Yesterday I had a good day. And for the first time in weeks I openly smiled. I mean I was smiling on the street and in the tram. I don’t know about you but I find trams pretty gloomy, especially those with two carriages, produced in the 80s and covered in colourful commercials. There is such a discrepancy between the angels trying to sell washing machines on the windows of the tram and the walls of the carriage that last saw a fresh layer of dye before the Velvet Revolution.
But let’s go back to my smile. In spring I had a friend over from London. She was born in Eastern Europe therefore she understands all the leftovers from communism/socialism still visible in the region. At some point she asked me why most people on the streets of Bratislava looked sad, why they don’t smile. We went to buy some food in Tesco and vazena pani pokladnicka was so unfriendly to us for the simple reason that we dared to buy an avocado. The humble green avocado got her into trouble as she had to ask whether it is a fruit or a vegetable. We assured her avocado is a tropical fruit and she barked back to us that we wanted to cheat on her and pay less. We had to wait there for 15 minutes until the head of the department personally came and persuaded her that that we were in fact right. My friend thought we and other seven people who were waiting in line, deserved an apology for the rude behaviour of pani pokladnicka. It didn’t happen and I felt embarrassed although I am not Slovak.
My friend kept on asking why people don’t smile on the streets. I tried some answers such as “well, they are tired” or “the weather is a bit chilly and rainy”. But then I kept asking myself the same question. Even in my own country I hate when people become very defensive and start giving stupid excuses such as “Do you think that in America is it better? They smile like idiots all the time but they are very fat”. I spent some years there and I remember what a strange feeling I had when every time I entered a shop I saw a smile (fake or real) and heard “How are you doing?”. Sometimes I was annoyed thinking that the shop assistant didn’t really care about how I was doing. Then I came back to Eastern Europe (namely Slovakia) and I terribly missed the artificial “Hi. How are you doing?” .
And what I missed the most was the smile. So yesterday I smiled. At one tram station downtown Bratislava I suddenly heard behind me a lady with two plastic bags addressing me out of nowhere: “A ty na com sa smejes? Clovek pracuje 8 hod denne a Vy mlada generacia sa smejete cely den”. I was at the end of some 10 hours of work but I tried to ignore her. She didn’t give up so easily and I couldn’t stop thinking I should ask her whether she was working as pokladnicka. Fortunately, a tram arrived. Yeh, that old type with two carriages but this time it was covered in a green poster with “Futbal je hra pre vsetkych” so it increased my smile. In the tram I had to stand next to the lady with the plastic bags. We passed by a billboard with three candidates of KDH for the regional elections. One tried to look serious, the second had his mouth open in what he thought it might resemble a smile and the third simply showed his clean teeth to everybody else. My angry lady commented:” Ten druhy ma hemoroidy alebo co? Preco ukaze taku grimasu?”
When everybody burst into laugh and comments around her she finally displayed a smile and said: “Pane Boze, dokonca sa usmejem aj ja ako sprosta zena na ulice”.
