Moving in

Bratislava, 4 September 2015

You might have guessed from the delay in posting this that my enthusiasm for blogging is waning. Well, yes and no. It's not so much a lack of energy for reporting as it is that we simply haven't been doing very much that would be interesting to any of you. (And apparently there are a few people out there actually reading what I write. Thanks!)

To quote the Slovak Fulbright Commission's handbook: "Things generally move slower in the Slovak Republic, for good and for bad." We gained some supporting evidence in finalizing our housing arrangements. We toured apartments on Monday, made our selection Monday evening, and sent a message to the real-estate agent with our decision, thinking that maybe we could even move in Tuesday or Wednesday. He agreed to process paperwork for us on Tuesday (despite it being Constitution Day, a national holiday). So we walked down to his office in the old city, paid his commission, and signed the papers officially buying his services ... but not the actual lease. He promised to try to get in touch with the landlords and arrange the lease-signing and the "hand-over" as soon as possible.

We spent about the next two days waiting in the hotel for him to call, text, email, or anything to let us know if there was any progress. A Tuesday lease signing was not possible because the landlords were apparently gone for the holiday. Then on Wednesday we heard nothing. Finally I told the agent that our hotel stay ended at noon on Thursday and asked if we could please get things arranged to move into the apartment by then.

He finally arranged the hand-over for noon Thursday. So after waiting impatiently for two days in the hotel, we are now finally in our apartment. We met with the landlady and the real-estate agent at noon to sign the lease and get the keys. Everything went very smoothly; the landlady is very sweet and she is trying to make everything work for us. She speaks enough English for us to communicate and lives nearby.

For anyone who wants to send something to us, the apartment address is below:

Jeff (and/or Suzanne) Parker c/o Lehotsky
Staré Grunty 332
841 04 Bratislava
Slovakia

The apartment is in the Karlova Ves district of Bratislava, a bit northwest of the center of the city. The university where I will be teaching is southeast of the city, so walking to school is not going to be an option, but I can get there with just one transfer on the tram/bus and it's about a 15 minute drive. After getting our suitcases (finally!) out of the back of the car and into the apartment, we enjoyed a bottle of prosecco (surprisingly good considering we bought it at a gas station in Italy!) on the balcony. It's wonderful to have a real refrigerator/freezer and an actual kitchen again!

There are a few quirks in the apartment, or maybe it is just us adapting to European life. For one, the "bathroom" has a shower, sink, and tub, but no toilet. That's across the hall in the WC, alone with the smallest sink I've ever seen. And the floor in the bathroom is very warm making the room quite hot on these warm days. The furnishings (which are quite complete) are late-Ikea and uniformly done in light-colored woods, matching the light wood floors. Clothing storage is in a large three-part wardrobe unit in the hall. But there are no drawers, just shelves and hanging loci---no place to hide unmentionables.

We have a reserved garage parking space ... that we can't get our car into! One enters the garage from the street, then our space is immediately to the right inside a second garage door. The problem is, we haven't been able to wiggle the car into the space without about twenty back and forth sequences to make what is effectively a 90-degree turn on a dime. Suzanne actually got it in, but then could not get out of the car because she was too close to the wall! We'll try to think of a new strategy but for now we're happy parking in the outside spaces adjacent to the building.

Quirks or not, it's home for the next five months!

While it's great to be in our own place and have a bit more space, it occurred to me last night that this is the first time on our travels that we do not have an English-speaking clerk downstairs to whom we could appeal if there was a problem. This whole "not speaking Slovak" thing is really bothering me. I feel so dependent on someone else's willingness (and ability) to speak my language in his or her country. In grocery stores, we always pick the line with the youngest clerk, on the assumption that young people are more likely to know some English than older ones. It has worked reasonably well so far. If you ask most Slovaks whether they speak English they will either shake their heads vigorously or else get a shy look on their faces and say very apologetically "a little." It has usually turned out that their "little" was far more than enough for our needs and, of course, it is we who should be apologizing for not speaking the native tongue.

Our one really negative experience with the language was trying to buy monthly transit passes. (It turns out that the process is complicated, involving filling out a form and submitting a picture, but we didn't know this at the time.) We found the transit office in the city a couple of days ago and stood in a long, long line for twenty minutes before we finally got to the front. The (quite young) woman behind the counter did not speak English at all, and when we started trying to explain what we wanted by saying "card for tram," she thought we said "train" and sent us two doors down to the train ticket office. Needless to say, we did not get back into the long line again and we still don't have transit passes, though we plan to get them on Monday when one of my new colleagues has promised to help.

We paid our first visit to the University of Economics this morning. Daniel Dujava is the professor who has been coordinating my course assignments and office arrangements and he agreed to meet me at 10am. He had the key to my new office (about the size of my Reed office, but narrower and deeper). They must have known something about me because the picture above the desk in my office has a glass of (white) wine! Daniel showed me around the largely empty department a bit and introduced me to Eva Muchová, the department chair, and to the department secretary, who is not Lois Hobbs! I'll be meeting more colleagues and starting to work in the office early next week.

One of the things that we noticed walking around the campus (and had noticed near other university buildings in the city) is that each year's class of each department paints its names and year on the sidewalks outside the buildings. Maybe the Reed econ department can adopt this habit and start working its way from the doors of Vollum out into the library quad. :)

The rest of today was spent shopping at multiple supermarkets. First back to Tesco (see previous post) for most of the groceries we needed and miscellaneous other items. As per habit, we picked the youngest clerk and she not only spoke quite good English, but she noticed that one of our items would be cheaper if we had stamps of the kind that they give out with purchases. She suggested that she should ring up the other purchases first, paste the stamps we earned onto a page of a little book that she provided, then ring up the last item, which she did, saving us about 5 euros. What a sweetheart!

Tesco has a lot of non-food merchandise, but after two or three passes through the store (remember that we can't read the signs or ask people) there were several things that we could not find: pillows, hangers, and measuring cups and spoons. So after a brief rest and our first home-cooked meal in nearly a month (grilled water-buffalo cheese sandwiches), we set out on foot for the two nearest grocery stores in Karlova Ves. The closest one is Lidl, right at the bottom of our hill, and it is one of the most unusual stores we've ever entered. It has standard grocery items, but in a row down the center aisle it has a seemingly random selection of all kinds of other stuff, from clothing to wrenches to school supplies to toys to build-yourself night stands. But not pillows, hangers, or measuring cups/spoons. A little farther away is a Billa, at which we had a little better luck, finding pillows and a graduated liquid measuring cup, along with a couple of bottles of Slovak wine to try. The wines in the grocery stores are either amazing bargains or utter junk---we haven't sampled enough yet to know. Nothing is priced more than about 6 euros a bottle. I'll let you know later whether that is a bargain or whether price truly is an indicator of quality in this market.

So now you're up to date as we head into the weekend. We have no real plans except to continue the search for hangers and measuring devices and perhaps to do a little touring around the area. Devin Castle is a ruin that is just outside Bratislava in the direction of our apartment so that is a possibility, as is visiting some of the many wineries in the area. You'll just have to read the next post to see what we ended up doing. :)