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.