A Long Autumn, a Short Winter: A Journey Through Slovakia

From Vienna to Nitra

«Over here! Over here!»

An unexpected, insistent call from a customs officer who, for some reason, chose to pick us from the crowd before our turn suddenly jolted three exhausted travelers out of a dreamlike haze, where plans for the days ahead blurred with anxious thoughts about their luggage. «Will it arrive, or won’t it?» – the kind of lottery every traveler dreads… And really, what else was there to do in that endlessly long, half-asleep line, creeping forward like a freight train, each carriage responding with a delay to the movement of the one ahead.

The officer greeted us with a friendly smile and bore a curious resemblance to Jesus from The Big Lebowski if he’d been dropped straight into Cyberpunk 2077. His mostly black hair was streaked with the odd patch of gray and bold flashes of crimson. Both ears glittered with earrings, while an elaborate tattoo curled across his neck. Unlike most customs officers, he resembled a rock musician more than a bureaucrat: his uniform fit so snugly it might have been tailored for an album cover photoshoot. The look was topped off with stylish fingerless cycling gloves, a slim scarf, and delicate silver-framed reading glasses. The whole improbable yet oddly harmonious ensemble left little doubt that we were dealing with a true Austrian.

What worried us was that our passports held Schengen visas not issued by Austria, even though we had to cross the border here. In the past this was quite normal, but times had changed. The officer, however, didn’t seem the least bit concerned. He tossed out a few jokes about our accent, quickly stamped the pages, and handed our documents back with a smile, wishing us a pleasant stay.

Expecting an interrogation with shades of psychological drama, we were pleasantly surprised by the officer’s composure, since the most recent posts on traveler forums, written by people who had lately crossed borders with «the wrong» visa, had painted a very different picture.

The officer seemed to take our genuine bewilderment for nothing more than a brief stupor, brought on by fatigue and unfamiliar surroundings. He even half-rose from his chair and, still smiling, pointed us in the right direction. Outwardly we may have looked sluggish, but our minds were firing at full capacity: the route had already been mapped out, and his gesture was simply the last signal that sent us sprinting toward the baggage claim.

After about ten minutes of winding our way through passageways and corridors, we finally reached the part of the airport where life was in full swing, pulsing with movement, and the faint smell of aviation fuel hung in the air – a peculiar, unchanging marker of adventures about to begin. It felt like an invisible line, separating everyday routine from the start of something new and exciting.

And then, to our surprise, the unexpected happened: both of our suitcases, heavy and dependable, rolled onto the carousel almost at the same time, among the very first. Anyone who has ever endured those long, weary minutes at baggage claim, watching everyone else’s luggage circle lazily past while their own seems lost to some parallel reality, will know just how rare and incredible such luck is. It felt as if life itself, for once, had decided we’d had enough trials – at least for today.

There’s a special kind of relief when fears that have chased you so stubbornly, and with every appearance of reason, suddenly don’t come true. But the awareness of this never comes right away. It’s as if fear itself needs time to pack up, tidy itself, and make a dignified exit from the place it had already claimed, settled into, and perhaps even started plotting how to turn to its advantage had things actually gone wrong.

Still, the sense of relief kept growing – slowly, almost without notice. It didn’t burst in with fireworks or blare with triumphant fanfares; it simply drifted in, like warm air after a long, relentless draft. Everything was back in place, we were together again, and ready to move on.

Right before leaving the airport, a shared impulse – perhaps some ancient family instinct – steered us toward a café. The decision was wordless and unanimous: grab a quick cappuccino to go. Tradition demanded it. So did the weary but proud heart of a traveler who has reached the end of the journey and longs to mark it properly, even if only with a paper cup in hand.

The prices, as usual, felt like the value of platinum during an intergalactic fever: for one cup of coffee they charged as if it were not meant for drinking but for analysis in a laboratory spectrometer, under the watch of serious scientists. It seemed less like ordering a drink than exchanging oxygen on Venus. And still, the hand reached out almost automatically – for the aroma, for the habit, for the warmth that comes not only from the drink itself but from the comfort of a familiar ritual. Such small details are what give an event its true ending. Coffee on the way out is the final point at the end of a sentence – without it, even the most beautiful text feels unfinished.

We found the parking lot almost at once. Our reserved car was already there – small, as planned, but perfectly fit for the road ahead. Leaning on the hood was a young man, an employee of Barkro. From the look on his face, it was obvious that too much idle time had already worn thin. He had come from Bratislava, where the company’s main office was, and apparently the wait had dragged on. Punctuality was never our strongest suit, and we knew it, so we kept it simple: we apologized and offered him a ride back to the office. It worked – the slight awkwardness that had lingered since our arrival vanished at once. Half an hour later, after cruising the highway together and swapping stories, we parted like old friends – with smiles, thanks, and a pleasant sense that things had worked out exactly as they should.

The drive from Vienna to Nitra took just over an hour and a half. An experienced driver, familiar with the route, could have done it much faster. But for us, fatigue and a few missed exits had their say.

To be fair, the navigation mishaps weren’t due to carelessness so much as a mild cognitive dissonance: what we saw on the screen didn’t always match what we heard from the languid female voice – flawless English, suddenly broken by Slovak place names that sounded like incantations from an old atlas. Luckily, our collective intuition came through – whether family instinct or a sharpened sense of geographic self-preservation. After a couple of missed loops and a few spirited debates over turns, we finally headed in the right direction.

The scenery outside the window slipped by like pages from a glossy magazine: green fields, rolling hills, little houses with tiled roofs. It all looked so peaceful that it felt as if we had entered not just another country, but an entirely different pace of life.

Nitra welcomed us with quiet warmth, resting snugly at the foot of mountains that looked straight out of a fairy tale like a city drawn on an old map, where every turn begins a story. We had arrived. And we knew it not from the signs on the road, but from the sense of calm that finally caught up with us, as if it had been following the car all along.

The apartment’s owner, Jan, showed up just minutes after our call. He was stocky, well-groomed, and looked every bit a man in excellent shape and in full harmony with himself. Dressed elegantly in a crisply pressed shirt, formal trousers, and shoes polished to a mirror finish, he spoke fluent English and radiated such warmth that it felt as if we’d known him not for five minutes, but for a good dozen years.

He gave us a thorough tour of the apartment, enthusiastically alternating between pointing out household details and asking about us – who we were, where we came from, and why we were here and then just as readily told us about himself: his family, his work, and his plans for at least the next ten years. His story was lively and engaging, filled with that touching sincerity which, in a foreign country, can instantly turn a stranger into almost one of your own.

After thanking Jan for his hospitality and calling him a true example of Slovak warmth, we had, as it turned out, made a small mistake. Jan scratched his head thoughtfully and, with delicate frankness, informed us that he was, in fact, Hungarian, although he had lived in Slovakia since early childhood.

Our rather tired, road-worn, and already somewhat overheated collective consciousness did not at once cope with processing this information. For several seconds we remained silent, trying to figure out how best to respond so as not to offend the man or say something foolish.

Jan, however, interpreting the pause in his own way, cautiously inquired whether we happened to have had any unfavorable experience connected with Hungarians or with Hungary in general. We quickly gathered ourselves and assured him that, strictly speaking, he was the first Hungarian we had not only spoken with but even met in person. The same, however, was true of Slovaks and, to tell the truth, meeting such a «double example» already felt almost like a trophy.

Just to be sure and with a bit of irony we asked if Jan might also have a trace of Slovene or Croatian blood. After all, if this was a trophy, why not make it a jackpot too?

But Jan proved steadfast and firmly denied any additional kinship. Instead, he promised to bring us a couple of bottles of his homemade wine which later proved to be not just «decent», but surprisingly good and even, in its own way, refined. All the more remarkable, given that the winemaker himself stubbornly insisted he had no real experience at all.

Thus, in fact, our arrival came to an end: we had landed safely in Vienna, reached Nitra without incident, and settled comfortably into the cozy apartment of our charming Slovak-Hungarian host, with whom we would later form a calm, warm, and unhurried friendship – one of those that grows better with the years, much like the homemade wine he had brought us.

How It All Began

Can an old little bookcase and a modest nightstand play one of the decisive roles in making a fateful decision? As it turned out, they most certainly can. Especially if you paint them…

To see the picture more clearly, we need to step back for a moment into the recent past. Our child was growing up wonderfully – full of appetite, brimming with joy, and endlessly curious about the world around him, especially anything that had to do with lightbulbs, wires, and microchips.

Trips to toy stores, with their endless aisles, felt like a celebration, but only for his parents. He was much more fascinated by old system units and laptops, by cables of every kind of connector, and by those peculiar devices and contraptions whose names rarely stick in the minds of ordinary non-tech people.

The few guests who showed up with bright, flashy, interactive gifts could never understand why, within minutes, the child would lose all interest in the toy and slip away, calmly determined, to his «workshop» behind the sofa, where an organized chaos of wires, parts, and every imaginable gadget had long taken over. These early passions would go on to shape his choice of studies.

Everything would have been perfect, if not for the troubles that kept coming one after another – severe allergies and worsening asthma, nurtured by the region’s poor environmental conditions. In our heavily industrial city, the chimneys of chemical plants were visible without even needing binoculars. Add to that the dense construction and the chronic lack of green space. And on top of it all, the demanding studies at one of the city’s best schools hardly helped his health, instead piling on nervousness, insecurity, and a lingering sense of anxiety.

Then came COVID, forcing everyone into isolation and online schooling – at exactly the age when children need face-to-face contact the most. A wave of sadness and depression swept over him, his health began to decline, and none of the medicines from our once-vast arsenal seemed to have any effect anymore.

By then, our apartment looked more like a sterile laboratory – no flowers, no books, nothing extra that might collect even the smallest trace of dust. A full cleaning with water every other day had turned from a routine into a way of life.

And then, one day, as we sat across from yet another professor-doctor telling us about a new medication – recently approved, effective, but extremely expensive and with its share of «possible» side effects, in the middle of all our anxious thoughts, a revelation suddenly struck: simple, clear, absurdly obvious – «It must be those damn cabinets we painted! » Such a «brilliant» idea, impossible to keep inside, could only have come to the head of the family, who leapt to his feet and, rather shamelessly, interrupted the respected doctor. The professor fell silent and peered at us over his glasses with thinly veiled irritation. Of course, he had dealt with all kinds of people in his long career, but this level of naivety seemed to him a step too far.

He seemed visibly relieved when we assured him that we would be in touch soon to discuss the next steps. With even greater relief, he closed the office door behind us, no doubt already sighing inwardly and thinking how he would recount the day’s peculiar patients to his colleagues.

No sooner had we come home than, at lightning speed, we and our child emptied the freshly painted wardrobe and nightstand done up in gloomy black-and-gray tones (the latest trend among modern schoolchildren) of textbooks, notebooks, and endless computer parts, and promptly hauled them off to the nearest dump. As we lugged the long, narrow black wardrobe looking suspiciously like something dark and ominous an elderly neighbor stopped in his tracks at first, wary. But once he caught on, he tipped his hat, wiped his sweaty brow, and gave us a friendly nod as we went by.

Amazingly, his health began to improve right before our eyes. Of course, it wasn’t a complete recovery yet, and there was hardly enough cause to start dancing around the house in celebration.

One evening we stumbled upon a video about Slovakia – a small country of mountains, lakes, scenic valleys, clean environment, and free education. That was when the female and, without question, the wisest part of our family mind voiced an unexpected idea. It was quickly picked up and turned into a clear plan: learn Slovak, polish his English to fluency, and apply to a Slovak university. And just like that, Slovakia became not simply a dot on the map, but a very real destination to follow.

Our child threw himself completely into learning Slovak and preparing for university. This unexpected turn felt like the natural sequel to the cupboard story – the illnesses faded, and in their place came something far more important: a sense of purpose, faith in his own abilities, and a clear bright horizon he now moved toward on his own, step by step.

Of the three Slovak universities that eventually offered him admission, the choice was made after only a short deliberation: Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra. Why so quickly? One look at the city’s photos was enough – nestled in a ring of mountains, with a river winding softly through its streets, it looked as if it had stepped straight out of The Wizard of Oz. A place like that simply had to have a university to match!

After all this, one can’t help but ask: can the role of that old painted cupboard and small nightstand in this incredible venture really be underestimated? Analytical minds will have no trouble concluding that sending them into well-deserved retirement was nothing more than a psychological device, a metaphor for the changes ahead. Romantic spirits, on the other hand, will be quick to see a direct connection. Either way, the cupboard and the nightstand will always remain an inseparable part of this story.

The First Day in Nitra

Our first day in Nitra greeted us with a bright, clear morning. There was no sign of the September chill so familiar to northerners – the air was perfectly still, as if nature itself refused to admit the seasons had changed. Perhaps the Slovaks knew exactly what they were doing when they set the official start of autumn for the twenty-third. Keen sticklers for accuracy might point out that this isn’t unique to Slovakia, and of course they’d be right… but why spoil a good legend?

The day promised to be challenging, and in its own way even ceremonial: settling into the dormitory and, at the university’s main building, receiving that coveted student ID – the passport to a new adult life, where schedules replace parents and roommates might be anything from quiet geniuses to die-hard fans of Kazakh rap.

Our child walked to the university with the solemnity of a first parade. Shoulders back, eyes focused, his whole posture spoke of determination. But we knew better: behind that resolve was a mix of emotions – anxiety bubbling up first, with a trace of confusion and a whisper of doubt, all balanced by a quiet inner enthusiasm.

The leaves crunched softly underfoot on the cobblestones, the air carrying the freshness and ease of morning. Nitra welcomed us with quiet warmth like a wise old professor who has seen it all, yet still believes in youth and curiosity.

A bit of history: Nitra is Slovakia’s sixth-largest city, but also one of its oldest, regarded as the cradle of Slovak Christianity. The first written record of it dates back to 828. Cyril and Methodius hold a special place in the city’s history – they lived here for some time, created the first Slavic alphabet, and translated the earliest liturgical texts into Old Church Slavonic, laying the groundwork for Slavic writing.

At the university named after Constantine the Philosopher (who, after taking monastic vows, became Cyril – yes, the very same brother of the equally great Methodius), an almost church-like silence hung in the air. The half-asleep guard at the entrance looked like the doorman of an old museum, guarding silence as if it were the main exhibit. From time-to-time professors swept past – focused, carrying piles of papers and cups of coffee – as though racing to make up, in these last calm hours, for everything they hadn’t managed to reread, rework, and rethink over the short summer break. We, guided by the schedule and plain common sense, strolled slowly through the empty hallways, as if on a tour through the university’s past, where every door held the imprint of hundreds of students lives, exams, and long sleepless nights.

At the dean’s office we were greeted by the familiar administrative minimalism: papers, signatures, stamps – everything strict and emotionless, just as it should be in a place where stamps carry more weight than words. With the coveted documents in hand, we set off toward the next big step – settling into the dormitory.

The dormitory left a good impression – a clean, well-maintained building with an air of order and comfort. Its spacious grounds, with tall trees, colorful shrubs, and carefully tended flowerbeds, were enclosed by a neat low fence and seemed to breathe calm and balance. Sprinklers worked everywhere, giving the fresh grass a special charm.

And this was where the true student odyssey began. Even in the early morning, lines had already formed outside the required dormitory offices, like a living encyclopedia of university life: young men and women with confused expressions, hugging their bags, armed with thick folders, water bottles, and a touch of shock at Slovak bureaucracy.

At the building’s entrance sat a woman whose sternness could have qualified her for guarding the border between worlds. After quickly asking about the proper sequence of steps, we got not only the information we needed but also a few wise tips delivered with that special tone only women have who know more about this place than all the deans and rectors put together.

After picking the right line, we found our spot and braced ourselves for the great ritual: waiting. Some in the crowd sorted through papers, others texted their friends, while a few just stared blankly into space.

And so our first encounter with student life began – through the silence of the university hallways and the line at the dormitory, where a special atmosphere prevailed, the kind that comes with every new beginning: a little odd, a little funny, but always full of discovery.

The faces around us told their own story: the more concentrated and sterner the expression, the higher the year of study seemed to be. By the look of his serious morning face, our child might have been taken for a candidate for his third doctorate. But after a while the ice broke: he started chatting with a petite, pretty girl standing next to him in line – a Slovak, a third-year education student, as lively and outgoing as springtime in the Slovak calendar.

She was quick to share her student secrets, valuable information, and a couple of handy life hacks. And though we did our best to look seasoned and all-knowing, it was obvious that without her kind help the whole settling-in process might have lasted until the winter exams. We were genuinely grateful and even, in our thoughts, pinned a medal on her for pedagogical talent shown long before she ever earned her official degree.

After about three hours of waiting which, in dormitory terms, counts as almost instant, the line at last reached us. First-year students were usually assigned to three-bed rooms, and our young hero, naturally, was no lucky exception to that long-established tradition.

The room assigned to him on the fifth floor was modest in every way, and clearly one of those that, even without a sign on the door, made it obvious – fun was guaranteed. The space was just enough to stand, breathe, and dream a little. How three full-grown students, with their suitcases, groceries, and all the mysterious clutter that comes with student life, would fit inside remained an open question – a puzzle fate promised to solve a little later.

But the room’s modest size was more than made up for by the balcony. From there unfolded a view worthy of a postcard or a computer screensaver: tall mountains, catching a steel glint against the endless blue of the sky, looking both majestic and, in their own way, familiar and homely. At their base stretched green fields dotted with tidy gardens, blossoming orchards, and neat houses.

Next on the list of student trials came the issue of bed linen – an indispensable part of any student saga, especially in its opening phase. The storeroom for this almost sacred handover of textile treasures stood in a small but sturdy single-story building, neatly tucked into the space between two dormitory blocks. Even before reaching its heavy door, flung wide open and framed by tidy shrubs, the air was already thick with a familiar scent – a blend of laundry powder, boiling water, drying cloth, and something faintly nostalgic.

Presiding over this kingdom of whiteness and faded labels was a woman of formidable stature – powerful as the very concept of order, with the arms of a shot-putter and a gaze that could pierce through steel. Her glasses looked as though they’d been forged from the lenses of a Tatra observatory telescope, so deeply did they probe into the essence and motives of every visitor.

After a few moments we managed to compose ourselves and timidly stepped up to the table, with the respectful hesitation the moment seemed to demand. She gave us a professionally stern look and, without a word, pulled a set of bedding from the shelf. A sheet, a pillowcase, a duvet cover, and a pair of towels – neatly folded, yet everything about them told of a long, battle-hardened past. Their color and rough, almost heroic texture brought to mind canvas that had weathered at least three sea storms, a boarding, and a couple of expeditions into the New World under the command of Henry Morgan himself.

Our child, like a true initiate in his first university quest, silently accepted the set and nodded with quiet resignation. For this was more than just bedding – it was a symbol, аn entry pass into a world where «clean», «ironed» and «comfortable» are treated as philosophical categories rather than guarantees.

As we left, the storeroom’s guardian gave us a look better suited to Fort La Fuerza, as if she were handing out weapons to raw recruits. In that gaze one could read it all: distrust, experience, a premonition of coming losses and, buried deep, a hint of tenderness. It all but said: «Protect this bedding as you would your soul, and never wash it except by the instructions. Or else…! »