Ahoj, Bratislava

Soooo it’s been a while, maybe even longer since the release of that shitty song by Staind. The New Year has produced multiple job opportunities, never-ending Central European bureaucracy, comedy shows, and my first jaunt to Slovakia.

And I'm still waiting to hear about my visa.

But during this seemingly infinite waiting period, I’ve taken two teaching jobs that are happily withholding my pay until I can become a legal Czech employee. They don’t have to pay me until further notice so I’m basically working for free, and hooooo boy do they know it. My schedule went from sleeping most of the day and going down a rabbit hole of late 90s Saturday Night Live videos to mapping out an entire timetable of trams and busses for my assignments all over Brno and its dingy yet incredibly charming suburbs.

I’m traveling to different companies in the metro area to help employees with their conversational skills, business English, and strange grammar unique to my native tongue. Most of the students I encounter are very intent on the idea that their English isn’t great but really it’s the opposite. I swear I had someone tell me, “My goodness, I am astonished at your surprise because I do believe my English is quite terrible!” but they aren’t speaking like a Soviet caveman. They’re actually speaking very well, better than me in some cases. I usually spend 45 to 90 minutes trying to produce some semblance of a lesson plan that revolves around discussing current events, politics, movies or other popular American media, and common dialogue from their place of work, but also HOW we discuss them. But what surprises me is that during every lesson, my students become so curious how a thirty-something woman from a booming yet not beaming country like the United States ended up in a place like Brno.

Brno has roughly 400,000 people. It’s been described to me as St. Paul without Minneapolis. There are enough people here to cause a very slight delay during morning traffic or a decent back up in any store in the mall on Sunday. Trams during peak hours are full and standing room only. This city as a pulse, and the only thing that would for sure kill it or at least slow its resting heart rate is something like Amazon becoming a budding and brooding feature. So when students ask me, “Why here?”, I usually respond with something that promotes the differences in cost of living while not having to live somewhere like Terre Haute, Indiana. I also explain that I’ve been through the Czech Republic before and liked it enough to move my life here. I’m not sure I have the balls (I don’t) to throw a dart at a map and expatriate to places like Kiribati or Lhasa or Ushuaia in Southern Argentina. But here I can live inside former communist architecture while practicing peaceful democratic resistance. Oh and that whole health insurance thing, too.

So right now, even though I come prepared each week with a loose lesson plan that can often derail like it did today when I had to explain the origin of the phrase “don’t drink the Koolaid,” my students are vastly interested in me and what I’m doing in the second biggest city in the Czech Republic. They also tend to ask me, “Why not Prague?” Prague seemed incredibly romantic at first. If I was going to write my own Eat, Pray, Love bullshit novel, my journey would probably start in Prague. The city (and most of the country) has amazingly preserved architecture. It wasn’t destroyed during the Second World War so a lot of the streets and flats and businesses are decades old and still in seamless operation. Prague carries a lot of the business in the Czech Republic but it isn’t all smokestacks and concrete. When I think of people in Prague, I imagine a woman wearing a silk bathrobe looking out her tall windows, tall windows that are emulated in the US because we can’t have things that are genuinely old so we destroy new places to purposefully make them look old. She has one of those stupid chunky blankets with the giant yarn draped around her. It’s snowing. There’s a dog outside leaving tiny footprints on the cobblestone sidewalk as a young boy chases muž’s best friend. The woman in the window snuggles her face into the giant yarn catastrophe while her gorgeous husband swoops in from behind her while carrying the smallest fucking espresso cup you’ve ever seen. She receives the bright white cup and saucer from within her Pinterest cape as they giggle over the idea of reading Faust in their giant sleigh bed in front of an exposed brick backdrop for the rest of the day. That’s Prague.

Brno is much more industrial, as are other cities here like Ostrava, Olomouc, and Plzen, so it leaves people wondering why I chose cooling towers over historical bridges. In short, it’s cheaper. But most of the expats in CZ are based in Prague, yet out in Brno it feels less like a vacation and more like an ongoing journey. If you live in Prague, you can go days without needing to speak Czech because everyone in your bubble speaks some derivation of English. I wanted to be around Czech people, not people who want to be around Czech people. I feel like a resident here. Somedays in Seattle I felt more like a tourist due to barely leaving the house during the throes of depression and anxious bullshit.

Teaching currently has me busy for roughly four days a week. I have some breaks midday and some downtime before hustling across town with a different set of folders for a different set of students. The nice part being is that if I notify the schools far enough in advance, I can take time off for comedy. This past weekend I ventured to Bratislava, Slovakia for a comedy show, my first time to the other half of the previous state of Czechoslovakia. Bratislava is a grungier version of Brno that could stand a good pressure washing. The city of 420,000 people is the largest in Slovakia and it is proving to be somewhat of a booming new metropolis. Slovakia is also on the Euro which catches people off guard. Surely the Czech Republic is on the Euro if Slovakia is, right? Wrong. CZ is on the Czech Koruna (crown) while Slovakia became a loose cannon and confused the fuck out of everyone by switching over to the popular Westernized currency. I exchanged money at the train station before I left, and two hours later, I walked off the train and onto a movie set designed for Liev Schreiber or Elijah Wood to extract their vengeance on the surrounding community for a betrayal of past generations. People think CZ is in Eastern Europe when really it’s in Central Europe, but Bratislava flirts with that misinformation much more, especially when people are confusing it with Slovenia.

Every European city east of Berlin has a section commonly referred to as “Old Town,” a four or five block district in or near the city center. At least one large church, forged statues and sculptures, and outdoor markets are picturesque both in person and on the overpriced postcards sold within the area. Bratislava’s Old Town is a nexus of hidden passageways featuring popular pubs, souvenir stores, flower shops, and coffee and wine bars. I’m not using the Oxford comma between “coffee” and “wine bars” because they are constantly featured together under one business. There’s a good intermingling of the old country’s hardened Slovaks enjoying their nightly pinot noir with younger travelers who wanted a piece of cake and tea (me). Since I arrived in the city at 4pm on a Sunday, a lot of businesses were closed and I only had roughly an hour of daylight remaining to take pictures, so I walked around and got lost in the caverns of brick and doors that weren’t rectangular in shape.

A few photos from my visit

The comedy show I was in took place at Goblin’s Pub, a dungeon-esque pub with plenty of beer and zero cell service. Upon arriving, I encountered a group of Irish dudes who were actually swinging their beer mugs from side to side with their arms around each other while they sang/yelled old Irish folk songs. Groups of football clubs, rugby teams, and bachelor parties will often come to Central and Eastern Europe to get their drink on because it’s so much cheaper. I was an economic drunk and 40 cents for a beer was nothing to sneeze at. I wrote out a setlist, similar to the setlist I was working off of the night before in Brno. I’m having a tough time deciding when to compromise my comedy. When I say that, I mean I don’t know whether to give the people what they want, which happens to be easy stereotypes and blanket statements, or do the comedy I really want to do and know I’m capable of. I want to have some measure of integrity without leaning towards an entire setlist of Blue Collar Comedy style jokes and tag lines. My set at Goblin’s was like most of my other sets in Europe; people like me and my enthusiasm, but if it’s not slightly off color in a way they want it to be, they’ll smile and have this sort of Resting Czech Face that I proceed to pander to for the remainder of my stage time. Doing 25 minutes is incredibly easy for me. Being confident in the jokes I’m telling to an audience expecting a certain style of humor is difficult.

I left the venue and hopped Bratislava’s tram back to the train station, took the train back to Brno, missed the night bus home, and called a Liftago, our version of Uber. My driver seemed happy I was communicating in broken Czech and he compromised with me by speaking some broken English in return. I checked my blood sugar when I got home realized my levels weren’t as predictable as they usually are. If I ever get sick or stressed, I can usually see it in my blood sugars before I actually feel or sense the onset of it coming. And by the time I had woken up a few hours later after falling asleep during an embarrassing Vikings loss, I was definitely sick. I had mono at 16 and ever since then I’ve been prone to sinus infections. I maybe get two to three a year where there’s a tremendous pressure in my sinuses, I feel and sound like I’m underwater, my neck and shoulders ache a bit, and I can’t focus. On Monday this week I was supposed to start at another school but had to defer my start since a) I’m not an asshole and don’t want to get other people sick, and b) talking for six hours a day while running all around the city by public transit wasn’t an option. I pretty much slept for three days and ended up being really hard on myself. I was supposed to start a new job and my body let me down, thus letting my employer down. I want to be ready and capable and worthy of work but this stupid sinus business wasn’t exactly allowing me to do just that. I felt worthless, not working and wanting to get better while trying to simultaneously practice the act of patience. And I fucking hate being sick. I turn into a swearing three-year-old sailor who has seen some shit, so much shit they can’t even drink anymore. Kitty and I slept and drank soup and as much water as we could, and today I’m almost back to 100%.

Today was my first day back teaching in four days and I learned that I was not the only teacher who was sick this week. Classes were cancelled, moved around, delayed, and rescheduled due to most of us combatting some type of a pseudo-plague. My Thursday class is my favorite. They’re a bunch of young dads who understand my puns and are eager to talk about politics, current events, traveling, and generic smalltalk used in getting to know one another. The 90 minutes goes by quickly and I don’t feel like it’s work because I’m learning, too. The second round of the presidential election in CZ is tomorrow. People throughout the country will pull their little grocery carts behind them while seeking to uphold the tenets of democracy or bring the country down to the level at which I left the United States. They told me about their candidates and the voting process. Brno (and the rest of the country I’m assuming) has a system that is similar to precincts, districts, and counties. People vote on a Friday by using paper and pen at a polling station, most often located in a school, and the results are then tabulated until the next morning on Saturday. I told them about the US having fifty different states, which means having fifty different sets of laws for how people vote. I explained the mail-in process for the state of Washington and how ballots are tracked and counted before the election. The two countries honestly don’t seem that different, and there has been an overwhelming turn out to support the guy who is more like a combination of Hillary and Bernie than President Fuckface (fingers crossed). One of the main areas of debate right now in CZ is the issue of "immigration." One tough thing about understanding the accuracy of politics and political views here is that the terms “immigrant,” “migrant,” “foreigner,” and “refugee” are all used interchangeably, so I went over the differences with my students and they agreed with their correct usage:

foreigner:

anyone who is of a different nationality or ethnicity than the place they are in presently

immigrant:

a person of a different citizenship or nationality legally seeking rights and citizenship in another country

migrant:

a person who is moving to a new country in seek of work, can be done legally or illegally, and is an economic based decision

and

refugee:

a person seeking asylum by escaping their country of citizenship due to political reasons (war is most common).

This class has been fun and valuable to me. In some ways, it feels like I’m getting paid to learn about my new home and the varying political climates by age group and geography.

My little victories are important here. I’ve had a master list of things I’ll eventually need to take care of, and today I got to cross of a major one: open a Czech bank account. Two banks have turned me away because I need to bring a Czech interpreter with me, even though I was told this in English. From my understanding, they don’t want to have a foreigner (refer to the above) signing a document if they can’t fully understand it. So today I went to a bank whose website is in both Czech and English and not by way of Google Chrome. It took about a half hour and the Czech banker was patient with my English and we both used Google Translate to ensure our definitions of terms were the same. Victory! I’ll get my “contactless card” in about two to three weeks. I’ve seen the magic of the contactless card at various stores: you’re supposed to hover the card over a hub and it will register as a physical swipe, but people end up needing to tap the hub numerous times and sometimes outright slam on it in frustration for it to register. Contactless!

So it’s after midnight. Tonight I had the energy to cook so I made this eggplant tomato basil…mash. I don’t know what to call it. Half the time I cook I’m coming up with something where all the flavors and textures are good but it doesn’t have a real name. I also put pepitas, capers, and cranberries in it and I shredded super good gouda on top. I’m going to be super farty tomorrow. Hopefully next week will be better than this week. I’m excited to officially have employment and an actual schedule. It will take some time to adjust and I’m just happy I don’t have to watch the fucking Pro Bowl this weekend at an absurd hour to distract me from doing great things. Oh yeah, and speaking of which,

Fuck you, Tom Brady!

We Fucking Did It

I don't even really know where to start.

Tuesday was the most stressful day I've had in quite sometime, and not for the reasons you'd think. From beginning to end, my journey from driving to Sea-Tac to shutting the door to my new apartment after my landlord left lasted about 18 hours. I had my last pumpkin spice latte until further notice and had some bizarro goodbyes and not the kinds you want to stay awake thinking about in a bed that doesn't even have sheets yet.

While checking in for my flights, I had to move some weight around between bags to make the attendants and airline policies happy. Four duffel bags and three carry-ons was an ordeal and I'm incredibly thankful my mom took a half day to help me. I know I'm alone now, but I'm not sure if I could have completed that part of my journey by myself. The cost of these duffel bags was pretty absurd and I started to regret hanging onto things like an actual cowbell and Christmas lights and blankets and the shoes that only look good with one outfit and gosh darnet if I want to wear that outfit, it had better be complete.

Patrick did an amazing job. I had these visuals of him sprinting off through the airport in a Home Alone-esque dash. He was in a harness for the first time since I was going to have to remove him from his spaceship to go through airport security. When I returned from Minneapolis, I asked a woman on my flight home about traveling with her cat and if she had any tips that made anything easier. She told me that when going through security, send all of my shit through first and take Patrick last so that way I can have my hands free. And we did just that. Patrick made the littlest of peeps when I unzipped his cargo and grabbed him by his harness to release him very briefly while we went through an old school metal detector. A TSA agent swabbed my hands and helped me put Patrick back into his carrier after we were cleared.

He was a sight to behold, a toothless tabby being transported in a spaceship and defying the laws of aerodynamics in a single security checkpoint. Lots of people would stop and look at him peering out of it, especially if I was in line and someone was forced to stand behind me. Lots and lots of questions. But how does he pee!? was the most commonly asked inquiry. I had inserted pads beneath him just in case, but after the 18 hour journey, he didn't make any business. At one point during my flight to Frankfurt I took little potato pieces from my breakfast and sort of flung them into the carrier with my finger in hopes he wanted to eat, but after arriving at the flat in Brno, I discovered no pee but small ignored potato morsels.

I had two flights, a ten hour flight to Frankfurt and another one hour flight to Prague. Thanks to German efficiency, this process was probably the least stressful part of my trip. I was sitting in Premium Economy because Patrick was at my feet and we wanted the extra legroom, but when booking this flight about ten weeks ago, I didn't realize that my flight wasn't full, so I had no one sitting next to me for the long haul. I was able to sleep on and off while Patrick did little circles and poked his head up in the bubble of his backpack. The German flight attendants were quite pleased with his little capsule and cooed to him in their native language.

For most of the long flight, I slept on and off and weirdly enough, it was more uncomfortable to try to find a position to sleep in because I had extra legroom and no one sitting next to me. I had two meals, watched "Se7en" with the sound off, and watched the aerial digital graphic of our plane moving across the earth. I could get up and pee as I pleased, and I didn't have to crawl over anyone sleeping while trying to examine the perfect time to do so between food and drink carts and more complimentary coffee. I watched the sunrise over the Netherlands and most of the continent was foggy coming in. Lots of cooling towers and wind farms dotted the yellow and green rolling landscape. The best part was seeing the roofs of houses becoming more red as the sun protruded into Thursday. You don't see red roofs from above in the US unless it's the shitty motel chain the Red Roof Inn or you're flying over a new cookie cutter real estate development somewhere in the suburbs of Phoenix.

The one part of my journey I was nervous about was changing flights in Frankfurt. Frankfurt International is a huge airport and I had 80 minutes to change planes, go through passport control, and possibly another security checkpoint with Patrick in tow. Row 26 in a 747 isn't as far back in the plane as I anticipated, so I was able to get off the plane quickly after being bombarded with cute comments about Patrick from people who didn't even know he was on the flight. We disembarked into the Z Gates and needed to make our way up to the A Gates. Z14 to A60 shouldn't have been a long walk but going the opposite way through the alphabet probably would have been quicker. Moving walkways helped us pick up our pace and we made it to the gate in about 15 minutes. I talked to the attendant at the counter to make sure I was seated somewhere that gave Patrick enough room underneath the seat in front of me, and he placed us in a whole row by ourselves. I sat in the window while Patrick went underneath in the middle during our second segment to Prague. The inflight snack was...a pastry. That's all I know because I couldn't read the rest of the label. However I now know "sacharidy" is Czech for "carbohydrate" so it's made calculating insulin dosages less mysterious.

Patrick and I got off the plane and made it to baggage claim at Vaclav Havel. I had been sporadically using my phone's data to contact and update folks where I was in my journey and I now had to make a phone call to the person who was picking me up and driving me to Brno. Petr picked up the phone after a series of beeps rather than rings, and said he'd be waiting for me past customs. Ahh fuck, customs.

All of my bags arrived and I was able to push all of them on a cart but was stopped by the most European looking border patrol agents you could imagine.

Border patrol agent in broken English: Anything declare?

Me: Nope.

BPA: What about this?

He points to my back. Ahh, Patrick. I never thought I'd have to declare something as gentle and weenie as Patrick, but there we were. Kitty didn't receive a pet passport since he's not an "EU citizen" but instead had a 15-digit microchip, rabies vaccination certificate, and official forms signed by the USDA in Washington State. The three border patrol agents scurried away with my passport and kitty's forms while we watched other people simply exit the terminal and into the Czech Republic. I was probably held up because of the four duffel bags and cat in a spaceship thing but whatever. About five minutes later, they came back with a scanner to make sure Patrick did indeed have the right microchip to enter the country. We were let go and told "okay, enjoy now."

Petr was waiting on the other side of customs for me. For the first time in my life, I had someone waiting for me at the airport with my last name on a sign (which was fucking spelled right, btw - if you're a comedy producer and you're making flyers on Facebook but can't double check the spelling of my last name and literally the first person I make contact with after officially arriving in a country that doesn't speak English, get your shit together, get it ALLLL together...). Petr helped me with my bags and once again, Patrick's space capsule was ultimately confusing but admired.

Petr drove like he was on a suicide mission, like Liam Neeson's daughter was in trouble and we had to make it from Prague to Brno in under two hours. I've been told the trip can take up to four hours depending on weather and construction so basically it's no different than Minnesota WHY WOULD YOU CLOSE 35W IN THE MIDDLE OF THE CITY ON A WEEKEND GAWD. There's a heightened sense of nationalism here that I think transpired when Czechoslovakia split into two separate nations. All of the billboards here are Czech flags. There are other kinds of advertisements on bridges and banners, mostly for beer and some kinds of bottled water, but all of the regulatory sized billboards promote a different red, white, and blue. I nodded off a lot in the car with my mouth agape having only slept minimal hours on two different airplanes. Occasionally I'd wake up to foggy rolling hills beside semi trucks that are flat in the front, or a "lorry" as I guess I should be putting it now.

We arrived at my apartment with my landlord and his son waiting for me. They spoke more English than I expected so I felt good going forward with the process. My place is just like I expected it to be based off the pictures I saw a few months back and there are definite perks to the place. My building is covered in graffiti (some of it is actually good) so it adds to the distant 1980 central European aesthetic. I feel like I should be selling black market Levi jeans and vinyl records. The downstairs has a full size kitchen, a nook with a desk, and a lot of storage cabinets for all the things I gave away before I moved. I also have an upstairs on the "first floor" since the ground floor is now the first floor and that'll be confusing at some point. Upstairs is a living area with leather couches and armchairs, more storage space, a small bathroom, and a king size bed whaaaat I can basically fall asleep in any position and not touch the sides of the bed. It fucking rules.

Everything is hardwood and freshly painted. I have a balcony (which sounds so bourgeois; let's just call it a deck) overlooking some walkways and a carpark. My neighborhood is popular and in order to experience any social stuff or culture based activities, I only have to walk under 100 meters. Also getting used the metric system is real wacky. I keep converting it in my head but at some point, all these powers of ten will be useful since it makes way more sense. The only other countries that use the imperial measurement system aside from the United States are Myanmar and Liberia.

And then I got horrendously sick. I've had a flu type thing for the last few days and it zapped me of any initial energy I had to get anything set up in my place. I actually don't think I left the apartment for the first 24 hours I was here. My landlord left me a bottle of wine, which is probably now in some drainage pipes somewhere in Slovakia, and some sweet treats to get me to survive so I didn't have to leave. I have a grocery store akin to Albertson's a two minute walk away and an ATM where I can fill up my prepaid phone number. RIP 206 number I've had for over ten years. We had some good times.

On Friday I woke up early to venture out for household items to make the place more comfortable: trash bags, garbage can, dish towels, paper towels, bath mat, electric kettle, sheets, etc. Tesco is European Walmart and I was told if I ever needed to get anything basic, they'd most likely carry it. So I popped some cold medicine and headed for the bus. I'm usually pretty savvy with the public transportation of wherever I am, but it's always a bit unnerving boarding a bus when no one speaks English. The ride took under ten minutes and I was able to get in and out of Tesco with a ton of items in a huge duffel bag not fit for public transit and a Czech SIM card in under an hour. I'm not one of those people who dinks around in stores and needs to look and touch every single thing, so I'm pretty much a stereotypical male when it comes to shopping: get in, get out.

Aaaand on Friday night, I had my first comedy show with some other English speaking comics. For most of the day, I ran through all of my jokes and tried to come up with the Czech/European equivalents to very American things (Walgreens, Boeing, true crime Netflix documentaries, creepy vans, not having good health insurance, etc). I took a tram to ArtBar Druhy, a dungeon like bath/slaughterhouse style space with curved brick ceilings and bright white tile that only went up 8 feet on the walls and drains in the cement floors. Aside from the location where they filmed Saw, the place was great. I followed two comics who were born in Prague but are bilingual in comedy. There's this weird style of observational humor they have that's so clean yet integral to being a Czech citizen. I did a little over 20 minutes and blew out my voice for the remainder of the night, but I had a good feeling. Based on the size of the crowd and the responses I was getting for the majority of my jokes, the idea of performing stand up in English while in a country who's secondary languages are either German or Russian seems a bit easier than I anticipated. Feeling good and accomplished, I took the tram back to my street and spent the five minute walk looking at the can control of the local graffiti artists and the fog engulfing all the lights around me. I may not have to title my first album "Do You Guys Have That Here?" after all.

I finally got my phone set up, a fitted sheet on my bed, and compiled a list of things I still need to get for the place. Hangers. Ziplock bags. A Swiffer if there is such a thing here. Cat food. I'm proud of myself for spending so much time being well prepared. It's probably a Girl Scout thing but having a few months to research and plan helped me not be as stressed. I mean Tuesday can straight up go fuck itself into the ground, but having kitty with me and gaining new life experiences while making friends and telling jokes is so worth it.

On Monday I go to Prague to start my visa process with a specialist because I don't trust myself enough to get it done correctly. I have an appointment at the embassy in the morning for a criminal record print out because the Czech government wants to be sure I'm moving here and not "fleeing," as someone put it. I'll then register with the foreign police to let them know I have intentions of staying in the country longer than 90 days, which is the maximum time the Schengen zone allows you to stay without a visa. I'll probably check out the neighborhood where I stayed in 2009 and get some food and make a day of it. I return in the evening so Patrick won't be alone for the whole day. I wonder if I should get him a friend...

I'm not exactly sure where this blog is going or what I intend for it, but I wanted to provide my experiences for other people who are entertaining the idea of expatriating. The Czech Republic has a large expat community, roughly 15% of the whole country, and it appears even larger than that with students coming here to study on erasmus. I'm going to be documenting my experiences with comedy, sobriety, Czech and American bureaucracy, and trying to finally put my English degree to use. If you have any questions, shoot me an email at cedonehue@gmail.com. Also I'm sure these posts won't be as long and text heavy in the future depending on how well my progress is proceeding. Na schledanou! :)