Today I received a text message from my old Slovak tutor in Zilina. It read:

Hi, I just wanted to tell you that there was a research of almost 8000 languages in Berlin. The easiest was Spanish and the most difficult Slovak.

You can imagine my joy/despair from reading this! I felt joy because of the validation it gave me: "I'm not crazy, this language is freaking hard!!!" But I also felt despair: "Great. I'm trying to learn the hardest language ever. Yeah. That's going to happen."

Anyways, upon further research I found this:

On September 27th a linguistic consortium in Paris has come up with following results:

the easiest languages to learn:

10. mongolese

09. aramaic

08. greek

07. norwegian

06. italian

05. romanian

04. croatian

03. bulgarian

02. english

01. the easiest language in the world spoken by more than 300 million people is spanish

the most difficult languages: (linguists examined complexity of grammar, syntax, historical development, pronunciation, orthography, letter styles, signs, etc.)

10. german

09. french

08. chinese

07. japanese

06. korean

05. persian

04. arabic

03. finnish

02. hungarian

01. the most difficult language is Slovak

The most difficult is grammar structure. Slovak language is the only one with seven grammar cases (nominativ, genitiv, dativ, accusativ, local, instrumental, vocativ), exquisite words, soft and hard "i", declension of adjectives and verbs, in other words almost each and every word in this language is being declinated. There are many other characteristics which are not found in other world languages. It is said, or estimated, that it takes about 12 years to learn it completely, but the linguists say, that there is no one on this earth who can speak this language perfectly knowing all the grammar rules.

So, this new nugget of information comes to me at the perfect time. Today I start studying Slovak again. I've been on a break for the past few weeks due to moving, but tonight it all begins again.

Bring.
It.
On.

My first JV Thanksgiving

Why, you ask, do I have a photo of the Pirate's of the Caribbean in my Thanksgiving post? Well, I'll tell you. Our annual JV Thanksgiving conference is our most relaxed conference all year. It's mostly about fellowship and food and "family," with a few sessions of Biblical teaching mixed in. One of the activities we all take part in during this conference is the "Family Frenzy" time. This is an allotted time when there are lots of different games, sports and activities for us to sign up for and enjoy. Well, Katka (Yes, the same one who helped me move, and who is in the senior photo shoot. I know, we spend a lot of time together.) and I decided we wanted to find something low key so we could just chill during that time, and, sure enough, there was a puzzle to work on. Perfect. Or so we thought.

Above is the puzzle we took on with our bare hands that fateful day of the 23rd of November 2007. I'll tell you what. All that green mess = impossible. I became slightly obsessed once we began the project and found that it stole many minutes of my life away from me this past week. And I say stole because, you guessed it, it was never finished. NEVER FINISHED!!! You might as well tell me my dog died, because an unfinished puzzle sucks just as bad. Okay, maybe not just as bad, but it's not fun.

Besides the unfinished puzzle, the retreat was great. And so was the FOOD! Before we started eating on Thanksgiving day I started to get a little sad, not just because I was missing family, but also because I was missing good Southern cooking. You see, in JV, Southerners are a minority. In fact, besides my friend Brittany who is heading to Ukraine, I think Slovakia is the only JV country that has any Southerners! Such a shame! So as I sat there preparing myself for the feast, I started to miss 2 things that I know I would have gotten at home: sweet tea and cornbread dressing. Well, the sweet tea was unavailable, but my amazing teammate, Kim (from Arkansas), filled my need for cornbread dressing. She had made one and it just wasn't out on the table yet. And it was glorious. I don't know if many of you know the joys of a good cornbread dressing, but I know my brother does, and I hope he is delighted when reading this.

The Move

Clearly lots of things have happened since I last wrote on here, but I will simplify it greatly for two reasons:

1) I don’t want to bore you with tons of details.
2) I don’t want to bore myself with having to write those details.

So, here we go. Most of my October was spent trying to find a place to live in Bratislava, and, after finding one, the beginning of November was spent trying to find a way to move my junk there. And this past Saturday it finally happened! I moved my butt to Bratislava!

Here’s a little recap of how the day went:

6:00 am – Woke up to a bunch of snow in Zilina. Great. Snow + Moving = Gross
9:00 am – A few friends came over to help move stuff out.
10:30 am – We are already done, and (by the grace of God!) all my junk fit in the Kompas van and Mike’s car. Woot woot!
11:30 am – On the road to BA.
1:30 pm – Arrive in BA and begin moving my stuff up 4 floors, with no elevator. And what really sucks is that the building has an elevator, but you have to have a special key for it to work. Well, we don’t have a key, and it seems all of my neighbors decided to leave town the day I arrive with 2 car loads of heavy stuff. Thanks for the warm welcome guys.
3:00 pm – Finished moving in!!
3:30 pm – Katka comes up with the amazing idea to hit up Ikea since we have the van until the next morning, and there are lots of things my roommate and I need get soon.
4:30 pm – Arrive at Ikea. I could spend days there.
7:00 pm – Arrive back at my place with 6 heavy boxes and no guys to help us carry it up. However, after circling the block for 20 minutes, we have to stop in the middle of the road (with 3 cars waiting behind us) and “quickly” remove all boxes from the van and onto the side walk.
7:30 pm – Katka and I stare at what we have to carry up 4 flights and wonder what the heck we were thinking.
7:35 pm – All of my neighbors are still mysteriously missing/ignoring our knocking on their doors, so, yet again, no elevator for us. Curses!
8:00 pm – After 3 boxes I literally think I’m going to pass out. This is when a single girl wishes she had a husband to take care of the heavy lifting. We decide to open up the rest of the 3 boxes and carry the pieces up individually.
8:30 pm – With one box left I try to persuade Katka to just leave it down there and we will get it in the morning. Thankfully she smacks some sense into me. It wouldn’t be fun to only have half the pieces to my new bureau.
8:45 pm – We are finally done. We quickly get into our pj’s and reward ourselves for this impressively productive day with last week’s Grey’s Anatomy.

8:00 am – We both wake up feeling every muscle in our body ache.



Here are some pics from the day:

What I woke up to:


Friends that came to help. I was pretty excited everything fit in two cars.


All my stuff.




The four flights of stairs.


My new building. I promise I wasn't lying about being on the fourth floor, you just can't see it here.


The park across the street from my place.


A view from inside the park.


Ok, well I hope this was a sufficient update on my move. On another note, I haven't had internet at home for 5 weeks now, which is extremely inconvenient. I'm kind of going crazy. That's another reason for my lack of posts lately. Yep, I'm still giving you excuses, but this one is pretty valid. I'm hoping it'll get set up here on Friday. We'll see.

A real one is coming soon...

Ok, so I promise a new blog is coming soon! I just moved to Bratislava, so things have been a little crazy and I don't have internet yet, but I'll get one ready this week. I PROMISE!!! (don't hate me for sucking at this!)

Fall Conference Pics

I don't really feel like writing today, but I feel obligated to give you some sort of treat since it has been a while since my last post. So, here are some pictures taken while at our JV Fall conference a couple of weeks ago:

This is a picture of the team I work with in Slovakia. The back row is (from L to R): Peto M., Zac, Peto H., and Kenric. The front row is: Draho, Paige, Me, and Miska.



Here is our team photo shoot gone awkward. Um, Kenric, you're a little too close for comfort.




Now these next set of photos could quite possibly blow your mind. They, in fact, are nothing short of AMAZING.

And to clarify, yes, we were going for the "cheezy-senior year-BFF" photo shoot. But I guess instead it should be considered the "cheezy-JV Fall Conference-BFF" photo shoot. The models other than myself are Brittney Boatman (soon to be serving in Ukraine) and Katka Vlnova (serving in Czech). They are my some of my favies.

Who knew I had the secret power to turn into a bunny?


This one actually turned out kinda cute, minus Brittney's "am I really doing this right now?" face.


My personal fave. Seriously, Katka's outstretched "look at me, I'm flying!" arms make me laugh EVERY time.


Oh the beautiful scenery. And the mountains are kinda pretty too. A wink!


NOTE: I realize I seriously overused quotation marks in this post. Please forgive me. But some things just can't be summed up in one word.

Is there such a thing as Autumn Fever?

Seriously, this is a problem.

Autumn is my favorite time of year, and it is in full effect here in SK. Really, it's quite lovely. But with it being so lovely comes the issue of me losing all motivation to be productive. As I was sitting in language today I just looked at my tutor and said, "I don't want to learn anymore." Thankfully, she assumed I was joking and just laughed, but sadly I wasn't joking.

Ugh. I need help.

Wait... This isn't Disney World?

While Steph was here visiting, we had the chance to visit a castle here in Bojnice. There are tons of castles throughout Slovakia, but most of them are just ruins. This one has been restored, so I was pretty excited to check it out. We didn't have a ton of time to hang out there, due to the fact we had caught a ride with Paige who had business there. Initially we thought we'd just walk around the grounds and appreciate the beauty from there, but we soon changed our mind when we saw people coming from inside the castle. We thought, we're here, so we might as well check it out.

So, we quickly go up to the ticket window, get ourselves 2 tickets, and start heading inside. Until we look around and see there isn't a clear entrance. I go back up to the window to ask where the tickets permit us to go, when I find out its actually for a tour. "Ok, great!" I say, turn around to go tell Steph, and then I realize it. The tour will be in Slovak of course.

Now, I don't know exactly what I was thinking when I bought those tickets. As if we could just skip around this huge castle, or that the tour would be in English. I think that part of me forgot I was in Slovakia since Steph was with me. And it probably didn't help that Steph kept saying at random points (and especially when we were in Prague), "I feel like this place isn't real, like we are in the international part of Disney World or something!" That made me laugh every time.

So, I go back to the window and ask if they have any English material to go with the tour. Thankfully they did. I go back and tell Steph the news, we share a good laugh, and then we head with the rest of the people for the tour.

Now, what happened next is a good picture of what life is like for me here most of the time.

As we head into the first room of the castle, Steph and I try to hug the back of the group in hopes that we won't stand out, since we'll be reading a little brochure instead of listening to the tour. So, as the tour guide starts talking, Steph and I start reading about the room. Well, after a few moments I look up to see that everyone else in the room has turned around to look at something right above our heads... while we are still just standing there reading our little handout. I try to slowly, and hopefully somewhat inconspicuously, turn around as if I knew what was going on, but it was too late. We had already been outed as foreigners, and I couldn't stop laughing at how absurd we looked.

And such is everyday life for me here in SK. I try so hard to just blend in, but then something happens which everyone else understands, and I'm stuck looking in the wrong direction. I can't do anything but laugh when this happens. Sometimes I cry, but, thankfully, most times I just laugh.