It’s a long way to Szombathely
When I set off for the IJK the Saturday before last, I took with me a big empty notebook. The idea was that I would use it as a diary in which to record my experiences of the week, and that blogging about it once I got back would be a piece of cake. Of course, what happened in the event was that I ended up having far too much fun to even think about taking notes, and so now I am completely at the mercy of my memory. I was going to say that happily my memory is better than that of my ageing boyfriend, but my mother has just told me off for describing him as old. Apparently you wouldn’t know he was nearly thirty at all, because he looks so incredibly “youthful” 
As I have noted already, attending the IJK was a prospect which worried me for several important reasons, but there were actually various less important factors which contrived to make me incredibly stressed during the day on which we set off. It just so happened that my mother was away from home the week before, having gone to Germany to help my sister with her move back home. My father had had to work during the week, but was scheduled to fly out to Stuttgart to join them on the Saturday morning, a couple of hours before my flight to Bratislava was booked. This was a momentous occasion indeed, because it was destined to be the first time my father, who is 54, would have travelled abroad on his own. There was, theoretically, no need to panic. My mother had not only packed his suitcase for him before he left, but also his hand luggage. I checked him in online, arranged his taxi for the correct hour and made him prove to me that he had set his alarm correctly. All he actually had to do was get up at 4am, and I even switched off the tv and ensured he went to bed at eleven. Nothing could possibly go wrong…
My journey, however, was one in which there was grave potential for something to go wrong. Having planned to travel for in excess of 12 hours through 3 different countries, two of which involved languages I didn’t speak and currencies I didn’t understand, and having the entire smooth running of the day reliant on a Ryanair flight being on time, it was no wonder that on Friday night I didn’t manage to relax enough to sleep until after one. I might not have been so bothered were it just myself who could be inconvenienced by a disaster en route, but having volunteered to arrange the transport for my boyfriend as well, I felt that there was an additional pressure for things to go according to plan, and if they didn’t I knew I was going to feel irrationally guilty, even if it was blatently outside of my control.
Four hours then into a rather fitful sleep, I was rudely awakened by frenzied bell-ringing and knocking at the door. My first thought was that someone must have died, and I lay in bed for a few minutes trying to think who it could be. I don’t know if I’m a terribly pessimistic person who always thinks the worst, but to me, knocking on the door in the middle of the night always implies a calamity. Once I had come to my senses, it became evident that this was indeed evidence of a calamity, although happily not one of a terminal nature. My father had managed to sleep through his alarm, and here was his taxi driver banging on the door in an attempt to take him to the airport.
I was perplexed how this could have happened, since I had forced him to show me that the alarm was set, and double checked myself that it was set for am rather than pm etc etc. It later transpired once I got home that in setting the alarm my father had accidentally knocked the volume control and thus the alarm had indeed gone off, but silently 
In any case, he managed to get off to the airport and made his flight on time, but suddenly I was faced with a whole host of jobs to do which I hadn’t allowed time for in my schedule. Most notably, I had to empty the rubbish bin, which for me was a very traumatic experience. I’m the sort of person who retches at the very thought of a rubbish bin, and I hereby declare to Babel that it’s a condition of us moving in together that he looks after the bin 
Having sustained a few haste-induced leg-shaving injuries, I set off for the city centre and happily was on time to meet my boyfriend at Birmingham New Street. I confess that I paid 50p extra to travel on a bus for which my monthly pass is not valid so as to avoid arriving 5 minutes after he did. It wouldn’t have been the end of the world in terms of our connection if I had done, but it would have been hugely embarrassing since I’d already text him to tell him to leave home at an appropriate time, as well as providing him with a detailed itinerary the day before
Having taken the train to Birmingham International, we made our way to Terminal Two or, as I prefer to call it, The Crap Terminal. I’m sorry, but I just infinitely prefer Terminal One I was surprised and horrified at how long we had to wait in line at check in, having innocently supposed that Bratislava would be a relatively unpopular destination with an almost empty aircraft. Not at all – the plane was full to bursting and we were lucky to get a seat next to each other. It was noticeable, however, that very many people on the plane were not speaking English and appeared to be going home for a visit rather than on holiday.
I had been nervous that my boyfriend’s rather heavy looking bag would exceed the maximum 15kg baggage allowance, but luckily it didn’t and we were swiftly through security and on a mission to eat the biggest possible meal before the flight was called for boarding. The nature of the connections meant that there potentially wasn’t going to be time to eat at any other point during the day, and for this reason we were also obliged to shell out nearly £4 in WH Smiths for two 1.5 litre bottles of Buxton water. Out of the three eating establishments in the terminal, Wetherspoons seemed like the best bet for breakfast and my boyfriend very kindly agreed to cover the cost. He probably hadn’t expected the cost to exceed £16 when he made the offer, but it was indeed a very nice breakfast and I discovered to my complete surprise that I like hash browns
We ended up sitting in the seats by the emergency exits, which was annoying because some legal requirement or other meant that I wasn’t allowed to have so much as my jumper on my lap during the flight, never mind my bag. It was a beautiful sunny day and so I had been looking forward to an exciting view out of the window, but it was not to be. The man sitting next to me was peculiarly nervous about flying, to the extent that he kept covering his face with his hands and emitting weird groaning noises. Despite the best efforts of the air hostesses to stop him, he persisted in closing the window shutter at inappropriate moments, and so I was denied an exciting view of central Europe 
The flight was 2.5 hours which I actually found a bit too long – I’m not scared of flying but I find it kind of claustrophobic. The pilot made a complete mess of the landing, but I was nevertheless pretty chuffed because he had got us into Bratislava ten minutes ahead of schedule and that would make all the difference for the rest of the journey 
I had been worried that Bratislava airport would be a huge affair and that passing through passport control and baggage reclaim would take ages. It turned out to be a tiny place, but happily efficient and we were literally able to walk out of the front door and see our bus
I’d opted for us to travel to Vienna with Slovaklines at the very reasonable price of £10 return. Buying the tickets online was slightly tricky as the translation of their site into English is rather shaky and haphazard, but nevertheless I was glad I had gone to the effort as the driver proved not only to speak no English but also next to know German. We were confronted with a typical example of English arrogance abroad when a fellow passenger from our flight walked up to the driver and started addressing him in English without, I think, it even occurring to him that he might not understand.
The journey was scheduled to take two hours and I had, to be honest, been a little perplexed by that, because I was sure the two cities weren’t so terribly far apart. The reason soon became clear, when after a ten minute jaunt down the road to the chief bus station in Bratislava we halted for what must have been half an hour for the driver to have his lunch break. It was a little frustrating to sit on a hot airless coach for so long, but next time I guess we’d be better prepared and know we could go for a walk around.
Our journey didn’t take us through the centre of Bratislava, but what I saw confirmed my impression that it is a rather industrial sort of place. That said, I would greatly love to go back there sometime for a cheap weekend and explore the old town because I believe there are many beautiful buildings. From the coach window we were able to catch a glimpse of a very spectactular castle perched on the top of the hill – I don’t know enough about Bratislava to know what it was, but it seemed very impressive indeed.
I had been talking to a guy from Bratislava the week before, through pure coincidence, and he had explained to me that the city was so close to the border of Slovakia that after the first world war there had actually been considerable discussion about which country the city should belong to. For a reason I can’t remember, because I was halfway up a hill and out of breath at the time, it was considered strategically important that the river Danube, which runs through the city, should not form the national border. Thus, as you drive out of Bratislava you cross the Danube (which is amazingly enormous here!) and then you traverse a bizarre strip of land which surely can’t be more than a kilometre before you find yourself abruptly at the Austrian border.
As my friend had told me, all the watchtowers and so forth have now been dismantled and the border is nothing more than a formality and a pleasant relief that the road signs are now in a comprehensible language. It must have been such a strange city to live in in the past though – to literally be able to see Austria every single day, and yet have no way of visiting this other world.
I had never been to Niederoesterreich before, nor ever particularly aspired to go there, but nevertheless I found the journey quite exciting. The initial part passed along the side of the Danube and through a couple of very pictureseque little villages. There were fields and fields of beautiful sunflowers, and also row upon row of wind turbines, which personally I find a magnificent sight and not at all ugly. My feelings towards Austria are a bit confused; it fascinates me, there are all sorts of things I would like to see there, and yet I would never want to live there. It is not good to make sweeping generalisations, but whenever I have been to Austria I have been disturbed by something in the national psyche. And that is not (just) because of certain right wing tendencies which certain Austrian politicians might have. Switzerland is potentially more right wing, certainly more insular, and yet it is not a place which makes me uncomfortable…
Anyhow, I was rather excited by the prospect of getting to Vienna. Vienna is somewhere I have spent my whole life wanting to go; I can’t imagine that it is more magical than Salzburg (which has truly got to be the most beautiful city in the world), but nevertheless I think there is something special about Vienna. It was thus a disappointment to find that our bus approached the city by means of a main road from the airport reminiscent of the Aston Expressway coming out of Birmingham. Think not just business parks and industrial estates but water towers, gas installations, huge chimneys pumping out black smoke. The outskirts of Vienna are an industrial wasteland, and because our bus stopped near one of the minor stations on a busy ring road, we didn’t get to see anything which was worthy of excitement.
Nevertheless, we found our way to the correct station without problems and even had enough time to grab a much needed slice of pizza before catching our first train. We only had to travel for half an hour on this one, to a town called Wiener Neustadt, but I became a bit panicky when the train was delayed by four minutes on account of us allegedly having a transfer time of only seven. The information I had printed off the internet informed me that I needed to disembark from one train at platform three and locate the other train on platform twenty one, and so I envisaged a mad dash across an enormous railway terminus rather akin to Munich Hbf. No fear; for reasons which ellude me, the town planners had chosen to skip platforms 5 – 20, and all we had to do was descend one staircase and ascend another
Happily seated in a train to Hungary, I felt I could finally relax… until I remembered that every minute was bringing me closer to a destination I actually wasn’t terribly anxious to reach. After passing through a row of small Austrian towns we quietly slipped across the border and wow, here we were, in a country where I was incapable even of saying hello. Believe me, after ten minutes of exposure to Hungarian, Slovak began to seem a very unexotic sort of language; I could look at billboards in Bratislava and pick out the words I understood – beer, help, love – but Hungarian is about as intuitive as Chinese. During the entire week I only managed to guess the meaning of one word, and that was the fairly obvious “Kemping”.
We sat on the train for about two hours, and during that time I scarcely saw any sign of human habitation. We stopped at Hungarian train station after Hungarian train station and sat for a minute or two next to a run-down railway building before moving on again, but none of these stations had a visible town attached to them. As far as the eye could see, vast arable fields stretched out across a flat landscape, scarcely even broken by the odd tree. Bizarrely, as twilight fell, I began to be able to make out the shapes of little deer, skipping through the crop fields in search of something to eat. They were the only sign of life.
Arriving in Szombathely at 20.32, I was instantly impressed by the sheer grandeur of the train station. The domed painted ceiling was reminiscent of almost of a cathedral. Armed with the directions we had been emailed, we set off on a half hour walk, for the most part following a column of confused Esperantists who were also searching for the kongresejo. About halfway they appeared to get fed up of walking in a straight line and began to mill about aimlessly, but having read our instructions more diligently we knew we had to get as far as the bus station, so took the opportunity to strike out ahead. We were soon rewarded with arrival at the university
And then the trauma began We all had to join a queue in order to be registered for the congress and the experience soon proved to be a baptism of fire into the world of Esperantist disorganisation. A line of volunteers sat at a long table in the akceptejo, and all new arrivals were supposed to pass through each one of them in turn. Being honest, I’m not sure what all the commotion was about because it was a fairly simple process, but a combination of bad organisation on the part of those in charge and dim wittedness on the part of those trying to sign up contrived to make the experience last in excess of forty minutes. I was particularly annoyed to have to queue to have my name badge laminated because the person in charge of laminating would only process eight at a time, or some such nonsense…
I don’t know, perhaps I wouldn’t have been so irritable had it not been so unbearably hot in the room. It was truly suffocating though, and by the time we had managed to extricate ourselves from the admin, all my boyfriend and I really wanted was to have a shower. I speak as a person who doesn’t even take showers! I warmed up to them, however, during the week because the showers in the university hall of residence where we were staying had been cleverly designed without screens or curtains so you could see the girl in the shower next to you. Unfortunately Esperantists don’t seem to wash a lot, so sometimes I went in and found the showers empty, but nevertheless I had quite a few enjoyable views over the course of a week
I was relieved to find that not only were my boyfriend and I in a two-person room, but we were in the same two-person room, and it was actually fairly pleasant. It was large at any rate, so at no point during the week did I end up feeling claustrophobic, and whilst it wasn’t perfectly clean in terms of dust and dirt, there were absolutely no bugs or insects. Added to that, there were some excellent shelving units and so we were able to arrange our stuff in a very efficient manner. Over the course of the week, I grew to like the place, despite the fact that it was unbearably hot and only one of the windows was capable of being put in the proper gekippt position. It would have helped if the organisers had indicated where the bathrooms were and which ones were male and female, but other than that, no complaints
By the time we had sufficiently cooled down, we had well and truly missed the interkona vespero, but we headed to the trinkejo to say hello to a few people anyway, and I drank several glasses of a rather delicious apple juice As well as a few people from JEB, it was nice to talk to a Serbian Esperantist who I had previously briefly met whilst he was in the UK attending the wedding of two people I had never met but in whose house I happened to be in order to have a one-night-stand with the person who is now by boyfriend but back then wasn’t intending to be. As should be evident, I had other things on my mind at that first meeting which pretty much robbed me of the power of speech, so I was fairly surprised that he recognised me at all
By 1am, however, I had really had enough. I’m not someone who excels at socialising with other people at the best of times, and so I decided I couldn’t cope with it any more and needed to get back to the room to be by myself. My boyfriend had no intention of having an early night, and so I asked him for directions back to the room. He gave me some, but me being me, by the time I had left the university and crossed the bridge, I couldn’t remember if he had said to turn left or turn right. I was too proud to go back and ask him again, so I began randomly wandering around in circles. It occurred to me that it was a little foolish to be wandering round a strange Hungarian town in the early hours of the morning, being unable to speak a word of the language and not even knowing the name of the building I was looking for, what road it was on, or indeed what it looked like. It was indeed a miracle that within half an hour I had managed to find the correct place, but that was not before I had managed to stand on a twig and bruise my foot, and been severely frightened by a demented-looking man on a park bench who later turned out to be a statue
I returned to my room for a much needed cry, and by the time my boyfriend returned I was happily asleep. A slightly strange start to the week, but from there it all went uphill
Tags: bratislava, Esperanto, IJK, Szombathely