culture shock

Leaving Hungary has been a culture shock. We have arrived in beautiful Slovenia and I have forgotten what it is like to be in the western world. People dress nicely, everything smells nice, there are no corrugated shanty homes and there are people speaking English.

We left Hungary early, because we were sick to fucking death of the country. It culminated in having to wait an hour for a bad breakfast (Hungarian table service is like British train services. Shit). So we hopped on a train for Ljubljana, the capital of little Slovenia. Slovenia may sound like yet another Eastern Europe shit hole, but in fact it's delightful. Clean, modern, green and friendly, it's halfway between Austria and Italy in geography and atmosphere. Coming into it's rolling dark mountains, covered in fog was like the Hogwarts' Express. But with less owls.

And there are lots of English people here. People from Manchester, Bristol, Birmingham and London - and it's weird. For those of you reading this in England, or the US, you have taken for granted hearing English all day. I haven't heard accents, or fast speakers for a year. And it hurts my ears. The man behind me with the Bristol accent sounded hilarious, and I had forgotten that around English people I am privy to the fact that people are stupid. All the time.

I am sure there were Hungarians round me all year saying, in Hungarian: "oooh what's that's bread with seeds and bits in it?" but I didn't have the language capacity to shout back: "it's called fucking wholegrain, you moron". So when you finally do have that capacity, standing behind a dimwit at breakfast, it's hard to resist.

But Slovenia is awesome. Everyone has perfect English and they all work hard, something else I haven't seen in a year because the Hungarians are anything but industrious. Lazy, yes, industrious, no. I saw a waiter sweating earlier, I thought he was sick. I'd forgotten what exertion looked like.

So the first night was great. It rains a lot so high up in Slovenia, so we stayed in. We have TV, which is novel after a year of no TV. Although it was Predator, dubbed in german.....Arnie dubbed in german - how fantastically post-modern is that?

And it's raining again, but that's OK because it's so pretty here (i'll post some pics later). Maybe they will have more Austrians on TV, speaking English, dubbed into German.