Getting settled

Bratislava, Monday 7 September

I have started hearing from some of my "audience," which is wonderful! I must say that I remain rather surprised (but really, really pleased) that anyone is following our adventures. I love to hear your reactions, so please comment either on the blog or by email. I miss Portland, Reed, and all of you back home very much.

Thanks for all the tips that various readers have sent on learning language. We will try a lot of them and are looking forward to the Slovak class sessions that Fulbright will offer this week. There is also a Slovak class for international students at the university starting in October, so we may sign up for that as well.

In the meantime, we have found a good language trick that helps with shopping: make our grocery lists in both English and Slovak. This not only helps us learn the words when we look them up but also gives us the Slovak words when we are at the grocery store and need to figure out if this mysterious tube or jar contains what we want. We've also begun to explore the depths of Google Translate, which is really an amazing app. With the camera option, we can point our phone cameras at any Slovak text and the English translation of the entire text will appear on our phone. Of course the translation is not always really intelligible, but who's complaining?

Wine, shopping, and restaurants

We finally opened a bottle of grocery-store Slovak wine.

The first thing that was surprising was the clear glass bottle. Most wines are, of course, bottled in green or sometimes brown glass, which (according to online sources) helps to reduce the rate of oxidation. I don't think that this wine has been in the bottle long enough for such things to matter, but it was startling to pour out the first glass and see clear glass emerge under the foil at the top.

Now to the taste. This particular wine (chosen somewhat randomly from the store shelves) is made from a grape that is called frankovka modrá (literally, "Frankish blue") in Slovak, but lemberger or blaufränkisch in Germany and America. It is a German variety that I've never tasted before but that apparently (if you trust Wikipedia) was one of the earliest plantings in the Yakima Valley of Washington. There are a lot of wineries in the Yakima Valley of which I am very fond, but I don't think Kestrel, Alexandra Nicole, or the Bunnell Family are making wine out of lemberger these days ... and the taste of this Slovak version might explain why. It's not bad, but after we each had a glass we agreed that Suzanne's wonderful dinner of genuine Italian penne pasta with an onion, garlic, tomato, and mushroom sauce and fresh buffalo mozzarella from Quattro Portoni would be much better with the Bordeaux sitting next to it on the shelf. I'm looking forward to some advice from my new colleagues about which winemakers are the best---it is certainly true that Oregon and Washington make a lot of unimpressive wine, too.

On Saturday, our ongoing shopping expeditions took us to Ikea and the adjacent Avion shopping center, both near the Bratislava Airport. We found about a dozen useful items at Ikea, including lamps, kitchen items, pillow cases, bathroom shelves, etc. The one thing we didn't find that was high on our list was a fan. Our apartment is not air conditioned, which shouldn't really be a problem as the very hot weather is probably behind us. But it is still uncomfortably warm at night without the windows open. Opening the windows at night seems obvious, but when we did that the first two nights we were besieged by a hungry family of mosquitoes. Luckily for me, Suzanne tastes a lot better to the mosquito palate than I do, so she got eaten up while I am largely intact. (This kind of reminds me of the old story with the punchline: "I don't have to run faster than the bear, I just have to run faster than you!") Anyway, not only did Ikea not have fans, but every store in the Avion mall was sold out of fans due to the brutally hot summer they have had here and, because it's the end of the season, none of the stores was planning to get any more.

While we were at Avion, we noticed a Subway restaurant in the food court and, knowing that we could get a "veggie delite" there we stopped for lunch. I'm not sure if it is company policy or if we were lucky, but both of the young women who waited on us speak excellent English. I hadn't thought about it until I was ordering, but Subway is a very language-intensive place: What veggies would you like? What kind of bread? What kind of cheese? Toasted? All these questions! I was very glad to take advantage of their good English skills after I had bravely offered "Dva veggie delite, prosim" at the counter.

Speaking of restaurants, on our last evening in the hotel we walked across the city to an Indian restaurant that had excellent online reviews. The restaurant was largely empty; there was one couple there when we entered and only one other family arrived before we left two hours later. Usually when we have been in empty restaurants, the service is very fast---sometimes too fast. But despite the lack of customers, this was probably the slowest service we have ever experienced in a restaurant. It seemed as though one young Indian man was doing all the serving, all the cooking, all the dishwashing, and maybe helping care for the baby who, with his mother, occasionally popped up the stairs and into the dining room. The food was good, though, and we're going to give them another try in hopes that maybe they were just understaffed that day. As we were leaving, we picked up a business card from the restaurant, which, when we got it home and read it, had a rather amusing language error. Now I assume that they wanted to say that they could "sit" 150-200 people for a party-"jubilee"-"reception," but they just added one unfortunate little letter that got the message all wrong. I won't go into all the mental images ....

Our neighborhood

On Saturday we did a little exploration of our neighborhood. We are in the district of Karlova Ves, which literally means "Charles's village." Looking to the east across the street is the Comenius University Faculty of Mathematics, and just down the road (to the right in the picture) are the faculties of natural sciences. Wow, how convenient this apartment would be if I were a scientist visiting at Comenius instead of an economist visiting at the University of Economics.

Comenius University Faculty of Mathematics, from our balcony

Directly below our balcony to the south is a school for the blind, which has a large garden with lots and lots of red tomatoes. Of course, the students probably can't tell that they are red. It would be unimaginably bad karma stealing tomatoes from blind kids, but it sure is tempting!

Looking to the west from our wrap-around balcony you can see the hills of Austria across the Danube in the distance. According to Google Maps, our apartment is 1.05km from the border.

Looking southwest from the balcony

The road Staré Grunty starts near our apartment building and makes a big northbound loop up the hill (to the left in the first picture) and heads back south on the other side of the hill. We drove it on Saturday just to explore. Terrible road with more than the usual substantial quota of potholes. And as we were coming down on the other side we felt like we were in some kind of apocalypse movie. First there were abandoned and half-demolished apartment blocks on the left, perhaps crumbling leftovers from the days of central planning. Then a dozen or more large, empty, and run-down apartment buildings on the right. A little research suggests that the ones on the right are student residences and, since school does not start for a couple more weeks here, they are indeed empty. Reed students: You have very cushy dorms!!

Football!

Saturday night was one of the biggest matches in the (short) history of Slovak football. They are in the late stages of the qualification round for next summer's European Championships. As with the World Cup and most other football tournaments, the qualification round places the countries into groups, with the top couple of teams in each group advancing to the next round. Slovakia was drawn into Group C along with Spain, Ukraine, Belarus, Luxembourg, and Macedonia. The last three are minnows and, historically, Slovakia are not much better---perhaps smelt. Spain are the defending champions and Ukraine have been a very good side over the years, so prospects for Slovakia qualifying for the final rounds were not good.

But this Slovak team has stunned the world! Going into Saturday's match, only Slovakia and England (in Group E) had won all six of their matches to lead their groups with perfect 6-0-0 records. The Slovaks had opened the qualifying with two stunning victories: a 1-0 win in Kiev---the first time in history that Slovakia had beaten Ukraine---followed by an even more shocking 2-1 win over Spain at home in Žilina. Saturday was the rematch in Spain, to be followed by a Tuesday home rematch against Ukraine. Unfortunately, our satellite TV is not yet hooked up properly, so we did not get to watch. From the media accounts, Slovakia held up well despite six players being suspended, though they ended up losing to Spain by a respectable 2-0. All players will be back for the Ukraine match Tuesday, where a win or even a draw should assure the Slovaks of advancing into the final rounds next summer for the very first time.

Červený Kameň

On Sunday, we did some real sightseeing outside of Bratislava. We trekked 50 or so km northeast from the city through the district of Rača and the towns of Svetý Jur (St. George), Pezinok, Vinosady. Modra, and Dubova to the castle of Červený Kameň  (pronounced CHAIR-ven-ee Common)---literally "Red Stone"---above the tiny village of Píla. Unlike most of the castles of Central Europe, this one was never ruined, just repeatedly remodeled. Hence it is in magnificent condition.

Červený Kameň served both the fortress/defense function of a castle and the residence function of a palace. From the 13th century it was given to various families of noblemen who supported the current monarch with money or troops. In the 16th century it ended up in the hands of the Fuggers, a famous family of German financiers who were mining copper near Banská Bystrica in central Slovakia. From 1583 to 1945, it was owned and occupied by members of the wealthy Pálffy family from Hungary (of which Slovakia was a part until 1918).

The insignia of the Pálffy family is a deer standing on its back legs atop a broken wheel. The story behind it is that members of the family were returning home late at night through a dark forest when a deer leaped out in front of the carriage, causing a crash that broke a wheel. The family was forced to remain in the carriage over night, and when dawn broke they discovered that the accident with the deer had stopped them from going over a steep cliff to certain destruction. To commemorate that event, they adopted the deer and wheel (see picture below) as the family symbol.

The interior of the castle is now maintained as part of the Slovak National Museum system and contains magnificent furnishings, art, and frescoes from the 19th century and earlier. We spent almost two hours going through the interior with a Slovak-speaking guide. We did not understand what she was saying, but their four-page, small-print English handout covered each room in some detail so we really knew exactly what we were seeing at each place. Here are some views, mostly exterior, of the castle:

Castle exterior

English garden outside castle

Deer and broken wheel in the courtyard: Symbol of the Pálffy family

Lazy peacocks in the begonias of the courtyard

Stairs up from the cellars, which were built to hold copper, not wine or prisoners

In the cellars

Back to campus

Monday morning I went to the office, which was not without incident. Driving the new car without Suzanne for the first time, I made a wrong turn, then once I got back in the right place I drove right past the University and almost to Hungary before I dug out the GPS and backtracked. Oh well, I won't make that mistake again. I spent a couple of hours working in my office for the first time and had a meeting with Anetta Čaplanová, who was my original contact at the university and who is my official liaison person. I'm beginning to set up Web pages for classes, but so much is still undecided that it is difficult to get very far. I'll go back in on Tuesday and try to get things better settled, since Wednesday through Friday are going to be taken up with Fulbright committee orientation.

A couple of random pictures from the campus are below.

The first is an example of the graduates' names painted on the sidewalks. (I mentioned this in the last post.) You can only see the white one clearly, but if you look to the sides and in the distance you can see different years and different departments in a rainbow of colors.

The second is a very strange phenomenon I have observed in the parking lot. There are rows of marked spaces on both sides of an aisle, just like in the U.S. (The lot is done with blocks that have grass growing between them for drainage, which is why it looks like weeds instead of pavement.) But long before the lot is even close to full, people start parking in the middle of the aisles between the two rows of parked cars. There is only one car in the middle in this photo from Friday, but this morning there was an entire row of cars parked one behind the other down the middle of the aisle. I guess it's not an outrageous idea, but why park in the middle when there are dozens of empty marked spaces on both sides? Given the size of our car, I'm worried that we could get blocked in, so I'm parking in the outlying rows (which have foot-high thistles growing through the blocks attesting to their infrequent use, and so far no one parking in the middle) and backing into my space, just to make sure!

The car directly in front of the camera is parked!

Tomorrow (Tuesday) we are going to get our bus passes, so maybe I won't need to park on campus as often. My colleague Daniel has agreed to meet us on campus in the morning and serve as interpreter to get us through the process of applying for the transit ID card (with picture) that is required. Then we will be able to start getting around on the trams and buses rather than having to drive everywhere. I'm sure that this will be an adventure, so be sure to tune in later in the week to catch up.