I have a client in therapy and she hates all of Hungary, partly for political reasons, cause she hates Orban’s right-wing autocratic head in the sand politics, but partly because she is mad at a whole nation because her mother is deeply unhappy there, because she had no friends there, because she had no job prospects there. In a way I have a similar relationship with Belgium. I sometimes jokingly call myself an asylum seeker, but it’s closer to the truth than you would think. Apart from my college years I have mostly negative associations with Belgium. Except at university and briefly when I started working as a journalist and a boss who was willing to give me a lot of freedom, I felt caged there. Like I felt there was just no need for me there. Like I was walking around in a reality that wasn’t my own. When I arrived in Slovakia it was obvious that doors opened here, that my social life boomed, not as interestingly as at university or the three years after, but still more than in Belgium. It had never made any sense to me why I had opted to study Eastern European languages and cultures. I had had many obsessions and passions in my life, but Russia had never been one of them. I think I studied it precisely because I knew absolutely nothing about it. I remember that before I went to study Russian the only Russian words I knew were some military terms from a book on Stalingrad and the title of some newspaper, krasnaja zvezda, red star. At the time I thought it would be a super hard language to learn, but looking back it wasn’t, at least not to reach a level to make yourself understood. I never fully fell in love with Russian, but for a couple of years I did fall in love with Slovene. Which seemed like falling in love with a girl from the bad side of the tracks, because what the hell was I ever going to do with Slovene, a rarity of language spoken only by about two million people, and worse, Slovenians are surprisingly good at English, if you’re in Ljubljana you actually have to push people not to switch to English when practicing your Slovene.

Slowly it made sense to me why I was in Slovakia. At first I preferred the sound of Slovene, and I thought many words were pointlessly longer than they needed to be. It’s like many words here have a syllable too many when compared to Slovene. I got used to it, and I think it’s more beautiful than Czech or Polish, but still not as beautiful as Serbo-Croatian or Slovene.