It's the seventies in Serbian shopping centres

My parents-in-law brought us a very odd present last month. Now it was a very sweet thing to do, and I don't want to look a gift-horse in the mouth, but it was odd. It was a frying pan that you plug in and (seemingly, according to how they used it) put on the floor outside to use. It is all the rage, apparently, in Serbia. Everybody has one. Both G. and I thought it pretty silly (why fry things outside on the floor?), but all the Serbian visitors thought it was the cat's meow, and moreover were convinced that the fried meat really tasted different when cooked in this laborious and orthopedically dangerous way. G and I had a real giggle about this making up advertising slogans: Why fry on the stove when you can fry on the floor in your living room, bedroom, or bathroom? Tired of frying smells being restricted to the kitchen? Well fret no more as with the floor fryer 3000 you can even fry things on the floor of your septic tank! And so on.

But then it dawned on me: this was the equivalent of the Breville Sandwich Toaster, which virtually everbody in Britain owns, but has systematically forgotten. Invariably these devices sit at the back of a cupboard still slightly dirty from the last use in 1986 - you could just never get these things clean. There were also thousands of things like this in Canada - wondrous labour saving devices that didn't really live up to the promises. Somehow they ended up creating more work than they saved, but the most popular devices went through a haitus whereby everybody who owned one and had to justify it by somehow believing that (say) frying things on the floor tasted different/better.

I suppose its natural, since shopping malls are pretty new to Serbia, and as a result they are new to the marketing strategy that places attractive people in shops actively cooking something and demonstrating it to passers by (indeed, we were just in Croatia and there were several of these in the local Konsum). I don't suppose many people in the West fall for this kind of thing any more.

There are other quaint or not-so quaint seventies throw-backs in the Balkans too. The tendency, as I have ranted on about previously, not to wear seat-belts, the fact that so few people have credit cards, a belief that there are no gay people in the country, etc. Perhaps some kind of disco revival wouldn't go amiss. I wonder how you say "Shake your booty" in Serbian...

A new level with Serbian or Croatian or Bosnian or Montenigrian

I past a real milestone the other day in terms of my ability at Serbian or Croatian or whateverthehell you want to call this language. I was paying the bill yesterday in Vrbnik on Krk and asked after paying if he could give me some change to pay for the #@$%^& parking machines that only take small coins. Somebody sitting at the bar said (in Croatian): why do you want to pay for a ticket, I know the guys and they hardly ever check? I then politely said that last year we were (#$%^&) clamped after being 20 minutes late to pay a ticket and he said, to my astonishment, "don't worry, I'll tell him that we should be nice to Slovenians".

I passed this milestone in German about two years ago when somebody asked if I was Dutch, but whey-hey, I did it in Croatian! Ja sam kod kuće! Well sort of anyway. I think the minute somebody mistakes you for somebody who almost speaks the same language is a great milestone. Viva Slovenia!

Krk village micro-economy

Our house in Croatia is in a tiny village of some 26 houses on Krk. The people seem to fall into two classes: those who really live here, or those who have holiday homes. The former are the permanent fixtures and we have got to know most of them. A funny thing that's been happening lately is that we seem to have entered into some kind of barter/trickle-down economy without really knowing it.

In this village it begins when you start building a house. The builders here started giving their empties to Anica, who collects bottles to supplement what I'm sure is a very meager income (she's 80, lives in an ancient stone house and has one goat). With our builders - most of whom are three-parts drunk most of the day - the income is substantial. We also give her bottles when we are here and since I've heard wine bottles too have a deposit value, I realize that we must be making her quite rich.

Some time after this we started getting greens from the garden of Anica's neighbors - blitva, salat that sort of thing - covered in earwigs to be sure, but great nonetheless. We actually got an extra helping after we helped Valter - another neighbor - sort out his virus infected laptop, and give him access to our WLAN (though he does have to sit in the barn to pick up the signal).

As our place isn't big, we've also been making extensive use of Ranka's apartmani - three sets of visitors so far for at least a week. She almost never has any customers apart from a few faithful in August - this village is too far from the sea to have a steady stream of visitors - so this is quite a boon for her. I think her way of thanking us it to provide us with a weekly dose of fish (I think her son knows a guy who knows a guy), though she is slightly upset that her visitors spend most of their time with us. I think she runs the apartments because she's quite lonely here, but I'll be the money helps.

Trickle down is also substantial. We seem to hive hired just about everybody who is willing to do things for us. Kuki around the corner built our cistern and septic tank, one of Anica's nephews or cousins cleared our garden, a couple of old people in the village collects our olives, and even the kids got to build cardboard houses out of the reams of furniture packing.

Balkan men helping pregnant women.

There is a lot of talk on certain web-sites (see here for instance) about how Germans can be very rude or inconsiderate in public, for instance not giving their bus-seats to pregnant women. I thought perhaps the most interesting response to this suggestion (by a non-German I should add) was that it wasn't rudeness or selfishness but an amazing sense of privacy that leads to this perception. I couldn't agree more: I think most Germans would be horrified to know that somebody needed their seat and they didn't give it to them, but the fact is most are so tunnel-visioned in public trying to avoid encounters that they just don't notice.

Anyway, I tend (or tended) to think that, on the whole, the Balkans are a bit ruder when it comes right down to it, at least to my over-sensitive, wimpy, effeminate Canadian senses. But I was truly amazed last week when we (myself and G who's pregnant again) had to take our daughter with a fever to the doctors on Krk. Now the medical system here is still something of a shambles - not enough money, not enough doctors, long queues, etc. It's still quite frustrating, or at very least boring to go to the doctor and sit on hot days waiting for something to happen. But each time we went in, we were immediately man-handled to the front of the queue. At one visit, a tough Balkan man took control of us and the whole room: "a pregnant women with a sick baby is here, you all get the hell out of the way" (or similar). It was very touching.

I guess that's one of the things I like about the Balkan character. It's a bit like a mint-humbug: tough on the outside with a soft center, or perhaps it's more like an igloo: icy outside, warm and comfortable in. Or both (see left)?

I don't mean to sour this good feeling, but perhaps for another entry I should comment on how the typical Balkan man deals with the babies once they are out, healthy and at home...

Vegeta on the brain

My first German teacher, in Canada, once suggested we go together to a quite traditional German restaurant to hear a bit of German. She said it would be a good experience, but the food was "terrible, everything very Maggi". This was before I lived in Germany, but even then I sort of knew what she meant: Maggi is a kind of savory flavoring that is ubiquitous in the cheaper sort of German, Austrian or Swiss restaurants. Its a savory thing, but as for many of these kinds of things, a major component of it is mono sodium glutamate (MSG). In the former Yugoslavia, the MSG variant of choice is Vegeta.

Very early on, I noticed that the food in Serbia was too savory for my taste, and moreover, that despite a lot of time spent on things like soup, the taste was very often the same. It was only some time later that I noticed that despite hours of preparation, and a complex set of ingredients acquired after some difficulty from far-flung parts of the city, that the cooking would invariably end with a large dose of Vegeta. Baka would get up in the middle of the night to make clear soup, and one would end up with something that tasted a bit like something from a packet.

Any biochemist (like myself) will warn you that Glutamate, the active ingredient, is a neurotransmitter. Indeed, "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome" - whereby certain people suffer from odd neurological symptoms such as numbness after eating - is attributed to MSG. I wonder if this explains the strange feelings in my brain that come after eating in Serbia or Croatia - or is that simply the in-laws?

Anyway, tip for improving your punjene paprike or sarma or whatever: skip the Vegeta, use fresh herbs and it'll blow people away.

P.S. I'm going to try and get back to this blog - Serbia's been blowing real hot and cold for me lately, but it's getting better.

Balkan Baby Balderdash

Everybody with children can relate to the torrent of unsolicited advice that one gets more or less constantly as a new parent. It is as if everybody who had children before has a Ph.D. in child-rearing, and many, it would seem, are more than willing to subject you to their opinions on everything. A brief survey of what I can remember: glass bottles are bad, car-seats are dangerous, you should feed every three hours, babies should sleep only on their front, only on their sides, only on their backs, you should breastfeed for four years, you should bottle feed from six months, you shouldn't use a microwave, if a babies hands are cold you are a bad mother, babies shouldn't sit until they are six months old, you should only serve honey with a plastic spoon as honey reacts with metal, etc. In this blog, I thought I would relate a few of the strange pieces of advice coming from Serbia.
1. Drafts are lethal. When our daughter was a few weeks old, my mother-in-law very kindly came to help us. It was a hot June, and we were warned by the Doctors that this was the only thing we should worry about and take care of (as an aside, that was the only piece of advice given really by medical people). I dutifully heeded this advice, as worried about her temperature constantly. I got a good breeze going by opening both sides of the house, but each time I left the room, I would come back to find both of the doors closed. I eventually realised this was my mother-in-law's doing, and she looked at me with some panic saying: Ali duva! As if that said it all. I must admit that the obsession with drafts is something that is common all over the former Yugoslavia, and indeed I'm not the first to notice this:

"Benjamin subscribed to the common Yugoslav theory that moving air was bad for children. Parents on stiflingly hot trains conscientiously kept the windows shut while the other passengers smoked their cigarettes and nodded approvingly".
--- The Impossible Country, Brian Hall

I'll simply never, ever convince her otherwise.

2. Suffering is part of parenthood. Whatever labor-saving, 21st century implement we have, it is always deemed to be bad, dangerous or just unwise. Even, it would seem, attempts to be comfortable while feeding the baby are not smart. Do your back in, naturally, so that the baby can eat 10 milliseconds faster. Why use a microwave when you can set up some complex arrangement of things on the stove?

3. Hand washing is best. The midwives told us that we shouldn't wash things with fabric softener, and that a simple warm machine wash, easy on the powder, was the best for babies skin. We were thus alarmed to discover that the mother-in-law was hand washing things in the sink with all manner of soaps instead of using the machine.

4. Swimming - are you kidding? Like thousands of other babies in Germany, our daughter takes swimming lessons. We are apparently insane for exposing her to the dangers of pool water. This paranoia, of course, isn't specific to the former Yugoslavia, but as a long time swimmer myself I have absolutely never understood it: when one swims a lot, it becomes clear that the worse thing that happens to you is that your hair and skin become too dry as they are cleaned too much. I mean at 4 parts per million (as a baby pool normally is), there is no way anything much is going to survive in that water.

5. Pregnant women shouldn't do much. There is, seemingly, some notion of "maintaining the pregnancy" that kicks in the moment you have a positive pee-on-a-stick test. Any western notion of doing things like (say) swimming or exercise or work even early in a pregnancy is scoffed at. Frankly I think this is just an excuse for people to do nothing.

6. Pregnant women should eat a lot of X. (where X is meat, potatoes, soap, whatever) It doesn't matter if it makes you sick.

7. Carbonated drinks give babies sore-throats (or all humans for that matter). What? I realised after a brief survey that this is something that a lot of ex-Yugos stick to. We used to drink fizzy ginger-ale when we had sore-throats, and I'm not saying that Canada is necessarily right, but I struggle to come up with a plausible explanation for how this could happen.

8. Science or logic does not apply. You may think you know that viruses can't, for instance, be readily passed from Dogs to humans, but here kod nas things are different. Nada told me that dog hair can make babies very very sick, and her cousin is a doctor.

There are probably dozens that I forget, but you get the idea.