In Your Face Nancy Drew!

While bringing the laundry in off the clothes line today, I noticed the resident Lexus pulling up. Sticking my head over the balcony I saw the lady who yelled at us re the BBQ. In a moment of international-man-of-mystery proportion I ran to get a broom and dust pan...

I took off into the main stairwell and began to sweep around our front door. As I swept I kept an eye out to see where the yeller lives. Naturally I ducked back occasionally to avoid detection. Wouldn't you know it, the people in our building who dislike us the most happen to live directly beneath us! Now the question has become do we stomp around or tip toe?

Now that we know where she lives, maybe we can works towards amends.....

BBQ... What BBQ?

So we went off to church this afternoon leaving our house guest Rod to man the fort. While we were gone another neighbor paid us a visit. There came yet another knock on our door, this one of the angry, pounding variety. Rod calmly answered the door with his biggest smile and politely tried to explain in English that he does not live in this apartment and the people who do aren't home. The man was trying to get in and kept talking about the "Balkon", "BBQ" and "Policia" - this is not a good combo. Anyway, in the two hours that Rod was at home after his experience with one of our neighbors... the police never showed. It just seems so odd to me that someone would come yelling at our door 48 hours after the "incident".

Needless to say when Matthew and I found out about yet another visit... we were both sick to our stomachs. When we arrived home the BBQ was promptly dismantled and loaded into four plastic bags. As I type, it is being walked over to our friends house... she is receiving her new BBQ. There is no evidence that a BBQ ever lived on our balcony.

I know that at some point in the future we are going to laugh at this whole experience... but right now it just seems terrible.

When BBQ's Fail

So yesterday morning we were still quite grieved by our BBQ experience. We decided to do something to show the whole building that we were sorry for all the fuss. So with broom, dustpan, bucket, bleach, cleaner and two cloths in hand we cleaned the stairwell for the building. While cleaning we got to meet a nice family we had never seen before.

Later that day Matthew was cleaning the balcony as charcoal sludge had poured out of the BBQ following the previous nights dousing of the grill. This led to us meeting our downstairs neighbor as water was dripping onto his balcony. Once he saw we were cleaning, he was okay with the situation. So the meeting of the neighbors continues - in one fashion or another.

BBQ's = Not the way to Make Friends

With summer approaching, we have turned our sights to our balcony intending to make it our summer escape. We have visions of herbs and flowers growing on the balcony rail, 2 patio chairs and a small charcoal BBQ. Last week, inspired by the sunshine, we began to make this dream a reality when we bought a very small charcoal BBQ that would fit our good sized balcony.

We had some concerns over whether BBQ's were allowed on balconies, but none of our Slovak friends protested the idea, and in fact at one friends house (who has a yard we should add), people were burning leaves and wood in giant oil drums. So, we thought we would be okay.

Last night we invited over four friends for the inaugural lighting of the BBQ. Well, shortly after lighting the BBQ I noticed neighbors whom I've never seen before with their heads out their windows. I waved and smiled nicely. A few minutes later our friends arrived. Before they even got their coats off and moved away from the front door, there was a loud, rushed knock. My friend opened the door only to be blasted by a lady, on a cell phone, wearing a house coat and slippers. She spoke too quickly in Slovak for us to understand so our friend intervened and got the the brunt of: "are you idiots? do you think you are in the park having a picnic? I should make a false report of a real fire to the fire company and have you fined. My neighbors called me to say my building was on fire. YOU ARE IDIOTS!". With that we decided the BBQ was not to be.

Matthew went out to pour water over the grill as people were yelling at him from the street. More knocking on the door. This time Amber answered it alone as our company had already been subjected to enough. Two men stood there very angry, but once they realized Amber was foreign they became much nicer and told her we "cannot grill on our balcony" - we were painfully aware of that fact by that point.

So we ate baked chicken instead and had a good evening with our friends, though every time we heard sirens we all paused to see where they were going. Come bed time both Amber and I were feeling a bit heavy in the heart department. We were up until 2:00am unable to sleep. Because our language skills are limited, we have been very deliberate in building relationship within our neighborhood any way we can. We say hello and smile, we hold doors open, we help people carry things up the stairs (no elevator in our building) and the list goes on. It would be awful if this one small event undermines our time here in this apartment building - how awful to be categorized as the foreigners who tried to burn the place down.

We are looking for a way to make amends - door to door apologies are not really an option. Until yesterday we had never met a lot of the neighbors who came swarming and we do not want this first impression to last. Please pray that God would somehow make this whole situation a way for us to build good relationships in this apartment community, especially with the people we never before yesterday.

Winter Festival - we think spring is here now!

Po Slovensky

Language acquisition - a true adventure. Our greatest asset in language study - each other! Amber has a great ear and so her accent is much better. Our tutor constantly tells Amber she sounds "Slovak born" while she asks Matthew to repeat the pronunciation of Slovak's soft consonants. Matthew however has a greater ability to remember words and so has a larger vocabulary. So when out and about, Matthew thinks of the words, but Amber says them! Here are some of our more interesting linguistic observations:

Sometimes we English speakers get confused as familiar letters make different sounds in Slovak:

English Letter - Slovak Pronunciation
I - E
E - A (like “eh”)
C - TS
U - OOO (like in Google)
R - You have to roll the R
CH - CH counts as one letter and is pronounced like a very guttural H

Some words of interest:

Slovak Word - English Translation
smely - brave
holy - naked
sväty - holy (pronounced like "sveaty")
fakť - the infinitive form of the verb "to look", but when spoken it sounds a lot like an attention grabbing four letter word in English
svorka - pack of wolves
svokra - mother-in-law (Matthew has made a few GENUINE mistakes with these)

It has also been fun introducing ourselves to people. People are able to pronounce Matthew's name because it has a Slovak translation - Matuš (pronounced "Matush"). It is also common to make someones name sound "more cute" once you are friends; so Matthew also gets "Matko" or "Mať " (pronounced like "Matay").

Amber's name is a whole other story! Women's names commonly end in the letter "a" in Slovak: Ludka, Edita, Evka, Katarina, Anna, Zuzka, Betka. You may have noticed that Amber does not. People often add the "a" to make it easier to say: "Ambera". The direct translation of Amber's name into Slovak is "Jantar". We think it loses a little something in translation. Also, because we are so close to Hungary, we have learned that in Hungarian "amber" means "human being". Nothing could be greater than walking up to someone and saying, "Hi, my name is Human Being".

The Complete Guide to Surprising Amber and Matthew

This video post is long overdue. It all took place in November of last year while at FUSE Young Adults Gathering in Kelowna, British Columbia.