This is the feel good post you didn’t know you needed. ‘Oh my God, this is painful. Look at how hot that one is. Exactly my type.’ Being very Czechoslovak he points at a generic blonde I wouldn’t normally notice. But there are others in the city center with excellent thighs. Am a thigh guy. And if that says something about my psychology I’ve never figured out what. Other than not caring about breast size seems to go hand in hand with no caring about cars or sports. 

I’ve agreed to teach two hours of Dutch while walking through Bratislava in 32 degrees Celcius heat. My student is Richard, mid forties, but looks about 30. 

First we look for a KBC/CSOB ATM cause in Slovakia there are steep fees if you withdraw cash from the wrong ATM. He pays me 150 euro for five lessons. Then says: ‘You don’t have to stay the entire two hours. It’s not cause I gave you money that you have to feel like you are here to work. We will just talk.’ 

The entire conversation is in Dutch. And there is no chance I leave early, I take my job more seriously than my clients expect me to. Strange, I know. I will get on a bus back home EXACTLY at 11.00. 

Before you think that Richard is shallow, you already know I am a shallow woman obsessed idiot who reads books and writes, but is a hormone driven idiot anyway, Richard is not shallow. ‘But you’re constantly thinking, writing, reading, observing, processing!’ Yes, but it could all be sublimation of my longing to just be with women and not deal with the constant dreariness of every day life. A counterargument is that I have always been cerebrally hyperactive, even on days I did roll around in bed with women 8 to 12 hours a day. Ah, the halcyon days of yore. 

The first 30 minutes of the class is about how a female friend of his is having paranoid delusions and he wants my advice. How flattering. 

I tell him she is a bit too old to be suddenly afflicted by schizophrenia. I think it’s a psychotic phase brought on by long endured stress plus some extra trigger. 

He says: ‘Her grandfather died recently.’ 

I say: ‘That could be it. She needs meds from a psychiatrist and also work with a psychotherapist. She needs both.’ 

‘And if not?’ 

‘Then she is heading for a cliff and a crisis will force her to.’ 

I refuse to promote myself, so I don’t say: send her over to me, I will fix her. 

Besides, she needs a psychiatrist first, then someone like me. 

‘The trouble is she refuses all help and thinks she’s fine.’ 

She already refuses to enter her own home at times because she thinks the place is bugged and people are spying on her. 

We get to areas where the Slovaks with money live, so we see hotter and hotter women pass us by. 

In Slovakia feminine beauty attracts money and money attracts feminine beauty.

Richard can’t ignore the short skirts, the waitresses at the Danube bars showing their tanned butt cheeks to get bigger tips and to feel powerful in a very low status job where the clients are often arrogant and showing off their real or pretended wealth. 

He says: ‘Bratislava never became a porn capital, because it’s too small, you can’t be anonymous. And because of Catholicism. Same in Poland. But Prague and Budapest became instant porn capitals, because it’s big enough to hide, production costs were low and there are way more atheists there.’ 

He also shows me with wikipedia pages that the only porn that had a moment in Bratislava was gay porn. He doesn’t explain why that type of porn was made here and not straight porn. Are only the female Slovaks stopped from starring in porn by religion and the risk of being exposed in a provincial backwater like Bratislava?

He then says that things are very different in Italy. That even the Pope used to ran brothels. 

In Italy you can still look at women without being branded a toxic retard. 

I tell him I should move to Italy. 

Am only in Slovakia cause of Bruno. 

My son even has a name that sounds more Italian than Slovak, even though it’s Germanic. 

When he doesn’t know a word he says it in German, English, Slovak or Czech, sometimes French and I translate to Dutch. 

That aspect of our class alone would be very fascinating to observe. 

dopyt >>> demand >>> vraag 

vertreten >>> vertegenwoordigen 

ubytovanie >>> Unterkunft >>> Onderdak 

In two hours this happens a minimum of 50 times.

You could say am not working, merely talking and getting paid.

But the whole time am tracking his mood, what he is really saying, and translating words from several languages to Dutch faster than anyone can google them. 

In the last part of the class he tells me about a murder case in Czechoslavakia in the seventies.

I find it so interesting I tell myself I have to do a video on it. 

He tells me about this case to illustrate that to him the Czech Republic is a real functioning state with a long institutional tradition and Slovakia is a mafia state. 

I say: ‘Vettergesellschaft’ 

Richard is fluent in German, even more fluent in German than he is in Dutch. 

He also tells me about a dissident he used to know. Who died cause he fell asleep with a burning cigarette. 

Richard was trained to be a lawyer, though he never worked as one, and he feels the need to prove everything he tells me. 

So he shows me the wikipedia page of the dissident. 

He does not show me a wikipedia page to prove that Italians have better sex lives than the rest of Europe, but he is so certain that for the first time in my life am considering to go to Italy for sex tourism. 

Thailand is too far and too full of IDF soldiers on holiday. 

I tell him I always thought Spain must be very erotic. I have never been to Spain, I have been in Italy and I don’t remember it as erotic at all. I only remember eating pizza there, not pussy. In several European countries I have the opposite memory, which is to be preferred. One has calories, the other one doesn’t. 

So many impulses from a two hour conversation I got paid to have. And it wasn’t how I would ideally wish to spend my time. Ideally I would want to be paid to be gigolo to classy women, cause then I still get to teach languages, but maybe she and I get to throw off the 20 tons of stress we all carry on our backs while learning something. 

Anyway, am not tall enough to find enough clients. Could be a very convenient excuse to keep living my comfortable low adventure life. Could be a very convenient excuse to pretend that it’s not because of Gaza I stopped being attractive. According to chatgpt I carry all the misery of the world with me and ‘girls just wanna have fun.’ 

As soon as I come home Bruno and I go outside with water guns and a bucket of water. 

Am not in Italy, so only the grass gets wet.