“People were a little surprised to hear Slovak, but they reacted very positively,” says Michal Majek, claims regulator from Bratislava, Slovakia, who spent some days working in the north Bohemian Decin area near the Czech-German border. While Czech and Slovak are closely related languages and people understand each other when speaking and listening carefully, Majek did experience some funny moments. “When I used the word for ‘roof tile’, I realized, that the Czech and Slovak words are completely different. This happened to me a few times, but overall, we did not need a dictionary.”
Slovakia experienced much smaller flood related claims – the mobile walls along the Danube were able to hold back the high waters. So Slovak claims regulators were surprised when visiting homes of people who were flooded up to two and a half meters. “But we were welcomed very warmly,” says Alfonz Kukucka from Slovakia. “When I told people where I am from, some older folks started remembering their time serving in Slovakia in the army decades ago.”
