What I will miss most about Bratislava

Bratislava, 26 January 2016

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

In my last post, I listed some of the things that I miss about our lives in Portland. It was a long list and it may have made you think that I have not enjoyed living in Bratislava. That is far from the case.

As we prepare to head back to chilly Sweden en route to soggy Portland, I am taking time to reflect on some of the things that I will miss about living in Bratislava. This is not a perfect place to live---no place is---but there are aspects of living here that are very attractive and that will, at times, make me wish that I was still here. Some of them may seem trivial, but I appreciate all of them as part of the adventure we have had living here.

So here are a few of the things I will miss most about living in Bratislava.

Public transportation.  For the most part, our spiffy new Volvo has sat in the parking area outside the apartment unused. It didn't take long in Bratislava to discover that (1) parking anywhere near the Old City is expensive, difficult, or impossible, and (2) the trams and buses go everywhere with (usually) minimal waiting. We are fortunate to live a short walk from a tram stop served by four lines, all of which go to various locations in the Old City in about ten minutes. With no more than one transfer, we can get anywhere in less than an hour. Shortly after arriving here, we bought three-month passes, which have our picture on them and an electronic chip embedded for identification. We have added an extra month online when necessary. Fare inspectors come around the buses and trams occasionally (twice for us in 5 months) with a machine that reads the chip and verifies that we have paid through the current date. It is a very efficient system that eliminates the need for cash or tickets on boarding. I'm sure that there is some cheating---literally, free riding---but there are so many people who dutifully stamp their single-ride tickets that compliance must be very high. The fines for violation are also very high (we have heard 80 euros), so you don't have to get caught very often to make it cheaper to pay up.

Because ridership is very high, trams and buses are frequent (a tram every two minutes at our stop during weekdays). Portland's award-winning transit system is pathetic in comparison, largely because it is so underutilized. Everyone takes the trams and buses here, which means that I don't get the feeling (common in Portland at non-rush hours) that I'm the only one on the bus who has taking a shower this month. I'm sure that we will go back to driving most everywhere when we return to Portland, but we will miss having the option of hopping on a tram and zipping home with no need for a designated driver.

Polite and courteous young people.  It is common when I enter a crowded bus for a young person to hop up out of his or her seat and insist that I sit down. (More so when I am not wearing a stocking cap to hide my gray hair!) Of course it makes me feel really old and I often try to refuse, but I find the general degree of politeness among young people here, including my students, to be a delight.

Low cost of living.  We timed our stay in the Euro Zone very fortuitously. This is the dollar vs. the euro for the last five years:

The euro is around 20% cheaper than it has been for most of the last five years, which means that everything we buy here is 20% cheaper than it would have been. But 20% does not come close to equating the cost of many things we buy with their cost back home. The Penn World Table estimates the price of consumer goods in Slovakia at 87% of the U.S. price level in 2011, so that would be about 70% now with the appreciation of the dollar and similar inflation rates---that seems about right. Most food items are much cheaper, with the exception of some American brands, and other than "Coke Light" we don't buy many of these. Unless we buy a lot of higher-end wine (by which I mean $10 per bottle), it is hard to spend $100 at the grocery store, even when we have 4-5 bags. (And buying 3 or 4 bottles of equivalent wine in Portland would cost $100 by itself.) Most produce items are very inexpensive, often a few cents per kilo, and the basic kinds of bread/rolls are almost free. It will be a real shock to go to Costco or Fred Meyer in Portland and spend several hundred dollars. I've talked before about the low prices of concert tickets: the most expensive seat at the Slovak Philharmonic is $15 and at the opera is $33. We went to a lovely concert last night at the historical national theater and paid less than $10. And of course we would struggle to find a new, modern, 2-bedroom, furnished apartment with utilities paid close to central Portland for anything near the ~$1000 we are paying here.

Sunrises and sunsets from our apartment.  As much as I will be glad to be back to living in a house and having all of our domestic amenities again, I will miss the views from our apartment windows a lot. Being two floors off the ground at the top of a hill means that we can see a panorama of western Bratislava. It's not like a Mt. Hood view or a beautiful cityscape of a downtown skyline, but the sunrises and sunsets (when the fog allows us to see them) are magnificent!

Produce market.  Portland's farmers' markets are attractive and we enjoy visiting them, but the all-year, six-days-per-week produce market here is incomparably bigger and better. Portland farmers' markets are an upper-middle-class luxury venue and charge prices much higher than the grocery stores. In contrast, most of the customers at the produce market here are older men and women of apparently modest means and prices are correspondingly lower. And while Portland markets limit the selection to only local products, the sellers at the market here have both local and imported items, so you don't have to  make a separate trip to the grocery store to get the bananas, oranges, persimmons, and dragon-fruit that can't be grown locally.

Struggling to learn Slovak.  This seems like a weird entry on this list. We have had great difficulties due to our lack of language and being back to a place where everyone speaks English was first on my list of things I miss about Portland. But it has been really fun to go to Slovak classes and have the constant challenge of figuring out what things mean. We both carry little dictionaries everywhere and often race each other to translate a phrase we see on a sign. In a different life, I might have specialized in languages because I really enjoy understanding the origins of words and how grammatical structures of various languages differ. Just a curious example: I expect that modern words like "laptop" will be the same everywhere based on their recent origins in English, but why is the word for "sugar" so similar in languages that are so dissimilar? It is cukor in both Slovak and Hungarian, Zucker in German, sucre in French, azúcar in Spanish, etc., all pronounced about the same way.

Our language teacher, Roman, turned out to be very amusing in his own dry kind of way. For the most part, he didn't seem to enjoy his work very much. This is probably due to the attitude of the students in our class, the majority of whom were likely there only because they were required to be. He spoke only a little English, which was the only common language of the polyglot class. This made it difficult for him to explain definitions and grammar in a lot of detail, but it also forced us to stretch a bit more than if we had someone who could easily speak English sentences. He had some mannerisms that still reduce us to giggles, especially his exclamations of "Super!" in Slovak when someone would do something especially well. And we still imitate Roman's "O mein Gott" (often combined with a resigned shake of the head), which he would say when someone said something either totally wrong or culturally inappropriate. For example, when we were learning gendered adjectives, he taught us that tučný muž meant "fat man." So Suzanne (never bashful in class) asked "so a fat woman would be tučná žena?" Roman:"O mien Gott! No! Never tučná žena! Pološtíhla žena. Never tučná žena!" (Pološtíhla žena translates literally as "half-slim woman.") I guess women are never fat here, which is not quite true, though there are an astounding number of very slender young women.

Speed limits that make sense.  The standard rural motorway speed limit here is 130kph (80mph). This is true in almost every country except Germany, where the default is no limit at all. Driving 65 or even 70 on U.S. freeways is going to seem like an enormous waste of time, which it is. Maybe I'll have to move to Wyoming!

Local foods.  While the food culture here is definitely meat-based, there are a few local specialties that I will really miss. There is a local string cheese called korbáčik that is my favorite snack. It comes in long strands braided together into a three- or four-stranded twist with loops at one end and the loose ends tied together with a piece of the cheese at the other.

To eat korbáčik you untwist the strands, then peel the thinnest possible pieces off of each strand. If you get them thin enough, they literally melt on your tongue! And it takes 10 minutes to eat the cheese pictured above, which is good discipline for habitually fast eaters like me.

The Slovak "national dish" is called bryndzové halušky. It is a bowl of tiny potato dumplings covered with local bryndza (a creamy sheep cheese). It is traditionally served with bacon on top, but Suzanne's vegetarian version has crispy onions instead. This is a dish we will continue to make if we can manage to find bryndza at home.

A Slovak festival specialty is terdlnik, a pastry wound in a spiral and rolled thin around a metal cylinder about two inches in diameter, baked, and then rolled in cinnamon or another sweet coating before being taken off the cylinder and served hot. Yummy! And Suzanne found a pair of terdlnik rollers to bring home, so we will get to perfect our terdlnik skills in Portland.

The dried cranberries I put on my cereal every morning are better than any we have had in the United States. They are plump and moist, not just shriveled husks, and very sweet.

Finally, though it seems like heresy to say it as a Portlander, I will really miss the fresh salmon here. It's not that we don't have good fresh salmon in Portland, but the salmon from the grocery store aisle or in a restaurant here is consistently as good as the best Pacific Northwest Chinook and costs a quarter as much. I don't know where it is caught, but it seems very fresh and is always flavorful and tender.

Well-dressed women.  (Trigger warning: I'm not going to be politically correct here!) We were told in our Fulbright orientation (by a woman) that Slovak women are very beautiful. There is a lot of truth to this. And most of them also dress very well, have every hair in place, and just generally seem to take a lot of pride in projecting a attractive personal image. While some men also seem to care about their grooming, many are as slovenly as I am. I realize that it is hopelessly sexist, but it is a real pleasure to sit on the bus or tram and appreciate the appearance of the people, especially the women, around me.

Things are not named for generals or politicians.  Slovakia is an unusual country. It hasn't been on the winning side of a war in over a century (or, arguably, ever) and it has only been a country for 22 years, so I guess that they just don't have a lot of military or political leaders. When streets, squares, parks, and buildings are named after people, they often commemorate writers, poets, musicians, scientists, architects, and other cultural leaders. Even Alexander Dubček, Slovak leader of the abortive "Prague Spring" rebellion in 1967-68 and as close as modern Slovakia has to a political hero, has no street named for him in Bratislava. There is a street named for Svätopluk, but he died in 894. I suppose that the Nazis and the Communists changed all of the Austro-Hungarian names. But I find it refreshing that the Slovaks did not seem to look for generals or politicians when they renamed them.

Dogs in restaurants and trams.  As a dog-lover and former and future dog-owner, I love the idea that it is okay to bring the pooch into a restaurant or on public transportation. The American germ police would no doubt come down hard on any plan to allow this, but I think it is great and I will really miss it, especially when we have another dog.

Little-bitty police cars.  The polícia here drive around in white cars about the size of a Toyota Corolla. I had never thought about it before, but how often do American police really need the giant gas-guzzling muscle cars that they always drive. Probably very rarely. And yet every police car in Portland looks like its fuel-economy should be measured in gallons per mile instead of miles per gallon. My tax money is being wasted!

Cool bronze statues.  Bratislava is short on the "heroic" sculpture that dots the landscape of major European capitals, where every monarch had to try to leave his mark. But its place has been taken by some wonderfully creative modern works. Many of these have appeared in the blog at one time or another: the iconic workman in a hard hat emerging from a (fake) manhole, the Napoleonic soldier who deserted to the Slovak side, leaning over a park bench with his back end stuck out toward the French embassy, and countless others. One of the charms of Bratislava is that it doesn't take itself too seriously, and the street art is a good example of that.

Euro coins and bills.  It took a while to get used to the euro, but I have come to really, really like the currency. It's very logical, with sizes and colors that vary with the denomination. After some initial confusion because the 50 cent coin is larger than the one-euro (but doesn't have the multi-color feature), it all makes so much sense. They could certainly get rid of the one-cent and two-cent coins here, but having the one-euro and two-euro coins (much like Canada) is so much better than the one-dollar bills in the United States. And having different colors and sizes for the bills makes them much easier to distinguish once you get accustomed to it.

Proximity of other countries.  This is totally irrational, but it's just cool to live in Slovakia yet to be one mile from Austria and five miles from Hungary, both with very different languages and cultures. Of course, Bratislava was part of Austria-Hungary for most of the last 500 years, so there is a lot of cultural overlap, but the fifty years of the Iron Curtain did a lot to make things in Austria very different from things on this side of the border.

Blogging!  I've never done anything like writing this blog before. I've always wished I could discipline myself to keep a journal, but my normal life is so boring that I couldn't imagine ever wanting to go back and read what I had written. I mean, how interesting is "Two students visited office hours today and asked interesting questions." It has been really fun to chronicle our travels and my thoughts about living and traveling in very different places. Or maybe it's just been fun to have a life worth writing about. I doubt that I will keep this up when we are settled back home simply because I won't have anything interesting to say. But writing this blog has made the experiences more meaningful and deeper for me, as well as perhaps helping you the readers to share them. I'll miss this!


So those are my reflections on some special things about Bratislava, Slovakia, and Central Europe that will always be fond memories for me. This week we travel north to Olomouc (in the Czech Republic) for a mid-year conference of the Czech and Slovak Fulbright scholars. Then next week we start our trek homeward. I'll try to post on the weekend with highlights from our last couple of weeks, and then a couple of times on our northward travels, and finally at least once from Portland as an epilogue before I close up shop on Blogaslava.