Good stories...

Sorry I missed last week! I'd had a lovely week full of annoyances, which was supposed to magically get better on Tuesday night, seeing as there were plans for awesome stuff; only, as these things go, the awesome turned out to be overshadowed by more annoyances, and I spent Wednesday being a little bundle of rage I didn't quite want to inflict on you guys.

I was supposed to roam the streets of Bratislava these days, but sadly things didn't work out and I'm stuck at home preparing for next term. At least hanging out at home means I'm cuddled up in my bed with good music blaring out of my headphones and a glass of red on my bedside table, instead of spending the night in an uncomfortable hostel bed surrounded by drunk tourists trying to recreate scenes from Eurotrip (well... possibly minus the incest).

Going back to Slovakia has been on my mind for the last five years or so, and by some weird whatever my favourite Norwegian live band (singing in Norwegian), and a Slovak band (singing in Slovak) I'm rather fond of played a gig together in Vienna, and I really wanted to go for the sheer linguistic mindfuckery (a second support act was in English), and could've easily hopped over the border afterwards and spend a few days in good ol' Bratislava drinking cheap Slovak vodka and pigging out on bryndzové pirohy (what could be better than pasta filled with mashed potatoes and stinky sheep milk cheese, drowned in fatty toppings?).

Admittedly, I left in late 2005 rather fed up with the place, although it had less to do with the country as a whole than with my particular situation. Maybe I should've known when I arrived and found out my predecessor had mysteriously disappeared. I was a volunteer at a youth centre, and since none of my colleagues spoke English (or German, or French) she was supposed to show me around etc. Yeah, that didn't work out. Instead I got a rather queasy gut feeling (not to mention friends & parents freaking out back home), and an endless hassle with rather incompetent policemen and the like. After three months we got a call from one of her friends saying she'd been so fed up with the place she decided not to take a flight back to Slovakia after a vacation, but bought a ticket home instead. In the meantime I spent two months without a functioning stove, still didn't have anyone to teach me Slovak and lived in a hotel that didn't allow me to have visitors in a town void of anyone my age. On the up side I had lovely colleagues, the kids were great and there was a lot about the place I enjoyed. But when my time was up I was more then ready to leave (and stay away a few years). I never regretted going though.

I wish I could explain my Slovakia, but lack the words to describe it adequately, and in enough depth to not reinforce stereotypes. When you move abroad you expect most stereotypes to turn out to be untrue, but I somehow always ended up in places where many were reality. My town in the states was European stereotypes of the US come alive; rural, conservative, run by extremely conservative white Christians despite being 80% Mexican, full of oversized cars, oversized people and oversized flags, full of fast food, teenage mothers and teenage binge drinking. My biology teacher apologized for having to teach evolution, my history teacher happily explained that Darwinism = social Darwinism, and I once almost got detention for saying “crap”. I usually throw in a disclaimer when I talk about the place, but I think most people here are aware that there are other towns in the states that are quite different.

Slovakia is more difficult, since hardly anyone knows anything about it (and a lot of people confuse it with Slovenia). It's somewhere there, out east, where all the places are rather run down and corrupt. In fact the Austrian border is only a stone's throw from the capital, and the west is quite comfortably hanging out with the rest of western Europe. Things are different (read: more conform to stereotypes) out east, but it'd be unfair to reduce the entire country to that. Every time I offhandedly throw out an anecdote, I feel the need to explain, but people tend to lose interest once the story is over. And really there isn't much I can say besides “it's different out west”, because I haven't actually spent more than a few weekends there, or to go into an extremely long rant about things I can't quite explain, least of all to people who've spent their entire life safely tucked away in western Europe or North America. To me it's such an amazing place, but it's hard to convey, especially since good stories rarely make good stories.

So I guess that's what I ought to do... find more good stories that are worth telling.