A travel memory from the original Venture.
Something you should know about me: I’m pretty unlucky. This is one of the reasons I get travel anxiety, because whenever I step out of my cozy little sphere of comfort, things inevitably go wrong — like the time I ended up in Rome without a place to sleep for two nights, or when my tire blew in the middle of a forest highway halfway between NC and NYC. When I’m not careful about my flight times, connections, and listening really closely to the station announcements, my life decides to get… interesting.
So as I head out at 7 in the morning toward Holič, a tiny town near the Czech-Slovakia border, on my second mission teaching for SIDAS Active English, I fully expect to miss my bus, or end up falling asleep and waking up back in Trenčin.
Instead, I end up in Holič in one piece, but this time, it’s my hostel that proves a problem. Getting off the bus, I type the address into Google Maps and heft my backpack for what Google predicts will be a twelve minute walk, but when I get to the area where the Ubytovna should be, it’s nowhere in sight.
It’s a bad sign when, after asking three people where the place is, none of them has any idea. Two ladies shrug and wave me off, while one particularly gruff office worker, standing outside with his smoke, points me in the completely wrong direction, just to get rid of me.
Finally, I ask an older lady who’s shuffling down the street, and within a few seconds of showing her the address, she’s made it her personal mission to find the place and deliver me there safely. She asks the owner of a nearby hair salon, who points us toward a door just around the corner, and apparently gives my guide a couple numbers for rooms and floors. We make our way into the dim building, and I follow the little old lady up two flights of stairs, while she chatters at me in Slovak, even though I can’t respond with anything but clueless smiles and nods.
At the door marked “Recepcion,” no one answers, so my Little Old Lady turns to the next door, her knock echoing through the tiled hall. The door creaks open, revealing a man. He’s heavy and shirtless and pale, his shiny round head perched like a boulder on wide, rounded shoulders, gym shorts hanging low from his waist. He glares down at the Little Old Lady, and I have the sudden, violent image of a mountain troll eating someone’s grandma.
This, I will later learn, is Peter.
“Co?” he asks, though it comes out as a low, rumbling choooooooh?
The Little Old Lady gestures to me, and I catch the words ubytovna and Anglicka (“hostel” and “English”) as she explains the situation. Peter continues to glare down at her. When she pauses, he answers with an irritated grumble of sounds, and I don’t have to understand a word of Slovak to know that he’s just said something along the lines of:
So what do you want me to do about it, Lady?
But Little Old Lady’s up to the challenge. She eyes Peter like he’s one of her naughty grandkids and pokes her finger into his chest, and after a good, sound chastising in Slovak, he reluctantly pulls out his phone to call the Receptionist. The call takes all of a minute, and then Peter hangs up.
“Dvadsat’ minút,” he says at me.
“Dvadsat’ minút,” says the Little Old Lady at me, smiling.
“Uhhh…” I say at both of them, because I don’t understand a word of Slovak.*
Peter throws his hands up, and the Little Old Lady traces an invisible number on the wall: 20. Twenty minutes. My face must light up as I get it, because the Little Old Lady grins at me and nods. “Dvadsat’ minút.”
Peter waves the Little Old Lady off, but he’s not done with me. “Kava?” he says. And then, in English: “Coffee?”
I look to the Little Old Lady, but she shrugs. She says something at Peter in Slovak, but whatever he answers, it’s good enough: she smiles at me and waves good bye. Peter gestures for me to follow him into his room.
Well, if the Little Old Lady has no problems with it, I guess it must be fine. So I readjust my backpack, and step through the door.
It turns out that “coffee” is pretty much the only English word Peter knows, though within a few minutes of him setting the water on boil, we’ve established that “sugar” means cukor (tsuu-kohr) and “milk” means mlieko (mm-lee-koh), and that instant coffee is the only thing Peter’s got in his cabinet, which is a little bit tragický (trah-gits-kee).
Oh, and also that the word vodka is pretty universal.
Over the next twenty minutes, Peter offers me three shots (all of which I refuse), forces a roll of rye bread into my hand (which I am not allowed to leave untouched), and sets out a plate of somewhat melty chocolate biscuits (which turn out to be tasty enough). For a man that rather resembles a mountain troll on first meeting, he’s quite hospitable, and after my early journey from Trenčin with no breakfast, I quite appreciate the food.
Still, I’d rather he didn’t keep trying to get me to take shots of vodka.
Finally, twenty minutes later, as promised, Reception guy arrives, with the keys for the two rooms that I’ll be sharing with my co-teacher. He knocks on the door just as Peter’s stepping outside to smoke.
Once again, I try to bid Peter a goodbye, but he insists on carrying my bag to my room for me. I thank him, smile, wave, and finally, Peter shakes my hand — before pulling me into a hug that is just a bit too friendly.
At last, he steps back, and I usher him out through the door. He goes willingly enough, though before I’ve quite managed to shut him fully out, he pauses halfway down the hall, turns back, and blows me a kiss.
Later, I will tell this story as a joke. I will laugh at the absurdity of it and bring it up at parties as “that time I was hugged by a sweaty Slovak man”. After all, it’s only one of the many questionable situations I would find myself facing while teaching out of my backpack through the rural towns of Slovakia and Czech.
But in that moment, alone and more than half-lost in a country where I don’t speak even two words of the language, all I can do is lock the door and sigh with relief. I can change my clothes and brush my teeth and hope, just hope, that I won’t be offered vodka again.
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