My Sunday of Internet and Ballet started out sleeping in till 10:00. I leisurely breakfasted, went to town to Tesco (!?) to buy drinks and my long-awaited pillow and comforter. Very nice, now I’ll sleep in the lap of luxury.

Ballet

After coming home and changing, I walked up to the State Theater 🎭 to buy a ticket for the opera playing at 14:30. Or rather, ballet 🩰. I knew not what it was, only saw a bunch of children with parents. Walked around town till curtain time, window shopping in the rain.

Well, it was a children’s ballet- and I was the only adult there unaccompanied by a child. Most had several. It was some type of traditional Slovak costume dancing with all the good girls ending up getting caught by pursuing boys. “Act coy, then allow yourself to be captured,” was the theme. Yes, it was nice colorful dancing. Music was recorded (not live.)

Internet

I walked home in the drizzle 🌧 to get my internet club card and then back up to town. This new Internet Klub is great! It opened this week, is half the price, and much more modern, organized and good atmosphere -including music, than the info center. I’m really glad I found it. It has 10 brand new iMac computers, totally teched out, even for Slovakia 🇸🇰! The owner is cool and they are also computer hackers. So you can sit there 2-3 hours and not feel like a fool. It’s good.

Yesterday on Saturday, I emailed for a few hours and finished reading a National Geographic and “Like Water for Chocolate” that arrived in my book box.

Another topic…

Zuska explained that before 1989, they (Slovaks) were only allowed to travel to Poland 🇵🇱, Hungary 🇭🇺, Russia 🇷🇺, Romania 🇷🇴. They needed to apply for travel and get approval. Getting approval took months. The authorities would check with your work, school, family, friends, teachers, neighbors… If you were lucky to be granted approval, it was only for 20 days. You had to demonstrate a return ticket, and prove that you had money or a bank account here (in Slovakia).

If you put down on an application for university that you believed in a religion, then you were prohibited from attending University.

Things have changed a lot, and Tesco is thriving. There are still very few places here that take credit cards-only Tesco and the tourist crystal shops.

Tomorrow hopefully I hear from boyfriend!

Week of March 7, 1999