Once a (happy) expat, always an expat. Will I be still able to become accustomed back to Brno? Old friends either moved away or have families, therefore different rhythm and schedule. I will have to look for new ones for the everyday life but firstly – AGAIN? – and secondly, people who haven’t left have their stable friends and groups of friends and few people around thirty are looking for more of them, they have their base, they have what they want and they are content in this matter.

In the meanwhile, in Amsterdam everyone is keen on meeting new people, new friendships arise every other week and they don’t necessarily need to be shallow. People like to get connected, they are hungry for friends as their old ones are back home and just on Facebook and they are as lonely as everyone else. That’s why things go faster and quite a deep friendship can develop in as short a time as a few months. Once you have clicked, you don’t let that person go. Everything is slightly more interesting, too, at least for people who enjoy unknown and strange, as Amsterdam is a mixture of diverse cultures, customs, approaches and anticipations (and cuisines!). Every day is a school day and what is the most awesome on it for me is the eternal intertwining of various languages, it’s just there like that. Fascinating. Just like if I was back on the faculty – comparative linguistics as an everyday wonder. On the farewell dinner, we were talking the whole evening just in Polish and Czech with Dorotka and Mikołaj and we understood each other every word. I loved our, Milica’s and mine, attempts to communicate in Serbian and Czech, without using English words, or, on the contrary, filling our gaps in English vocabulary with Slavic words, which were usually understandable all right. We compared those words with their parallels in Bulgarian, Russian, Polish or Slovak and rejoiced on it.

At work, we got to another level; besides in Czech and Slovak, I was wishing good morning in Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Hungarian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Slovenian and Icelandic every day, Andrejka was clarifying some my Czechlish expressions for me (which helped me understand even better how painfully bad my English is, oh well), I discovered many interesting facts about Latvian and Lithuanian languages and about some of the similarities of Baltic to Slavic languages, I can toast in Estonian and Hungarian, realized Hungarians say fuj as well as us and that Lithuanians, Slovenians, Hungarians, Estonians, Czechs, Italians, Slovaks and most likely many more nations call a string spagat as it comes from the same thing as spagetti. I will miss this astonishing (the Czech word for astonishing/awesome means awful in Bulgarian) mixture. Will I ever be this lucky again and will I get to such an inspirational team once more? Now there are still my dreamed-of adventures in Asia ahead of me but I am quite curious what will my life look like after I come back and will try to settle a bit. If I am able to do such a thing.