Looking back

I got here just before I turned 20. A fresh faced 19 year old I didn't know what to expect or what was round the corner. As I got off the plane and went to meet Alona the heat hit me, I thought I was gonna burn alive! As I got on a bus it was so weird! There was ticket machines at the stop that you stamp on the bus. What was that about?

As we got in to beautiful Bratislava the buildings looked like something from the past. It was massive (compared to the field in Scotland I had grown up in). I thought it might have been as big as new York! Alona laughed at me and told me that in McDonald's there was a cheeseburger that was a whole block of cheese! I like it here I thought, then I almost got hit by a mystical thing called a tram.  In my defence it was the opposite side of the road that I was used to and everything was different and strange. 

The food was an adventure in itself. It is always hard adapting to new food, from stews and chippies to cabbage dumplings; it was a little bit of a shock but the whole day had been.

Alona took my down to her local bar, it was wooden and half full. She orderd me three of the local shots. They were in massive shot glasses like 2 times the size as back home. Bloody hell, I had never really done hard core shots before just a cheeky Apple Sours here and there. As I drank the first one it was like burning acid was waging a war on my throat and it burned my entire chest. What the hell is that? It was Borovicka (Slovak gin). Alona and the bar man laughed and said that the other two are nicer. Foolishly I belived them and let me tell you they were not. By the end of it I was burning bright red and completely pissed. Don't remember much after that!

As I look back I cant believe I ever found them so foreign. Now I wait fo the trams to pass as I walk past the tall buildings on my way to work, they seem so familiar now. I think I would have a shock going back to living in a field. I like having the choice of shops and I grew to like the food eventually.

The city is not so big and I can see why people first laughed at me for saying so. Nowhere near the size of New York. The busses seem like second nature now. I do like when my friends come to vist and they are shocked by all the things I originally was. The horror on there faces as a tram wizzes past!

I am going to miss the tall buildings and bright red trams. 

The shots not so much.