The effects of the crisis that has plagued Slovak Technical University's Faculty of Informatics and Information Technology (FIIT) for the past year continue to be felt, not only within the university itself but also in Slovakia's IT sector. According to Mario Lelovský, the vice-president of ITAS, Slovakia's biggest IT business association, the crisis we see today at FIIT has its roots in a long series of problems that go back as far as 1989, the year of Slovakia's Velvet Revolution. The first group of three Japanese university maths students recently finished a 3-month study here in Bratislava as part of a new exchange programme sponsored by the Japanese government. They talk about their experience here and give us their impressions of Slovakia.