- Doorknobs. There are no round doorknobs anywhere in this country. They're all the kind that are shaped like the letter L, with the short end in the door and the long end parallel to the floor.
- Lightswitches. Rather than the neat white rectangles of my youth, these are all square.
- Chalkboards. There's nary a whiteboard to be found anywhere, but the chalkboards slice, dice, make julienne fries, and even sort your socks. The board is comprised of a rectangular piece with two folding wings, which open or close to allow the teacher to write on both sides of them, provinding a surface area three times that of the original rectangle. They slide up and down about six inches, too, the better to write at both the tippy top and way down at the bottom.
- Notebooks and other school supplies. Rather than aisled upon aisles of notebooks, binders, and the like, students here have only about three rather hideous styles of little staple-bound booklets of lined, plain, or quadrille paper, in addition to the three styles of more expensive spiral bound notebooks.
- Radiators. The big old-timey ones. There's one in every room. No central heating here!
- Very, very narrow streets. Coupled with the ridiculous speed at which these people drive, their utter disregard of seatbelts, and pedestrians' habit of jaywalking, it's a wonder I'm still alive.
- Yellow lights. They come on both sides of the red light. The cycle goes green, yellow, red, red and yellow, and back to green. Pretty good idea, actually.
- One last rant about socks, and then I promise I'll shut up about it. What the crap is wrong with not wearing socks? Seriously, these people are obsessed. And it's not just socks. If you're going to wear a skirt or even a pair of capris or something, you'd better be wearing nylons or tights (unless you're a guy. But if you're wearing shorts in the winter, apparantly that means you're on drugs). Otherwise you will be accosted by everyone you meet, even total strangers on the bus, with the thrice-accursed phrase: "Nie si zima?" ("Aren't you cold?")
- Shoes. There's some sort of rule about "inside" shoes and "outside" shoes, less strict than in Japan, but I still haven't figured this out. I think you're supposed to change shoes when you get to school, and we wear old, worn-out birkenstock knock-offs around the house. But some kids wear similar shoes around school (with socks, naturally), so I have no idea what that's about.
- Lunch. The school lunch system is complicated. The day before, one must register their choice of meal by stamping bot hhalves of a perforated ticket and depositing one of them in a little box. Then, the next day, you hand the lunchlady the remaining half, in exchange for which they provide you with a steaming plate of... food. The problem: 1. I can't read the menu, and therefore, my choice of meal is utterly random, and 2. I didn't get any more tickets for October. I'm working on that.
- Dubbing. Roughly half the TV shows one sees here are dubbed into Slovak from some other language- usually, but not always, English. I've seen episodes of Friends, CSI, Monk, NCIS, some random German show about a crime fighting dog, and any number of Spanish soap operas, in addition to the local programming- sitcoms, reality shows, soap operas, and the like, all in Slovak.
- It's funny to read the back of the shampoo bottle and see four languages, none of which are English. Often, you get Slovak, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, and sometimes German.
- Public buildings, including my school, are all in such bad condition that, were they in America, they would long since have been condemned and torn down. Cracked linoleum, broken windows, graffiti all over the desks- there's even a mural of the Simpsons on the back wall of one classroom. That and the bars on many windows and doors gives the place a very strange vibe, like a converted prison or insane asylum or something
- The oldest building in Eugene is on campus and dates back to the 1870s. The oldest buildings in Slovakia date back to the 12th or 13th centuries. Note, for instance, this conversation that took place when the language camp kids went to see a castle:
"There was a fire here recently, and this ceiling was the only wooden thing to survive." "So all the other wood is a reproduction?"
"Oh yes. We replaced it shortly after the fire."
"When was this fire?"
"Oh, 1800."
- Every name has a special day, which the bearers of that name celebrate much like a birthday. The upshot of this is that there are only a couple hundred names for the entire population. I know two Martins, about four Barboras, four Ivetas, two Dominikas, and countless Sashas.
- The bathtubs here have a little seat built into them and a showerhead. Lots of families don't have a shower, so they shower in the tub. They never fill it up and take a bath, they just shower sitting down. Which is actually kind of nice, especially for leg-shaving.
- Everyone uses umbrellas in the rain. If you don't have one, then friendly strangers walking your way will often offfer to share, which is kind of nice.
- Gym class is wild. There are usually about three classes having PE at once, in the same little gym. Seventh graders duch under the volleyball net as they run laps, a crowd of 11th grade girls ignore their male counterparts' football game as it weaves through their volleyball game, and against the far wall, sixth graders do situps- the kind that were condemned as "bad for the back" years ago in America. It's beautiful and dynamic to watch, if loud.
