Like just about anybody in the west, I've spent a good amount of time in Ikea. As a student in Canada they furnished my student room, and since then I've accumulated dozens of things. I guess it isn't my favorite furniture, and it tends towards the cheaply made side, but it is relatively easy, and neither outrageously ugly nor outrageously expensive like so much of what is available in Germany (in my humble opinion). A necessary evil: if I had more money, time, inclination, I would go elsewhere, but alas, I don't.
It surprised me a little, then, to find out that there is something of a craze in the former Yugoslavia for Ikea furniture. People in Novi Sad, for instance, will drive to Hungary to place orders and then usually charge some kind of premium for the service. And it seems the second hand stuff sells like wildfire, and at a hefty price. And it isn't just furniture. Much as I hate to admit it, before our last visit to Serbia, we bought a lot of the kind of Ikea stuff that I normally avoid on the basis that it is just them flogging us things we don't need: rucksacks, cookies, little plastic gizmos, pen holders, Swedish vodka (for chrissakes). We did this for presents, which by and large were greatly appreciated as something good. I mean Ikea - super je.
There are a lot of other things like this in Serbia: Addidas is a fashion label, not a sport shoe-maker; Nescafe is a luxury, not a convenience - they even sell it in Duty-Free in Belgrade Airport. I also found it rather strange during a visit of my mother in law they way she would handle some of my things. For example, some Ikea 50 cent napkins, bought in a hurry to accommodate guests, were hand-washed, ironed and put carefully away whereas my precious hand-made, very expensive, one-of-a-kind, Provencal napkins bought during a holiday some years ago were used to clean paint brushes. Ditto cheap 1 Euro glasses were hand-washed and dried, while 25 pound apiece, lead-crystal glasses from Harrod's were used to hold paint-thinner (you couldn't see the Ikea label on the latter).
I'm not trying to have a go at the taste of people in Serbia, but rather to point out that one values things for different reasons. It is, I must admit, quaint in a kind of genteel way to see how cheap-as-chips things in the west are so covetted in former communist countries. I always remember with a smile the first post-Glasnost Russians (scientists, lawyers, doctors, whoever) arriving in the west in the early nineties, and how within days they would all being decked out in white trainers and acid-washed Levi's circa 1984.
What is ironic to me, however, is that it was only in Serbia that I started to appreciate the worth of things - well made things, long-lasting things. At least when I started going there people bought things to last, and checked out the material and the stitching. This was in contrast to my typically western Gap/Zara/Ikea approach which consists of buying a lot of cheap clothes and renewing them every year when they wear out. To see people being converted into this label-only, it-isn't-cheap-if-I-see-a-name kind of culture is a bit sad.
Or maybe I'm just a sentimental old fart. Oh, to hell with it, buy and enjoy what you like!
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
The real Serbian mentality
My mother-in-law recently gave me A Guide to the Serbian Mentality, by Momo Kapor. I was looking forward to reading it, mostly as it looked on the surface to be a bit like "How to be a Brit" by George Mikes, which was a great humorous read, and how else, I thought, could you write such a book. Through the humor both foreigners and British people alike learned a lot about who they are. These kinds of books, so I thought, just have to be funny to work.
As to Kapor's book: not my cup of tea. I'll spare you a lot of detailed criticism, but the book is neither what I expected, nor terribly funny, and moreover I found it rather over-sentimental and even nationalistic in places. Proud Serbian traditions, people, places, etc. But very little poking fun. Where, I wondered, was the true impression of the Serbian mentality?
As to men, I think there is a certain humorous side to the mentality of the Balkan man. The first time I heard the term "typical Balkan man" was during a Croatian course for a boat license. Every time the Lucka Kapitan had to refer to some not-so-bright, but nevertheless righteous local he would say "Now imagine I'm a typical Balkan man" and then go on to describe some stupidity-meets-boat-related incident to make his point. There is a kind of chest-thumping, know-everything attitude that can lead to all kinds of humorous situations - particularly when they gather in significant numbers, or meet people from outside of Serbia/Croatia. Almost Borat-like at times, but with a peculiar Balkan charm.
As to women, of course (as the book points out) Serbian women are beautiful, but there is also a funny side to their mentality. Here it is a more, dress-to-kill, stand in the corner and smoke, little bit grumpy, very sultry, and, well again, pretty funny.
I sense what I would love to read is a book about the more humorous, lighter side of the Serbian mentality - meaning how the people behave, and not what the cities or restaruants in the country are like. I think Serbians (and other Balkans) pride themselves on being funny, but as for Germany, I've never noticed a great tendency to laugh at oneself. I firmly believe that problems like nationalism arise out of certain self-righteousness that often goes along with a tendency to take oneself, one's community, or one's country a bit too seriously. In Serbia, the Balkans (and many other places to be sure) a good dose of self-effacement could be a good thing.
As to Kapor's book: not my cup of tea. I'll spare you a lot of detailed criticism, but the book is neither what I expected, nor terribly funny, and moreover I found it rather over-sentimental and even nationalistic in places. Proud Serbian traditions, people, places, etc. But very little poking fun. Where, I wondered, was the true impression of the Serbian mentality?
As to men, I think there is a certain humorous side to the mentality of the Balkan man. The first time I heard the term "typical Balkan man" was during a Croatian course for a boat license. Every time the Lucka Kapitan had to refer to some not-so-bright, but nevertheless righteous local he would say "Now imagine I'm a typical Balkan man" and then go on to describe some stupidity-meets-boat-related incident to make his point. There is a kind of chest-thumping, know-everything attitude that can lead to all kinds of humorous situations - particularly when they gather in significant numbers, or meet people from outside of Serbia/Croatia. Almost Borat-like at times, but with a peculiar Balkan charm.
As to women, of course (as the book points out) Serbian women are beautiful, but there is also a funny side to their mentality. Here it is a more, dress-to-kill, stand in the corner and smoke, little bit grumpy, very sultry, and, well again, pretty funny.
I sense what I would love to read is a book about the more humorous, lighter side of the Serbian mentality - meaning how the people behave, and not what the cities or restaruants in the country are like. I think Serbians (and other Balkans) pride themselves on being funny, but as for Germany, I've never noticed a great tendency to laugh at oneself. I firmly believe that problems like nationalism arise out of certain self-righteousness that often goes along with a tendency to take oneself, one's community, or one's country a bit too seriously. In Serbia, the Balkans (and many other places to be sure) a good dose of self-effacement could be a good thing.
Monday, September 8, 2008
The wrong rung of the social ladder
We had a Serbian lunch yesterday, complete with home-made Gibanica and Ajvar. The mother of one of our work friends was visiting from Belgrade, and we spent a pleasant afternoon in a little Serbicised corner of Heidelberg. A good deal of the discussion, as ever, was about whether or not to move back to Serbia. Our friends are both Serbian, and often think of moving home. One of the things she was mentioning yesterday was ones social standing in the countries in which so many Balkan people now live: France, Germany, Austria, the US. One can be the king of the hill in Serbia, but when you move somewhere else, you end up on the bottom rung of the social ladder. And as a result one ends up mingling with people outside your normal social group in the new country. Our friend was telling us that they - with four college degrees between them - regularly attend parties with Serbians or Croatians that are truly working class: cleaners, laborers, etc. Something that is mostly unheard of in - well - anywhere.
Examples are everywhere. Consider the old friends of G.'s parents: they moved to Calgary for work. He had been a leading petroleum engineer in Serbia, but found himself being placed with entry level engineers. I think they like living in Canada for many reasons, but struggle to cope with the loss of status. Most people start to wonder, indeed, if it isn't better to go home and face whatever reality they have to face there - lower salaries, lack of work, etc. - if only to be better off in terms of connections and social standing.
It isn't, of course, a problem unique to Serbians in Europe. It is everywhere. Poles moving the UK, Russians moving to Israel, and many others all make the same comments. The university professor turned street cleaner is a well-worn cliche.
I think the problem that most Westerners have with understanding this, is that we normally don't move countries out of shear necessity. Normally those who go abroad are doing so by choice, and more often than not it is the opportunity of a lifetime that allows somebody to take direct advantage of skills gained at home and needed abroad. And if things go foul, we can usually return home, without too much lost in the process. For those moving out of a need to support families, the situation is alas different.
I guess my message is that the next time you hear a foreigner struggling to make him or herself understood in a language that he/she probably learned after the age of 30, that possibly you might nevertheless be in the presence of a genius or at least somebody that you would like to know better or perhaps possibly admit onto your social network. You never know, maybe - in exchange for just a modicum of respect - they have a house on the Croatian/Bulgarian/Romanian coast (free holidays!), or can get your foot in the door into something lucrative in a country you don't understand.
Examples are everywhere. Consider the old friends of G.'s parents: they moved to Calgary for work. He had been a leading petroleum engineer in Serbia, but found himself being placed with entry level engineers. I think they like living in Canada for many reasons, but struggle to cope with the loss of status. Most people start to wonder, indeed, if it isn't better to go home and face whatever reality they have to face there - lower salaries, lack of work, etc. - if only to be better off in terms of connections and social standing.
It isn't, of course, a problem unique to Serbians in Europe. It is everywhere. Poles moving the UK, Russians moving to Israel, and many others all make the same comments. The university professor turned street cleaner is a well-worn cliche.
I think the problem that most Westerners have with understanding this, is that we normally don't move countries out of shear necessity. Normally those who go abroad are doing so by choice, and more often than not it is the opportunity of a lifetime that allows somebody to take direct advantage of skills gained at home and needed abroad. And if things go foul, we can usually return home, without too much lost in the process. For those moving out of a need to support families, the situation is alas different.
I guess my message is that the next time you hear a foreigner struggling to make him or herself understood in a language that he/she probably learned after the age of 30, that possibly you might nevertheless be in the presence of a genius or at least somebody that you would like to know better or perhaps possibly admit onto your social network. You never know, maybe - in exchange for just a modicum of respect - they have a house on the Croatian/Bulgarian/Romanian coast (free holidays!), or can get your foot in the door into something lucrative in a country you don't understand.
Monday, August 25, 2008
More little countries
The situation in Georgia reminds me again about the force of nationalism. I don't pretend to understand the situation at all, but I presume that again there are multiple groups of people who a) don't like each other, b) treat each other badly, and c) probably deserve each other. And as for the whole Serbia/Kosovo thing, I don't know what to think. Separation is a good thing as it might stop the bitterness, but a bad thing because it provides another example that groups can't co-exist. It is a good thing as we should acknowledge groups of people their right to self goverment, but a bad thing because the new divisions often go along with the creation of small, embittered and often badly treated minorities inside them. And on and on.
But frankly, my biggest problem with dividing big countries into smaller ones is that I begin to wonder why we need all these silly little countries and what good does it do in the long run? Drunk a few months ago I was arguing with a Nationalist Catalan friend of mine, and my final comments were along the lines of "why do you want to create another bullshit little country?" and "what, another Switzerland? Sheesh." Drunk or not, I think I may have had a point.
Smaller countries don't just create additional currencies and border crossings, but actually divulge power into smaller and smaller pieces. What chance of a powerful voice in Europe does (say) Slovenia have compared to (say) Poland? Sure, they can be members of the EU, they can join Nato, etc. but will any of the big players in the world really listen to them? When I think of the former Yugoslavia, exactly this force - namely the desire by neighbors not to have an over-ambitious all-slavic nation - was very often behind the politics. Italy and Austria, for instance, were always vetoing the early Yugoslavia pretty clearly for this reason. Originally it was because they thought it easier to make land claims on a set of smaller countries, but perhaps those now running Italy and Germany and France and England have, at the back of their political consciousness, a desire not to have another Poland storming into Europe, but a series of smaller, rinky-dink countries that are easier to manipulate.
I don't pretend that such a view addresses any of the complexities of the Georgia or Kosovo situations, but it is at least something that a semi-nationalist might like to remember. United we stand; divided we have less influence.
But frankly, my biggest problem with dividing big countries into smaller ones is that I begin to wonder why we need all these silly little countries and what good does it do in the long run? Drunk a few months ago I was arguing with a Nationalist Catalan friend of mine, and my final comments were along the lines of "why do you want to create another bullshit little country?" and "what, another Switzerland? Sheesh." Drunk or not, I think I may have had a point.
Smaller countries don't just create additional currencies and border crossings, but actually divulge power into smaller and smaller pieces. What chance of a powerful voice in Europe does (say) Slovenia have compared to (say) Poland? Sure, they can be members of the EU, they can join Nato, etc. but will any of the big players in the world really listen to them? When I think of the former Yugoslavia, exactly this force - namely the desire by neighbors not to have an over-ambitious all-slavic nation - was very often behind the politics. Italy and Austria, for instance, were always vetoing the early Yugoslavia pretty clearly for this reason. Originally it was because they thought it easier to make land claims on a set of smaller countries, but perhaps those now running Italy and Germany and France and England have, at the back of their political consciousness, a desire not to have another Poland storming into Europe, but a series of smaller, rinky-dink countries that are easier to manipulate.
I don't pretend that such a view addresses any of the complexities of the Georgia or Kosovo situations, but it is at least something that a semi-nationalist might like to remember. United we stand; divided we have less influence.
Friday, August 22, 2008
Yugo diary 2008 VI - Building a house without a boiler in the bathtub
In England, even now, people almost never have good water pressure. I remember being amazed when I bought my first flat in the UK to find that, though the flat was built in 1988, that, like most other places I'd lived in to that point, hot water was made by heating (electrically) cold water that was stored in a large, un-pressurised bucket stored in the ceiling. This means that, like every where else I'd lived, that hot water pressure consisted of a dribble driven simply by gravity from the ceiling, and that, consequently, one could never adjust temperature in the shower, having either scalding hot or freezing cold water, and nothing in between.
Things are generally better on continental Europe (including the former Yugoslavia), but as we slowly begin to renovate a house here, I've been noticing some of the oddities of house-building here. Namely the boiler-in-the-bathtub phenomenon. Having a boiler in the bathtub seems to be about as consistently ex-Yugo as the insistence on wearing slippers in the house (watch out for Brain fever) or the universal paranoia about drafts causing serious illness even in hot weather (ditto). In both Serbia and Croatia it often seems the norm to place the houses boiler above the bathtub. And more often than not this comes at the expense of any ledge to put soap on, or (more seriously) anywhere to fix the shower head to the wall, meaning that showers consist often of a rubber hose with a shower head that one has to hold, while always avoiding contact with the boiler next to you.
And its funny that people rationalise this with the same pseudo-logic that English people use about the water pressure. Where English people might say that European hot-water is too strongly pressurised (one friend told me that showers in Germany actually hurt), at least one Croatian builder told me that if the boiler was anywhere else, it might take 20 minutes for the hot water to move through the pipes. And just like in Enland, there is no counter argument along the lines of "but I've seen it work better in other places, honestly".
Still, if I had to choose, a boiler in the bathtub beats never having proper water pressure, but I'll fight tooth and nail to get that damned boiler put somewhere else.
Things are generally better on continental Europe (including the former Yugoslavia), but as we slowly begin to renovate a house here, I've been noticing some of the oddities of house-building here. Namely the boiler-in-the-bathtub phenomenon. Having a boiler in the bathtub seems to be about as consistently ex-Yugo as the insistence on wearing slippers in the house (watch out for Brain fever) or the universal paranoia about drafts causing serious illness even in hot weather (ditto). In both Serbia and Croatia it often seems the norm to place the houses boiler above the bathtub. And more often than not this comes at the expense of any ledge to put soap on, or (more seriously) anywhere to fix the shower head to the wall, meaning that showers consist often of a rubber hose with a shower head that one has to hold, while always avoiding contact with the boiler next to you.
And its funny that people rationalise this with the same pseudo-logic that English people use about the water pressure. Where English people might say that European hot-water is too strongly pressurised (one friend told me that showers in Germany actually hurt), at least one Croatian builder told me that if the boiler was anywhere else, it might take 20 minutes for the hot water to move through the pipes. And just like in Enland, there is no counter argument along the lines of "but I've seen it work better in other places, honestly".
Still, if I had to choose, a boiler in the bathtub beats never having proper water pressure, but I'll fight tooth and nail to get that damned boiler put somewhere else.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Yugo diary 2008 V - Langauge Lunancy in Unlikely Places
Croatians are probably the most language sensitive in the former Yugoslavia, and I'm certainly not the first to comment on this. But I must admit this sensitivity is being expressed in some pretty odd places, the oddest of which is surely ingredients of snack foods. While on holiday, one always buys a lot of junk food - salty sticks, coke, etc. - and Croatian manufacturers clearly see this is as an opportunity to express linguistic distinctiveness.
On the back of many foods, the list of languages explaining ingredients is impressive: Slovak, Russian, Hungarian, Romanian, German, English, Italian. And helpfully the standard traveler/car symbols for the countries are used to denote them: SK, RU, HU, RO, DE, GB, IT. I noticed the other day a symbol I hadn't seen before MNG as well as separate lists of ingredients for BiH, HR and SRB (Bosnia/Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia). And then it clicked: Montenegrin, making four lists of ingredients where previously there would have been just one. A glance revealed that the differences were mostly a mixture of ijekavian and ekavian changes variously mixed up in ways presumed to be most peculiar to the language and some cute differences, such as Kisela voda being used only in Serbian & Bosnian for carbonated water.
I wonder if armies of ex-Jugoslav polyglots are employed to accentuate the differences in what is, after all, a single list of ingredients that would - minor variations aside - be understandable by all four groups of people. Perhaps it is worth thinking about what the equivalents would be like in the various English flavors. I mean, after all, it is obscene to consider English, American, Australian and Canadian to be the same language. So let's set the record straight with the ingredients to Coca-cola.
USA: Seltzer water, High fructose corn syrup, carmel color, phosphoric acid, natural flavors, caffine, aspartame (NutraSweet brand), potassium benzoate, citric acid
GB: Sparkling water, corn syrup elevated in fructose, colour of caramel, phosphoric acid extract, flavourings (including caffeine), Nutrasweet, benzoic acid potassium salt, citrate at low pH.
CAN: Club soda, sweet corn syrup, carmel colour, phosphoric acid, natural flavors, caffeine, Nutrasweet artificial sweetener (contains aspartame), potassium benzoate, citric acid.
AUS: Carbonated water, corn syrup, carmel coloring, phosphoric acid, flavors from natural sources, caffeine, Sweetener (Nutrasweet, contains aspartame), benozic & citric acids.
No problem. A few spelling differences (e.g. Caffeine/Caffine, Colour/Color, Carmel/Caramel), different colloquialisms (Sparkling/Seltzer water), and rearrangements and voila! Not that there is actually any difference between them, but perhaps somebody who didn't speak English might begin to believe they were truly different, though related.
On the back of many foods, the list of languages explaining ingredients is impressive: Slovak, Russian, Hungarian, Romanian, German, English, Italian. And helpfully the standard traveler/car symbols for the countries are used to denote them: SK, RU, HU, RO, DE, GB, IT. I noticed the other day a symbol I hadn't seen before MNG as well as separate lists of ingredients for BiH, HR and SRB (Bosnia/Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia). And then it clicked: Montenegrin, making four lists of ingredients where previously there would have been just one. A glance revealed that the differences were mostly a mixture of ijekavian and ekavian changes variously mixed up in ways presumed to be most peculiar to the language and some cute differences, such as Kisela voda being used only in Serbian & Bosnian for carbonated water.
I wonder if armies of ex-Jugoslav polyglots are employed to accentuate the differences in what is, after all, a single list of ingredients that would - minor variations aside - be understandable by all four groups of people. Perhaps it is worth thinking about what the equivalents would be like in the various English flavors. I mean, after all, it is obscene to consider English, American, Australian and Canadian to be the same language. So let's set the record straight with the ingredients to Coca-cola.
USA: Seltzer water, High fructose corn syrup, carmel color, phosphoric acid, natural flavors, caffine, aspartame (NutraSweet brand), potassium benzoate, citric acid
GB: Sparkling water, corn syrup elevated in fructose, colour of caramel, phosphoric acid extract, flavourings (including caffeine), Nutrasweet, benzoic acid potassium salt, citrate at low pH.
CAN: Club soda, sweet corn syrup, carmel colour, phosphoric acid, natural flavors, caffeine, Nutrasweet artificial sweetener (contains aspartame), potassium benzoate, citric acid.
AUS: Carbonated water, corn syrup, carmel coloring, phosphoric acid, flavors from natural sources, caffeine, Sweetener (Nutrasweet, contains aspartame), benozic & citric acids.
No problem. A few spelling differences (e.g. Caffeine/Caffine, Colour/Color, Carmel/Caramel), different colloquialisms (Sparkling/Seltzer water), and rearrangements and voila! Not that there is actually any difference between them, but perhaps somebody who didn't speak English might begin to believe they were truly different, though related.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Yugo diary Summer 2008 IV - Becoming normal Europeans... on the road
I was reading the other day about the late, great Zoran Đinđić. I was interested to read in Wikipedia that (and I like they way this is put) many people felt he was, at the time, the best hope for Serbians to become "normal" Europeans. Certainly Gs mother thinks this. "If he was still alive, we would be in the EU." But what are Normal Europeans? Tough one to be sure. What links the person in Athens with the one in Helsinki? This is a theme that I would like to develop later, but let's focus on one thing that I've been exposed to a lot during the past week, and that makes Serbia very abnormal in the context of Europe: Driving.
Now I must say I've driven in many European places with crazy drivers: Crete, Greece, Sicily, Marseilles and other more terrifying places like Istanbul & Tunis. And based on this I'd have to say that people in Serbia drive more like those in Turkey or Tunisia than those in Spain or Germany. I've had crazy driving experiences in France, Portugal, Italy - the usual stuff: tailgating, rude hand gestures, speeding, etc. And I always feel like Germans are rather brutal, or at least inconsiderate on the road, even when they are being safe. But in these places I've experienced nothing like those I experienced in just six days of driving in Serbia. Overtaking at speed on the left shoulder when somebody is waiting at a pedestrian crossing - mothers with children carefully leaning out past my car to avoid instant death. An eight year old child nervously and quite desperately trying to cross the road to his mother only to be sworn at by savages in white vans. Driving in the middle of a two lane national road under the assumption that people coming the other direction will just get out of the way on the hard shoulder. Actually pushing a car that is, in your opinion, taking too long to go around a large gaping hole in the road. Tailgating, gesticulating and honking impatiently at the driver in front of you in a construction zone on the Autoput when the other driver is doing 80km/h in a 40km/h zone, and knows (as well as you do) that there is a police speed control 1km ahead. Making it a habit to reverse on the Autoput when you've missed a junction (and well done, you've put your hazards on, that'll stop all those over-taking lunatics behind you). Normal? Hardly.
The other rather savage thing is the attitude towards seatbelts. In the seventies and eighties in Alberta (my sometimes redneck home province in Canada), when the laws about seatbelts gradually came into force, there was a lot of complaining and I had mostly forgotten about all of this until I drove with passengers (or as one) in Serbia. This week I've heard the same moronic statements I remember from Alberta 25-30 years ago. "Seatbelts trap you in a burning car, or one that is submerged under water" or "You don't have to wear a seatbelt here" or "Don't you trust my driving?" And odd behavior too: I see people taking the belts off (say) when they get off the Autoput, or when they get close to home, or taking them off on the Autoput once they are on the straight. I half-wonder if it might be embarrassing to be seen to be wearing one. Incredibly, at least one of the ex-pats we know (i.e. returned to Serbia after years of living in Normal Europe) also has this attitude, looking at me like I'm somehow less of a man for insisting that she wear one. For me seatbelts in the car are like slippers in a Serbian house - its dangerous not to be wearing them. Anyway, all rather primitive, rather 30 years ago, and not very, ahem, normal European.
I often think that something said in the US version of The Office applies here. When sycophantic employee Dwight Shrute is asked by noodle-head boss Michael Scott about the most inspirational thing that he was ever told by him, he answered immediately that it was: "Don't be an idiot", clarifying that now "whenever I'm about to do something, I ask myself 'would an idiot do this?' and if the answer is 'yes', I don't do it". Applies, seemingly, on the road here. Would an idiot put his blinkers on and reverse 500m to get back to a junction on a busy motorway to save ten minutes?
And more seriously, for any Road Gorilla who might getting upset about this as some kind of slight on his (or her) manliness, watch these:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVBfMMMUsGs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb5q_YYpxB0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1HV5h4K8D0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AT5e44lty88
And you will change your driving habits forever.
Now I must say I've driven in many European places with crazy drivers: Crete, Greece, Sicily, Marseilles and other more terrifying places like Istanbul & Tunis. And based on this I'd have to say that people in Serbia drive more like those in Turkey or Tunisia than those in Spain or Germany. I've had crazy driving experiences in France, Portugal, Italy - the usual stuff: tailgating, rude hand gestures, speeding, etc. And I always feel like Germans are rather brutal, or at least inconsiderate on the road, even when they are being safe. But in these places I've experienced nothing like those I experienced in just six days of driving in Serbia. Overtaking at speed on the left shoulder when somebody is waiting at a pedestrian crossing - mothers with children carefully leaning out past my car to avoid instant death. An eight year old child nervously and quite desperately trying to cross the road to his mother only to be sworn at by savages in white vans. Driving in the middle of a two lane national road under the assumption that people coming the other direction will just get out of the way on the hard shoulder. Actually pushing a car that is, in your opinion, taking too long to go around a large gaping hole in the road. Tailgating, gesticulating and honking impatiently at the driver in front of you in a construction zone on the Autoput when the other driver is doing 80km/h in a 40km/h zone, and knows (as well as you do) that there is a police speed control 1km ahead. Making it a habit to reverse on the Autoput when you've missed a junction (and well done, you've put your hazards on, that'll stop all those over-taking lunatics behind you). Normal? Hardly.
The other rather savage thing is the attitude towards seatbelts. In the seventies and eighties in Alberta (my sometimes redneck home province in Canada), when the laws about seatbelts gradually came into force, there was a lot of complaining and I had mostly forgotten about all of this until I drove with passengers (or as one) in Serbia. This week I've heard the same moronic statements I remember from Alberta 25-30 years ago. "Seatbelts trap you in a burning car, or one that is submerged under water" or "You don't have to wear a seatbelt here" or "Don't you trust my driving?" And odd behavior too: I see people taking the belts off (say) when they get off the Autoput, or when they get close to home, or taking them off on the Autoput once they are on the straight. I half-wonder if it might be embarrassing to be seen to be wearing one. Incredibly, at least one of the ex-pats we know (i.e. returned to Serbia after years of living in Normal Europe) also has this attitude, looking at me like I'm somehow less of a man for insisting that she wear one. For me seatbelts in the car are like slippers in a Serbian house - its dangerous not to be wearing them. Anyway, all rather primitive, rather 30 years ago, and not very, ahem, normal European.
I often think that something said in the US version of The Office applies here. When sycophantic employee Dwight Shrute is asked by noodle-head boss Michael Scott about the most inspirational thing that he was ever told by him, he answered immediately that it was: "Don't be an idiot", clarifying that now "whenever I'm about to do something, I ask myself 'would an idiot do this?' and if the answer is 'yes', I don't do it". Applies, seemingly, on the road here. Would an idiot put his blinkers on and reverse 500m to get back to a junction on a busy motorway to save ten minutes?
And more seriously, for any Road Gorilla who might getting upset about this as some kind of slight on his (or her) manliness, watch these:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVBfMMMUsGs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb5q_YYpxB0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1HV5h4K8D0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AT5e44lty88
And you will change your driving habits forever.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Yugo diary Summer 2008 III - The improvement of Novi Sad
Several people in Serbia have asked me how Novi Sad looks today. And I have to say, that for the record, it is looking a lot better on just about every level than how I first remember it in 2002. The first things I noticed in Novi Sad, the first time I visited, are those things that most residents don't notice, and moreover don't see any different from, say, Vienna or Frankfurt or Marseilles. The dirt, for starters. In 2002, the roads in Novi Sad sat like swamps of mud, peppered with rubbish. Today, the city is looking after these things a lot better, and where there had been muck, there is now grass, and even when there isn't grass, at least there is less rubbish.
Another big change is the number of kiosks. On Dunavska (the main street) in 2002, kiosks were everywhere, selling the usual odds and ends that kiosks sell, and this gave the impression more of a Turkish bazaar than a Western city. I don't know why, but now they are no more, and the high street looks more like a pedestrian zone in any European city. I have mixed feelings about this - kiosks were kind of local culture - but I must admit it is better without them. I wonder what happened to remove them. I think it was in the space of a few months, as suddenly, one summer, they weren't there anymore.
The same goes for the park in the center of the city. In 2002, this was a depressing or even scary place, rubbish, needles, dog-shit, that kind of thing. Bins sat overflowing with all manner of muck and people generally seemed to hurry through the place. Today, though I did see a rogue needle (at least it was a new one), the park is otherwise very nice.Other things remain more typically Eastern than Western European. I'm still reminded more of central Athens on a hot day than Hyde Park. As a Polish colleague told me when he visited Novi Sad himself, the smell of the air is typical of a country where people have too little money to meet emissions standards for cars (which I think don't exist yet in Serbia, but would be happy to be corrected). I once walked home - eyes watering - from the city center during rush hour and was honestly shocked at the air quality. I guess it will get better as cars get better.
Many buildings also remain shabby. The office where G's company works is fairly nicely done up inside, but the interior of the building looks pretty terrible, and the outside of this building is visibly eroding. Again, the issue is money, and I'm encouraged that many buildings are getting facelifts. All in good time.Graffiti is also everywhere. Even in relatively well-to-do neighborhoods it is really omnipresent. We were walking in the city the other day, heading to a relative's flat, and I started to get that feeling of walking in a rough council estate in, say, White City in London. G. was pointing out that the area was actually quite up-market, and that engineers and doctors and lawyers lived in these rough looking tower blocks. Again, all understandable when people have little money, but I do wonder about the graffiti.
And now that we have a dog, I notice the animals. Dogs and cats are everywhere in Serbia, running wild, pooping in children's playgrounds, etc. In Germany, perhaps rules and attitudes are perhaps extreme in a different direction: one never sees dogs running through the street. Any rogue animal is quickly taken off the street to avoid it pooping in places where children might be, but anyway, German dog-owners would never allow their precious Jagthund (or whatever) to run as freely as many dogs do in Serbia. Interestingly, however, both Croatia and Serbia have issued edicts that all dogs must be registered (in fact, the only post we received in our house on Krk was about registering our dog), so I'm told that, in principle, all of these street-wise, often mangy rogue dogs have a chip in them. All these little things, I'm told, are part of the large list of things that one must do to qualify for EU membership. Hopefully car emissions are another.
Yugo diary Summer 2008 II - Zekstra is still ok in my book
We've come to Novi Sad for the wedding of the daughter of old friends of G.s family. Unfortunately, I hadn't been able to dry clean anything before we left, so I dragged a not very clean suit in the car, leaving it squished between a suitcase and the dog food. It emerged from the 1400 km journey looking like a potato sack, so G thought it wise to see if we could get me a new suit. As I'm 203 cm (6'8") tall, I'm always skeptical about any suggestion that I can just go out and buy something as tailored-to-fit as a suit just off the rack in a shop, but we went into Zekstra, the Serbian clothing retailer, which I have mentioned before, on the off chance that it might just work this time.
The woman helping us looked me up and down and said that it wasn't a problem,and that they had several suits that would fit. I scoffed, and followed her. Yeah right, I thought. Heard this one before.
Much to my surprise, however, I tried one on and - hey presto! - it fit, with the only problem being the fact that the legs were too long. I bought two suits, and danced out of the shop feeling that I was once again among the land of the giants where I belong. There are some big boys in this country to be sure. And Zekstra - all is forgiven. You are still all right by me.
The woman helping us looked me up and down and said that it wasn't a problem,and that they had several suits that would fit. I scoffed, and followed her. Yeah right, I thought. Heard this one before.
Much to my surprise, however, I tried one on and - hey presto! - it fit, with the only problem being the fact that the legs were too long. I bought two suits, and danced out of the shop feeling that I was once again among the land of the giants where I belong. There are some big boys in this country to be sure. And Zekstra - all is forgiven. You are still all right by me.
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Yugo diary Summer 2008 I - driving to Serbia
This will be the first in a series of blog entries discussing our trip to Serbia & Croatia this summer. And what a more fitting way to begin than the journey. It began with both of us desperately tired - circles under the eyes, just back from other travels - and some dread at the prospect of a 1400 km drive. We wanted to bring our Serbian dog home for a visit, and more selfishly wanted her with us, so driving was the only real option. We decided this time to drive via Vienna/Budapest rather than Zagreb. It is a six-in-one half-dozen-the-other kind of decision, but a change is as good as a rest, and what the hell. It was long, but easy enough to navigate. This last point gave me an interesting observation about borders and the former Yugoslavia.
The other two times that I drove to Serbia we did so via Croatia. Driving from Zagreb to Novi Sad is rather long (5 hours at least) and the terrain is a bit dull, unchanging. But one thing stands out: namely the absence, on the Croatian side, of any signs telling you what you are driving towards. There are dozens of signs for every major town/city on the way (e.g. Vukovar) in addition to every two-horse village seemingly, and one is always reminded where to turn in order to drive to Bosnia (BIH), but only 25 km from the border do you see the first (and I think only) sign that tells you that Belgrade, by the way, is also on this road. Throughout the journey I kept asking G. if she was sure this was the right way. Of course, any Serb who spent any time in Serbia in the last ten years knows that road signs are only a rough guide to directions, being more geographical, as-the-crow-flies indicators. During my first visits to Serbia, we were forever going in directions opposite to what signs said, usually because a bridge was still missing (having being destroyed by Nato in 1999). Typical driving instructions from a gas-station attendant would be "to get to Novi Sad you definitely don't drive towards Novi Sad, you follow signs for Ruma and then drive towards Zagreb".
But I digress. Almost no signs for Serbia on the road out of Croatia. Understandable, I guess, there are hard feelings there, and why remind people of the war? This made sense to me at first, and I then had the feeling that we were one of about ten cars in the past 15 years that had done this drive. I felt like a real pioneer. Leading the way towards reconciliation, etc. This overly proud feeling, however, evaporated when we reached the border. There were about a thousand trucks on each side, and we passed a queue several kilometers long. Surprisingly most of them seemed actually to be either Serb or Croat as opposed to transit of (say) Turkish or other trucks. Later, I was actually somewhat surprised to read that Serbia is Croatia's fourth or fifth largest trading partner, and the countries have a free-trade agreement. Understandably, then, the borders are completely clogged with goods traffic.
This gave me a kind of capitalist inspired feeling of confidence. It reminds me rather of all that is being said these days to justify trade with evil dictatorships with oil reserves. I heard, on the BBC, somebody from the state department last week saying that whether or not the US reopens an embassy in Tehran doesn't really depend on the Bellicose grumblings of the leaders, but more on the need for embassy operations, which are invariably mostly about trade. Germany makes similar noises now about Algeria; France about Libya. Now I'm not endorsing such things, but I do see the point that economic well being and the win-win situation that comes from the exchange of goods can do a great deal to cool political hot tempers.
Anyway, we'll drive this time back from Serbia to Croatia, and perhaps I can comment on the reverse trip, except that I can't as I just remembered that I won't be there. I have to fly to the UK, leaving from Belgrade flying back to Zagreb to meet G. and the dog. I wonder if the Croatian Airlines planes are re-painted JAT machines.
The other two times that I drove to Serbia we did so via Croatia. Driving from Zagreb to Novi Sad is rather long (5 hours at least) and the terrain is a bit dull, unchanging. But one thing stands out: namely the absence, on the Croatian side, of any signs telling you what you are driving towards. There are dozens of signs for every major town/city on the way (e.g. Vukovar) in addition to every two-horse village seemingly, and one is always reminded where to turn in order to drive to Bosnia (BIH), but only 25 km from the border do you see the first (and I think only) sign that tells you that Belgrade, by the way, is also on this road. Throughout the journey I kept asking G. if she was sure this was the right way. Of course, any Serb who spent any time in Serbia in the last ten years knows that road signs are only a rough guide to directions, being more geographical, as-the-crow-flies indicators. During my first visits to Serbia, we were forever going in directions opposite to what signs said, usually because a bridge was still missing (having being destroyed by Nato in 1999). Typical driving instructions from a gas-station attendant would be "to get to Novi Sad you definitely don't drive towards Novi Sad, you follow signs for Ruma and then drive towards Zagreb".
But I digress. Almost no signs for Serbia on the road out of Croatia. Understandable, I guess, there are hard feelings there, and why remind people of the war? This made sense to me at first, and I then had the feeling that we were one of about ten cars in the past 15 years that had done this drive. I felt like a real pioneer. Leading the way towards reconciliation, etc. This overly proud feeling, however, evaporated when we reached the border. There were about a thousand trucks on each side, and we passed a queue several kilometers long. Surprisingly most of them seemed actually to be either Serb or Croat as opposed to transit of (say) Turkish or other trucks. Later, I was actually somewhat surprised to read that Serbia is Croatia's fourth or fifth largest trading partner, and the countries have a free-trade agreement. Understandably, then, the borders are completely clogged with goods traffic.
This gave me a kind of capitalist inspired feeling of confidence. It reminds me rather of all that is being said these days to justify trade with evil dictatorships with oil reserves. I heard, on the BBC, somebody from the state department last week saying that whether or not the US reopens an embassy in Tehran doesn't really depend on the Bellicose grumblings of the leaders, but more on the need for embassy operations, which are invariably mostly about trade. Germany makes similar noises now about Algeria; France about Libya. Now I'm not endorsing such things, but I do see the point that economic well being and the win-win situation that comes from the exchange of goods can do a great deal to cool political hot tempers.
Anyway, we'll drive this time back from Serbia to Croatia, and perhaps I can comment on the reverse trip, except that I can't as I just remembered that I won't be there. I have to fly to the UK, leaving from Belgrade flying back to Zagreb to meet G. and the dog. I wonder if the Croatian Airlines planes are re-painted JAT machines.
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Thank you in Albanian
Faleminderit is "thank you" in Albanian - I looked it up. I did a small, not-very rigorous experiment, and discovered to my shock that almost nobody from the former Yugoslavia knows how to say this or anything else in Albanian. I only asked about ten people from Serbia or Croatia, but I strongly suspect that the trend will hold if I asked dozens more.
What possessed me to do this was the observation that a 2002 Economist World Summary booklet - something I got free with a subscription, and picked up again when thinking about moving the bookshelf - listed Albanian as the second language (indeed the only significant language listed other than Serbian) for the then about-to-be renamed Yugoslavia. I suspect they only listed languages spoken by more than a million people, and weren't clouded by notions of officialdom. In addition to this, I suppose I was driven by the frequent observation of Albanians all over Croatia and Serbia. As far as I can tell, they run a great fraction ice cream parlors and bakeries, and people seem immediately to spot the accents. And with all the discussion of Kosovo lately, it has certainly emerged that one of the issues Kosovo Albanians have is the fact that they learn (or at least learned) Serbian and nobody ever learns (or learned) Albanian.
I've often asked G. about what school was like under Communism, with the normal fascination of a free-worlder who remembers the early eighties well (did you really wear red? what was it like to be a commie? wasn't it terrible? really?) Whenever we drive through Slovenia - me struggling to read signs in a language that is half-recognisable to a bad Serbian-speaker - I ask about languages they learned in the former Yugoslavia. As I remember from what she told me, it consisted of a few weeks a year covering the other two languages, meaning Macedonian and Slovenian. When I asked anybody about Albanian, even G. who absolutely hates nationalism, said "no" first almost as if to suggest that it was a silly question, but then uttered something like "huh" - as if to imply that it had been a little strange. A little unfair.
But why not? Why wouldn't one at least know one word spoken by what was - even in the former Yugoslavia - the second most widely spoken language (just by a hair)? Anyway, whatever your opinions about Kosovo are, remember that knowing Faleminderit might just be one of the first few baby steps towards racial harmony.
What possessed me to do this was the observation that a 2002 Economist World Summary booklet - something I got free with a subscription, and picked up again when thinking about moving the bookshelf - listed Albanian as the second language (indeed the only significant language listed other than Serbian) for the then about-to-be renamed Yugoslavia. I suspect they only listed languages spoken by more than a million people, and weren't clouded by notions of officialdom. In addition to this, I suppose I was driven by the frequent observation of Albanians all over Croatia and Serbia. As far as I can tell, they run a great fraction ice cream parlors and bakeries, and people seem immediately to spot the accents. And with all the discussion of Kosovo lately, it has certainly emerged that one of the issues Kosovo Albanians have is the fact that they learn (or at least learned) Serbian and nobody ever learns (or learned) Albanian.
I've often asked G. about what school was like under Communism, with the normal fascination of a free-worlder who remembers the early eighties well (did you really wear red? what was it like to be a commie? wasn't it terrible? really?) Whenever we drive through Slovenia - me struggling to read signs in a language that is half-recognisable to a bad Serbian-speaker - I ask about languages they learned in the former Yugoslavia. As I remember from what she told me, it consisted of a few weeks a year covering the other two languages, meaning Macedonian and Slovenian. When I asked anybody about Albanian, even G. who absolutely hates nationalism, said "no" first almost as if to suggest that it was a silly question, but then uttered something like "huh" - as if to imply that it had been a little strange. A little unfair.
But why not? Why wouldn't one at least know one word spoken by what was - even in the former Yugoslavia - the second most widely spoken language (just by a hair)? Anyway, whatever your opinions about Kosovo are, remember that knowing Faleminderit might just be one of the first few baby steps towards racial harmony.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Acceptable foreigners
It happened again, when we were out walking the other day. We ran into a neighbor we hadn't yet met, and got talking. When she heard my accent in German, she asked me if I was English, and when she heard I was Canadian, she entered into a typical enthusiastic discussion about the usual things: Vancouver is very nice, the Rocky Mountains are beautiful, I liked Montreal, etc. (frankly I can't remember which). She then turned to G. and asked where she was from. The answer came: "Original from Novi Sad in Yugoslavia", and you could see our neighbors face drop in disappointment, and all she could utter was a mild "oh".
Once again, I must emphasise that this wan't a one-off (see Not Speaking Your Mother Tongue), but was the latest of many examples where it becomes apparent that certain kind of foreigners are preferred over others here (as elsewhere). The fact that G speaks perfect, though mildly accented German, has lead to some comic situations. For instance, people often guess wrongly, and then ask expectantly and enthusiastically if she is, perhaps, Swedish, only to be again visibly disappointed when she turns out to be something else.
As to the preferences here, broadly speaking: Italian, French, Scandinavian, Swiss, British, Irish, American, Canadian are in the good camp; Russian, Polish, Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, Turkish are not. The first group can come to Germany, work at whatever they were originally trained to do, speak appalling German, while having an accent typically considered to be charming, and live in your neighborhood. The second group are generally to be avoided unless they clean your house, or do any number of less desirable jobs, and if they should move into your street, the typical grumblings about There goes the neighborhood are uttered, and gradually, as numbers increase, that part of town starts to be considered dangerous.
I don't particularly want to have a go at Germany. The other countries where I've lived have been exactly like this. Certainly all over North America there are race issues, and this aside, most people would be much more interested to have somebody from New York, London, Paris or Rome as a neighbor than one (say) from Novosibirsk, Guayaquil or Podgorica, this mostly being a question of who would be the more glamorous. The English, as a very general rule, often dislike, or at least avoid, foreigners, but probably have particular unfavorites, including (alas) Germans. I think the tendency to (metaphorically) round up a group of foreigners and consider them inferior, or at least project some stereotypes on them is sadly one of those things that all humans do. And inevitably this comes with some kind of ranking scheme as to who is better than whom.
There isn't a happy ending to this, at least not yet. But I was uplifted somewhat when we visited G's brother's student digs in Mannheim for his birthday party. Apart from the usual quaint student goings on - I honestly, truly, not-making-it-up, kid you not, there was a guy with a goatee in a Che Guevara T-shirt playing a didgeridoo - I was encouraged to see several couplings across the desired/undesired groups - German/Polish, German/Uzbek, etc. I often forget that Heidelberg, where we live, is the archetype of old Germany as clearly opposed to Mannheim, which is very much the new. And moreover, the new generation of people is much more open to multiculturalism than the old. Give it ten or twenty years, and perhaps all of this will become moot, here and elsewhere.
Once again, I must emphasise that this wan't a one-off (see Not Speaking Your Mother Tongue), but was the latest of many examples where it becomes apparent that certain kind of foreigners are preferred over others here (as elsewhere). The fact that G speaks perfect, though mildly accented German, has lead to some comic situations. For instance, people often guess wrongly, and then ask expectantly and enthusiastically if she is, perhaps, Swedish, only to be again visibly disappointed when she turns out to be something else.
As to the preferences here, broadly speaking: Italian, French, Scandinavian, Swiss, British, Irish, American, Canadian are in the good camp; Russian, Polish, Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, Turkish are not. The first group can come to Germany, work at whatever they were originally trained to do, speak appalling German, while having an accent typically considered to be charming, and live in your neighborhood. The second group are generally to be avoided unless they clean your house, or do any number of less desirable jobs, and if they should move into your street, the typical grumblings about There goes the neighborhood are uttered, and gradually, as numbers increase, that part of town starts to be considered dangerous.
I don't particularly want to have a go at Germany. The other countries where I've lived have been exactly like this. Certainly all over North America there are race issues, and this aside, most people would be much more interested to have somebody from New York, London, Paris or Rome as a neighbor than one (say) from Novosibirsk, Guayaquil or Podgorica, this mostly being a question of who would be the more glamorous. The English, as a very general rule, often dislike, or at least avoid, foreigners, but probably have particular unfavorites, including (alas) Germans. I think the tendency to (metaphorically) round up a group of foreigners and consider them inferior, or at least project some stereotypes on them is sadly one of those things that all humans do. And inevitably this comes with some kind of ranking scheme as to who is better than whom.
There isn't a happy ending to this, at least not yet. But I was uplifted somewhat when we visited G's brother's student digs in Mannheim for his birthday party. Apart from the usual quaint student goings on - I honestly, truly, not-making-it-up, kid you not, there was a guy with a goatee in a Che Guevara T-shirt playing a didgeridoo - I was encouraged to see several couplings across the desired/undesired groups - German/Polish, German/Uzbek, etc. I often forget that Heidelberg, where we live, is the archetype of old Germany as clearly opposed to Mannheim, which is very much the new. And moreover, the new generation of people is much more open to multiculturalism than the old. Give it ten or twenty years, and perhaps all of this will become moot, here and elsewhere.
Sunday, June 8, 2008
The Best Moments in Croatian Football
I've traveled often in Croatia with Serbs, as I've said before. I don't have a lot more to add this time, but the opening of Euro 2008 (the football competition I mean) last night reminded me of one humorous incident from two years ago.
I'm not a big football fan, but I do like to watch big matches, such as the World Cup, and I watched many games from the 2006 World Cup. During the beginning of the competition, I was again in Croatia, with G's parents. And one fine day, after a fine lunch in Stara Baška , G's father reminded me that it was time for the match between Serbia & Montenegro and Argentina.
Now, Croatia, like most places, went pretty silent when the national team was playing, and indeed most of the World Cup matches were on somewhere, but Stara Baška is a small place, and there was no sign of a television where we were sitting. After a brief search, I found one in a quiet interior room. G's father and I (of course, rather predictably, the ladies weren't interested) dithered about whether to ask the people running the restaurant if they would let us watch the match there.
I've said before that I'm a bit nervous about certain people in Croatia - almost a Don't mention the war kind of feeling - and in this restaurant most of the staff were men of my age, which places them among those people who are likely to have the strongest feelings (i.e. it was people of my generation who ended up doing most of the fighting after all). But they had been very kind to us, and we had tipped generously, and the customer is always right - dirty Serb or not - so we eventually plucked up enough courage to ask the Konobar, if we could, pretty please, watch this match quietly on their TV. He nodded and smiled, as if suddenly his suspicions were confirmed - a lot of people recognise G's parents' distinctive Novi Sad accents - and probably he had made some guesses already. He lead us to the room, turned on the TV and then left us, though I noticed upon leaving, he muttered something to another Konobar in the distance (e.g. I imagined: Hey Ivica, two Serbs want to watch their team get destroyed, or something).
The match opened, and any Serbian football fan must now remember the outcome with pangs of regret. It wasn't that Serbia had bad players, but they played very badly - rather selfishly I thought, and certainly all subsequent analysis of the team said that they weren't playing as a team. Anyway, after just 6 minutes they were down 1 goal. The Croatian Konobars came by smiling after this goal, and after the second goal for Argentina (31 minutes) they started to cheer. This continued, but by the fourth goal for Argentina, I was impressed to see the sense of sympathy that one football fan has towards another at times like this. Naturally, the Croats didn't want the Serbs to win, but 4-0 is a humiliation (in fact, we left before it worsened to 6-0), and the Žao mi je - I'm sorry - that came afterwards, even with a smirk, seemed touchingly heartfelt.
I was reminded of a humorous Viz comic that I had seen some years ago, entitled Best moments in Scottish football, which consisted of nothing but some of the worst moments for the English national team: David Beckam's botched over-the-top-of-the-goal penalty against Portugal in Euro 2004; David Seaman looking whimsically at Ronaldinho's goal from a corner in the 2002 World Cup.
But cynicism aside, after this little Serb/Croat exchange, I was struck by how Football, that great War substitute, was working its magic again. I'll definitely cheer for Croatia this month.
I'm not a big football fan, but I do like to watch big matches, such as the World Cup, and I watched many games from the 2006 World Cup. During the beginning of the competition, I was again in Croatia, with G's parents. And one fine day, after a fine lunch in Stara Baška , G's father reminded me that it was time for the match between Serbia & Montenegro and Argentina.
Now, Croatia, like most places, went pretty silent when the national team was playing, and indeed most of the World Cup matches were on somewhere, but Stara Baška is a small place, and there was no sign of a television where we were sitting. After a brief search, I found one in a quiet interior room. G's father and I (of course, rather predictably, the ladies weren't interested) dithered about whether to ask the people running the restaurant if they would let us watch the match there.
I've said before that I'm a bit nervous about certain people in Croatia - almost a Don't mention the war kind of feeling - and in this restaurant most of the staff were men of my age, which places them among those people who are likely to have the strongest feelings (i.e. it was people of my generation who ended up doing most of the fighting after all). But they had been very kind to us, and we had tipped generously, and the customer is always right - dirty Serb or not - so we eventually plucked up enough courage to ask the Konobar, if we could, pretty please, watch this match quietly on their TV. He nodded and smiled, as if suddenly his suspicions were confirmed - a lot of people recognise G's parents' distinctive Novi Sad accents - and probably he had made some guesses already. He lead us to the room, turned on the TV and then left us, though I noticed upon leaving, he muttered something to another Konobar in the distance (e.g. I imagined: Hey Ivica, two Serbs want to watch their team get destroyed, or something).
The match opened, and any Serbian football fan must now remember the outcome with pangs of regret. It wasn't that Serbia had bad players, but they played very badly - rather selfishly I thought, and certainly all subsequent analysis of the team said that they weren't playing as a team. Anyway, after just 6 minutes they were down 1 goal. The Croatian Konobars came by smiling after this goal, and after the second goal for Argentina (31 minutes) they started to cheer. This continued, but by the fourth goal for Argentina, I was impressed to see the sense of sympathy that one football fan has towards another at times like this. Naturally, the Croats didn't want the Serbs to win, but 4-0 is a humiliation (in fact, we left before it worsened to 6-0), and the Žao mi je - I'm sorry - that came afterwards, even with a smirk, seemed touchingly heartfelt.
I was reminded of a humorous Viz comic that I had seen some years ago, entitled Best moments in Scottish football, which consisted of nothing but some of the worst moments for the English national team: David Beckam's botched over-the-top-of-the-goal penalty against Portugal in Euro 2004; David Seaman looking whimsically at Ronaldinho's goal from a corner in the 2002 World Cup.
But cynicism aside, after this little Serb/Croat exchange, I was struck by how Football, that great War substitute, was working its magic again. I'll definitely cheer for Croatia this month.
Friday, June 6, 2008
Getting to know Baka Mila
Former-Yugoslavs seldom want to talk about the past. And for somebody of Western Canadian extraction this is almost sacrilegious. By this I mean that we, in Alberta, have so little history that every nugget is savoured and honored. Quaint ceremonies I remember from my childhood include celebrating the Province's 75th Anniversary, and many cultural or heritage days when people show off where they came from, dressing like their grandparents and so on.
Just why Serbs, Croats, etc. don't dwell on the past is perhaps obvious. I think this was put most fittingly in the Thames Television Documentary Series The World at War as: Old men forget, particularly when it hurts to remember. With so much bad stuff lingering in the past, who wants to think about it, let alone tell some outsider all the gory details. For the curious, this can be rather disappointing or even irritating, but obviously one bites ones tougue.
Over the years, however, I've accumulated a lot of details about G's past, and particularly about her grandmother, that I hope will finally prompt me to sit down and get her to tell me everything. This will have to be done, I realise, by me, in my broken Serbian, perhaps coaxing the rest of the family to translate the hard parts. No matter how hard I try, G. doesn't really want to do it. And it will be difficult, since Baka has little patience for my Serbian - she's never left Yugoslavia, and often berates me for not speaking it better. Trebaš da uceš Robert - You need to learn. And as is so typical of people lacking a more worldly perspective, she shinks me quite the dunce for not speaking properly.
Despite having stayed in one country (that became six and soon probably seven) all her life, she has obviously had a fascinating, event-ridden life. I think most grandparents have a lot to tell, and I don't think mine were any exception, but there is something more in Baka - more than anything I've ever been directly exposed to. In Canada there is the occasional war death, and the odd farm tragedy, but we, of course, never had a revolution - at least not in living memory - whereas Baka lived through two. And life in Canada, on the whole, has been so darned good for people who either moved or grew-up there. Good stories always need a healthy dose of tragedy.
What I know about Baka is sketchy. I know that she was born in the late 20s in Srem, a part of Vojvodina, and mostly brought up in a rural environment (her brother still lives on a farm today). Like everybody else, her life was turned upside down when the Nazi's invaded the region during the second world war. Her father was taken prinsoner - I think he was in the Army, but I'm not sure - and I know that he died in Germany. This is because G. explained to me why she was laughing at something Baka's brother was saying, one day a few years ago:
You know, I'm getting so old, I can't remember anything. For instance, I can't remember the name of the City where father died. I remembered that it had something to do with fast-food: Pizza, Burek or something, but I couldn't --- ah, Hamburger --- Hamburg! that's the place.
It was later revealed to me that he (that's G's great-grandfather) had died apparently after being subjected to human experimentation. Now I suspect a lot of people would tell a similar story about a relative, particularly if they were feeling angry about the Germans (or even wanting mildly to boast), but in this case it was apparently admitted by the German goverment in the 80s, but any attempt to extract money (these people aren't stupid afterall) failed, as I was later told.
I then know that Baka, at 15 or 16, joined the revolution, which basically meant that she marched in the 40s with most of the others of her generation with Tito and eventually helped free the country from the occupiers, not to mention presumably at least being near to nasty masacres that also happened at the time. Along the way, she ended up meeting her husband to be, who was one of Tito's Generals. G' remembers him as a very old man, which he must have been since he was 30 or more when he married his teenage bride.
After the war, and because of her husbands elevated status, they lived very well. Apparently the General had been quite the bourgeois before the war, but (likely to save his skin) had given all of his fortune & property to the state, only to be given it, and probably a lot more back as a member of the upper eschelons of the Communist Party. I don't know much more than this, but it is incredible to see the kinds of hand-me-downs that Baka has given G over the years. She has, for instance, an incredibly chic Parisian jacket, dating from the 50s, that must have cost a fortune, is still in mint condition, and which G. still wears, and which is always admired, to this day.
I know as well that her husband fell foul, as so many others did, of the Communist leaders, and was on the verge of imprisonment when Tito died, and he was thus able to salvage something of his reputation and manage a peaceful retirement.
Baka herself is a rather traditional Serbian woman. She believes in maintaining an antiseptically clean household, and holds the tradtional notion that no meal is worthy of eating unless it has been the product of at least six hours of toil, preferably involving at least two 4AM mornings (for instance to make stock or Ruski Salat from scratch). However, there are signs of her revolutionary youth. Until her health started to fail (she's nearly 80), she cycled everywhere, and always (at least to me) seemed to sport clothes more suited to a Communist than a little old lady. The image of her on the bike always conjured up images of plucky Chinese revolutionaries.
I'm dying to know more. What was her husband like? What did he do? Why did he fall foul of the party? Did she meet Tito? Where did that Jacket come from? Was life luxurious for them? What happened on her march after the war? And most of all: what does she think of what has happened to the country to this day?
I know that she didn't like the break-up of Yugoslavia. I think she rather had that old-persons incredulity about it all (e.g. This can't be happening). I know that during the Nato bombing of her city, when G's parents spent a lot of time in her fathers company's office in Budapest, that she shunned shelters preferring to hold fort in the family house, even scaring off some drunken Nationalist who thought that he should have the house instead of these traitors. I know, in essence, that this charming old lady - who likes a tidy kitchen, who watches hours of Latin soap operas, who doesn't give much away, and who (let's face facts) doesn't have long to live - has a great story to tell. I just hope that I can coax it out of her and then do justice to it before it is too late.
Just why Serbs, Croats, etc. don't dwell on the past is perhaps obvious. I think this was put most fittingly in the Thames Television Documentary Series The World at War as: Old men forget, particularly when it hurts to remember. With so much bad stuff lingering in the past, who wants to think about it, let alone tell some outsider all the gory details. For the curious, this can be rather disappointing or even irritating, but obviously one bites ones tougue.Over the years, however, I've accumulated a lot of details about G's past, and particularly about her grandmother, that I hope will finally prompt me to sit down and get her to tell me everything. This will have to be done, I realise, by me, in my broken Serbian, perhaps coaxing the rest of the family to translate the hard parts. No matter how hard I try, G. doesn't really want to do it. And it will be difficult, since Baka has little patience for my Serbian - she's never left Yugoslavia, and often berates me for not speaking it better. Trebaš da uceš Robert - You need to learn. And as is so typical of people lacking a more worldly perspective, she shinks me quite the dunce for not speaking properly.
Despite having stayed in one country (that became six and soon probably seven) all her life, she has obviously had a fascinating, event-ridden life. I think most grandparents have a lot to tell, and I don't think mine were any exception, but there is something more in Baka - more than anything I've ever been directly exposed to. In Canada there is the occasional war death, and the odd farm tragedy, but we, of course, never had a revolution - at least not in living memory - whereas Baka lived through two. And life in Canada, on the whole, has been so darned good for people who either moved or grew-up there. Good stories always need a healthy dose of tragedy.
What I know about Baka is sketchy. I know that she was born in the late 20s in Srem, a part of Vojvodina, and mostly brought up in a rural environment (her brother still lives on a farm today). Like everybody else, her life was turned upside down when the Nazi's invaded the region during the second world war. Her father was taken prinsoner - I think he was in the Army, but I'm not sure - and I know that he died in Germany. This is because G. explained to me why she was laughing at something Baka's brother was saying, one day a few years ago:You know, I'm getting so old, I can't remember anything. For instance, I can't remember the name of the City where father died. I remembered that it had something to do with fast-food: Pizza, Burek or something, but I couldn't --- ah, Hamburger --- Hamburg! that's the place.
It was later revealed to me that he (that's G's great-grandfather) had died apparently after being subjected to human experimentation. Now I suspect a lot of people would tell a similar story about a relative, particularly if they were feeling angry about the Germans (or even wanting mildly to boast), but in this case it was apparently admitted by the German goverment in the 80s, but any attempt to extract money (these people aren't stupid afterall) failed, as I was later told.
I then know that Baka, at 15 or 16, joined the revolution, which basically meant that she marched in the 40s with most of the others of her generation with Tito and eventually helped free the country from the occupiers, not to mention presumably at least being near to nasty masacres that also happened at the time. Along the way, she ended up meeting her husband to be, who was one of Tito's Generals. G' remembers him as a very old man, which he must have been since he was 30 or more when he married his teenage bride.
After the war, and because of her husbands elevated status, they lived very well. Apparently the General had been quite the bourgeois before the war, but (likely to save his skin) had given all of his fortune & property to the state, only to be given it, and probably a lot more back as a member of the upper eschelons of the Communist Party. I don't know much more than this, but it is incredible to see the kinds of hand-me-downs that Baka has given G over the years. She has, for instance, an incredibly chic Parisian jacket, dating from the 50s, that must have cost a fortune, is still in mint condition, and which G. still wears, and which is always admired, to this day.
I know as well that her husband fell foul, as so many others did, of the Communist leaders, and was on the verge of imprisonment when Tito died, and he was thus able to salvage something of his reputation and manage a peaceful retirement.
Baka herself is a rather traditional Serbian woman. She believes in maintaining an antiseptically clean household, and holds the tradtional notion that no meal is worthy of eating unless it has been the product of at least six hours of toil, preferably involving at least two 4AM mornings (for instance to make stock or Ruski Salat from scratch). However, there are signs of her revolutionary youth. Until her health started to fail (she's nearly 80), she cycled everywhere, and always (at least to me) seemed to sport clothes more suited to a Communist than a little old lady. The image of her on the bike always conjured up images of plucky Chinese revolutionaries.
I'm dying to know more. What was her husband like? What did he do? Why did he fall foul of the party? Did she meet Tito? Where did that Jacket come from? Was life luxurious for them? What happened on her march after the war? And most of all: what does she think of what has happened to the country to this day?
I know that she didn't like the break-up of Yugoslavia. I think she rather had that old-persons incredulity about it all (e.g. This can't be happening). I know that during the Nato bombing of her city, when G's parents spent a lot of time in her fathers company's office in Budapest, that she shunned shelters preferring to hold fort in the family house, even scaring off some drunken Nationalist who thought that he should have the house instead of these traitors. I know, in essence, that this charming old lady - who likes a tidy kitchen, who watches hours of Latin soap operas, who doesn't give much away, and who (let's face facts) doesn't have long to live - has a great story to tell. I just hope that I can coax it out of her and then do justice to it before it is too late.
Sunday, June 1, 2008
Not speaking your Mother-tongue
As I said before, our dog speaks Serbian. I commented last time that this gets me into trouble in Croatia (sedi, sijedi, sidi), but I neglected to mention that it causes a rather obvious problem in Germany. We both traveled last week, meaning that we had to dump Monitsa in a dogs home, and though I tried to tell the keepers that Moni spoke Serbian, they didn't seem much interested in tailoring their Deutsch dog supervision techniques accordingly. However, the husband of the pair did mention that he understood a few words of Serbocroatian, since his mother was from Croatia. And by a few words, he meant and Dobar dan and Hvala and not much else. So his Mother tongue, was really his Father's tongue only, since he barely spoke a word of his Mother's.
I wouldn't have batted an eyelid had it not been that this was the latest of many examples of people like this I've met in Germany and to a lesser extent in England: namely, those who speak barely a word of one of their parents' languages. And add to this untold numbers of couples where one half does not speak the language of the other.
Now I currently work in a very polyglot environment. We work in English, live in Germany and come from everywhere. Only a few stray English people speak only one language, and even many of them try their damnedest to learn at least German. People are young, meaning that there are many kids about, and it often impresses me how many languages kids can learn simultaneously seemingly without too much incident. E.g. Tartar with Mother, Russian with Father, German at School, and of course English out of general necessity. It greatly surprises me, then, to see so many examples of second generation immigrants who speak nothing at all of their language of origin.
I often wonder what possesses people, moreover, not to speak their native language with their children. Or for that matter, how one half of a relationship has no apparent desire to speak the language of the other. How, after all, can you ever really understand somebody if you can't speak to them in your most comfortable manner? And what about all of the relations? These days people in (e.g.) Eastern Europe always speak English, or at least try to, but German is on the decline anywhere in the former Yugoslavia except the Croatian coast for obvious tourist-driven reasons. Speaking to relations is obviously important to form bonds with them, but even this doesn't seem always to change attitudes. In one instance, half-Serbian Germans actually spoke no word of Serbian despite having spent nearly a month every summer in Vojvodina with their mother's relatives.
One pattern emerges. The people in this category are not - despite being in cross-cultural relationships - usually very worldly. And I suspect that a feeling of envy runs through one half of the relationship at the thought that a child will speak a language that they have never bothered to learn. Maybe they think there is no point in learning a language - what use would Croatian be ever? (As a Canadian from Alberta, I certainly understand this rather redneck statement, since many simple folk feel this way about French) Or perhaps they think that two languages will confuse a developing child - advice from monoglot, unworldly grandparents might help to reach this conclusion. And if I can be permitted to add a sniff of racism to the argument, I have yet to see a case of a German/French, German/Italian or German/English couple where the children do not speak both languages.
Whatever the reason, I think it is a crying shame. I think that any language enriches a person, and even has practical advantages (Serbian or Croatian will ultimately help somebody speak/understand Russian for example). An opportunity to learn a language from a native early in life is not to be missed, no matter what theories, prejudices, hang-ups or insecurities a monoglot partner has.
I wouldn't have batted an eyelid had it not been that this was the latest of many examples of people like this I've met in Germany and to a lesser extent in England: namely, those who speak barely a word of one of their parents' languages. And add to this untold numbers of couples where one half does not speak the language of the other.
Now I currently work in a very polyglot environment. We work in English, live in Germany and come from everywhere. Only a few stray English people speak only one language, and even many of them try their damnedest to learn at least German. People are young, meaning that there are many kids about, and it often impresses me how many languages kids can learn simultaneously seemingly without too much incident. E.g. Tartar with Mother, Russian with Father, German at School, and of course English out of general necessity. It greatly surprises me, then, to see so many examples of second generation immigrants who speak nothing at all of their language of origin.
I often wonder what possesses people, moreover, not to speak their native language with their children. Or for that matter, how one half of a relationship has no apparent desire to speak the language of the other. How, after all, can you ever really understand somebody if you can't speak to them in your most comfortable manner? And what about all of the relations? These days people in (e.g.) Eastern Europe always speak English, or at least try to, but German is on the decline anywhere in the former Yugoslavia except the Croatian coast for obvious tourist-driven reasons. Speaking to relations is obviously important to form bonds with them, but even this doesn't seem always to change attitudes. In one instance, half-Serbian Germans actually spoke no word of Serbian despite having spent nearly a month every summer in Vojvodina with their mother's relatives.
One pattern emerges. The people in this category are not - despite being in cross-cultural relationships - usually very worldly. And I suspect that a feeling of envy runs through one half of the relationship at the thought that a child will speak a language that they have never bothered to learn. Maybe they think there is no point in learning a language - what use would Croatian be ever? (As a Canadian from Alberta, I certainly understand this rather redneck statement, since many simple folk feel this way about French) Or perhaps they think that two languages will confuse a developing child - advice from monoglot, unworldly grandparents might help to reach this conclusion. And if I can be permitted to add a sniff of racism to the argument, I have yet to see a case of a German/French, German/Italian or German/English couple where the children do not speak both languages.
Whatever the reason, I think it is a crying shame. I think that any language enriches a person, and even has practical advantages (Serbian or Croatian will ultimately help somebody speak/understand Russian for example). An opportunity to learn a language from a native early in life is not to be missed, no matter what theories, prejudices, hang-ups or insecurities a monoglot partner has.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
On the silliness of language distinctions
We were in Croatia again, last week. Mostly we were trying to relax, but we spent a good deal of time sorting out our ruin of a house on Krk. Nice weather, good, if a little bit homogeneous food (I don't think I'll ever be able to eat lignje na žaru again), pleasant company. We actually brought the dog, which introduced an interesting complexity to my Canadian sensitivities regarding the whole Serb/Croat thing. Namely that one has to tell her sedi and not sijedi to sit down, and frankly, she doesn't always understand it if you say it the Croatian and not the Serbian way. Perhaps this will be food for thought for linguists struggling to distinguish the languages (if a dog can tell they are different languages, then surely....).Anyway, I was going about saying quietly, or whispering sedi (puppies need to be told this very often of course), or just trying to use the Croatian sijedi a bit louder, with mixed results. I was probably more conscious, with my ever improving Serbian, that I tended to drop the ijs rather than use them, and it was obvious to anybody who thought about it that I had learned the language more in Serbia than Croatia. G makes few attempts to speak anything but her native Vojvodinian dialect, freely saying hleb, aerodrom, hiljada instead of the Croatian kruh, zračna luka or tisuća (for bread, airport, thousand). And indeed the way they speak in that part of Croatia is a bit of a deviation from what I think is standard Croatian anyway - they seem more inclined to ikavski (if that is what it is called): that is, Serbs say belo for white, typical Croats say bijelo and people on Krk and in Istria almost say bilo. G anyway says it is silly to worry about it, and being a Canadian, who has lived in the UK and now in Germany, and who stopped worrying about my English accent years ago (I think I now sound American), I did think it was a bit silly.
I cast my mind back to the first few words I learned in Serbian. I had bought my first book Teach yourself Serbo-Croat, and was learning Dobar dan and such like. G was on a visit to Novi Sad, and on the telephone had just excitedly told me Pada sneg! Pada sneg! to denote the fact that it was snowing there. I was, as it happened, presently on a skiing retreat with people from work, and when it snowed in the German alps I said to two Croatian colleagues Pada sneg. I was then curtly told that it was Pada snijeg in Croatian, and that I must remember that it was a different language. But my book, though it mentioned what it called Eastern and Western dialects, devoting about two pages to the differences, didn't make such a sharp distinction.
The above, I guess, is my way of introducing my general dilemma about the whole language issue in the former Yugoslavia.
As I improved in Serbian, I began to see that it was probably a bit of a stretch to call Croatian and Serbian different languages. As I've said before, I also speak German well, and also know Spanish, and as for English, these are languages with enormous variations in dialects. My once English wife found it impossible to understand people in truck-stops in my native Alberta, and though I'm fairly competent in high German, it is difficult for me to understand local-yokels speaking village Austrian, Schwaebian or even strong Heidelberg accents. I've never encountered any such difficulties in Serbian/Croatian, and indeed rather begin to think that the difference between them is more akin to American/British English than the seemingly greater distance between Austrian and German dialects. The Serbian/Croatian distinction would be similar in English dialects if one imagined that people in America, England & Scotland spelled words as they pronounced them (as is the case for Serbian & Croatian) - e.g. girl would then be gurl, gul and gerl respectively - it might be easier to say they were different languages, with all the practical problems that this would introduce.Of course, people will take offense to this - I've certainly seen a lot of the vehement assertions in the discussions at Wikipedia on the subject of Serbian/Croatian or Serbocroatian. But I think the perspective of one who has come in as a naive outsider and (at least partially) learned the language(s) should not be cast aside without some thought. It is fairly easy to tell somebody ignorant about the language or the region that the languages are different - they will probably take it face value, and anyway they won't very much care. To them, all the languages sound like mumbo-jumbo and they wouldn't be able to distinguish Hungarian from Russian, and probably would label the whole lot as "Eastern Europe" and lump them all together anyway - geographically, culturally and linguistically. But when somebody has taken the time to learn the language, they immediately see how silly, and indeed impractical, it is to distinguish them. Why do I have to worry about how I address my dog? And take it from me, having learned a good deal of the language, I can't suddenly see (as perhaps my Croatian friends, who told me the sneg/snijeg distinction as evidence of divergence, expected) that they are so different, unless I start saying that I speak Canadian as a native and not English. It doesn't take a genius, at any rate, to see that the distinction is political more than it is linguistic. Very silly.
Silly also does mean impractical. I read in the Economist last year that many western publishers were just not bothering with translations in the former Yugoslavia since the nationalist fervor that boldly states the languages are different makes translation and publication a headache. Namely that the attitudes effectively partitioned what was originally a market of 22 million people into smaller pockets of people sensitive to missing or present ijs and minor differences in vocabulary. They mostly just washed there hands of it, until some plucky Bosnian publishing house saw an opportunity and began translating mostly English books into something neutral - more Croatian than anything else, since they are probably the most sensitive - but importantly without any l specific label of what the language actually was. All countries, whether they spoke Croatian, Serbian, Montenegrin, Bosnian, Istrian or God-knows what else, started eating them up, hungry for translations of books that otherwise might never be available to small markets. The article ended with a somewhat ironic quip that the Croatian government, eager to make Serbian entry into the EU easier (the much believed notion that it will be easier to go in together; or perhaps they just wanted to demonstrate good will to the EU onlookers), helped the Serbs with the thousands of pages of translation into the local languages needed for EU membership. This, of course, they did by sending several hundred word documents that, with a few find-and-replace operations, and perhaps a trivial change to cyrillic, would do well enough to satisfy the EU officials that the job was done.
Back to me. I guess what I now find myself doing is not worrying too much about it unless I'm in some place where I suspect that people are more nationalistic, or among people who have made some indications already that they feel strongly about it. I hold my tongue and try to add or take-away ijs as necessary. But frankly, I still think this is a bit silly.
I'll end this with something that I found very touching from another book I have called Colloquial Croatian and Serbian: A Complete Course for Beginners. This was written in 1998 by Celia Hawkesworth, an academic in London, who specialises in these languages and clearly speaks them having spent a lot of time in the former Yugoslavia, and shows a great devotion to these countries. Indeed, she has written the very best translations that I have seen of Ivo Andrić, the Nobel Prize winner for literature from the former Yugoslavia (ok, ok, he was a Bosnian Croat, who wrote in Belgrade mostly and died in Yugoslavia - better?). In the preface to the book, she makes an apology to those of her friends in the former Yugoslavia (Bosnia if I remember clearly) who had taken issue with her views on their language (the peoples of these lands speak the same language, the book opens with). At the end of the acknowledgments, she writes:I am well aware that my attitude to their language is unacceptable to some of my friends in Croatia and Bosnia at this time, but I hope at least that those who use this book will learn to understand more than just the language.
This is certainly how I feel. When it comes to losing friends over those lost ijs and hleb/kruh distinctions, this is very silly indeed.
And incidentally, I notice that Dr Hawkesworth now publishes separate Serbian and Croatian language books. One wonders if this rescued the friendships.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
The adages of old Serbian wives
An Old Wives' tale, at least in English, refers to one of the vast number of home truths that people tend to believe regardless of any hard evidence. Anyone who spends any time with their grandparents invariably gets a few of these thrown at them. Wikipedia names several classics: staying out in the cold causes pneumonia, chocolate causes acne, masturbation causes blindness, etc. In Serbia there are a good number of these, and for the benefit of Westerners new to the country, here are some of them, mostly suggested by a recent visit from a Serbian of advancing years:
1. Anything that is produced by hand by somebody you know is always necessarily better than anything that is bought in a shop.
This applies to wine, sausage, cheese, bread, chickens, fish, furniture, clothing, and frankly just about anything. The adage expresses itself by the need to bring said items, often illegally across borders, in order to save poor relatives stuck (say) in Germany where sausages are terrible (here is one of our sausages, made in the garage by our friend Milo) or to France where wine only ever comes from the shop and isn't provided in old, plastic water-bottles, as is the natural way for it to be served. How many times have I eyed with some longing the ubiquitous gift bottles of good wine from a shop (e.g. Vranac), only to then be offered home made wine of questionable vintage, colour and taste. I actually wonder if these bottles are ever opened, or if they are just past around in some tradition of re-gifting.
There is, at least in Novi Sad, also a tendency to travel great distances to buy individual items. For instance, a University Professor is a well known supplier of fresh fish, and he lives on the other side of town. When we protested that we could get great fish at the newly opened supermarket, the elders scoffed at us. It isn't fresh, so don't even think about it. The fact that the fish in the supermarket were actually alive in a tank didn't (if you'll excuse the pun) hold water.
2. Any meal that takes less than two grueling hours of toil in the kitchen is no good and not healthy.
We are a busy couple, and fond of quick meals in restaurants, or fast recipes at home for tasty meals. However, every time we try to impose such a recipe on visitors from Serbia, we are questioned about whether one can really eat (say) mushrooms if they haven't been boiled, sauteed, fried, soaked in fat, then baked.
This adage applies not just to meals, but to housework in general. I actually think that a lot of this is to do with a desire to be busy at home. My mother used to tell me that her mother, who was a housewife, would dutifully wash and polish the parquet flooring in a grueling four hour exercise each week, commenting that it was necessary to get rid of the germs. Heaven knows what she would think of our parquet, which I consider to be clean even if it only gets a fast clean once per week, and polishing, well, never. It's a wonder we are still alive.
3. Wet hair, even constituting a single drop of water on the head, will cause immediate life-threatening illness to a person if they set one foot outside, even in a sweltering summer.
I've been told this dozens of times, and the fact that I was a competitive swimmer in Canada for ten years, who twice a day would go out into weather that was as cold as -40 degrees with hair that was, for reasons of haste, almost never fully dry and managed to reach adulthood un-stunted (and in fact taller than almost everybody) is no argument.
I remember, in a mild winter in Novi Sad, after we had exited the swimming pool, something that habit means I can do in less than five minutes, I was sitting waiting for G. and noticed a number of swimmers who sat under the dryers for what I thought was a ridiculous length of time. Men with practically no hair dried their fuzz for upwards of ten minutes. I now understand that this was a habit enforced by constant warnings from aging relatives about the dire consequences of not doing so. There scalp must have been peeling off when they left, but Baka would be happy.
4. Not wearing slippers in the house, will lead to some kind of health catastrophe.
How many times I've been given slippers with a sense of urgency, and asked incredulously, in my own house, by visitors from Serbia (and Croatia to be fair) how I can possibly walk around without slippers on - just in socks or
5. Any minor sniffle must immediately be treated by antibiotics.
Now here is something that I definitely do know something about, as a PhD biologist. And curiously, this is, by definition, a new and not a medieval adage. Of course, most sniffles are caused by viruses, not bacteria, so I always protest, pointing out that not only will the antibiotics be ineffective, but taking them will harm your liver and ultimately increase resistance in your system so that they will fail to be effective against real bacterial infections in the future - the biological equivalent of the boy who cried wolf. But all of this is to no avail. Hands are held up, my tongue is requested to be held, and a general feeling that one shouldn't question the elders about things they know better about hangs in the air until the subject changes. Frankly, from a biological perspective, the sooner prescription drugs are more controlled in Serbia, the better.
And yes, I know this is a bit of a grumpy rant, but one must get the visitor frustrations out somehow, and if you can't rant to your blog, who can you rant to?
Sunday, April 13, 2008
The virtues of cabbage weddings
Like most people reaching 40, I've been to many weddings. I've also had the privilege of having friends from many parts of the world, so I've experienced weddings in many different countries, let's see: Canada (6+), US (2), England (20+), France (2), Germany (5+), Austria (1), Italy (1), Serbia (2), Poland (1) with mixtures of people inside (i.e. two Americans marrying in France, an Italian marrying an English person in Sicily, a Croatian-Serb marrying and Bermudan person in Cambridge, etc.), and different social groups: posh English people, middle-class Germans, down-to-earth French people, etc.
Now I love a good wedding, and I've been to many such, but generally the quality from a guests perspective has varied. Some are great fun, some are boring. English people are the drunkest, Italians/French had the best food, German weddings are probably the most organised on average. But the most striking thing I found is just how similar most western weddings are. The people who speak might change, and the clothing varies slightly, but generally the format (church in the afternoon, evening reception), the drinks before (bucks fizz, champagne, campari & soda), the food (some typcial variant of catering), the entertainment (light jazz before dinner, then a band or disco) and even much of the music (eighties classics and the chicken dance) is seemingly universal. There are, of course, exceptions to these, but this is why they are exceptions: outstanding food and unusual entertainment are, for example, merely minor deviations from established wedding norms.
I felt this way, and indeed didn't think much about it until I attended a wedding in Serbia. I didn't know the couple - in fact, G. and I were replacing her parents at a wedding for one of her fathers employees - and couldn't speak Serbian that well, so I was a bit like a puppy looking out the window of a moving car for the first time. But even in my haze of misunderstanding, this wedding was different from the outset.
For starters, the church. This was an Orthodox wedding, and though one could see some similarities, the singing clergy and their outfits certainly stood out - not understanding the service perhaps also gave an air of mystery to the whole thing (old Slavonic as G. later told me, so probably I was not alone). Then the food: cabbage everywhere, very good, but like nothing I had ever had at a wedding, the drink: rakija (šlivovica, kruškovac, etc.) and wine from a Knjaz Miloš bottle (the ubiquitous home-made, often barely drinkable wine that one gets everywhere).
Then, of course, the music. After dinner we were presented with a pretty typical wedding band - cheesy keyboard, singer, bassist, drummer. - the rather bored-looking, sigh-yet-another-wedding, why-aren't-I-a-pop-star type of group that make there living playing at such events. But what they played! There were a few western pop-songs in there - in fact, I think they even played the chicken dance - but for the most part, these were Serbian or Jugoslav songs I had never heard before. And what was more, the people at the wedding both knew and sang along to these songs, and danced to songs (as I said in my last blog) that I could barely understand rhythmically.
Perhaps the most impressive event was when a woman, who owing to her dress (frankly, a bit slutty to my eyes) I presumed to be a band member, got up on stage, on a request from the guests, and absolutely belted out Mala garava - the gypsy song so popular there - to everyone's delight. G. later informed me that she was the sister of the groom.
On the whole this wedding, and other weddings in Serbia I attended, have been true My Big Fat Greek Wedding experiences. By this I mean that for once, there is an immediately discernable, distinct culture, and at least to my mind, this is - despite the shell-suits, arguably too much cabbage, fairly bad wine, sometimes rather grisly venues - a marvelous thing. The strange thing is that some Serbs find these weddings rather savage, and would opt for a more Westernised, chicken-dance wedding instead of a cabbage one. Understandable, in some ways, since whatever is ordinary appears dreary and common. But I think we would lose something if weddings in Serbia morphed into yet another variant of the chicken-dance, cordon-bleu sort of affairs that everybody in the west is pretty tired of. In my mind, the more cabbage, the better.
Now I love a good wedding, and I've been to many such, but generally the quality from a guests perspective has varied. Some are great fun, some are boring. English people are the drunkest, Italians/French had the best food, German weddings are probably the most organised on average. But the most striking thing I found is just how similar most western weddings are. The people who speak might change, and the clothing varies slightly, but generally the format (church in the afternoon, evening reception), the drinks before (bucks fizz, champagne, campari & soda), the food (some typcial variant of catering), the entertainment (light jazz before dinner, then a band or disco) and even much of the music (eighties classics and the chicken dance) is seemingly universal. There are, of course, exceptions to these, but this is why they are exceptions: outstanding food and unusual entertainment are, for example, merely minor deviations from established wedding norms.
I felt this way, and indeed didn't think much about it until I attended a wedding in Serbia. I didn't know the couple - in fact, G. and I were replacing her parents at a wedding for one of her fathers employees - and couldn't speak Serbian that well, so I was a bit like a puppy looking out the window of a moving car for the first time. But even in my haze of misunderstanding, this wedding was different from the outset.
For starters, the church. This was an Orthodox wedding, and though one could see some similarities, the singing clergy and their outfits certainly stood out - not understanding the service perhaps also gave an air of mystery to the whole thing (old Slavonic as G. later told me, so probably I was not alone). Then the food: cabbage everywhere, very good, but like nothing I had ever had at a wedding, the drink: rakija (šlivovica, kruškovac, etc.) and wine from a Knjaz Miloš bottle (the ubiquitous home-made, often barely drinkable wine that one gets everywhere).
Then, of course, the music. After dinner we were presented with a pretty typical wedding band - cheesy keyboard, singer, bassist, drummer. - the rather bored-looking, sigh-yet-another-wedding, why-aren't-I-a-pop-star type of group that make there living playing at such events. But what they played! There were a few western pop-songs in there - in fact, I think they even played the chicken dance - but for the most part, these were Serbian or Jugoslav songs I had never heard before. And what was more, the people at the wedding both knew and sang along to these songs, and danced to songs (as I said in my last blog) that I could barely understand rhythmically.
Perhaps the most impressive event was when a woman, who owing to her dress (frankly, a bit slutty to my eyes) I presumed to be a band member, got up on stage, on a request from the guests, and absolutely belted out Mala garava - the gypsy song so popular there - to everyone's delight. G. later informed me that she was the sister of the groom.
On the whole this wedding, and other weddings in Serbia I attended, have been true My Big Fat Greek Wedding experiences. By this I mean that for once, there is an immediately discernable, distinct culture, and at least to my mind, this is - despite the shell-suits, arguably too much cabbage, fairly bad wine, sometimes rather grisly venues - a marvelous thing. The strange thing is that some Serbs find these weddings rather savage, and would opt for a more Westernised, chicken-dance wedding instead of a cabbage one. Understandable, in some ways, since whatever is ordinary appears dreary and common. But I think we would lose something if weddings in Serbia morphed into yet another variant of the chicken-dance, cordon-bleu sort of affairs that everybody in the west is pretty tired of. In my mind, the more cabbage, the better.
Friday, April 11, 2008
Muzika Balkanska
When I first listened to Dave Brubeck seriously a few years ago, I was really impressed by their innovative attempts to break into different time signatures. I had read somewhere - I think on the CD inset for Time Further Out - that they had been inspired after listening to musicians in places like Turkey, but had never really seen the connection. Something about the fact that they had met brilliant drummers, who were outstanding technically, but just couldn't play in 4/4 or 3/4 time - that is the time signatures of 99.9% of all western music, including rock'n'roll, classical music & Jazz.
I never really thought about it again until I attended a wedding in Serbia in 2002. The audience all got up and danced, in some circular fashion, to the Serbian folk song Šano Dušo (a love song: roughly "My Beloved Shano"). I was amazed and impressed that the usual collection of arrhythmic wedding attendees were dancing in sync to this song, who's rhythm I just couldn't figure out immediately. I eventually deduced while watching that it is 7/4 or 7/16 depending on how you count it, though apparently it is also sometimes played in the more western friendly 3/4. Speed it up, I thought, and you start to get towards Brubeck's Unsquare Dance with that infectious, but confusing (to Western ears) 1-2-1-2-1-2-3 beat.
Later on, we met a musician friend of Gs, who played for us music from a Novi Sad (I think) band call Ljube [If anybody knows if they are still around, I would love to know]. They, of course, play Šano Dušo, but they also played a lot of music from the deep south, and by this I mostly mean Macedonia. Here, I heard things like Lihnida: a song about a bereaved woman on Lake Ohrid. It is also mostly 7/4 time, with some odd beats in the middle for effect (4/4 if memory serves). Skipped betas are familiar to anybody who has tried to dance to Chain of Fools (there is a 2/4 in the middle of an otherwise 4/4 song; another is present in Street Life). More impressive, however, are the mind-boggling 9/8 melodies like Čoček Bakije Bakića. The first time I heard that song I thought that the band must have just memorised the whole thing, since the timing seamed so martian to me. Actually, it is just as Brubeck's "Blue Rondo a la Turk" 1-2-1-2-1-2-1-2-3, and eventually some Bosnian musician just pointed this out to me. Incidentally, as you might have guessed, I'm something of an amateur musician myself.
These beats are yet another quaint surviving influence of the Turks, who have always played music with these oriental time signatures. And as one might expect, there are fewer songs with beats like this in Slovenia or Croatia, where, at least in my humble opinion, the traditional music is more dull or at least more Western and over-familiar, and frankly prone to a few too many oompa beats for my liking. In Serbia, Bosnia & Macedonia the Turkish influence lives on, and it always impresses me to see people simply just understand these beats without thinking about it. I mean come on: dancing to 7/4 - are you kidding me? Until I spent more time experiencing the music in its original form, I always thought it was some kind of (all-too-typical) attempt by musicians to appear clever. Yet, in Šano Dušo or Lihnida it just flows beautifully.
Years later, now I find myself tapping these beats, out of habit, and indeed, I taught myself to play Lihnida on the piano, with vague plans to make some Jazz version of it. And I continuously try to redo Jazz standards in unusual signatures (I do a 5/4 version of Summertime, though I note with some envy that Jacqui Naylor does an 11/4 version on her album The Color Five). And I guess if you look for it, unusual beats are around in western music. Think of Pink Floyd's Money (7/4) or Sheryl Crow's Strong Enough (6/4).
And on the other hand, I do like 4/4 songs from the former Yugoslavia. Having seen the film Grbavica I was very taken by Kemal Monteno's Sarajevo Ljubavi Moja. Which, in a roundabout way, brings me back to yet another linguistic curiosity. A Croatian linguist friend visiting last month, was reading through some of my books on learning Croatian/Serbian, and asked, rightly enough, why they were using the word Grad (city) to illustrate the vocative (i.e. command) case. When on earth would you have to address a city as you would (say) a person or a dog? I immediately began to sing the opening lines to Kemal Monteno's song:
Zajedno smo rasli, grade ja i ti... [We grew up together, my city, you and I...]
More rambling soon... I'm not done with the music, but I need a new train of thought.
I never really thought about it again until I attended a wedding in Serbia in 2002. The audience all got up and danced, in some circular fashion, to the Serbian folk song Šano Dušo (a love song: roughly "My Beloved Shano"). I was amazed and impressed that the usual collection of arrhythmic wedding attendees were dancing in sync to this song, who's rhythm I just couldn't figure out immediately. I eventually deduced while watching that it is 7/4 or 7/16 depending on how you count it, though apparently it is also sometimes played in the more western friendly 3/4. Speed it up, I thought, and you start to get towards Brubeck's Unsquare Dance with that infectious, but confusing (to Western ears) 1-2-1-2-1-2-3 beat.
Later on, we met a musician friend of Gs, who played for us music from a Novi Sad (I think) band call Ljube [If anybody knows if they are still around, I would love to know]. They, of course, play Šano Dušo, but they also played a lot of music from the deep south, and by this I mostly mean Macedonia. Here, I heard things like Lihnida: a song about a bereaved woman on Lake Ohrid. It is also mostly 7/4 time, with some odd beats in the middle for effect (4/4 if memory serves). Skipped betas are familiar to anybody who has tried to dance to Chain of Fools (there is a 2/4 in the middle of an otherwise 4/4 song; another is present in Street Life). More impressive, however, are the mind-boggling 9/8 melodies like Čoček Bakije Bakića. The first time I heard that song I thought that the band must have just memorised the whole thing, since the timing seamed so martian to me. Actually, it is just as Brubeck's "Blue Rondo a la Turk" 1-2-1-2-1-2-1-2-3, and eventually some Bosnian musician just pointed this out to me. Incidentally, as you might have guessed, I'm something of an amateur musician myself.
These beats are yet another quaint surviving influence of the Turks, who have always played music with these oriental time signatures. And as one might expect, there are fewer songs with beats like this in Slovenia or Croatia, where, at least in my humble opinion, the traditional music is more dull or at least more Western and over-familiar, and frankly prone to a few too many oompa beats for my liking. In Serbia, Bosnia & Macedonia the Turkish influence lives on, and it always impresses me to see people simply just understand these beats without thinking about it. I mean come on: dancing to 7/4 - are you kidding me? Until I spent more time experiencing the music in its original form, I always thought it was some kind of (all-too-typical) attempt by musicians to appear clever. Yet, in Šano Dušo or Lihnida it just flows beautifully.
Years later, now I find myself tapping these beats, out of habit, and indeed, I taught myself to play Lihnida on the piano, with vague plans to make some Jazz version of it. And I continuously try to redo Jazz standards in unusual signatures (I do a 5/4 version of Summertime, though I note with some envy that Jacqui Naylor does an 11/4 version on her album The Color Five). And I guess if you look for it, unusual beats are around in western music. Think of Pink Floyd's Money (7/4) or Sheryl Crow's Strong Enough (6/4).
And on the other hand, I do like 4/4 songs from the former Yugoslavia. Having seen the film Grbavica I was very taken by Kemal Monteno's Sarajevo Ljubavi Moja. Which, in a roundabout way, brings me back to yet another linguistic curiosity. A Croatian linguist friend visiting last month, was reading through some of my books on learning Croatian/Serbian, and asked, rightly enough, why they were using the word Grad (city) to illustrate the vocative (i.e. command) case. When on earth would you have to address a city as you would (say) a person or a dog? I immediately began to sing the opening lines to Kemal Monteno's song:
Zajedno smo rasli, grade ja i ti... [We grew up together, my city, you and I...]
More rambling soon... I'm not done with the music, but I need a new train of thought.
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