Playing Catch Up

     I realized recently that I've been neglecting writing about my real life here in Bratislava because I'm so behind on my Italy posts, and that's not really fair. However beautiful Italy was, Bratislava is so much more my life that not writing about it because it's not as exciting is stupid. I will continue to post about my Italian adventures as time allows, but I'm not going to put everything else on hold because of it. So here goes. An update on my life in Slovakia.

City center from the walls of the castle.

School: It's hard to believe that I've been teaching for almost two months. The time has absolutely flown by. I've learned so much in these past two months it would be impossible to describe all of it, and it would probably bore you all to death anyway. So I'll summarize. The first several weeks, even up until spring break, I was primarily trying not to drown beneath everything I was doing: planning classes, grading assignments, figuring out the various systems for grades, attendance, and substituting. It was rough. There were times I'd go into class not really having a clue what I was going to teach these kids for the next 45 minutes, and need to think on my feet to fill up the time, sometimes more successfully than others. Also, I just didn't (and still don't) feel old enough to have authority over these kids. Yes, I'm 24, and I have a college degree, I know that. But I don't feel that old, and it took a while before I was able to convince myself that I could, in fact, tell these kids what to do, and grade their essays, and ask them to behave in class. There were absolutely moments where I wanted to break into tears, and there were moments when I did. I was overwhelmed, unsure, and self-conscious of the fact that I didn't have the faintest clue what I was doing. As a die-hard perfectionist, and my own worst critic, I was tearing myself apart. I had good days, but I was concentrating on the bad ones. There was no middle ground for me; I was either a really good teacher, or someone who couldn't accomplish anything in the classroom. It sucked.
     But I don't feel that way anymore. Or rather, I feel that way significantly less often than I did before. Don't get me wrong, it's still really difficult, and I still feel like I want to pull my hair out sometimes, but I'm learning how to cope. I've started planning lessons out more than a day at a time. I'm able to cut myself some slack and not grade papers the day they're handed in to me. I've gotten more comfortable with my students and am able to relax more in front of the classes. I've realized I don't have to be a "teacher". I have to be me, as a teacher, and that's probably what has helped the most.

UFO Bridge and Petrzalka from the Castle.

    Though much about teaching has gotten easier in the last couple months, there are things that have gotten harder. I started teaching, as many people do, with thoughts of inspiring young minds, of eager students with good questions, wanting to be taught. While those things may exist in some places, they don't here. I know my classes better than that, and am able to recognize that, with a few exceptions, no matter what I do, no matter how well I plan out my lessons or how thoughtfully I grade their papers, they're still not going to appreciate it. It's discouraging, to say the least. My naivete, while mostly a burden, was also a little bit of a blessing.  I'm still on the fence about whether I want to keep teaching or not but at least now I know that when I do have to answer that question sometime in the relatively near future, I'll have an answer based neither on fear nor optimism. I'll have an answer based on real life.

Bratislava: You may recall that my first impression of Bratislava was not the greatest. I thought the city was, for the most part, ugly, dirty, inconvenient, and frustrating. That opinion has definitely changed. Spring came early to Slovakia this year, and it has been very kind to us. While my family in Minnesota was buried under drifts of snow, the trees were starting to turn green, the sky was consistently blue, and I was able to go outside with bare limbs. The last month has been absolutely gorgeous, even during the cold snap we had the temperature barely got down to freezing even at night. The city has come alive. Walking around downtown and seeing all the cafes and restaurants with their tables out along the sidewalk instead of jumbled all together inside, being able to have an ice cream cone (for significantly less than a euro) and not worry about shivering, wandering through the city center at night in a light jacket comfortably, all these things have greatly increased my appreciation for Bratislava. It really is quite a nice little city.

Along the canal in Petrzalka.

     Even Petrzalka is growing on me. Last week I went for a walk along the canal and discovered a lake! A little lake, but a lake nonetheless. With the grass turning green and the trees starting to blossom, even the concrete blocks start to look less foreboding.
     At some point I'm going to have to force myself to sit down and write about Bratislava. The problem is that now that I've lived here, I'm recognizing things that a visitor wouldn't. I can't be as flighty as I can be with other cities. Bratislava is more than a place I've visited, it's become a place I've lived, and that makes it infinitely more difficult to document. It's more than the buildings, more than the atmosphere, even more than the contrasting elements of it's history. It's complicated, and what's more, I understand that it's complicated. Florence, for all of it's loveliness, has to have some complications, but I can go there and not see them, because they're well hidden from the eyes of casual tourists. Day-trippers don't want complicated, they want the Duomo and the Uffizi, so that's what they get. Even if Abbie and I did stray from the tourist track, we were still only in Florence for two and a half days, not nearly enough time to become more than acquaintances.
     But that's not real life. Bratislava is real life. It's a real city, with real problems, problems that I have experienced, problems that, even if I can never understand them, I can recognize. At the same time, it has more joy hidden in it than I've seen so far, more to offer that I have yet to take advantage of. There's so much more, of everything. That's why it's so hard for me to write about Bratislava, and maybe that's part of the reason I've been putting this off. I know too much about the city to write from a tourist's perspective and not enough to write from a resident's perspective.
     So I guess that's where I have to leave it. That's my life, in the smallest of nutshells. I'm going to try my darndest to write more frequently, about Italy, about the impromptu day trip we took to Budapest, about what I'm doing here as a Bratislavan, about what I'm thinking as I move forward into the future and about the decisions that are, once again, going to have to be made about my life and how I want to live it.