To Tell The Truth

In reading over the blog so far, all the posts are about our travels around Europe. It reads very much like the fabulous life of Jenn and Joey. Not to say we are not enjoying ourselves and we like sharing our experiences, but when we're not out being fabulous, we live our everyday lives.

I wake up each day and walk 2km to work. I listen to a podcast on the way to work, usually The BS Report from ESPN, the ESPN Fantasy Football Focus podcast (which seems to be doing me no good in improving my fantasy football team), or NPR's Planet Money. I have the trip home too, so I usually can get one or two knocked out on a given day. While I get going, Jenn gets out of bed and makes her way into the living room, sits on the couch, starts up her laptop, and gets to work.

I take the elevator up to the 9th floor. There are no cubes or offices. We just sit at long shared desks, with small dividers. There is little privacy. I face the big windows facing out to the city. It's a nice view. In Round Rock, my cube would isolate me from the world and I was nowhere close to a window. I wouldn't know if there was a meteor shower outside or if a UFO landed in the parking lot. When I don't have a bowl of cereal at the apartment, I go down to the 8th floor bistro and get a croissant or go downstairs to the canteen (the cafeteria) and get a banana.

In Austin, I bring my lunch almost every day, but I've mainly been eating in the canteen here. This is partly because I haven't gotten that comfortable with the grocery store here and what is available, but also because the food is pretty good and not very expensive in the canteen. The lunches are much heavier than what I prefer to eat, but when in Rome...

Twice a week, I rush home from work for our Slovak lessons. The lessons are an hour and a half with Jan, a graduate student who speaks Slovak, French, and English. He's very patient with us. We're really enjoying working with him. Slovak is extremely difficult to learn, but we're coming along okay. We won't be fluent anytime soon.

For dinner, we generally have been going out to eat. As I stated above, we haven't gotten the hang of the grocery yet and haven't been cooking as much as we when in Austin. There isn't a wide variety of restaurants as it's pretty much Slovak/Eastern European or Italian. We haven't found a place we're overly enthused about just yet, but we need to explore the city a little more beyond the city center where we live.

We're still getting used to Bratislava and while we're settled in to some extent, we haven't necessarily gotten into a regular routine. We also haven't spent nearly enough time exploring the city. This will all come as we're determined to give living here our best effort.

It's been 3 months since I arrived (2 for Jenn), so 9 more to go. Winter is almost upon us. Stay tuned.