The Slovak Emergency Room

If you don't believe the icewalks can be dangerous, listen to my experience.

While leaving a restaurant with another teacher, he slipped on the ice and hit his head.

"Get up", I say, and as he does, the pool of blood coming from the back of his head is clearly visible on the white ice.

So I change my mind, "Lay back down!" and he does, and now I have to wonder to myself, what should I do? I inspect the wound and see a gash on the back of his head the size of half my fist. As he tries to sit up again the blood streams down his face, around his eyes, into his mouth and onto his shirt. I cradled his head from the ice and they too were solid bloody red. (Don't worry; we took AIDS tests to work here.)

He's lying in the street so I can't vary well leave him, yet I know I need to call someone. He's starting to shiver and chatter his teeth, either from shock or the cold (and it is cold, maybe only 15 degrees/ -9). And to my rescue a city vehicle stops and two men get out with cell phones and call for help. Who says you need to know Slovak. You really only need to be very bloody and lying in the road.

So I get my first ride in an ambulance and a free trip to the emergency room.

The stretcher has wheels the size of a bicycle, and they are anything but gentle as they move him about. It's Saturday morning and we are the only people there. No waiting rooms or delays. I'm in charge of paperwork, which is in English but still doesn't make much sense. It consists of one page, which says the name of the patient, passport number, town of residence, and an agreement to pay, though it doesn’t say how much.

Maybe the lack of paperwork lets them give stitches without anesthetic, or keep you for three days even though the MRI and X-rays are all fine. Or only feed you bread and water for a day and a half. Who knows, I couldn’t talk to them, and the people I called to help from the school hadn’t arrived yet.

So, three days for a concussion. He thought it was great. His roommate had been there for three months because of a car accident. They were going to keep him for three more. No outpatient services, no recovery ward or nursing home, just the same drab hospital room with bad food, limited visiting hours and no TV.

It can always be worse. And I’m glad it didn’t happen to me (knock on wood).

But I do still feel like Lady Macbeth with her bloody hands that she never could quite get clean. "Out, damned spot! Out, I say!"

George Bush Visits Slovakia

It's hard to get rid of your reputation, especially when it's true.

George Bush's visit to Bratislava on Thursday was the talk of the town for weeks. The Slovak newspaper, SME, and English newspaper, The Slovak Spectator, both carried stories about the security procedures and money spent on the summit between Bush and Russia's President Putin. The event went without a hitch, and Slovakia seemed happy to be put on the map for a brief moment.

Depending what map you are talking about. The USA Today published a map showing Slovakia where Slovenia is. Bratislava was located in the present capital of Ljubljana. So maybe the America press doesn't have it all together.

But the Slovak press had a field day with Bush. Fridays front page story in SME was how Bush welcomed the Slovak people with "Dobre Den", which a local could tell you is a butchering of their pronnunciation. Another story focused on how Bush shook hands with the president while wearing his gloves. Evidently this is not acceptable and the paper showed a close-up picture of the now famous handshake.

So it's nice to know that there are some universal themes and ideas around the world and one of them is making fun of George W.

My Address

It may be the first thing kids learn when they go off to school, but it took me two months...anyway, my address is:

City University
Bezrucova 64
911 01 Trencin
Slovak Republic

Is It Spring Yet?

I bought a thermometer, and using seine twine and a few clever sailor knots, I managed to attach it to the outside of my 6th floor window on the top of my old communist cement drab building. It has been reading three or four degrees above zero for several days now which leads me to believe that eventually this snow will melt and spring will come.

Only, when I look out the window past the thermometer, which is reading three or four degrees above zero, I realize it's snowing. Still. How can it snow when it's above freezing?

For two days the weather made an attempt to change seasons. It actually rained, and the icewalks turned into lakes with floating slush in them. The water was ankle deep, and the snowplow went down the sidewalks to push the water and slush into the streets.

And then it snowed again, three or four inches in one night. And right now as I'm typing this, it's snowing again. The forecast is for snow all weekend.

However, if the forecast is as accurate as my new thermometer, I expect to be sunbathing soon.

Skittles and Sour Milk

I was invited to go out with a group of my adult students to experience the game of Skittles, which is the English term for the game Kolky. Like you reading this, I still had no idea what the game was. It turns out, kolky is a game similar to bowling, or maybe nine pin.

We went to the Kolkarena (room with kolky lanes), which was a cowboy bar, complete with cowhides, deer antlers and German Cowboy and Indian movies. It was only missing the sawdust, swinging doors and a jukebox with Willie Nelson. Downstairs were motorcycles hanging on the walls, car seats for furniture, engine blocks for decoration, and the two Kolky lanes.

Like bowling, you take a ball and roll it down the lane trying to knock down the pins. The ball is smaller, though, and you palm it in your hand because there are no finger holes. The nine pins at the end of the lane are attached to strings which lift the pins and reset them after every turn. You score a point for each pin you knock down and the game ends after 50 or 100 turns.

It was a simple but wonderful game and we cheered each other on in broken English and Slovak.

Afterwards, my students decided that I needed to eat some authentic Slovak food to complete my night. We walked through the slush and puddles to a restaurant to enjoy Bryndzove Halusky, (a small potato dumpling, or gnocchi, with sheep cheese), and a big cup of sour milk. The milk came in a traditional wooden cup with a carved horse for the handle. I wish it tasted as good as the cup looked. Instead it was more like a cup of mixed yogurt and sour cream that left a look of complete horror on my face after I tried it. I'm glad they laughed and didn't take offence.

That's how everyone should take their experiences in a new place, with laughter and not judgment. Too bad that's rarely the case.

Your Slovakia Heat

I used to sit on the boat in Miami next to the arena where the Miami Heat played and listen to the announcer repeat for hours on end... "Yoooouuuur Miii-aaaa-mmmiiii Heeeeaaat" in that long, drawn out, sports commentator voice. Then the announcement would go on to what you couldn't bring into the arena, and the list seemed to include everything from backpacks to weapons of mass destruction.

So heat. In Miami it was hot, and you often dreamed of a cold shower, or to go swimming though you wouldn't dare touch that water. Slovakia, obviously, is the opposite, and luckily, they are as good at heating the country as Shaquille O' Neil is at playing basketball.

Somewhere down by Nitra, Slovakia, is a nuclear power plant that chugs away. The energy is piped into every apartment and store on the western half of Slovakia in the form of warm water. Radiators are attached to the wall with no thermostats, continuously heating, until your room becomes a sauna. If it’s too hot, you open the window, (they say it is cheaper then installing thermostats).

And the showers! Coming off the boat where you are lucky to get a shower once a week, and then very short and only mildly warm, Slovakia is a showerers’ paradise. The water is instantly hot and always available. The water pipes run through the bathroom and are warm to the touch, always. Sometimes, it’s such a treat I even shower twice.

By 2008 the EU will require the nuclear power plant to be shut down. This might be a good thing, given that Chernobyl isn’t too far away, and we all know what happened there. But then again, how will Slovakia heat the water and the buildings? How much money and planning will this require? Are they ready for the task?

ICE!

They say it's an unusually cold winter, and I certainly hope they are correct. We had a few days of snow, but the temperatures have remained in the low 20's for the last few weeks leaving the snow, and even worse, turning it into solid sheets of ice. The sidewalks, in particular, are dreadful, and I now prefer to call them icewalks. You take baby steps as you walk to town, or the coffee shop, or grocery store. Then, after awhile, you gain confidence, let your mind slip to a different thought besides walking, and inevitably your boot slips out from under you and you flail your arms, trying to look like a graceful ice skater but looking more like a windmill.

I've only fallen once. Perhaps that means someday I can dream of becoming a professional icewalker. Probably not.

The locals walk quite quickly down the icewalks, often in high-heeled boots with ridiculously pointed toes. They pass me like I'm an invalid. The only local I've seen fall was a drunk who would have fallen anyways. Only, on the icewalk, he slid a good five feet and his keys and belongings slid the other direction. I tried to ask him if he was okay, but I only know how to say "How are you?" so he looked at me funny and probably wondered if I even existed or was he dreaming in his drunken haze about two foreigners (the other being Hideki, the teacher from Japan) with horrible Slovak pronunciation. But more on the language later.

The icewalks are ridiculous.

The major roads and part of the sidewalks have been cleared. They have normal snowplows here and use some combination of sand, salt and gravel to keep them drivable in all conditions. On the sidewalks, the landlord, shopkeeper or owner will come out with a tool that looks something like a flat hoe, and chop up the ice in front of their building, then shovel it away. They always stop at the property line. There are small clearings now and again where you can actually walk. The city takes care of the bus stops, and they usually are the first cleared parts. But those long stretches, the no-mans land of the sidewalks, I mean icewalks,…well…watch out Fred Astair, here I come.