Slovakian Swedish

On Thursday after lunch I wandered around the old town, familiarizing myself with it better, and I climbed up to the imposing castle above the city. I like Bratislava better now, and the locals speak much better English and are friendlier and more open than in Poland. We’re right on the Austrian and Hungarian borders here, so they’re used to needing to speak something other than Slovak, I guess.

Speaking of that, after work I did something unique: I joined a Slovak Swedish conversation Meetup group for a 2-hour Swedish session at an underground tea house in a former bunker. Not many people can say that. Well, four people can say it just from that evening. So there were two Slovaks who’d lived in Sweden for 3-5 years, and there was a lady who learned Swedish while getting a university degree in German! Crazy. Europeans are so good at languages that they’ll just throw an extra one in, and then even practice conversation with one of their lesser-known languages. They all love Swedish culture, and the two would like to live there again one day. I could understand them well, but I was rusty, so I’m sure I sounded like a drunk, though they understood. And since my brain seems to have only two shelves for languages (English and non-English), I kept throwing in Spanish words too, like sí and también. I do the same in reverse – that is, when I speak Spanish I will accidentally put in Swedish words too. It’s a mess. But I could tell them where I was from, why I was visiting, where my daughter goes to school, what kind of work my son does, etc, and I could ask them for tourist tips as well. It was fun, but tiring. I probably burned more brain calories than usual!