakia!"

I'm starting to think a bit more about the classes that I will be teaching at EUBA. The scheduling of classes is a bit different from the style to which I'm accustomed in the U.S. My Ph.D. macro course is scheduled for eight Thursday mornings in October and November, with one 3-4 hour session each week. Needless to say, this is a change from the 3-4 one-hour sessions over 13 weeks that I teach at Reed. What is even more surprising to me in that the weekly schedule of class sessions for my Master's macro course won't be determined until about a week before classes begin in late September. Quite a difference from the year-in-advance scheduling that we have here! I've been assured that the class will meet on Tuesdays and/or Wednesdays, but beyond that I'm not going to know my weekly schedule until just before the semester begins.

I am very grateful, though, that they have been willing to concentrate my class meetings in such a way as to allow me to make trips on Fridays and/or Mondays to visit with economists and policymakers in other parts of Eastern and Central Europe (and perhaps combine these visits with some weekend trips see a little of the region). As a tourist, Bratislava seems like an ideal home base for exploring Slovakia and its neighbors, most of which we have never visited. In fact, the location seems like a perfect combination of the new-to-us and the somewhat familiar. Our last trip to Europe was 35 (!) years ago, when we spent a summer in Vienna. With Vienna only 30 miles or so from Bratislava, we are very close to fond memories. But in 1980, Vienna and Bratislava were separated by the Iron Curtain making it difficult to travel between them. What a difference: from an Iron Curtain to a shared currency and a non-stop Schengen-zone border!

So on Monday we are off! Portland-San Francisco-Copenhagen-Goteborg = 18 hours of flying and lay-overs, plus 9 hours of time change. Lots of time to study our Slovak! I'll report from the other side next week with pictures of the new car and perhaps stories of how I most likely managed to sleep away the entire flight and Suzanne most likely did not. Until then, "Čau!"