Here in Nitra, the Erasmus Social Network (ESN) association organises events each 2 weeks that they call “Nation to Nation”. The purpose of these events is to discover the culture of other Erasmus people, with whom we live and enjoy everyday.
N2N are generally organised in a bar, where people from a specific country have to talk about their culture, political and scholar system, habits and customs, and whatever they can teach to foreigners about their country. After that presentation, everyone can taste typical dishes from the country involved.
For now, only one N2N has been organised, and it was about Slovakia. They showed us the way to prepare this kind of event by making us dicover the country where we’ll all live for a few months. We learnt about many places that now, we intend to visit (for example, the Slovak Paradise National Park).
Slovak Paradise National Park
After that, we tasted dishes that we already knew, like Halušky, and unknown dishes (more or less good!), like Koláče. We also tasted some typical drinks that you can figure out in the article “Typical alcohols in Slovakia”. They even played Slovak music and danced typical dances !
The next N2N will be made by Italian people. We know them and they told us that they will prepare many tasty dishes like tiramisu and probably different kinds of meals with pastas.
And after the Italian night, it will be our turn ! So from now, we have 2 weeks to think about french things to talk about and dishes to cook… For the salty ones, we’ll probably prepare croque-monsieurs, gratin dauphinois or tartiflette, and for the sweet meals, we talked about apple pie, far breton and pain
perdu (french toasts). It will be hard, if not impossible, to cook in our kitchen in the dorm (only 1 hotplate and no oven), but some Slovak peoples kindly proposed to lend us their fitted kitchens. So the most difficult part will be to find the ingredients in this foreign country. We’ll try to do our best to make them love France !
Benoit Jamet-Fournier.
Erasmus in Slovakia 