Struggles to Complete Life Tasks

Living as foreigners and struggling to complete the most basic and every day tasks has been a trip. These seemingly simple things like paying the rent, buying a bus pass, and successfully navigating the grocery store have consumed many many many hours of our life and filled us with confusion, frustration, and endless laughs. 

Yesterday, a wonderful woman from the Fulbright office here offered to take us and our fellow American friends to the bus station so that she could facilitate the purchase of our unlimited bus passes. Public transportation here is fabulous -- timely, efficient, goes throughout the entire city--but until now, we have been using paper tickets, which is not a great long term solution. Even WITH our kind and helpful Slovak chaperone, purchasing these long term bus passes was still quite an endeavor. Passports, photos to taken, lots and lots and lots of talking in Slovak during this process. Disgruntled employees who were rolling their eyes at us. At one point, our friend Ann said to our Slovak companion "Truly, how could we have done this without you??" Her answer was essentially: "You couldn't." I 10000% believe her. We parted ways and were very thankful for her help.

Fulbright building

Bus station ticket office

Doug and Zuzana, our wonderful companion and helper. Mid way through the bus station "field trip"

After that, we wanted to go to the train station to register the kids for the "Zero Fare Rail Cards" that allow all registered children to ride trains within Slovakia for free. The McCarthy family had successfully completed this same task the day before and helpfully offered to accompany us to the train station to walk us through it. Basically, you pay 5 euro/ kid in a photo booth to get the children's photos taken. Then you take your photos and your passports to an employee and ask for the (free) card to be created. We thought this would be easy breezy since we had the McCarthy family with us and copies of their children's cards to show as examples. We went to the exact same small office in a hallway right off the main train station where they had their cards made the day before. We were denied. They kept handing our documents back to us and telling us to go somewhere else. So we left. We took our things and headed back into the main terminal and chose another line to stand in. We again showed them the card we wanted and handed them our documents. And again they shooed us away and told us we needed to go somewhere else. We we gathered meant "anywhere else" but there. On our third attempt with a new person, the woman tried to do the exact same thing, but she must have recognized the desperation on our faces and gave in. She made the passes for the kids which turned out to be somewhat cumbersome and tedious....I think we were repeatedly turned away because no one felt like doing it. 

Outside the train station -- victory at long last!

All in all it was a successful day and we accomplished what we set out to accomplish! It just took a lot longer than we thought and was a lot funnier as well. 

Random thing to note that is making us feel like helpless Americans....in our tiny kitchen there is one overhead light. Suddenly it wasn't working. No big deal. We even have spare light bulbs so we thought we'd just change it. But standing on a chair didn't get us high enough. So we carried the dining table in....and realized we couldn't get it through the door to the kitchen. Doug ended up standing precariously on the bookshelves that we are using as counters / storage in the kitchen. He changed the bulb! But the light still didn't work. So now Doug will have to contact his point person at the university, who will have to contact the people who run the apartment (whose contact info we don't have and "just" speak Slovak") to come and fix our light.

Another random funny thing! Last night our friends went to a Superbowl re-watch party that the U.S. Embassy hosted and while they were there they texted us to tell us that they ran into a childhood friend of Doug's! Doug and his man grew up in the same neighborhood together, which is also the same neighborhood where our friends live back home in Pittsburgh. Small, small world.

Yesterday we also found ourselves in an adorable neighborhood very close to where our family is staying when they come to visit us. We can't wait to see Ginny, Kathy, Megan, and Claire at the end of the month. We scoped out their Airbnb, which is on the way up to the castle and on a charming narrow street with several cafes, restaurants, and great views. These pictures were all taken practically right outside their door!