It is hard to believe that nine months have gone by so quickly and in about a weeks time we will be heading home. It is definitely with mixed emotions that we leave. We are eager to see friends in Seattle and pick up with things we were doing when we took out a year to visit Bratislava. Also it is hard to imagine a place better than Seattle in the summer. Still we have had a great time here, made many new friends and traveled to many places. To give a few examples, on Friday we took a train into Vienna to catch the first day of a new show at the Albertina Museum on German Expressionism. We then had lunch at one of our favorite restaurants before heading back to Bratislava. On Saturday we decided on the spur of the moment to go to the opera that night to see Lucia di Lammermoor. We were lucky getting the last seats in the house, which turned out to be quite good seats. What a performance! The soprano, L’ubica Vargicova was spectacular.
About 10 days ago we flew to Paris for a quick 4 day trip to visit Bev and Bob Corwin, friends and neighbors in Seattle, who are living there for 6 months. Earlier Bev and Bob had visited us in Bratislava. It was a great opportunity to visit friends, see some new parts of Paris and visit places in Paris which were favorites from prior visits. One interesting place is a new pedestrian bridge across the Seine from the new Francois Mitterrand Library which is part of an entire new area of Paris which is being developed. (Paris seems to have a penchant for that with La Defence and now this new area.)
About 10 days ago we flew to Paris for a quick 4 day trip to visit Bev and Bob Corwin, friends and neighbors in Seattle, who are living there for 6 months. Earlier Bev and Bob had visited us in Bratislava. It was a great opportunity to visit friends, see some new parts of Paris and visit places in Paris which were favorites from prior visits. One interesting place is a new pedestrian bridge across the Seine from the new Francois Mitterrand Library which is part of an entire new area of Paris which is being developed. (Paris seems to have a penchant for that with La Defence and now this new area.)
We were back in Bratislava for one day and then packed up a rental car and headed north to the High Tatras, which are some spectacular alpine mountains near the Polish border. It was our first outing in a rental car in Slovakia and went very well. Roads were well marked and we had no problems finding our way and visiting some interesting small villages along the way. We stayed in two hotels, the Grand Hotel in Stary Smokovec and the Grand Hotel Praha in Tatranska Lomnica. Both were indeed grand, dating back over 100 years to the days of the grand tours of the rich and famous, of which we were neither. After several days of hiking, touring to small villages with wooden churches and going to spas, we headed back without any incidents.
I have graded all the exams, turned in all the evaluations and we are saying goodbye to some good friends, both residents in Slovakia and fellow Fulbrighters who are now scattering around the globe. One thing surprising to me was the amount of rather blatant copying which took place during one of the exams, particularly by some of the Polish students. I separated them for the second exam and I was surprised to find out that they did better when they could not copy. Some of them copied students who got a lot of the multiple choice answers wrong. I asked other professors about this and they sort of sighed and said that this kind of “collaboration” was all too common and not much was done about it. Generally however the students did pretty well, some of them extremely well.
We are spending the day packing boxes for mailing later this week. So instead of packing as I should, I am here writing this blog. See you in a short time.
