Welcome to Slovakia!

This morning, I took the train from Budapest to Bratislava.  Some people have been wondering why I was in Budapest at all since I was just there for four days over Christmas Break.  Well, in the weird world of Europe, it was basically the same price to fly to Budapest and take a 2 ½ hour train ride to Bratislava as it was to take a 15 hour train from Gdansk to Bratislava. Two and a half hours on a train vs. fifteen hours?  No. Question.

One thing in Europe that weirds me out is the European Union.  Most countries in the EU have signed into an open borders program where citizens can freely move between the countries.  This also applies to visitors.  That means when I fly to different countries, no one is checking passports.  It’s very strange, but at least the airport checks to ensure I have a passport before I fly. 

On the trains, no one looked at my passport once.  And I’m most positive I switched countries because the language and currency are much different.  Some Europeans last night tried to convince me that it’s like the United States, but I really don’t think that you can compare a group of sovereign countries with different heads of states, militaries, languages, currency (to a degree), and cultures (extremely different cultures) to the USA, which is actually one country. 

The next argument is that the USA is just as diverse as Europe.  This is kind of true, but not a very convincing argument for me.  The U.S. is diverse first because of immigration, and second because of geography.  Even then, geographically, the U.S. is diverse primarily because immigrants chose to settle in clusters of their own people.  On the other hand, Europe is diverse based on geography. The culture of France is entirely different than the culture of Poland or Ireland or Greece. 

Furthermore, while the U.S. has different dialects of English, the vast majority of citizens and residents speak English.  Americans might be multi-lingual, but most speak English, with the accent of region (Midwest, southern, Chicago, Boston, Jersey, etc).  Europeans speak their language first, and then English, German, Spanish, or French as a second language.  And the variety of languages is so vast in Europe that it’s impossible to compare Polish to German or Spanish.  Apparently, they tried to introduce an European Union language, but it died quickly because no one speaks it. 

Anyways, international travel in Europe is strange now.  I would feel better if someone scanned my passport and just seemed to care that foreigners were coming in and out of their country.   And I’m still not completely sold on the EU or the euro zone.