Back to the grindstone

Well, I can at least breathe a sigh of relief at having rejoined the ranks of the great employed! This is now my second week working for Tetras, and I’m glad to say I’m enjoying it. All my colleagues have been really nice and welcoming, and many speak good or excellent English. For the rest, it’s been a good opportunity to work on my rusty spoken German.

I’ve been struck by a couple of interesting things so far. First of all, I’ve had some fun wrangling with a ‘Slovak-speaking’ version of Office and Firefox and getting used to the different keyboard layout. These are soon to be replaced with English versions but, in the meantime, unless it says “Hello”, “Goodbye” or “Thank You” (not often…), I’m pretty much helpless!!

Secondly, people seem to routinely start work at crazy times like 7 o’clock or earlier. Having said that, I may be joining them when we get back to Virginia, or the 6-hour time difference will mean we’re scarcely both in the office at once, which I can imagine causing some issues. At least there’s more time and more daylight to enjoy in the evening that way.

The only downside is the layout of the office. It’s located in a converted house, so we are split across many rooms on 2 different floors. This makes it harder to become friendly with people. It’s someone’s birthday tomorrow, so I hope that will help – after all, one of the main reasons I’m here is to get to know people who will soon be four or five thousand miles away.

On the culinary front, we’ve continued to explore Žilina’s many restaurants and bars, a high number of which seem to be either hidden behind shops or underground! This has not been hindered by the prices which - to us at least - seem very low. On Friday we tried a famous national dish ‘Bryndzové halušky’ (small potato dumplings, not unlike gnocchi, tossed in bryndza sheep’s-cheese sauce and topped with crispy bacon) – mmmmm :-)


One particular revelation has been the lunch voucher scheme supported by many shops and employers here. Basically, how it works is that I use the voucher each day to pay for whatever I like to the value of €3, then Tetras takes €1 out of my wages. I wish they could do something similar for me back in the US, but it would cost over $10 to get that kind of value in Washington.

So far we’ve only ventured out of town once, and it just happened to be the the first clear day we’ve had since we arrived (one of four since October, according to my new American colleague, Rob!). I hope a little bit of the magic is conveyed in the picture.

The trip took us only a few miles away to Martin, a town which played an instrumental role in Slovakia’s sucession from the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I. We saw various monuments and had a brief look at the national museum.

We have lots of interesting travels planned for the remaining six weeks, most either suggested or accompanied by colleagues, so there’s lots still to look forward to.

Mark