Entrenched in Trenčín

After teaching in Nitra, all five of us (Lisa, myself and our three new colleagues: Ryan, Jack & Robert) decided to head to Trenčín for the weekend. Trenčín is a town in northwestern Slovakia, near the Czech border, that has about 56,000 people and is known for its rich history—it has been around for nearly 2,000 years— and remarkable castle.

Fun fact: Zdeno Chára is from Trenčín, as well as some other notable Slovak hockey players in the NHL, and the Stanley Cup has visited the town on four separate occasions.

Nice to Meet Ya, Nitra

We left Bratislava—Lisa, our new friend Ryan & myself—and made the short bus trip to our first teaching destination since returning: Nitra. Wikipedia makes the claim that Nitra is the 5^th largest city in Slovakia but our students violently argued that it is, in fact, the 4^th. I suppose I’ll never actually know. In any event, it is a good sized city with about 85,000 residents and is situated on one of Slovakia’s main rivers, the Nitra River. Despite the students being unyielding on the population of their city, they didn’t have quite so much pride in their river, telling me that I should never swim in it. They didn’t say much more than that, but since they were above average non-native English speakers, I would imagine it wasn’t because they had no more thoughts on the matter.

Eastern Europe: The Second Leg

In order to start writing this post, I felt it would beneficial for me to step back and take a look through my own eyes back to September when I originally took off to Europe. I managed to do this by rereading my first blog post, Eastern Europe: The First Leg. Not too much was different from how I remembered it—the airports had still been stuffy and frustrating, the people I met had been singular in every way imaginable & the windmills in Wolkersdorf, Austria are most likely still beautiful in their very ominous sort of way. And even now, as I lay in my bed here in Trenčín, Slovakia, it’s amazing to me how similar some of the aspects of my life are to how they were six months ago. My daily routine is fairly similar—I generally pack my backpack the same way, wear most of the same clothes, teach the same sorts of lessons, wash my hair in the sink the same sort of way when I don’t feel like showering, eat the same kinds of yogurt every day for breakfast, speak the same minuscule amount of Slovak, etc.

It’s fair to say that I took to this lifestyle rather rapidly.