First Slovak haircut

Bratislava, Saturday 24 October

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own personal opinions, not those of the Fulbright Commission or the U.S. Department of State.

Greetings to all. Before I start into today's post, let me say that I am totally humbled by the fact that yesterday marked the 2,000th page-view for this blog. When I started doing this, I'd have been content with 20 and surprised with 200. But 2000? Wow! It's exciting to think that there are quite a number of people who seem to be following my posts quite regularly. I hope that I can continue to inform and amuse you sufficiently to keep you reading!

No news from the Foreign Police. I have two students in one of my classes from Thailand. They are remarkably diligent---always the first to submit assignments and ever punctual---so I was very surprised that they were not in class on Wednesday evening. They both arrived at our break, around 6:30pm, and the young man apologized profusely and explained that they had been at the Foreign Police since Tuesday night and had just now (Wednesday late afternoon) successfully submitted their application. Despite having spent most of 24 hours there (and presumably without sleep), he was in a far better frame of mind than I was after 3 hours in that place. There is much to be said for the resiliency of youth and for the patience of those who, unlike most Americans, are accustomed to such things being inconvenient.

Shopping in Austria

About the end of last week, Suzanne and I hit a wall. The novelty of Bratislava had worn off and we were ready for something new. So Saturday we went to the border town of Hainburg an der Donau in Austria to shop at an Austrian grocery store and shopping center. Hainburg is 10 miles from our apartment by road, but only about 6 as the crow would fly. Another American had said that he goes there to shop in preference to the Slovak markets, so we wanted to give it a try.

The store, Merkur Markt, is large but not huge, and it has a somewhat different selection of items than the stores---even the larger ones---in Slovakia. We found wine vinegar (which must exist in Slovakia but we haven't found it) and real Viennese "semmel," a flat, twisted hard roll that we remember fondly from our summer in Vienna decades ago. Suzanne also found index cards, which apparently do not exist in Slovakia, in a stationery store in the shopping center. She used them all up in one day making Slovak language flash cards, so now we'll have to go back!

This was the first time we had been out of Slovakia since arriving and we were slightly concerned about the border controls that many countries have instituted in this part of the world. But everything was smooth. There was no hint of any control going into Austria. Coming back into Slovakia there were two polícia cars at the border, but they paid no notice to us in spite of our auslander plates. We have been told that they only stop large vans and trucks that could be carrying human cargo. (But really, why would refugees leave Austria to come to Slovakia?)

Day trip in the Danube Valley

Having briefly touched the soil of another country on Saturday, we headed out again on Sunday, but downstream along the Danube instead of upstream. Other than a couple of trips into the wine country north of Bratislava, we have not explored the areas outside the city at all. Our Sunday journey took us on some very bumpy roads down the river valley through the town of Dunajska Streda, which literally means "Danube Wednesday." Apparently the town was named after its Wednesday market day, with the Danube appellation being added later to distinguish it from other Wednesday markets. 

Not much to see in Dunajska Streda on a Sunday, so we continued on to Komárno, a larger city on the north side of the Danube just a short bridge away from Hungary. This part of Slovakia is has a majority of ethnic Hungarians and all of the road signs are in both Slovak and Hungarian. We drove into Komárno, parked the car near what the GPS said was the center of the city, and set out on foot. 

The first people we encountered were two older men staggering up the street in front of us. One of them was leading/dragging/carrying the other one to his house up the street. After depositing the hopelessly inebriated man inside his door, the other turned and returned down the back street onto which we turned to a bar. Perhaps this scene would have taken us by surprise less had it not occurred at 11:00 on Sunday morning.

We wandered a few blocks in a dismal residential neighborhood wondering where the center of the city really was. Following the usually reliable rule that the old city is always near the river, we soon emerged into a lovely pedestrian-only district with the church, a couple of lovely plazas, and lots of (closed) shops. It turned out to be a nice little city; you just couldn't get to the nice parts in a car.

Having stretched our legs in Komárno, we headed north toward the town of Nové Zámky. Back in April, long before our departure, we had dinner with a Reed student named Emmie King who lived in Nové Zámky for a year as a high-school exchange student. Emmie was the only person we could find in Portland who knew the Slovak language and had significant experience in the country, and she gave us many valuable insider tips. We wanted to at least drive through Nové Zámky to see where she had been. The town actually reminded us a lot of mid-sized agricultural towns in the American Midwest, but with a few historic buildings and a few of the ubiquitous Soviet-era apartment blocks.

From Nové Zámky, we continued north to Nitra, a larger city with a long history as a center of Slovak culture. Nitra is a lovely city with a two universities (including the Slovak Agricultural University), sitting at the first Carpathian foothills adjacent to the flat-as-a-pancake Danube Valley. The cathedral, castle, and historical center lie on the side of the hill, with the modern city and the universities below. There is a large, paved square in the center with a beautiful modern theater building on one side. It was well past noon and we were hungry, so we walked down the (empty on Sunday) main street of the city looking for (vegetarian) food. Pizza is always a reliable veggie alternative, so we popped into a pizza place that seemed to be kind of open. There was one other occupied table in the restaurant, with an attractive young couple snuggled on the same side of a corner table. They looked like the stereotype of young lovers, but in the thirty minutes that we sat across from them in the restaurant, I don't think that they said 10 words to each other. Then they got up and left. These situations always make me wonder what's actually going on in the lives of people whom I casually see in public. If I were a writer, I might have created a short story around this scene... 

The pizza was good and very quick. We ate up and headed back through the deserted streets to the car and back to Bratislava on the motorway. 

If you are like me, you'll be looking at maps to try to follow where we went. I'll save you the trouble: you can see our route on the map below.

The haircut

Having lured you into reading this post with the promise of a haircut, I guess I have to deliver. 

First of all: I love my Portland barber! We found her at Supercuts in 1988 (though she has since moved) and she has now been cutting my hair for 27 years. She even came to our house to cut the family's hair while she was on maternity leave from Supercuts. No one else has touched my hair with a clipper or scissors since 1988.

Needless to say, I was very nervous about getting my hair cut in Slovakia, and put it off until I was certifiably shaggy. Finally, this week, I just had to get it cut. I had asked a couple of Americans about barber shops where they might speak English, but had not received a lot of encouragement. One said that he had been to a couple, but that both the English and the haircut were disappointing. But he recommended Gentleman's World as the next one he planned to try. 

I wasn't sure quite what to expect. In the United States, an enterprise named "Gentleman's World" would be more likely to feature lap dances than haircuts (or maybe both?). They had a phone number for reservations, but given my less-than-rudimentary Slovak a phone conversation seemed risky. The gestures that I have come to rely on to supplement my Slovak vocabulary don't work on the phone. 

So I went into the city on Friday morning like a scared sheep headed for shearing. I arrived at 10am and found a pleasant-looking glass-front barber shop with 6 chairs, only one of which was active, on the ground floor of a large bank tower, sandwiched between a pharmacy (note the green cross!) and a bank branch.

There were two employees in the room, one giving a straight-razor shave to a customer and the other at the appointment desk in the back. Approaching the desk, my first words (as they so often are) were a desperate "Hovoríte po anglický?" ("Do you speak English?") The young man at the desk gave the universal, modest Slovak response, "Yes, a little." They could not cut my hair right away, so I made an appointment for 11:00 and joined Suzanne at a coffee shop across the street to wait for my time.

I returned just before 11:00 and sat in the waiting chairs for a few minutes. The person who was at the desk before was now cutting a new customer's hair and the first barber was also hard at work. Just after 11:00, another young man entered and plugged in his clippers at the chair between the other barbers. He was destined to cut my hair, and he spoke "a little" English.

I had the foresight to have Suzanne take pictures of my last Portland haircut from the front, side, and back, in case I had trouble communicating with my Bratislava barber. I told him that I had pictures and showed him what I wanted to look like. He seemed to think that he could accomplish this and started off buzzing and snipping while I sat nervously staring at my unfocused (without my glasses) image in the mirror. After about five minutes, I relaxed, figuring that whatever was going to happen was going to happen, and I really never have to look at my own hair anyway! I kept thinking about an old favorite cartoon, in which the barber has just finished with a customer and, pointing to a wall of hats, says "You're right, that is a terrible haircut. Do you want to buy a hat?"

It seemed like he took forever, going over and over the sides and back with his razor as my long, gray fleece accumulated on the floor. Then he took the scissors to the top. Finally, after about 25 minutes, he asked if this looked OK. I put on my glasses and got my first peek at my "new look." Mostly it was fine, although he left the top a little longer than usual and wanted to comb it back off my forehead rather than across. So I approved, thinking that I was finished. But no ... next came the wash, which I actually appreciated because I hate having the little hair clippings falling all over my neck and clothes for the rest of the day. After the wash was the scalp massage, which consisted of him pulling the skin up toward the top of my head from every direction. Then was the combing, blow-drying, treatment with hair tonic, and finally application of hair spray. I can confidently say that never has so much attention been given to my thick, gray mane.

The results? I'll let you judge for yourself. Here's the before (August) and after (October):

August

October

I can live with this, and after one more haircut in December I'll be back to Portland and can have it the old way!

Slovak Philharmonic

This week was the opening of the fall season of the Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra. Kind of at the last minute, we decided to see if we could get tickets for Friday night. The online ticket site has an English version and is very easy to navigate, with clear seat selection options. Five minutes and 26 euros (for two top-price tickets!) later I was printing out our tickets. The convenience of their ticket process (with no service charge) puts American ticket vendors to shame!

We got all dressed up and took our stand-by #6 tram into the city. We had been warned that European concert goers are more formal than in America, so I put on my black suit, a white shirt, and a conservative tie. Suzanne wore a long black dress with her black-and-white jacket over the top. We arrived (as we always do) 30 minutes before the 7pm concert at the Philharmonic's concert hall Reduta, next to the old national theater and around the corner from the U.S. Embassy. We were surprised that the concert began so early, as many things in other parts of Europe (like dinner) have been quite late in the evening. 

As we walked by the Reduta concert hall last month, there was lots of construction work going on inside. The results are magnificent. Inside the building, a young lady glanced for an instant at our tickets and waved us up the stairs. (Surprisingly, this was the only ticket check.) The main staircase leading to the lobby is amazingly beautiful; Central European 19th century style at its best.

Reduta upper lobby

There are two halls on opposite sides of the upper lobby, the larger one where the orchestra plays and a smaller one for chamber music. Finally, at 6:45, they sold us a program for 50 cents (so the concert actually cost 26.50€, still a tremendous bargain) and let us into the hall to find our seats. The hall is surprisingly small (seating just over 500 on the main floor, with a small balcony), but is every bit as beautiful as the lobby. It has large windows on the right wall as you face the stage, and three small boxes of seats on the left side.

Our seats were near the back, just under the balcony. The organ whose pipes you see behind the stage is brand new. You can just see the box containing the organ keyboard at the side of the stage under the front window in the picture above. We can't wait to go back and hear something with organ!

After hearing about the relative formality of European concert halls, we were surprised to see everything from suits to jeans, though more of the former than the latter. I guess it is the 21st century and no performing group is going to turn down ticket money from the shabby rabble. 

Although the requisite "Turn off your cell phones" announcement was done in Slovak and English, the printed program was solely in Slovak. We battled our way through as much of the program as we could, relying on easily-translated Slovak phrases such as postbeethovenovským symfonickým komplexom and mendelssohnovskou atmosférou to guide the way. Unlike American symphony concerts, the stage was empty when we entered the hall. The orchestra filed in as the lights went down, taking their seats and tuning before the conductor's entrance.

The evening began with the premier of a work called Stimmung by local composer Anton Steinecker. It was one of those insufferable modern works in which even the (presumably) right notes sound wrong. This was probably the worst possible way to begin our experience with a new orchestra. We were thankful it was only 10 minutes long. 

Next up was a violin (husle in Slovak) fantasy by Josef Suk, a Czech composer active in the early 20th century. Suzanne has played a Suk symphony with the Oregon Sinfonieta, so his work was familiar. The soloist was a brilliant young Czech huslista named Josef Špaček, who studied at Curtis and Julliard in the United States and at age 29 has been the concertmaster of the Czech Philharmonic for four years. The performance was wonderful and the audience would not let him off the stage without an encore and numerous curtain calls. 

After the intermission came Dvořák's third symphony, on which the orchestra was at its best, turned loose for the first time in the evening from the earlier atonal noise-making and basic orchestral solo accompaniment. The concert hall is small, so at times the fortes were almost overpowering. The lower strings and brass seemed to resonate more than the upper-register instruments, but perhaps that was just because our seats were under the balcony.

Overall, a delightful evening of Czechoslovak music. The orchestra is good; probably about on the level of our beloved Oregon Symphony. But we missed the subtleties of interpretation that Carlos Kalmar brings to that group and I particularly missed the brilliant pianissimos that we have learned to love from the Oregonians.

Breakfast!

We love going out for breakfast! Almost any weekend day in Portland we are likely to be found at Genie's, J&M Cafe, Marco's, or one of another half-dozen favorite breakfast spots. Naturally, one of our first searches here was for places with good, substantial breakfast menus. The Web site Best Breakfast in Bratislava was very helpful and we have now visited most of the places it recommends. Mostly we have been either somewhat disappointed or moderately satisfied. There are usually only a couple of egg dishes without meat and the overall tastiness has been uneven. But the first place on the list is one that is worthy of Portland's breakfast/brunch scene. We revisited it this morning for the second time.

Rannô Ptáča (roughly "morning chickadee" as nearly as we can translate) is a branch of the Štúr Café chain of coffee shops around the city. It is located across the street from the entrance to the cul-de-sac leading to main train station and is accessible for us with one transfer on the trams. The staff are delightful, speak excellent English, and the breakfast menu is the most complete and delicious we have yet found. I've had one of their breakfast burritos (with scrambled eggs, avocado, homemade salsa, and sour cream) and the Mexican omelette with corn, cheese, salsa and sour cream. Suzanne vouches for the Greek omelette (feta and spinach) and the Italian eggs (fried eggs on tomato sauce and Parmesan cheese base). There are several other enticing veggie choices, so I'm afraid that we'll end up being regulars there before long.

Rannô Ptáča from the outside

Suzanne inside. Note the wings hanging from the ceiling to complement the chickadee theme.

Random pictures

This post is getting a little long, so I'll close with a couple of pictures from around the city that I haven't included in earlier posts. The first is one of the iconic buildings left over from Communist Bratislava. It is the headquarters of the Slovak television company. Why would someone build a building in the shape of an upside-down pyramid? Maybe just to show that they can! Capitalist architects have no monopoly on weirdness! (The building that you can just see a bit of at the right is the base of the tallest building in Slovakia. Fittingly, it's the central bank!)

Last month they had a several collections of award-winning photographs displayed in large panels on the Hviezoslavovo Namestie, the wooded pedestrian avenue/square in the old city that is the closest Bratislava has to a Champs Élysées. (And which has the historic national theater at one end and the U.S., German, and Czech embassies on one side.) There were a lot of interesting photographs, but one in particular caught my eye every time I walked down the street; I'm glad that I took a picture of it before the exhibit was taken down. The three generations, babka, mama, and dievča, all in traditional Slovak clothing and all buried in their cell phones, tells a lot about life in Slovakia as it races from a traditional society into the 21st century.

So dovidenia for now. I hope that all of our friends in Portland and around the country are enjoying the fall.

Visitors and classroom adjustments

Bratislava, Friday 16 October

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own personal opinions, not those of the Fulbright Commission or the U.S. Department of State.

It's been a while since I've posted, for which I apologize. One of the things that I promised myself when I started this blog was that I wouldn't write just to write: only when I had something to say that I thought might be interesting to those who might read it. There simply hasn't been much "news" this week to write about. But I am now 3-4 weeks into my teaching, so I can share some better insights about my reactions to teaching in this very different environment.

First, I'll start with what news there is, or isn't. No word from the Foreign Police. They have a month from our submission date (5 October) to respond, so we may not hear from them for another few weeks. We're just keeping our fingers crossed (and our gas tank full in case we need to flee to Croatia).

We had a lovely visit with my sister Pat last week, and her partner John over the weekend. Pat arrived on the train from Vienna on Wednesday late afternoon, and we narrowly averted disaster. Bratislava has two train stations: the main station just north of the old city (hlavná stanica) and another one in the south of the city (stanica petržalka). We had talked with many natives about trains to Vienna and were told that they go out of the Petržalka station, so I assumed that would be where Pat would arrive. I would be going to class at the late-afternoon time of her arrival, so Suzanne would be doing the pickup. We practiced twice how to get to the Petržalka station from our apartment, where to park there, and then how to get to the hotel where Pat would be staying. On the morning of the day she was to arrive, I happened (fortunately) to look online just to see if there was any information about her train. Hmmm, it seems that her train was to arrive at the main station, not Petržalka. Had I not happened to look (for no particular reason) at the train schedule, Suzanne would have been at Petržalka and an undoubtedly panicked Pat would have been at the main train station with no Slovak at all, no cell phone that works in Slovakia, and no one there to pick her up! As is was, all the well-rehearsed directions to and from Petržalka were out the window and Suzanne had to figure out how to get to the main station, where to park, and how to get back to the hotel on her own. Of course, she did perfectly, despite her misgivings and, I´m sure, lots of internal cursing of my original claim that Petržalka was the place to go.

Once we got her picked up, we had a great time with them, visiting a lot of the places in Bratislava and the region that Suzanne and I had enjoyed earlier. The one "adventure" we had during their visit was on Saturday night. There is a TV transmission tower at Kamzík in the hills above Bratislava that is renowned for its view. (Picture below is from Wikipedia; I don't have one as good.)

It has a revolving restaurant that was alleged to serve good food and to provide the very best panorama of the city, so we booked dinner reservations there for Saturday night.

As with the Petržalka train station, we had to practice getting there because we weren't sure of the best route. Well, at least we tried to practice. Let's just say that the practice, ending up time after time on one-lane roads that became one-way down the hill, did not inspire much confidence in our ability to actually make it back up there. So I had it all mapped out and printed out from Google maps because our GPS didn't seem very helpful on the practice run. (GPS is pretty useless in Slovakia because the names of the streets are almost never posted in a visible way; if a marking exists at all, it is a small white sign on the side of a building that you can never find in time to make the turn. It's bad enough that Jill's Australian voice butchers the pronunciation of the Slovak names. But even when we can figure out that she said to "turn left on Bárdošova" there will rarely be a visible sign that will tell us which street is Bárdošova. We have to go by the distances---50 meters to the turn---and just hope we get it right.)

So Saturday evening came along and up we went ... up into the clouds! Late Saturday afternoon a dense fog had settled in above the city. By the time we got halfway up the hill, we could barely see lines on the road (when such existed). When we got to the tower, after a very nervous (but geographically sound!) ascent, you would never have known from the parking lot that there was a tower! We went up the elevator to the "Altitude" restaurant to find that the lovely dining room, with its revolving circle of tables, was completely surrounded by white. We couldn't see the ground below, let alone the city in the valley! Oh well. Dinner was good, and they had a pianist playing in one of the corners of the (square) room outside the revolving circle of tables. We revolved past the piano every hour and he seemed to play "oldies" every time we came by; I guess we must have looked like (and maybe were) the oldest people in the uncrowded dining room.

Pat and John left on Monday morning, so it has been back to the routine of grading homework assignments and preparing for and attending my classes since then. I've been trying to apply the teaching methods that have seemed to work well for me over the years at Reed. I give lots of homework and use the comments as a mechanism for individual intellectual communication with each student. But unlike at Reed, where I never, ever put a numerical or letter grade on a paper, I'm actually (when I remember) putting points on each question for the students.

Apparently the emphasis on comments rather than points is not the norm here. I had an interesting email exchange with one of my masters students. I had forgotten to put the points on the first question of her assignment when I read it, so she wanted to know her score. I responded to tell her the score and to apologize, saying that I was accustomed to a system in which we wrote detailed comments to help students learn but didn't put points on the page. Quoting from her response: "Your system ... is quite different than here in Slovakia. I have never before seen any comments on my homework, thesis, or even tests." Stop for a minute and let that sink in. She is in her fourth year of university study and has never seen a comment written on any of her assignments. Wow!

But she liked the idea of comments very much and went on to say "I guess it costs a lot of your free time." Hmmm. Maybe that's why I don't have any free time (and neither do any of my Reed colleagues)!

I am finding teaching the classes to be quite difficult in some ways. The actual lecturing and, of course, the subject matter, are very easy and familiar. I can switch on my "Romer Chapter 2" lecture and practically do it in my sleep. But as I've mentioned earlier, the classes meet once a week for three hours. It is really quite brutal on the students to try to listen to me for three hours and stay awake. I try to break it up by asking lots of questions (in response to which most of the students just stare at me silently), taking periodic breaks, and reviewing homework, but three hours is a long time. And seven days between classes is a very long time. It's hard to maintain any momentum.

The masters class has presented some interesting issues. These are fourth-year students and there is a real mixture. The class seems to be about 25 students. I say "seems to be" because students that I have written off as having dropped the class have sometimes reappeared after missing a couple of weeks of classes and assignments. A preliminary assessment suggests that there are about 10-15 students who are strongly engaged in the class: attending regularly and working hard on all of the assignments. Then there is a group that are only marginally engaged. These students miss classes, miss assignments, or turn in assignments that are quite poor. A lot of them are looking at their phones in their laps during class or staring at their laptops (which they may or may not be using to take notes). I'm generally inclined to treat the students as adults who are responsible for their own decisions. If they decide that it is not worthwhile to pay full attention during class, then they are either smart enough to learn the material without listening, in which case I can't really fault them, or they are going to do poorly the exams, in which case their grades will reflect their lack of effort. Either way, it's their choice, as long as they do not disrupt their peers. But I miss the Reed students with whom this just doesn't happen!

The PhD class has some different issues. There are about 10 students, of whom about half are economics students and the rest are from various business disciplines and international relations. Pretty much all of them are intimidated by the level of mathematics in the class, and some are really struggling with it. Given the very limited class time, I'm having to omit large sections of what I teach at Reed and trying to focus quite narrowly on the very basic elements of each set of models. They all pay close attention in class, but I get a lot of deer-in-the-headlights stares whenever I ask a question. The last class of the first half is next week, followed by the final exam for the economic growth part of the course the week after. I'm sure that some of the first-half-only students will be glad not to have to spend their Thursday mornings listening to me any more!

This afternoon and early evening we had a city tour and a brew-pub get-together with a remarkably diverse set of international researchers and graduate students organized by Euraxess. At the pub we sat across from an agricultural science PhD student from Uzbekistan, an architecture PhD student from Afghanistan, and a linguistics scholar from Croatia. A few seats down the table were two economists from Ukraine who are in the same building as my office at EUBA, and with whom I hope to connect on campus. And across from them was a Russian economics student who is auditing my PhD course. Interesting evening!

A few weeks ago, I posted something about the tendency of Slovaks to economize on the use of vowels. I'll sign off for tonight with a wonderful example, courtesy of the Croatian linguist, who challenged us to pronounce it: Strč prst skrz krk. A four-word sentence without a single letter we would recognize as a vowel. It means, approximately, "Put a finger through your throat." It seems like you'd have to do exactly that to make it come out right! My best rendering of its pronunciation is "sturch purst skurz kurk," with all of the "r"s rolled aggressively. One more fun-with-consonants adventure, try the verb for "to ignite:" vzbľknuť!

After that mouthful, I can't think of anything else to say, so that's all for now. More next week, or whenever anything happens worthy of passing along.

Trip to the Foreign Police

Bratislava, Tuesday 6 October

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own personal opinions, not those of the Fulbright Commission or the U.S. Department of State.

Having given our paperwork over to the nice facilitators at E.R.I. on Friday morning, Monday was the big day when we were to visit the Foreign Police to submit them and have our bio-metric data recorded. This should be easy, right? Hand in the paperwork and have our fingerprints taken.

Nooooo way! What an ordeal! I think Suzanne has more scars from this experience than I do, but even I found it to be at the same time eye-opening, dehumanizing, and immensely frustrating. It was a little like a miniature of what Ellis Island must have been like, except that we had a wonderful, English-speaking chaperon Beáta to lead us (sometimes literally by the hand) through the process. Her livelihood is taking foreigners to the Foreign Police office the three days a week that they are open, and she is very good at it. Very simply, there is no possible way that we could have gotten through this process without her.

It started for us at 7:15, when we arrived at the Foreign Police office in Petržalka, the rather frumpy district of Bratislava where the university is located, across the Danube from the old city. The office is a dumpy, low building of socialist vintage, crumbling in places but, I guess, ultimately functional. The morning started much earlier for Beáta's family; her son got in line for us (and for Tony, another American they were representing on Monday) sometime before 5am. But the "line" worked in mysterious ways. Most of the time, it was more of a crowd with no obvious order. The office nominally opens at 7:30, but no one was actually processed until at least 8:30 or 9:00. Some time about 7:30, Beáta and her counterparts from other similar companies went to the front of the line and were allowed inside the building. I can only speculate on what happened during the next hour, but I suspect there was a lot of horse-trading as the various chaperons negotiated their positions. At about 8:10, Suzanne got a phone call from Beáta inside saying that they were going to issue 19 numbers today to the much-longer-than-that queue of customers. We didn't know whether to be worried or not.

Some time around 8:30, people started going in, crowding the door to the point that we were being squeezed between those behind and those in front. The police allowed about 15 people in and then one of them put his hand across the door to prevent further entry ... just as we got to the door. Beáta was inside signaling frantically to us to come in and even came to take Suzanne's hand to pull her in. So we ducked under the policeman's arm-barrier and scooted into the room, with the policeman shouting at us in Slovak (which we could honestly ignore because we didn't understand it). We took tickets from the machine: 323 and 324, and they were starting at 301. It looked like we were out of luck if they were only taking 19 numbers: we would have to start over on Wednesday.

But we stood with Tony in the crowded anteroom filled with hopeful temporary immigrants for about 30 minutes. There seemed to be no one going into the inner chambers where the actual business was (or, actually, was not) being transacted. Suddenly the number board above the door flashed into action: 301! At that point, around 9:00, Beáta raced across the room, swooped us both up by the arms, and led us into the inner sanctum. Whatever happened in the anteroom between 7:30 and 8:30, she ended up with the first number and was using it to get first us, then Tony, through the process.

There were three windows in the office staffed by three pleasant-looking young female police officers, plus one window on the side that occasionally opened for what seemed like quick transactions and was run by a rather grumpy-looking older male officer. Beáta was camped in front of the first window with our massive file of documentation. Suzanne and I sat helplessly on the only two chairs in the room, about five feet from her on the back wall. We understood absolutely nothing of what went on in the next hour and half. The officer handling our case asked many, many questions. Beáta answered them and, periodically, raced across the room to the man's station to discuss something with him. We heard the name "Fulbright" mentioned numerous times, but understood nothing else except her occasional "Ano" or Nie" (yes or no).

At one point, Beáta came to us and commented that they were suspicious of the authenticity of Suzanne's visa stamp. I guess the Danish need to re-ink their stamp pads more often! The processing of our application was no doubt delayed by the fact that the officer handling our case was training a new officer, and had to explain every step of the process to her as well as doing the processing herself. Even with the training delays, I really, really can't imagine how it could take 90 minutes to accept our application materials. They must have checked the spelling on every word of the translations, cross-checked every birth date, etc. Maybe they even tried to call our siblings and children using the information on the form. (Did any of you get a call in the middle of the night on Monday?) Or maybe they were trying to contact our deceased parents.

About 9:15 Beáta asked Suzanne "Are you also a teacher or are you here to take care of the family?" She had coached us on this point and that Suzanne was to say "family," which she dutifully did. About 9:30 Beáta called me to the desk to sign my application form. Then back to the seat. Finally, around 10:00, after an hour of sitting in the hot little office worrying, she signaled for me to come to the little kiosk off of the main room to have my bio-metric identification information taken. The young woman there spoke good enough English and expeditiously took my photo, fingerprints, and signature. Then I was dismissed with Beáta's admonition to send Tony in to replace me. I waited in the anteroom for another 20 minutes or so until Suzanne finally emerged at about 10:30, ending one of the least enjoyable three hours we ever remember. I cannot imagine how Beáta can fight this fight (with the same pleasant-looking young and grumpy-looking old officers) every day. I hope that she is well paid.

We are so thankful for Beáta and that the Fulbright Commission arranged for her to facilitate this process. Had we showed up at the Foreign Police office, not speaking much Slovak and not having someone to arrange for us to be at or near the front of the line, we would never have gotten inside. And if we ever managed to get inside, we would never have been able to respond to the unintelligible inquisition that Beáta managed effectively on our behalf.

Of course, the process is not over. This was just the submission of our application, not the approval. If it took two hours of scrutiny just to verify that we could apply, how many days of debate will it take before they actually make a decision? The Foreign Police now have 30 days to decide whether to grant us a residency permit. If they decide in the affirmative, then we have to bring in all of our medical forms, indicating that we have been tested for lots of diseases and vaccinated against others, plus the forms showing that we are covered by medical insurance while in Slovakia. If all of that is in order, then perhaps we will actually receive the coveted residency permits, which will allow us to stay in Slovakia another couple of months past the automatic 90-day tourist visas.

It's tempting, and might be true, to say that the Slovak authorities learned to complicate bureaucratic procedures under Communist central planning. Wherever they learned them, it is clearly something they do brilliantly well. If one were cynical (and if one listened long enough to the bellicose rhetoric with which Prime Minister Robert Fico denounces the possibility of accepting Syrian refugees) one might be tempted to conclude that they make the process of residency deliberately impossible in order to discourage immigration. It's a process that I would not ever want to go through again.

As you can probably tell, we have reached the stage in our stay where "Oh, that's different and interesting" has started to give way to "Why in the world would they do it like that?" but we have not yet arrived at "Well, Slovakia is just different and now we're used to it." I imagine that we will get to that final stage eventually. But perhaps with the culture as well as with our Slovak language skills, we'll just be starting to get comfortable about the time that we head home in February. And yes, Bratislava has its charms, but it's not (yet) home.

Time for class

Bratislava, Sunday 4 October

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own personal opinions, not those of the Fulbright Commission or the U.S. Department of State.

Deportation Update: Things are looking more promising. The amazing Minnesotans managed to get our corrected, certified, and "apostilled" marriage certificate here in four working days. Huge thanks again to the Wadena clerk of court's office, the Minnesota secretary of state's office, and Steve and Lois Parker in Minneapolis. We found out about the problem on Thursday and got the new documents the following Wednesday morning. Everything is now ready for submission. The office that is coordinating the submission will have someone standing in line for us at 5am on Monday. (She thinks that colder weather will shorten the line, so she won't have to get there at 3am as has sometimes been the case.) We will join her in line at 7:20, awaiting the 8:00 opening of the Foreign Police. We hope to be in the first 10 or so in line so that we can get processed within an hour or two. Then it's a few weeks' wait until we find out whether we actually get our permit cards. We are so glad to have reached this stage on time that we haven't even thought about the next stage.

Despite that fact that most of my time since we arrived has been spent just figuring out how to live in Bratislava, I am officially here to teach two macro classes and do research on regional unemployment rates. One of the classes, for their masters students (really 4th year college students), meets on Wednesdays from 5pm to 8pm. The class list suggested 37 students enrolled, but 12 of them did not show up for the first class (and 4 who were not on the list did). The group was quite a bit smaller the second week, so I expect it will settle around 20-25. That's a little bigger than a typical Reed class, but not enormous. The class time is supposed to be 90 minutes of lecture and 90 minutes of seminar. But in practice it's going to be 180 minutes varying freely between lecture, discussion, and students presenting their homework problems. The first week went fine, except that the students (and I) were totally exhausted well before the end of three hours.

For the second week, Suzanne made her wonderful chocolate chip cookies, which were a hit and helped with blood-sugar levels when I handed them out at the break. But the students (and I) were still pretty tired toward the end. I'm now halfway through grading the first problem set. Some of the students are doing very well; others less so. The overall experience of teaching here is not so much different from classes at Reed (or at Houston in the 1980s). The students seem to appreciate my feedback a lot, though, as I don't think they are used to the kind of detailed comments that Reed faculty write on student assignments.

The PhD class met for the first time on Thursday morning: 9 to 12:15 with a 15 minute break. Same plan: officially 90 minutes of lecture and 90 minutes of seminar, but it ends up being three hours of a mixture of formats. There are about a dozen students in the PhD class.

The PhD class is an unusual (to me) registration arrangement. First, the class only meets for eight sessions: 24 actual hours of classes. This is less than half the class time that I have for macro at Reed (52 hours), and yet I'm trying to cover most of the same textbook. It's going to be difficult to get through all of that material in such a small amount of class time. I'm already going through my Reed notes and figuring out what I can cut altogether, what they can (try to) learn on their own, and what is really, truly essential to discuss in class.

Second, there are students in the class from non-economics departments who only need to take half of the class (12 hours of class time over four Thursdays). We've arranged the class as four weeks of economic growth, then four weeks of business cycles, so the half-term students can take either half. We'll see how this goes. I keep reminding myself that I can only do what the constraints of their program allow me to do, but I fear that frustration will set in soon because I always want all of my students to learn everything!

Not surprisingly, the physical classrooms are very different from the Reed norm. No "conference rooms" here with carpeting and soft chairs. The masters' classroom is larger, but both have the same arrangement: a lecture hall with straight rows of desks and fold-down, wooden seats, tiered upward from the stage to the back. The larger room would probably hold about 80 students (and there is a door at the top that opens onto the floor above). The seats are wood and not padded, which must be very uncomfortable on the derriere for three hours. (I asked the students the first night if the seats were as uncomfortable as they looked, and they said that they definitely were!)

The large building in which my office and classrooms are located has a glassed-in booth in the lobby that is staffed by one or two "building monitors." (That's the best description I can think of for them, but I don't know what they are officially called.) Both classrooms have computer projectors, but you have to go to the monitor station to check out the remote control, the cable, and markers and chalk, all in a metal suitcase with the room number in big letters on the side. My most helpful colleague Daniel Dujava is sitting in on the masters class. (He says that he is teaching the Slovak language version and is interested in comparing my approach with what he does. Or maybe he is just so worried about what might happen in my classroom that he wants to be there to avert disaster!) It was a great help to have him there to get the equipment for me and show me how to set it up.

On Thursday, when I showed up (without Daniel's supporting presence) to the PhD class, the room was locked. I knew where to go for help, but there was a lot of improvised sign language trying to communicate with the men at the monitor booth. Finally I wrote the room number on a piece of paper and used my hand to demonstrate turning a key, they figured out what I needed and obliged with a key (and the suitcase containing the projector remote and other equipment) and collected my signature on a sheet in case I decided to abscond with the remote or the key.

I guess that the biggest surprise about the teaching so far is how similar it is to all of the other teaching that I have done. I'm focusing on speaking slowly, on using European rather than American examples, on avoiding slang and jargon, and on all the other things that might help me be understood. But really, they seem to be understanding the lectures as well as Reed students do, so my job in class so far hasn't been a lot different than what I do when I teach these courses at home.

Perhaps the biggest difference has been in the homework answers: not whether the answer is right or wrong but rather the style of the answer. Reed students understand implicitly that when I ask a question, they should not just provide the simple answer to the question but that they should use the question as an opportunity to support their answers with a detailed explanation of the underlying theories. I've tried to be pretty explicit about this in the homework here (for example, adding Explain. or Why? to the end of the question), but there are some students who still don't give me the analytical answer I seek. For example, when I presented them with the six different measures of the unemployment rate published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and asked why economists might be interested in the alternative measures, one student  responded (paraphrasing) "because they all measure a different aspect of unemployment." I guess I need to be even more explicit. ("For each alternative measure, explain in detail how an economist or a policymaker might use the information that this variant provides.") Good lessons for me in being careful about how I ask questions!

I haven't really gotten launched on my research activities yet, but I'm close. The first task is to locate experts on the labor market and unemployment in the region. I have a few leads and will begin following them up this week now that classes seem to be under control. The university is so fragmented that it is likely that the people who do work closest to mine are located in another department. I am in the Katedra ekonomickej teórie, or Department of Economic Theory, whereas the labor economists are in the Katedra sociálneho rozvoja a práce, or Department of Social Development and Labour. Both are administratively in the Faculty of National Economy and they are just a floor below us in the same building, so it shouldn't be too difficult to connect.

Four museums in a day

This morning we headed out on a museum tour of Bratislava. We hadn't yet explored many of the local tourist attractions within the old city, so we started out at the Clock Museum located in an old house on the side of the castle hill. It has a wonderful collection of clocks, both from a decorative perspective and from the functional side. Here is a representative selection of the clocks and watches, all made by Bratislava artisans over the centuries.

One of the most beautiful clocks

A combination of four hour glasses. How did this work?

Note the real clock at upper right in the church's clock tower

After the clocks, we had a quick lunch at what has become one of our favorite old-city restaurants, a place called Re-Fresh, where they speak both English and vegetarian. (We initially found them from their sign in front, which says "Vegan, Vegetarian, Meat-Eater? You can all eat together here!") Then it was on to the Wine Museum on the main square in the city. This was a small display, but an interesting one, featuring the stories of the two most prominent historical wine families in Slovakia, the Hubert family (which "still" makes really good sparkling wine) and the Palugyay family, whose winery assets were sold off in the 20th century.

 

Pozsony and Pressburg are "Bratislava" in Hungarian and German

Medals won by Hubert sparkling wine from 1825

The wine museum is attached to a museum of period furnishings in the Apponyi House, the palace of a leading noble Hungarian family, which was very pleasant. But none of the furnishings in the Apponyi House are original and after touring the Červerý Kameň castle, which has largely original furnishings, the marginal value added was not large.

Finally, we went through the City History Museum of Bratislava. This museum contains lots of artifacts from the history of Bratislava since 1200. One observation from this museum: Slovak history seems to end in 1918 with the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire. There is very little about the inter-war period when it was part of Czechoslovakia, absolutely nothing about 1939-45 when it was a Nazi puppet state, and nothing at all about the Communist era. Unlike Germany, Slovakia has not yet faced up to regretful aspects of its past. As of now, there does not seem to be a "holocaust museum" or "museum of Communism" here. It will be interesting to watch how much Slovakia's attitude toward these periods change over the next few decades as the more recent episodes become "history."

Tomorrow is our big day: 7am to register the Foreign Police. If things don't go well, I'll probably post again tomorrow just to vent my frustrations! If things go smoothly, it will be longer. My sister Pat arrives for a visit on Wednesday, so I'll be busy late in the week and you might not hear from me again until Sunday or Monday. But if you don't see a post, it probably means that all is well! Until them, dovidenia!