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Reflections from the Slovak Republic

Reflections I: Greetings from the Slovak Republic!! - Oct 18, 2004

It is now been one month since my family and I arrived in the city of Nitra in the Slovak Republic. In one sense, not much has happened in those four weeks -- but in another sense, where one counts every little success as a major victory, quite a bit has happened!! Thus far we have enrolled our children in school, we bought a car, we rented an apartment (a flat), and I began meeting my classes. Although it seems simple to state those outcomes in only a few words, the activity needed to generate each has been substantial.

Our children are in a Slovak school -- no English or international school was available, but we wanted them in a Slovak school so that they could pick up the language more quickly. And while the students and (most of the) teachers have been quite helpful, the language barrier is enormous. The language barrier was much less onerous when we were traveling for two weeks in northern Europe before arriving in Slovakia. My wife, Carol, speaks a little and understands a lot of French. I speak some and understand less of German. Together, however, we were able to make out fairly well in France, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. But the Slovak language is more akin to Russian than to any western European language, resulting in substantial difficulty in picking up even the smallest conversational bits in the language. Most of the Slovak students have had multiple years of English classes and are able to translate most of the material. So Eric and Rachel are in school, but they often must feel like those poor lost souls sitting in the back of the room in the fourteenth week of my Microeconomic Principles classes at EKU.

Buying a car was also a bit tricky, but not impossible. We bought a new Skoda, the Czech-made automobile, Europe’s "Car of the Year" in 2002 (after Skoda was purchased by Volkswagen). The Skodas have certainly changed since I first saw them in 1996! Out from under the Soviet influence, they are now sleek, well-built and quite trustworthy on the road. So we negotiated a bit with the dealer and came to an agreeable price. The sales person said we could charge it to our credit card, an ideal situation for us in that credit cards tend to translate the best exchange rates. So we made our down payment on the credit card on a Wednesday and arranged to pick up the car the following Monday. On Monday we learned that our sales person was a bit hasty in his assessment. His manager would not take a credit card purchase ­ the credit card fee would be too costly and we had to pay cash. That’s cash, as in CASH. So I transferred the necessary funds in my US bank electronically, waiting the necessary overnight delay due to the time difference. The sales person accompanied us to the bank, where we learned that the Slovak bank had a limit on how much cash we could withdraw from our account back home, even though the "cash" was going directly from our hand to the Skoda dealer’s account. So we did the limit (3/4 of the total cost) and received the keys to the car, with a blood promise not to skip town before the rest was paid off. Looking back (and even at the time to some extent), we are/were quite grateful to have gotten the car even one day before the final payoff, given how we have seen the post-Soviet bureaucracy at work here in other situations. So on Wednesday we were back at the bank to transfer the rest of the money. But we will still be dealing with the dealer for some time to come, since we had to get temporary license plates from the dealer because we do not yet have "Slovak IDs". And to get a Slovak ID (necessary for my position here), I/we had to go to the local police. Unfortunately, that chapter is such a depressing story that I will go no further on it. Suffice to say, we still have temporary plates on the car and we are still waiting for Slovak IDs.

Getting an apartment (sorry, a FLAT!!)... It seemed like a good plan to us to rent a 3-BDR flat, given that we had brought along our 16-year-old son, Eric, and our 14-year-old daughter, Rachel. It also seemed like a good plan to rent a furnished flat, in that an 8-9 month stay did not seem to justify the purchase of a complete set of household goods. And one might imagine that in a city of 90,000 people, finding a furnished 3-BDR flat should not be so difficult, especially in that apartments outnumber houses here by about a zillion to one. Our first mistake was assuming that a 3-room flat meant three bedrooms, when it really meant two bedrooms and a living room. Our host (my Slovak colleague) had graciously provided us with a fine selection of 3-room furnished apartments. After a few phone calls we realized the error in our assumption and began looking for furnished 4-room apartments. Those, it turns out, were few and far between. We looked into a few houses, but the expense was more than we could justify. So we began looking for unfurnished flats, asking about the possibility of them furnishing the apartment. The plan worked ­ after 3 ý weeks in a dormitory we moved into a mostly-furnished 4-room flat. Our landlords, Rudy and Jana, are wonderful retired people. They speak no English but he speaks a bit of broken German, so he and I can communicate on a small level. Also Carol has an amazing facility to understand the essence of a conversation just from picking up a few words. Rudy and Jana have gone far out of their way to place really nice furniture where the flat was deficient. We now can say "Home, sweet flat" instead of "Home, sweet dorm". If you wish to send surface mail, we are at Javorova 10, Nitra, Slovak Republic, 949 01 . By the way, "javorova" translates to "maple". So we live on Maple Street ­ so American!!

Finally, my classes... There was a bit of negotiation involved here. My Fulbright proposal had called for me to teach any of three courses, one or two classes per semester, with a major focus on a Slovak equivalent of my ECO 130 course, "Economic Issues". The proposal called for my host and I to co-author a textbook on "Economic Issues Facing the Slovak Republic", so the Economic Issues course was of primary importance. The assignment that I received while I was still in Richmond, however, called for me to teach two sections of a course quite unrelated to my Fulbright proposal. They were essentially plugging me into courses where they had need, with too little regard for the proposal. So we began the negotiations from afar, with the full support of the Slovak Fulbright Commission that I not teach courses outside the proposal. That support was important, in that the Fulbright Commission is paying the bill! Our negotiations upon arrival were quite successful ­ both the Dean and the Department Chair agreed that we create an Economic Issues course that we titled "A Policy Approach to Solving Economic Problems". They also asked the Economics faculty to recruit students for the course. Thus far it has been successful beyond my wildest expectations. Eighty students showed up for an orientation session (I had felt that we’d be lucky to have ten students express an interest). After two classes in each of three sections, seventy students have filled out roster cards indicating that they would like to take the course. Attendance has been excellent and class participation has also exceeded my expectations, given the students’ difficulty in speaking English. I will speak more on my classroom experiences in a later note.

In addition to overcoming the four major hurdles noted above and establishing a "normal" life here (translate "normal" here different than "normal" back in Richmond), we also attended a three-day Fulbright Orientation in Bratislava and spent two nights in the mountain region known as the High Tatras. The countryside in Slovakia is beautiful; the mountains are striking and the fall colors we noted as we drove to the High Tatras rival anything we would see in eastern Kentucky. The Slovaks are wonderful people, extremely hospitable when one enters "their space". That said, if we are outside their space they seldom acknowledge us, except that some of them often stare at us for exceedingly long periods. I guess we look and act differently.

Our bottom line ­ we are doing quite well, better than expected!! I hope to send another update in another month or so.

P.S. After more than six weeks in Europe, we have yet to meet a European who, given the chance, would vote for George Bush. Do they know something we don’t?