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.

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.

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.

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.