Identifiably legal

Bratislava, Sunday 29 November

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

She's legal!

Finally, nearly two months after our initial ordeal at the Foreign Police, I picked up Suzanne's official Slovak residency ID card today. They got the birth date and address right and Suzanne's face appears on the front, so it seems that she is fully legal for the next two-and-a-half months. Hooray!

Thanksgiving in Bratislava

Of course, Thanksgiving is not a holiday here, so I had to give my final PhD lecture from 9-12:15 on Thursday morning. The Slovaks spread their thanks-giving across an abundance of holidays. One can interpret Struggle for Freedom Day as a day of giving thanks for the success of their independence. Likewise Constitution Day and Slovak National Uprising Day, all of which we have celebrated in the three months we have lived here.

We enjoyed American Thanksgiving with one of the young Fulbright scholars who is teaching English in a small town outside of Trnava. She is a Williams alumna of Vietnamese descent and we have gotten to know her fairly well through the Fulbright orientation and another trip she made to Bratislava. She stayed with us a couple of days this week and had Thansgiving with us before joining the other young Fulbrighters (there are nine) in Vienna for the rest of the weekend. She even has a Minnesota connection; her grandparents immigrated from Vietnam to Willmar, Minnesota, where they were the only Vietnamese people in town. Talk about culture shock!

On Thanksgiving, we had an excellent feast at the best restaurant in Central Europe---Suzanne's kitchen. The menu included baked salmon with garlic and dill (I hate to admit it, but the Atlantic salmon in the grocery stores here is as good as the best in Oregon), stuffing with artichoke hearts and sun-dried tomatoes, heaps of mashed potatoes, homemade cranberry sauce with cinnamon, zucchini sauteed with Parmesan cheese, and pumpkin pie for dessert. The wine for the evening was the local sparkler from Hubert, the first sparkling wine produced outside of France. A lovely Thanksgiving without turkey or pointy-ball!

Of course, our Thanksgiving tradition in Portland is making massive quantities of 10-15 varieties of brownies, which we then share with friends, colleagues, students, and eventually with anyone who will take them! (There are always way too many...) Most of you know the story, but we began making brownies in 1996, when Gourmet magazine had a feature on Christmas brownies. I was very excited about them and so was Sarah. One of us said "Which ones shall we made." To which the other replied "Let's make all of them!" So we decided to make (almost) all of the recipes during the Thanksgiving weekend while Suzanne was busy playing in the Singing Christmas Tree orchestra. Ten-year-old Sarah proved to be an excellent chocolate-melter and we had great fun---and some culinary success---in producing plates and plates of mouth-watering chocolate delights. The next Thanksgiving it wasn't a question of whether we would do it again, but of what new recipes we would add! I lost my brownie partner in 2003 when Sarah went to college, but soon after that Suzanne stopped playing the Tree, so she took Sarah's place and added her culinary expertise to make them even better.

But no brownies this year. We just don't know enough people to make it worthwhile, and we certainly don't need that many calories (my spreadsheet calculates 67,146.33) around the apartment!

Political advertising

Elections are due in the Slovak Republic next spring, and ever since we have arrived the streets have been filled with billboards advertising candidates' smiling faces. The polls suggest that the election won't be close, with the ruling Smer party of Robert Fico likely to win a sizable majority. We don't watch Slovak television or read the newspapers, so I can't appreciate the advertising in these media, but I find the billboards very interesting. Here's a sample of the ads in our neighborhood.

First up is SDKÚ, which stands for Slovenská demokratická a kresťanská únia, or Slovak Democratic and Christian Union. They are also known as Demokratická strana, or Democratic Party. Their campaign slogan is "Som zmena," which means "(I) am change." I've translated some of the other words on the billboards in the captions.

I AM CHANGE: health

I AM CHANGE: for advanced policy

I AM CHANGE: direction

I AM CHANGE: education

The next party is Sieť, which means "Network" in Slovak. Their slogan dobrý štát slúži means "serves a good state" or something like that.

Serves a good state: Families

Serves a good state: Hardworking

Slovenská národná strana (SNS) is a left-wing party. Their slogan means "proudly, expertly, respectably: together for our country."

I can't easily find anything about the next party online. The slogan at the top means "Stop them, brothers!" Strana obbornikou means "Expert party," which might be its name.

MOST-HID is a Hungarian minority party. The text at the bottom translates as "The corruption problem in EU funds is serious."

And finally, the ruling party, Smer, which means "Direction." Their slogan (at the bottom) means "We work for the people" and the big lettering on this sign says "Protect Slovakia."

I don't think this guy is running for anything, but it just shows how similar the political ads are to others. The text here means something like "A Slovak piece in a man's wardrobe."

And I'll add one more billboard that is next to a coffee house sporting Cuban flags, on the main road that our trams traverse to the city. I doubt that Fidel is running for office, at least in Slovakia, but clearly some people still have affection for him from the old days. The text after the name means approximately "personality of the century" and the bottom text is "We Slovaks congratulate Fidel on his jubilee." We haven't met many people with a lot of nostalgia for Communism, but then we have not talked with older, rural, and less educated people.

Bratislaviana

I have a couple of miscellaneous things to add this week. First, the weather here is getting cold, but the spaces where we live and work are very hot. We have not yet had to use our heating system, despite outside temperatures in the 20s, and we often end up opening windows to keep the temperature below about 78. 

I'm not sure exactly why our apartment is so hot. Our apartment has southeast and southwest windows, so we get sun (when it shines) all day, but it seems to be hot even on cloudy days. One possible explanation is that there seem to be hot-water pipes under the floor between the WC, the bathroom, and the water-heater room, and they exude heat from the floors. A second is that the water-heater room itself is always very hot; so much so that we hang our clothes there to dry. And I'm sure that we absorb heat from all of the neighboring apartments as well. But whatever the explanation, it's always hot. (Maybe it's because our landlord's name is LeHOTsky.) :)

My office on campus is also very hot, but that makes sense because it's on the top floor of the building. The first thing I do in the morning is open the windows to cool it off. That works well until the break between classes when students go out to smoke outside the entrance, which is five floors below my office.

The rest room on our floor of the building at the university is not particularly hot, but it is getting more and more dysfunctional by the week. I mentioned in earlier posts that the toilet paper is located outside the stalls, so you have to bring an appropriate amount with you, and that the soap dispenser has been empty since I arrived in early September. Now the light in the entry hall where the sink sits has burned out, so you enter a completely dark room and just have to hope that the motion-detecting light actually goes on when you go into the second room. So far so good, but that light goes off after about two minutes, so you have to finish your business quickly or be left in the dark. And then this week they ran out of paper towels to wipe your hands. What's next? No plumbing?

Here are a couple of pictures of the classroom (lecture hall, really) in which I teach the masters macro course. The first picture shows the student seating. The wooden benches must get really hard after three hours. The second shows the combination marker-board/chalkboard in the front of the room---two panels of white marker-board on the outside when it's closed and four panels of green chalkboard in the middle when it's open. There is not much "area" on this board, so I'm constantly opening and closing, switching between markers and chalk, and trying not to cover up or fold out something important. I'm also struggling not to write too small for the students to see, although I always remind them that they can move closer if they can't read the board.

In an earlier post, I mentioned Music Forum, the wonderful sheet-music store in the old city, where proprietor Igor has been so very nice to us. Here is a picture looking up his cobblestone street Na Vŕšku (literally "On the Hill"), with the old city walls and one tower of Bratislava Castle in the background.

Finally, on the way to breakfast at Rannô Ptáča this morning, we looked in the windows of an antique and art gallery in the old city. On the table were four pointing devices: elegant short sticks ending in a tiny hand with an extended pointer finger. (Do you think they have a version with the middle finger extended?) What in the world are they used for? About the only thing I could come up with was that you could use one at an auction to make a bid without having to raise your arm. Can any of you enlighten us? If you have any answers or ideas, please leave them in a comment or send me an email.

That's all from Bratislava for now. I'll be back next week with more news, or perhaps with lots of boring stuff that's not news! We attend another orchestra concert on Thursday so I'll tell you all about that. We are also thinking of traveling to Central Slovakia next weekend if the weather is decent, so I might have some pictures of mountains and castles. You'll just have to tune back in and see!