Once you go Slovak you never go back.

This week was another example of how generous Slovaks are.

Whiskey from Xerox on Monday.

Dark chocolate from a sexy Nirvana fan on Tuesday.

A bottle of wine from what could easily be a supermodel. The poster girl for the Fall collection. A Cleopatrian nose. You’d scoop her up and run off with her. To Tahiti. Or any place where they have sunny beaches. And horses. A woman like that is even more regal on a horse. A white one. There’s not a speck of evil in her eyes.

A book lent to me by a mathematician who finds my Woody Allenesque life of overanalysis, romantic entanglements, fears and permanent alienation simply hysterical. She laughs a lot. An unrestrained sort of laughter, she is as unrepressed in her laugh as in her movements as in her humor and comments.

Dark chocolate, a poem in flawless Dutch (impressive!) and the book ‘medzi Slovakmi’ from 185 cm + of long-legged elegance.

These are just the materialistic tokens of generosity.

Far more valuable is the lavish spiritual support Slovaks freely give. When they ask you how you are they actually want to know.

I have never understood why at the end of highschool I set out to study Slavic languages at university. It was job market suicide in Belgium. I had no connection to Slavic languages whatsoever. I remember that at first I found Russian ugly and cumbersome, archaic.

It would have made much more sense to emigrate to the USA and/or study psychology as my dad did advice.

Instead I did something entirely out of line with my previous interests.

It’s the wrong turns you take that ultimately let you arrive at Your Self.

I never thought I would end up living in Slovakia. It was not a very conscious or deliberate choice. At the time I experienced it as a desperate move, a flight into obscurity and oblivion.

Then I saw that what I need is everywhere here….

Which is still a shock every day.

Medzi Slovakmi.