How to choose a destination, or why Ostrava?!

I’m not going to feed you up with fibs that I liked anything about the university or the country… I even study at Pécs because when applying to universities we had to pay 9000 HUF (~30€) for applying to three places (+ 2000 HUF for every next place; joke is that we were the last year who didn’t apply for free) and I thought if I had to pay for three then why apply for only two, I was sure I would be accepted to Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church, English studies, but didn’t have enough points for the first (Eötvös Loránd University, Scandinavian studies) and the second place either (I was crying after Budapest and KRE until I went back to the city in May) so I ended up in Pécs and started my English studies there. Choosing an Erasmus-destination was a similar torture, I’m not kidding.

The university of Ostrava was chosen by excluding those elements from the list I was given where I couldn’t go (because I didn’t speak the language required, such as France, Spain or Germany) and where I didn’t want to go (I had only like two criteria: I didn’t want to go to a city where a big group of Hungarian minority lived [e.g. Osijek, Croatia; Timișoara, Romania] and I also wanted to go North from Hungary [no Turkey, just nope, it’s too hot there]) and soon only two countries were left: the Czech Republic and Poland. With Łódź and Wrocław we had connection with the faculty of English Linguistics but with Ostrava and Katowice there was my chosen study track, English Literature and Culture so I applied for both places. First I didn’t know what order I should choose for them but a Czech twitter-friend of mine helped me saying prices were almost the same in the two countries so as I got a little more in the Czech Rep. I decided I wanted that one a little better. It was totally unimportant for me which one to choose, I didn’t spend hours on Wikipedia reading about the history of the cities or the ranking of the universities. Sad but true.

I even tried to get in touch with other universities the Faculty of Humanities had connection with (mostly Scandinavian and Finnish ones) but all of them were dead ends I, as a simple student, couldn’t do anything but quietly cry in the corner, mourning my love, the never-ending emerald taiga.

But finally, I could luckily get all papers in time (let’s say) and I was nominated by my faculty to go to Ostrava, so I’m looking forward to get there and get some knowledge from people living in the country of Dvořák, Smetana, and, most importantly, the best beers in the world.