Getting oriented

Bratislava, Friday, 11 September

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed on this blog are my own and do not reflect those of the Fulbright Commission or the U.S. Department of State.

OK, so now you're going to see a disclaimer similar to the above on each post because I'm not the President of the United States or even the Secretary of State, and therefore I'm not allowed to speak officially on behalf of the U.S. government.

What's happened since my last post (Monday)? The first thing was a power failure! After I posted on Monday, we talked with Chad on my phone via Google Hangouts. My phone was starting to get low on power, so Suzanne plugged it into the outlet and the power promptly went out. So there we were, speaking none of the native tongue, trying to figure out how to get the power back on. First we figured out that it was just our apartment. Then we found our breaker box, which looked totally normal---nothing was tripped. What to do next? We went outside and tried communicating through a combination of pantomime and Google Translate with a couple who emerged from the building. She took us to our neighbor on our floor, who is also the building manager and speaks a bit of anglicky. He, then, took us to the garage where we found the master breakers, which were indeed tripped for our apartment. We turned the power back on, but it was back off by the time we got upstairs. So we went back down and turned in on and it immediately snapped back off. After about five iterations of on/off, it miraculously stayed on, and has been on ever since. This does not inspire confidence, but so far so good...

Tuesday morning we drove to campus and my new colleague Daniel Dujava went with me to obtain an ID to get lunches at the university, then he walked with us to the transit office where we presented our pictures and bought a three-month transit pass. The car hasn't moved since! The trams run within a couple of blocks of our apartment right to the center of the city and are so much easier than driving in traffic and worrying about parking. We'll do a lot of driving out of the city, but for getting around in Bratislava we'll probably be riding the "električka" and the buses most of the time.

Then we came home and worked on our applications for Slovak residency permits. Wow! These people are amazingly good at bureaucracy! (And the locals seem to agree with this opinion.) To get the permit that allows us to stay in the country more than three months, we need

• official certification from the Fulbright Commission that I have an appointment here and will be paid enough to survive (OK, that sounds reasonable)
• criminal history reports from the U.S. FBI on which our birth date appears (which takes three to four months, and there's another story here...)
• clearance from our physician that we do not have HIV, hepatitis B or C, syphilis, or tuberculosis
• documentation that we are covered by health insurance during our stay in the SR
• a notarized form on which I state that I will financially support Suzanne during our stay
• an original marriage license, authenticated with an apostille from the Minnesota Secretary of State attesting to the validity of the County Clerk's signature
• a certified lease contract (in both of our names) supported by an extract of the landlord's title deed

And then there's the application form. This form requires the usual stuff, plus the names, birthdates, and addresses of our parents (all four deceased!), the names, birthdates, and addresses of all of our siblings, and the names, birthdates, and addresses of our children, even though none of the above are actually going to live in Slovakia. So if you are related to us and reading this blog, the Slovaks might be getting in touch with you!

We are meeting with Nora, the Slovak Fulbright queen, on Monday to go through all of this and get ready to submit the forms, which must be done in person at the local police station. The Fulbright office will send a native speaker with us to help with this process. (Thank goodness!)

I promised you a story about the FBI, so here it is. Nora warned us that the FBI clearance typically takes 90-120 days. (Huge backlogs of gun buyers?) So we applied diligently in early May giving them our credit-card information to process the payment. Well, they don't process the payment until the end of the 90-120 days, and in the interim, our credit card was compromised and the account had to be closed. Of course, when the FBI actually processed the payment, the account number was rejected and we had to send them the new one. We did this and waited (impatiently) for the charge to clear. It didn't. A couple of days before our departure in August I called the FBI line to find out the status of our clearance. A nice lady named Pam informed me that because our payment was declined we had to go back into the 90-120 day queue for processing, so we wouldn't get the clearance until November. This would, of course, mean that we would have to leave Slovakia in mid-November because our 90-day tourist visas would have expired. At that point I tried to explain to Pam that this would mean that my students would not be able to finish their classes because I would have to leave the country a month before the semester ended. Her response? "Oh, is this for a job?" I told her it was. "Well in that case we will process your request in 7-10 days." So ... gun-buyers get to wait months but job-seekers get to jump the queue! 

On Wednesday morning we finally got our satellite TV hooked up. It took two hours and at the end we have almost 200 channels, but very little that is of interest. No sports or food channels at all. We have CNN and CNBC, but almost all of the rest are Arab, Asian, or religious channels. We are mustering up the courage to go back into the satellite lineup and see if there are other channels that we can add. In any event, I missed the Slovakia/Ukraine football match on Tuesday evening, which ended in a 0-0 draw that puts them through to the final tournament if they beat Belarus at home and Luxembourg away in October.

Wednesday through Friday was our official Fulbright orientation. When we arrived, we discovered that I am the only faculty Fulbright recipient who is here this fall---the other four are arriving for the spring semester. So our orientation sessions were with a delightful group of nine new college graduates who will be teaching English in high schools across Slovakia, many in tiny villages. Half of each day was Slovak language class with Maja (pronounced Maya), a wonderful language teacher who regularly works with international medical students on learning Slovak. She managed in seven hours to get us to the point where I am much less intimidated about the language. We'll need to study our notes a lot and try to build our vocabularies, but the basics are starting to make sense even if I'll never really understand all the cases.

This afternoon, the group took a tour of some of the leading Bratislava tourist attractions. Our tour guide, another Nora, turned out to be a Ph.D. in international trade who taught until a month ago at the University of Economics, and whose husband still teaches there. (We are hoping to get together with them in the coming weeks.) I'd been warned that the faculty here are grossly underpaid and often seek outside employment: she is a great tour guide and obviously loves her second job!

At the embassy reception last night, I spoke with a number of embassy staff and a few people associated with the University of Economics and with Comenius University, the big, general university in the country. One person told us that the typical salary for university faculty is 700-1200 euros/month, or about 10-15% of what a Reed faculty member earns. In fact, the student Fulbright fellows will earn more than the teachers with whom they work or even than university faculty. This makes me feel an awkward combination of lucky, rich, and embarrassed. (But not embarrassed enough to donate 90% of my salary back to Reed! Sorry, Hugh!)

So that brings you up to date on our not-very-exciting week. We are exhausted from our language-learning efforts and are re-thinking plans to head to Vienna tomorrow. We'll probably just stick around Bratislava and I may start getting serious about class preparation. I'll  try to post something next week with an update.