Day 4- Štvrtok (Thursday)

Today we had class and a break in between as usual but we had shortbread cookies which were quite delicious. During our lunch break I went to the mall and bought a Slovak/English, English/Slovak dictionary as well as a visual Italian/English dictionary!!! It is so cool… tons of vocabulary. Then we had more class and played games most of the time. Our teacher had set up these teams and we are having an “Olympics.” It is pretty fun. Our team name is dobré meaning good. Slovak’s use that as a filler word all the time. I think it was actually the first Slovak word I learned J. The other 2 members of my groups are Réka from Hungary and Laure from France. Today we studied question words and a ton of adjectives. Right after class we went up to the lecture which was very interesting; the most interesting out of all the lectures. He talked about politics in the post-communist Slovakia. I learned that there is very low civic participation in Slovakia and when people do participate it is usually very passively, such as signing petitions. Also recently, there was a large wave of protests; one of four significant civic activities since 1989. The professor was very clear and a great lecturer. Then I went to the restaurant across the street and hung out with a bunch of people until the presentation about the upcoming Slovak trips. It was really funny because two people were studying Slovak, two were playing with an electronic English to Japanese translator, one was reading a Hungarian book, two were talking in English and I was looking at my Italian book; quite the table I’d say. The presentation was reat and I will write more about where I am going as I get closer. After I walked back with Selina, the girl from oxford, hung out and then left for the movie with Autumn.  The movie was pretty interesting although I didn’t really understand all that was going on. It was about a young man who got a job as a radio technician during the Soviet Communist era. The movie was about his struggles with this. All in all it was a pretty good day. Until tomorrow… <3