ExYugoBlog

Various thoughts on films about the last Balkan wars

2012-02-03T13:02:00.003+01:00

Recently I finally managed to watch all of the 1998 film Savior. I say "finally" as I've tried a few times to watch it previously and always give up after the first twenty minutes as it is overall too disturbing (it is the part where Goran and Guy are in the house with the Grandmother). But in the end I think it's worth sticking to it. The film doesn't get any less grim, but perhaps more human after that. Anyway, I liked the film as it is on the whole very evenly balanced on which side were the bad guys (answer: all of them), and ends on a high note. Essentially it is the story of a US military man turned, owing to the murder of his wife and son by Islamic terrorists, stoic and embittered Foreign Legionnaire fighting eventually as a mercenary for the Yugoslav army during the Bosnia war. He meets a Serbian woman pregnant after being raped by Bosnian soldiers and the story is about their attempts to get from Bosnia to Split.

I've seen a few other films about the period. I liked Welcome to Sarajevo a lot, but I have some sympathy with those who say it carries the Western anti-Serb bias; though perhaps bias in these films always stems from perspective (here it being Bosnian Muslims in Sarajevo being targeted by Serbs).

Probably my favorite film, however, about the war in general is Grbavica - the story of a Bosnian muslim woman living with her 15-year old daughter who, unbeknownst to the daughter, is also the product of a rape (by a Serbian Chetnik in a prison camp). I like this film not just as a well-done film, but also for aspects such as the lead role (Emma) being played by a Serbian actress (Mirjana Karanović) who I think did a good thing in taking the part.

The above are all serious films, and G. says that nobody in the former Yugoslavia ever takes them seriously. Somehow telling, I guess, that seemingly the most popular home-grown films about the wars are comedies. We very much liked Sivi kamion crvene boje (The GreyTruck of Red Color), which is a humorous story about a Serbian woman and a Bosniak travelling from Belgrade to the Croatian coast during the early stages of the war. Some of the humor is (to my eyes) a bit dubious, and watching people laugh at scenes where the lead actor jokes his way out of being murdered can be unsettling, but I guess I've married into this culture.

P.S. I'm sorry for never writing - I'll try to do more. I think I've just run out of ideas, or am not always inspired, but I'll work on it.

Proof from Google translate that Croatian and Serbian are not that different...

2011-06-01T22:42:00.003+02:00

Being a bit hum-drum about the Ex-Yugo experience or maybe just busy

2011-06-01T13:50:00.008+02:00

Just heard the sad news that Rosemary Bailey Brown split up with her Yugo husband. Sad as this was the original inspiration for this blog, and perhaps double sad as I haven't really done justice to her original inspiration (I haven't blogged anything in nearly a year). But as the summer nears and we start, at least, to talk about going to Croatia on holiday, perhaps I should start again.

We've had another child since the last entry, which accounts for some of my inactivity, but I think the truth is I'm running out of bloggable material. Or perhaps more accurately I'm a bit humdrum about Serbia, Croatia and the cross-cultural stuff that I would discuss in the past. In short, I'm used to things. It's somehow a part of me and like all parts one forgets about them. As G said to me today (after hearing about Rosemary's break-up) - even if we break up I'm stuck with the whole thing - "you've mixed with us now and it's your kids heritage".

Anyway, we head for Croatia in a few weeks and my mother-in-law is visiting again, so perhaps inspiration will come again.

It's the seventies in Serbian shopping centres

2010-08-31T14:08:00.008+02:00

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

2010-06-16T18:59:00.003+02:00

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

2010-06-16T17:56:00.003+02:00

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.

2010-06-15T11:02:00.005+02:00

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

2010-06-01T14:30:00.001+02:00

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

2010-05-28T16:43:00.003+02:00

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.

Pazi Pas: on Dogs

2009-09-15T11:02:00.005+02:00

We were rather saddened to hear that the dog belonging to our neighbors on Krk had died. It actually went along with the death of the old goatherd, who had been looking after the old, blind, wheezing dog. Not to worry, opined one of the other villagers, the dog was really old, “maybe six or seven”. In a way, that about sums it up for dogs in the Balkans, and I guess much of southern Europe: a dog does very well if it makes it to six. This shocks the likes of me: my first dog lived to 13 (hobbling, deaf, blind, epileptic, no bladder control, constant visits to the vet in the last years) and my sisters two dogs just died a few months ago aged about 14 (blind, deaf, wheezing and living only for their daily carrot), my other sister has a dog that thrives aged about 9 and going strong(ish).

So we have a dog, as readers will know. And I must admit that now that we have a baby, she is less of a princess than she was, but she still: lives in the house, very often sleeps on our bed, eats only dog food, regularly goes to the doctor, has a passport, travels with us most everywhere, and is generally part of the family. To pacify both G. and her family, we bought a dog house for outside, and I went along at least vaguely with intentions to have her live outside, but I just couldn’t do it: making a seen week old puppy live outside in February just didn't gel. I don’t think I’m so unusual in that I love my dog like a family member, and indeed most Germans, British, Americans, Canadians, Swiss, etc. would heartily agree. Perhaps on farms, people would be a bit less coochie-coo about the animals, but on the whole, people where I come from and where I live behave similarly. Germany, on the whole, is extreme: dogs can more or less go everywhere – we’ve found only one or two restaurants in Germany that don’t allow them – and I’ve heard it said that people are often more welcoming of dogs than children, which is an exaggeration, but not a very gross one.

This is, however, clearly not the case in Serbia, or elsewhere in southern Europe, for that matter. I had, for a time, a relationship with a Spanish woman, and she mentioned one day in passing that she had “dogs” at home. “Oh”, I said, “what are their names?” She gave me a strange look, and said that they didn’t really have names, or that we called them this or that, but it didn’t matter, they were just dogs. Same kind of thing in Serbia: vague memories of dogs one had as a child, inconsistent names, not trained, and “umm…. I can’t remember what happened to him; he ran away, I think”. Of course people love their dogs, but somehow the relationships are most distant: they seem to be only rarely allowed in the house, and even people with flats often condemn (cruelly I think) dogs to live on some tiny balcony.

G’s mother is convinced that our dog caries terrible
germs, and when visiting tells us 2-3 times daily that the dog hair (abundant in the house when she sheds) will be terrible for the baby. I must admit she has a point: their dog regularly walks unattended around the neighborhood and smells like a tramp’s underpants, because she has almost never had a bath, and regularly eats garbage only after she has rolled in it. I wouldn’t let that feral animal anywhere near our baby. In contrast, I believe our dog, who is virtually never unsupervised, to be a lot cleaner than many people I know.

Croatia, though similar in attitude, seems however to be on the turn, at least on the coast. There seem to be a lot more dog-friendly people, and the general trend that they are banned from public places seems to be over-turning. As recently as last spring, one could see harsh warnings that all dogs must be on a leash and muzzled at all times in public, but I haven’t seen so many this summer. Not surprising, I guess, as a large fraction of the tourists are (of course) Germans, and think that if little Maxi-schen can’t come with us, we won’t spend anything.

Perhaps, in any case, G's mother is on the turn too. During a recent visit to Germany we caught her sitting on our sofa with the dog at her feet ("they were cold"), and she spent three days babysitting our daughter alone on Krk and was seemingly very appreciative of Monitsa's amazing instinct to guard the baby and all associated with her.

Numb to the Ex-Yugo experience

2009-09-15T10:46:00.001+02:00

My brother-in-law has a new girlfriend. Unlike his last, this one is not naša, or rather, not Serbian. This one is German, and thus, like myself, a foreigner. We met her the other weekend and she seems very nice, but I experienced an alarming sense of irritation at just how enthusiastic she was about Serbia and Serbian (textbook tucked eagerly under her arm). Obviously it’s new love, and with it comes a healthy helping of blind enthusiasm about the new partner and where he's from, so I readily forgive her for this. But I was alarmed by my reaction. For me Serbia – together with Serbian, Croatia, Croatian, the former Yugoslavia, the Balkans, burek, Šlivovica, bad homemade wine served in Knjaz Miloš bottles, Nationalism, typical Balkan men, dangerous driving, the smell of the air in Novi Sad, typical Balkan behavior – are now so ingrained in my life as to be like something between a rather pleasant recurring dream and an untreatable genetic disease.

I had all of that, everything. I had that feeling of first-love with a native from the former Yugoslavia too. I bought every language book there was, and I’m proud to say that I definitely function in this language, if a little clumsily. And not just language books either: a recent survey of my book collection revealed no fewer than twenty books about the history of the place (e.g. Black Lamb, Grey Falcon), or novels by ex-Yugo authors (e.g. Ivo Andrić). I certainly know the lands, or more specifically, I know a lot about Novi Sad, that part of Vojvodina, and Krk in Croatia and its surrounds, where we have a house, and bits about most everywhere else. I know that Serbs don't normally want to go to Split, and that Croats should probably avoid places like Novi Pazar. I know the people as well: warts and all.

But I’ve certainly lost my original sense of mystique about the people and the place: both impress about as often as they disappoint, or in other words, they are normal. I still have, obviously, an emotional attachment to the place, but somehow it is more like a sympathetic cousin than a new friend: the relationship (and by this of course I mean to the place, not to my dear G.) is a bit forced, but not unpleasant.

P.S. Apologies for the long silence. Our daughter M.T. was born in June and time has become a precious commodity. Blog about Balkan Baby Balderdash to come.

Krk diary 2009 Number 1: Y-tong and Krk village culture

2009-09-01T11:11:00.000+02:00

Well, our house is almost there. As ever with construction, people are telling you that it will be “about two weeks” for about (say) three months, and costs escalate and what have you, but we saw it yesterday, and the view from what will be the terrace is fantastic – Cres and the blue Adriatic in the distance, just over or through our little Olive grove. It is heaven.

Well, sort of. At least the old Yugo (ca. 1978) is no longer sitting without tires in the property next door, there seem to be fewer wild dogs and children running around than before. Sadly, we heard that the funny old guy who used to walk shirtless and smoking with his flock of twenty goats met his maker a few months ago (we don’t know what became of the goats), which is disappointing for our dog, but she’ll survive.

And maybe I’m just getting used to it, but the gastarbeiter houses look a bit less thrown together. This is something one gets used to in this part of the world. Those who left home 20-30 years ago, worked usually in Germany or Austria, and then returned home, bearing a big Mercedes Benz, a wide-screen TV and enough money to build the dream house. The problem is they normally build it themselves, and often the gastarbeiter (i.e. Guest worker in German) mentality doesn’t go along with a good sense of the aesthetic. Big, modern box-like constructions are favored – I guess because they are easiest, and provide the most room for the whole family, plus a complement of paying guests to bolster the retirement income.

Anyway, in our tiny Krk village, there are fewer houses like this, and indeed many signs of a kind of Western European gentrification: more tastefully renovated old houses (including ours I would like to think), and fewer cinder block monstrosities; tidier rubbish bins, and even better roads. Though the village lacks running water (apparently in a year or two), but now has DSL internet. I’ve got mixed feelings about all of this, I suppose. On the one hand, I think that it will be nicer to live in the village as it is becoming, but on the other, I feel we’ve somehow contributed to the destruction of this little way of life: what was once a village of Krk old-timers and refugees is now a village of well-off former Croatian ex-pats, Austrians, Slovenians and ourselves. I think we and the others really are restoring some kind of traditional Kvarner look-and-feel to the place, but perhaps we lose something more than Y-tong and bad-brickwork in the process. Ah, progress.

Somebody who comes here is nobody

2009-04-25T03:03:00.006+02:00

Groucho Marx famously said that he wouldn't care to belong to a club that accepted people like him as members. Something that happened recently in Croatia reminded me of this statement. I met a famous Croatian, who works outside of the country. He could, like many others, have decided to stay away, but he actually gave some of his valuable time to founding something in Croatia, with an aim to give something back to his country. Admirable sentiment, to be sure, and to be fair, he gets a lot of points in some sectors of Croatian society. However, there is, he admits, another side to it: namely that there are many at home who question his true worth, to the point of even denying that he really is well known elsewhere. The problem, it seems, is coming home. He said he moves from the 1st league abroad to the fourth league at home, and as he put it "I'm not very good any more at fighting in the fourth league".

I've experienced this before. Several times in Novi Sad, we had arranged for people to visit who were well known or at least highly experienced outside of Serbia, and the simple fact that they turn up leads to people thinking they are nobody. Some fourth rate academic at the University of (say) Minnesota is, on the other hand, somebody important. I mean he has a website, and has published something, and most importantly, didn't deign to visit this place. He is thus somehow preferable to anybody whom I've actually met.

This is an odd, recurrent theme in the the former Yugoslavia, and I wonder where it comes from. Is it a generally poor sense of national self-worth? That is, the sentiment would run: Why would anybody who was anybody ever come here? There must be something wrong with them. The rather dumb thing is that it has a rather negative effect on anybody who decides to do something useful. What is the point of doing any good if you'll be considered a sap if you do it? Is it better to stay abroad and not bother?

I guess by the same logic, bands like the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, who visited Serbia a few years ago, must be second class? Nah. Maybe I'm just an over-sensitive nobody with a chip on his shoulder.

Pretending not to be what you are

2009-04-17T14:26:00.010+02:00

I like to ask people about where they come from, particularly when I see or hear a name with an origin that doesn't tally with who they apparently are. As one might imagine, these days I tend to look for the "ić" endings in their various disguises - I even asked my mother recently about the obviously English name Aldrich that is in our family history (I still wonder, frankly). I have a nominally German colleague who's surname has the German ending itsch and he admits, with just a bit of reluctance, that at least part of his family history is from somewhere down in the Balkans (in fact, he shares a name with a famous, heroic Croatian politician who is now on the 200 kuna note).

A few years ago, I met a rather strange Austrian fellow once who's surname was pretty clearly simply the name of an animal in a Slavic language. When I asked him where he was from, he said that he was from the south of Austria, some old family. When I said that it sounded curiously like the animal name in Serbian, a Slovenian, also in attendance, broke in and said that it was in fact exactly the word in Slovenian. Ah, I said, so some of your ancestors must have come from Slovenia, zar ne? No, he said, it was south Austrian. Eventually, I think he conceded that his name was probably Slavic, but there was also this reluctance to do so.

There are other examples that are more poignant somehow, in that they involve people denying their true origin rather than their ancestry. I heard of people in the UK who would say that they were (say) Irish but were actually be Czech, and of course anybody who's lived in both North America and the UK can probably spout off dozens of examples of people feigning Britishness despite being born in (say) Oklahoma. And the fake accents can make your ears bleed, even if people from (say) Oklahoma would probably never notice. Once I met an American living in Paris who, upon hearing that I lived in the UK for a long time, said: "I'm glad you don't have that stupid accent that so many people try to make up".

Not all people deny their ancestry. Certainly in the once highly multi-national Austria, I've met a lot of people who embrace it. But it is just frequent enough to warrant mention. The simple fact of the matter is that some people just seem to be ashamed of who they are, and think that somehow they will do better in this world if they hide it. This seems a stark contrast to the attitudes of people at home, who are almost invariably proud to be who they are. As ever, I don't have a sensible ending to this, but just a thought: take some more of this pride abroad, and remember you don't normally get many points for being a pretender.

Your mother's south slavic tongue

2009-04-09T17:35:00.020+02:00

There is a short but fascinating book called Your Mother's Tongue, by Stephen Burgen. I don't remember everything about it - I borrowed a copy and read it about eight years ago - but it was very interesting. This was mostly because he charted the trends in swears, and how the tendency to swear and the nature of them varies geographically around Europe. Norwegians, I recall, are wimpy at it - I think the worst that can be done is to call somebody a Devil; latin people from the south are much more prone to the worst, or at least most insulting & sexual forms of swearing. The British were a strange exception, being north Europeans who swore more than the others of a similar latitude, and English and Spanish speakers in the Americas hardly swear at all compared to their European counterparts. And so on.

In Germany, where I live, the swears are essentially only scatological and any attempt to insult or affectionately cajole somebody about the sexual habits of his mother will either not be understood, or just laughed at (Waaait a minute, you think my mother is a what? What does this have to do with what we are talking about?). I understand this perspective when I think about the Spanish insult cabron (cuckold) which is very complicated , particularly when applied out of context (let's see, I just accidentally spilled your beer, and now you are saying that, though you don't know her, or indeed if she exists at all, that my significant other is having relations with some other man also unknown to you). And of course in English, it is all about the F-word, unless you come from some minority that has imported the concept of insulting another's mother from elsewhere (i.e. MoFo among African Americans).

I should say that I swear - and I swear too much. It's a bad habit, I know, but as with everybody, I try to avoid doing it in polite company. I firmly believe that a well-placed swear is about the most effective literary tool there is. For a great, great example, see the Martin Amis Autobiography Experience where he talks about his father's - Kingsley Amis - best ever instance of the F-word as said by an angry dog. But through my own overuse I think I ruin my chances of any kind of suitable emphasis.

But it's fair to say that my foul-mouthed behavior comes nowhere close to that of the men I know from the former Yugoslavia. Get a couple of men from Serbia going and - whether they are closest friends or casual business colleagues - and the invective invects. And man oh man, are they dirty.

As anybody who isn't a monoglot knows: swearing in another language is a tricky business. Frankly, you should almost never do it unless you are fully, Joseph Conrad-like, fluent. You'll always offend, and never get the use of it right. But undeterred, or just seeking some additional insights into the place/language that I had found myself increasingly associated with, I asked a few years ago how one swore (psovati incidentally) in Serbian or Croatian. G. was no good, wouldn't tell me anything: don't swear, you savage, it's primitive. But every now and then, when something fell on her toe, or she dropped something, very very occasionally an utterance would come: P--- M---! What was that, I would ask, never to be told. Nothing, nothing.

Eventually, I worked out that this was absolutely the darkest of all swears that exist. When I realised, what it was (my mother's WHAT?), I started spotting it all over the place. Two people speaking in a cafe dropping it into an otherwise ordinary conversation. Elsewhere, there is the more standard fornicator type of invective, that I think is more common in Croatia (at least the Croatians I know use it more often). Related to this verb, some of early attempts to conjugate the similar sounding verb to eat (jesti or ja jedem) led, after some forgivable mix-ups with ds and bs to some interesting looks (We f--- dinner now?). Indeed, people sometimes warn you about this mix-up if they have ever previously dealt with anybody learning this martian language.

If I had to draw a parallel it would be to the way that I remember the English speech of working class Quebecois, that I would sometimes encounter during my student days in Ontario. The F-word came typically once or twice a sentence. And I think it is similar in the sense that nobody means anything by it. Obviously no insult is intended: it has just become a useful adjective/adverb/interjection. It might as well be OK or like or more suitably Ovaj or Važi.

I don't have a sensible ending to this, but one word of warning: to the prudish West, swearing is often frowned upon, even by hipocrits who swear constantly, and given the (often unjustified) reputation of people from the former Yugoslavia, perhaps it is wise either to cut down on it, or at the very least, never translate what you are saying about your friend's mother's anatomy to some curious outsider.

And of course, I know, I can go f--- myself. Oh, and f--- you too.

But your parents must come from Srem, zar ne?

2009-03-30T13:19:00.004+02:00

When I first flew to Belgrade in 2002 it was quite an experience. I had the feeling that there were no other foreigners on the plane - judged by the appearance of the people, and the fact that I heard no English or German spoken. It was quite a surprise, then, to see the queue for "foreign nationals" at passport control in Belgrade nearly as full as that for the locals. The official rather mercilessly (like all officials, in all countries) asked me in rapid-fire Serbian what I was doing there, and when I said I didn't speak any Serbian (I hadn't even bought my first language book yet), she rolled her eyes and had to get somebody else who spoke English to ask me the normal immigration questions about whether I was a terrorist, a smuggler, infectious or whatever. [As an aside, today things are very different, and one even regularly hears English on the streets of Novi Sad in February].

I asked G. about this afterwards, and she told me that most of the "foreigners" where just people who had dual nationalities who had probably temporarily without a Serbian passport, or children of far-flung diaspora from Canada, the US, Australia, Germany, etc. Now that I sort of speak the language, I'm often reminded of the diaspora when I simply say something. Unless they presume I'm Hungarian or Romanian (in Novi Sad this is pretty common), people normally ask where I'm from and when I say "Canada", they then almost always say, "ali roditelji?" ("but your parents?"), whereupon I'm supposed to say that they are from Zrenjenin or Niš or Bjelovar or something. When I deny any true genetic links, people are always rather sweetly surprised. In fact, I once had a waiter in Novi Sad disbelieve me, perhaps thinking I was pretending to be something I was not.

For me, its deeply encouraging. For all of us who are sometimes frustrated with learning these moon-man, mega-complex Eastern European languages, it is good not to get the reaction that one gets (say) in Paris when speaking bad Canadian french to snobby French waiters who would rather speak appalling English than suffer your accent.

Having said that, people could be just a tad better at speaking to foreigners: as for all languages where few foreigners attempt them, people in Serbia or Croatia are a bit merciless when you show signs of speaking it - 1000km/h with all the complexities put in. Polako, polako. Gs mother is extremely good to me, speaking slowly and even having the patience to tell her mother to show a bit more understanding. Gs grandmother has little patience for me, thinking that people who don't speak properly are some kind of alien species, but on the telephone she now speaks to me like a tape-player and quarter speed: "Oooonnaaaa jeeeeeee uuuuuuuuu graduuuuuuuuuu. Daaaaaa liiiii razuuuuumiš?" (Shheeeeeeee's innnnnn theeeeeee towwwwwnnn. Doooooo yoooooouuuuu unnnnnderrrrrrstaaaaaand?"). Then she says, as ever, "Robert, trebaš da uceš" (you need to study) and continues at 1000km/h about some further details of which I understand about 50%, but growing steadily.

On refugees and house restoration in Croatia

2009-03-27T09:18:00.001+01:00

Refugees are still very much part of the scenery in the former Yugoslavia. As I've mentioned before, many of those with the most energy today are those who have lost everything in the past, and who now want more than anything to live life to the full: Croatian Serbs, Serbian Croats, Bosnian everythings, etc.

Many of my first encounters with refugees were during our searches for a suitable property to buy in Istria or Kvarner (i.e. the North Croatian coastal area). For example, we looked at one run down property in a place called Kunj in Istria, that was in a tiny terrace of four houses. Some friendly people came out and introduced themselves, and it turned out that they were from near Novi Sad. Serbian Croat refugees obviously. They said they missed Vojvodina, but had to flee, as did so many others during the various exoduses of the early 1990s. In the then common house-swap process, they ended up with a tiny ruin of a house in the middle of nowhere in a region that they didn't know at all, having lived for generations in northern Serbia. Anyway, they were very friendly and gave us pointers about how much it cost to put in a bathroom, and how we shouldn't trust Nekretine (Estate Agents - as if we needed to be told - I always thought the kretin part of the word was fitting).

We met several other displaced people during our search for a house, and I suspect that some of the circa 1989 renovated empty properties were probably once vikendici (i.e. little weekend houses) of owners who were no longer nationals of the country in which we were searching. But the parade of refugees didn't stop after our eventual purchase. We are pretty sure that the person who was actually living in the condemnable wreck of a house that we eventually purchased was a refugee. And strangely, or perhaps fittingly, as we started to do things on the house, we encountered ever more of them. For example, one summer Sunday two years ago, Gs father telephoned some guy who called some other guy with a truck to remove the gigantic heap of rubbish we extracted from the property after first aquiring it. The talkative Croatian landlord who was hosting us in an apartman asked quizzically, upon hearing this: Tko rade njedelje?!? (Who works on Sunday?!?) And everybody laughed when they heard: neki Bosanac. Of course it was some Bosnian Croat, keen as ever, so some stereotype apparently dictates, to work any day of the week to make money.

Before

The trio of builders we eventually hired to renovate and build was like some kind of homage to the former Yugoslavia: all originally from Bosnia, but one Croat, one Serb, one Muslim, all living happily in the stable that they lovingly converted into temporary and seemingly comfortable lodgings. Our attempts to rent them more suitable accommodation failed when one of our neighbors in the village who hosts the only rentable apartmani refused to rent to a bunch of dirty builders. And did I mention that the neighbor, herself, is a member of the most perplexing variety of refugees I've ever encountered? She is a Croatian Orthodox. Gs father has no patience for this, insisting that she is a Serb, but somehow she feels ethnically Croat and spiritually closer to Constaninople than Rome.

During

Perhaps the greatest house-building related refugee story comes from the people who are actually the greatest help to us of all: R & S from Slatina, in Eastern Croatia. They are second or third generation Serbian Croats, and great friends of Gs parents. At the moment, for legal reasons, they actually own a small piece of what is technically farming property behind our house as foreigners cannot easily buy agricultural land in Croatia. In other words, we bought a piece of land for them. When I was, at first, anxious about this - "I mean, who the %^&* are these people?" I said in some obnoxious North American tone - G told me the story of how they came to be so utterly enthusiastic about helping us, and why we should utterly trust them.

Up until 1991, this couple lived with their family in Novi Sad, and ran a successful rubber business. I'm not sure how they came to be such good friends with Gs father, but I suspect that business connections kept them close. They are great people: I like them a lot. She is a tough machine who seems capable of organising anything, and he is the strong and silent type, and they are both warm and affectionate people. Anyway, they and Gs parents get along like a house on fire. Perhaps house on fire is the right metaphor here, as around the time of the massacres in Vukovar and elsewhere, ethnic hatred rose to the boiling point even in the normally peaceful city of Novi Sad. Other Croats (in other parts of the country) had had their houses burned to the ground, and they perhaps sensibly decided that they had little choice but to flee to Croatia. In a turn of events that I don't know precisely - but which was repeated thousands of times on both sides of the war - they lost their business and were left with nothing but an apparently unfair house trade with some Croatian Serb refugees in Slatina. Gs father gave them 8000 DM - which was then a considerable sum in Yugoslavia - and told them to go and start a new life. The story ends happily as they now live in Croatia with another successful business and grown up children now successful in their own right, probably profiting from that refugee initiative that I've so often commented on in the past.

Anyway, Gs father, being the last of a breed of Yugoslav gentleman, naturally refused to take the money back when they offered a repayment. R & S decided that instead they could offer their considerable experience - at no cost - to help us build our house; if not to repay a debt of all debts, then to help out some dear friends. This is the kind of friendship loyalty that I've never experienced, and I think it goes without saying that I'll trust them - and for that matter their children and grandchildren - unconditionally.

An Eerie Sense of Homecoming

2009-03-26T07:08:00.004+01:00

Those who look at this blog could be forgiven for wrongly thinking that I dislike the former Yugoslavia, or tolerate it out of necessity owing to my relationship. This tale, however, should convince people otherwise.

In early 1993 I was just flying back to the UK after a visit to Canada. It was one of those strange times in a young mans life (I was 24): love life just recently in tatters, no job prospects in the then depressed economy, an unfinished PhD and only six months left to deal with it. I didn't feel I had a lot to smile about. As I woke from my typical 20 minutes of sleep on the night crossing, I noticed the sun shining out in from the blinds and opened mine to see the countryside over England and experienced a strange feeling of thank goodness I'm home at last. I remember remarking to myself how strange this was at the time: I mean I'd just lived in this country a three years, and wasn't Canada still my home? Anyway, seven years later I left the UK somewhat reluctantly for Germany, and still consider it to be home. Formative years, you might say, define the man, perhaps in some ways more so than where one actually grows up.

Last week, we were in Opatija for a) a break, and b) a survey of the ever improving house on Krk. We lucked out, I must say, with the weather: it was mostly glorious, and being March, refreshingly empty, which proved ideal and just what we needed: quiet walks by the sea, some sunshine, and I even ate Lignje na zaru and enjoyed it for the first time in ages (I had, as readers of this blog might remember, an overdose on this some time ago).

Anyway, in thie middle of this break, I had to drive from Opatija to Genoa for a conference. It was a nuisance driving 700km there and back on two successive days, but easier, I reckoned, than any train or plane combination odyssey. The conference was in a lovely venue in the centre of the old city, we had fabulous food, the people were very nice, I had a great walk around the old port, the drive back was long but mostly painless, and when I got into Slovenia I felt for only the second time in my life: thank goodness I'm home at last.

What on earth? I mean Slovenia isn't even a place where I've spent much time. Two nights in Ljubliana on separate occasions and perhaps two meals in and around Bled. Upon self-inspection I realised that it was a kind of better the devil you know feeling than anything else. I mean I like Italy, but it drives me bonkers. The drive was mostly painless, but perhaps 10% of the time I had the crazy gesticulating Italian 50cm from my bumper at speed. I stayed in a lovely hotel room, had a fantastic view and the internet and phone didn't bloody work (as ever). The language frustrates me (I speak some Spanish and French, but as these are seemingly both muddled with Serbian now, Italian is like some kind of strange puzzle in my befuddled brain), and I don't really understand how Italians think. That's not to say that I couldn't one day figure the country and the people out, but certainly at the moment, it isn't home. At least in the former Yugoslavia I understand the crazy drivers (e.g.: Rule 17: in Istria/Kvarner, if you see "RI" on the license plate, it is best to get out of the way. Rule 18: do not drive in Belgrade, etc.). When stuff doesn't work, at least it is consistent (usually a bad view goes together with not working, and if you pay for stuff it work, unlike at least my most recent Italian episode). The people might not be my people, but I'm beginning to understand the way they think, and for the most part, I like them, warts and all. And I suppose even if they laugh/gawk at my Serbocroation or my wimpy foreign manners, they do, for the most part, accept me.

The nail in the coffin, if that is the appropriate metaphor here, is that I have never, not in nearly nine years of living and working in Germany, felt the same thing upon landing in Frankfurt or crossing the border by car. The devil I know better is definitely that of the south Slavic variety.

Communist relics everywhere

2009-03-18T20:30:00.006+01:00

If you want to go swimming in Novi Sad there is a quaint but daft ritual you have to go through. You might, being logically minded, think that going to the swimming pool, paying something and then swimming might be a sensible plan. But oh no, you silly outsider. Of course you can't just go to the swimming pool, you need to buy a ticket at another little office about 200 metres away first. This office has (or at least had) opening hours that differ from the pool itself. One person issues the tickets, the other takes the money. Make sure, you dimwit, that you specify precisely when you are going to swim. There is 10-13, or 13-15, and naturally tickets for one time period won't work for the other, though they cost the same. Oh, and don't be surprised if the ticket office isn't open when the pool is open. What, are you new here?

Ok, Ok, so I don't remember the exact details I'm quoting above, and I'm exaggerating, but not very much. Anyway, I do this in order to introduce one of the most interesting and persistent themes in the former Yugoslavia: namely signs of communist lunacy lingering on.

Another one of my favorites is in the Rijeka airport. There are of course signs of modernisation everywhere - modern rent-a-car firms and travel companies - but if you want to eat or drink something before you get on the plane, you get exposed to one of these strange relics. The cafe (at least as it was circa 2007) consists of a long counter in large tiled atrium with tables and chairs. Behind the counter are four or five staff, all women, all angry. They're angry because nobody seemingly understands that they (or at least three out of four of them) are not there to serve customers or answer questions. One is there to take orders only without knowledge of the menu, one prepares things, another cleans, and still another seems to be employed only angrily tell-off customers who get the system wrong. Foreigners from five countries stumble around bewildered trying to spend the last of their money and often failing to do so in frustration.

JAT airways is (or was) another reminder of the communist past. Until a few years ago it was not possible to buy tickets online or indeed through any travel agency. One had, naturally, to buy the ticket at he airport before the flight or travel in person to the airline's central office. This used to drive me bonkers as I always had the feeling that I would a) not get on the plane or b) have to pay more, which was at least for me was always the case. Prices varied pretty wildly and at least in Novi Sad, one got a better price by flattering the ego of the woman in charge of tickets. One had to buy her a little flower or at the very least say nice things about her to get her (pretty please) to give you a ticket on a flight that would eventually be revealed to be empty. G said that as late as 1999 she still had to travel from Cambridge to London just to speak to somebody about the possibility of buying a ticket to Belgrade. Like many of these other relics of the communist past, people just simply refuse to work by telephone - and amazingly had the power to do so. In all of these things there is just a sniff of the corruption inherent in the system. Always the system assumed that people would serve their comrades, and always people found some way to abuse it, if not exactly for money or favors, then just for personal satisfaction.

The pool, the cafe and the airline are charming reminders of a system that once strove for full employment rather than customer care, being very literally run entirely for the convenience of the staff. And of course this makes them rather unpleasant on the receiving end. But mind you, there are good relics as well. We once spent a very pleasant three days at a hotel on Brijuni, Tito's one-time summer residence off the coast of Istria. There one is/was exposed to the very best of old communism - the service then afforded to visiting dignitaries. The hotel is/was like a time-warp to mid-sixties chic: Bakelite ashtrays, gigantic (but then high-end) radio/television console, funny looking phone and furniture from some sixties science fiction film. In the restaurant is the kind of service that one almost never gets in the former Yugoslavia anymore. Professionally trained waiters, complete with uniforms out of an Agatha Christie adaptation and bleached white towel over one arm, and charming manners.

I think it would be a shame to lose these things entirely. Clearly the swimming pool, the restaurant, JAT and the thousands of things like them are already disintegrating. Some clever clogs at JAT obviously realised they might even turn a profit if they just stopped people from little power-trips that were sending customers to the competition - never mind sacking them (i.e. now you can buy JAT flights via Opodo). But I would like to see some of this preserved. It would break my heart to find out (as is probably already the case) that the old communist hotel was purchased by Sheraton and morphed into some vanilla flavored Starbuck's latte type of establishment. Far better to preserve this time warp to show people what it was really like: kitch and all. I mean afterall it is still a great and unique hotel.

Perhaps too there might be some mechanism to preserve the screwy traditions of over-staffed, inefficient, customer-defocused cafe/restaurant. Maybe some ride in a theme park or an entire theme park (Tito's world?) would do the trick. Upon arrival you would stand in a queue for a long time before being tutted at, and told you were in the wrong one. You would then be forced to figure out a bewildering system of tickets and queues to get a coffee, and need to negotiate with some bored official smoking behind a desk to use the toilet.

Hmm. Maybe not, eh?

On studying forever

2009-03-02T16:13:00.003+01:00

One of my favorite subjects in Germany is just how long people seem to study without anybody else seeming to notice or care. One institute, which shall remain nameless, describes a ten semester (i.e. five year) programme on its web site, and then announces that the average time for students to finish is fifteen semesters (i.e. seven and a half years). And of course an average means a tail to the long end, since few students will finish in less than five years, so that means there must be a good number that take 8 or 9 years.

Precisely the same thing often happens in Serbia and probably Croatia and many other places in the region and around the world. I've been repeatedly astonished to hear that many of Gs friends are still studying for their first degree. This is something G herself finished in 1999 and something which is a dim and distant memory for me. At first I would ask if the person were very young, but now it is more or less established that many people just drift along for 8, 9, 10 even 11 years without anybody really commenting. Perhaps a dozen times we've tried to meet up with one or other of her old friends, only to be told (for example by parents) that they musn't be disturbed because they have an important exam and need to study. This at the age of (say) 32 when they've already been studying for 9 years, they live at home and almost invariably have a couple of older female relations cooking and cleaning for them.

What, I ask, is going on? I guess the truth is that when people have little to look forward to in the job market, they prefer to linger as a student rather than get on with their lives. Having all the home comforts around probably isn't the best thing either. I'd be willing to bet that students in (say) Novi Sad that come from (say) Srenjenin and thus pay more for lodging and experience all the usual pizza-boxes, rat-infestations and the like that student housing offers will finish quicker.

I think as well that the weaker the University in terms of international standing, the less inclined the faculty are to get people finished. I don't know if this is because the staff have something to prove (i.e. our course is too difficult to finish in the specified time), or if they want students to stay on as cheap labour when grants are non-existent or difficult to get, or for some other reason.

In the AngloSaxon Universities, at least as I remember mine from the eighties, a four year degree is nearly always done in four years. You can take longer (say five) if you can afford it but normally you would need to have a good reason (e.g. illness, family problems, etc.). The conventional wisdom is that if people can't handle it, they drop out and do something else.

Anyway, I don't have much to offer in terms of advice apart from obviously finish quicker. And perhaps be critical about advice from either your family (who probably wrongly think you can't handle the stress and why don't you take this exam next year) and academic staff who might have some hidden agenda to stop you from getting through too quickly.

Naming a baby Balkan

2009-02-23T16:14:00.005+01:00

For only the obvious reasons I've been thinking about names in Serbian/Croatian. What kind of name can you give to a baby girl with a mixed heritage? Amidst all the Jelenas, Tanjas, Mirjanas, Tijanas & Bojanas, there are some real gems. Some beautiful, and some, well, even if they are not ugly, they are, well, difficult.

I think that SerboCroatian produced some of the funniest names in history. For example, quaint, charming, and out-of-the-question for us is Traktorka, probably given to many peasant farmers' daughters in the newly industrialised Yugoslavia as a tribute to the biggest equipment purchase of his life. It would be like an American calling his daughter Fixedtermilina or something. Right up there with Hitlerina is Staljinka, derived from the short-lived friendship with the Soviet Union. Equally frightening is Mašinka , which I read is a direct tribute not (as you might think from the sound) to machine, but to a Tommy Gun (machine gun). It does, however, have a cute diminuitve: Maša which you might never associated with an implement of war. Admittedly these are all names G's grandmother's generation, and I doubt many people kept them to the present day.

Elsewhere there are relatively common names that would stymie easy friendships with the English speaking world only owing to unpronouncability. For example, Ksena and Tihana both require you essentially to gob while saying them. Other names look like somebody forgot a letter, like Smiljka which I have simply never been able to say correctly quickly, or the male name Grgur (Gregory or Gregor) that would at least require some coaching for the non-Serbian family members to pronounce. To this day my family members have to do a little jump when they pronounce the island Krk and even then they don't say it right.

I think, on balance, we can't be too creative here. Two syllables max, and no messing about with R-as-a-vowel, or sounds that hurt the mouth of a non-native speaker. Ana, Marija, Mila, Ema?

Blowing hot and cold about Serbia and this blog

2009-02-19T13:11:00.006+01:00

It's been a while since I blogged anything here, and perhaps the reason why is worthy itself of an entry. Being honest: we've had a few rather bad experiences in or about Serbia over the past few months. Nothing that serious, but just enough to dampen my enthusiasm to the point where I haven't felt inspired to write anything for a while.

I remember in Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island (his tribute to life in Britain), he said that a smile from a pub owner, or a pleasant sunset in the English countryside would be enough to make him think that he should never leave the country. Something of the opposite has happened recently to me regarding Serbia. As I said, nothing that serious, but just an accumulation of things that have dampened my enthusiasm.

Its a funny ole relationship that one has with these countries sometimes. A real mix of hope and despondency. Meeting an enthusiastic young person in the workplace can make you believe that there is great hope, and some ape-like, un-intelligent staunch nationalist on the street can tear it away. Grace, charm and courtesy shown by some stranger in a restaurant is ruined by some pushy Balkan stereotype in a swimming pool threatening to punch a pregnant woman (I kid you not). A deep sense of family can make you think that other countries have a thing or two to learn from the ex-Yugoslavia, but then the ass-backwards logic that one has to adhere to in order participate makes you think that they actually have it wrong. Pleasant scenery in the countryside is offset by the mud and pollution of Novi Sad in February. Et cetera.

As ever, other countries are similar, and having been an ex-pat basically all my adult life, I know well that one often simultaneously loves and hates where one lives or visits. I guess its the extremes in Serbia or Croatia that are the difference. As much as I whinge about Germany or the Germans, I don't ever really feel afraid or worried like I can do in Serbia. English people can be rude, but never on a par with what can sometimes happen in Serbia. It's as if there's this precarious control mechanism that can both pleasantly surprise or deeply terrify without warning.

Anyway, it will blow hot again, and when it does, I'll be back at it.

A week with the ex-Yugo elite youth

2008-12-17T06:32:00.008+01:00

My other half's UK company retreat was, for the first time, held in Germany last week. I like the event, as it brings together people from all over Europe - employees and customers alike. This time, however, I got perhaps more of an exposure to the Serbian side of the business. Its a small company and needs to be careful in terms of expenditure, but also (mostly) in terms of executive time. G had the great idea, then, that we could get the most out of the time and save to boot by having the entire Serbian office staying in our house. The reasoning being that we could easily and comfortably accommodate five guests (two others stayed in a hotel), giving her ample opportunity to speak to everybody at all hours.

It was a very jolly week - the house has never been so lively - lots of Serbian around long meals, lots of discussions about work and beyond. The thing I always like about these kinds of visitors is that they are uniformly young (22-27), and typically among the elite youth of the country, which makes them both inspiring and entertaining. True, Borat-like statements occasionally bubble to the surface (at some point someone asked if our dog always barked at Gypsies), but on the whole I really like the energy of the motivated ex-Yugo youth. And obviously it was this that got me together with the person inspiring me to write this Blog.

Almost without exception the people in the Serbian branch of the company are atypical Novi Sad residents in some way - many refugees (Croatian & Bosnian Serbs), lots of returning diaspora (from Canada, the US, Australia, South Africa), local minorities (Vojvodinian Hungarians, Macedonians), and perhaps herein lies the key. The energy of the migrant seems to be something very special, and worth harvesting when available. No better example than the Croatian Serb refugee, who in between bemoaning about the state of his former countries, and the general way of things in the former Yugoslavia, brought five times more money than any salesman (including those in the UK or Germany) owing to his energy, charm and tenacity. He once said to me that when you've had such rough times, you never, ever want to miss a trick to experience life to the full, be it in love, career, travel or even food.

And I know, I know, that these people are the exception, and that for each of them there are probably ten who don't seem to want to start with life even when they are pushing 30. But with such energy in this migrant minority, I think these countries can't fail to move forward.

Differences in perceived worth: the IKEA phenomenon

2008-12-10T11:23:00.006+01:00

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!

The real Serbian mentality

2008-11-12T07:12:00.008+01:00

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.

Yes you can or No you can't?

2008-11-10T06:19:00.004+01:00

Like most everybody in the world, I was pleased about the US Presidential Election. Gob-smacked to be honest. That America can do this impressed me more than I thought was possible, especially given the terrible crap of the past eight years. I suspect that, despite the fact that the last Democrat in the white house bombed some of them, people in the former Yugoslavia probably mostly feel the same way. The world seems always safer with a Democrat in the White House.

But what of the race issue? What is the parallel? With so many new little countries forming on the basis of racial homogeneity, one has to wonder what goes through their minds when they see an African American voted to lead the country that has seen massive race riots in clear living memory (remember LA in the eighties?). It really begs the question: what is the equivalent in my country?

I think it is pretty clear for many: in France it would be like electing an Algerian, in Germany it would be a Turk, in the UK probably an Indian or a Pakistani. But in Croatia? Serbia? The problem here is that people have rather not thought of themselves as proud multi-racial countries (with exceptions I'll admit; despite what he turned into, I liked a speech from Koštunica in the Otpor time of ca. 1999 where he spoke inclusively about the multiracial nature of the then Yugoslavia), but as nations founded upon the idea of a single race.

There are, of course, many possibilities among the various countries. In Croatia or Slovenia you might imagine an Italian as the Obama. The Macedonian one would necessarily be Albanian, and while this might also be the parallel in Serbia, another obvious choice would be a Roma person (with something between 1.4 and 7% of the population), or one could pick somebody from the many Hungarians. But in fact, I guess for Serbia and Croatia, the simple choice would be to imagine a Croat or a Serb leading the wrong country.

I'm not making any practical political suggestions, as that would be absurd. I guess what I'm trying to suggest is that thinking this way, without sneering or eliciting a reaction that suggests it will be ridiculous forever, is probably the only way to imagine ever being on a par with the modern world. I think the rest of Europe also has somewhere to go on this score: Germans will acknowledge the Turkish minority, but I would strongly doubt they could currently put together a ticket that would have ethnic Germans electing someone of Turkish decent to lead the country. Ditto Serbs electing an ethnic Croat and vice versa. But the need to move beyond racial politics is clearly what is needed to face our modern challenges. So if you are happy about the change in Washington, then ask yourself if your country would ever be so progressive, and if not, why not?

The wrong rung of the social ladder

2008-09-08T09:59:00.002+02:00

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.

More little countries

2008-08-25T12:16:00.009+02:00

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.

Yugo diary 2008 VI - Building a house without a boiler in the bathtub

2008-08-22T13:50:00.002+02:00

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.

Yugo diary 2008 V - Langauge Lunancy in Unlikely Places

2008-08-12T10:00:00.003+02:00

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.

Yugo diary Summer 2008 IV - Becoming normal Europeans... on the road

2008-07-23T18:20:00.018+02:00

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

2008-07-21T15:37:00.007+02:00

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

2008-07-21T12:44:00.003+02:00

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

2008-07-19T14:36:00.002+02:00

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

2008-07-13T07:38:00.015+02:00

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.

Acceptable foreigners

2008-06-28T07:13:00.011+02:00

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.

The Best Moments in Croatian Football

2008-06-08T10:50:00.014+02:00

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.

Getting to know Baka Mila

2008-06-06T12:38:00.008+02:00

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.

Not speaking your Mother-tongue

2008-06-01T09:00:00.005+02:00

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.

On the silliness of language distinctions

2008-05-21T08:47:00.016+02:00

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.

The adages of old Serbian wives

2008-05-20T15:43:00.010+02:00

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 in bare feet! The look is one of horror, as if to say that I'm walking a thin line between life and death. A some time corollary of this is that wearing shoes inside will lead to death for all of those inside the house. You'd think I spent my days walking in nuclear waste.

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?

The virtues of cabbage weddings

2008-04-13T08:09:00.008+02:00

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.

Muzika Balkanska

2008-04-11T11:17:00.004+02:00

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.

Making do and mending

2008-04-08T14:02:00.009+02:00

My mother-in-law is arriving on Sunday, and though it goes against the cliches, I'm actually looking forward to it. For a number of reasons. First and foremost, it is always nice to have her around (I have to say this, but I do mean it). Second, it helps my Serbian immensely, as we now speak this exclusively. And third, she is one of those people who is utterly handy to have around the house - cleaning parts of the house we forgot about years ago, and fixing things that typical Westerners would probably throw away rather than bother trying to repair.

In this day and age of environmental concerns verging on the hysterical, I think we in the west often forget some of the basic principles that our grandparents upheld: waste-not want not, make-do and mend. A lot of this is still alive and well in Serbia, but sadly, as westerinisation creeps in, it is being lost.

This is best illustrated, perhaps by example. Last year our aging digital camera went on the fritz and we then immediately began to consider getting a new one. It was only 3.5 megapixels and when one can get terrapixels with a widgeryflop extension and a billion squillabytes of storage, for just a few hundred Euros - why not? More to the point: it would be impossible to fix it here in Germany. Fixing electronics past their guarantee is hopeless as anybody who has tried to do so will testify. Usually one has to send the thing away for weeks or months, and then the whole process costs more than replacing it - what with the price of technical skills and so on. Anyway, this broken, obsolete camera sat unused and sad and broken and ready for the bin until my Mother-in-law said she would take it and get it repaired. Har har, I thought, how naive she was. In the end, we gave it to her.

I ate my words a few weeks later when I found myself shocked to see her using it. Apparently it was just a loose contact, and was fixed in Serbia in just a few minutes by some bloke in a shop. And what about all those cables that she didn't take (and indeed we couldn't find)? And the charger? Apparently this was all dealt with easily, and in any case, when it was full of pictures, she just had another shop print everything out for her, since pictures aren't pictures unless they're in your hand. The irony is that we, faced with a bewildering selection, and not really having time, haven't even replaced the camera, so we now get pictures from her.

I've had a lot of other experiences like this since in Serbia. I've had shoes fixed that I would have chucked out, and fixed well, for just a few Euros. I've had cashmere jumpers patched that I would have just replaced and used for rags. But sadly I think this is not going to last forever.

Anybody who has been visiting Serbia, or other countries in the region, over the past five years can't fail to see how much things are changing, and I think a lot of the changes mean the end for the kinds of things I've mentioned above. We in the west are so used to the use-and-throw-away philosophy that we readily impose it on the new members of our club, or at the very least encourage them to adopt it. So this means that these little fix-it shops and a rather large cottage industry that makes clothing and other things is disappearing. It is, afterall, hard to stay in business when a mega-giant multinational is offering to replace anything broken or worn-out for so cheap. And these things, unlike the coat that a neighbor made by hand, have logos on them, so they must be better.

I've also found it rather sad that this notion of quality in goods is seemingly disappearing as well. A few years ago there was a great clothing store in Serbia called Zekstra - indeed I still have two coats made by them. What impressed me was that they actually provided quality at reasonable price - not cheap, but acceptable - even if things weren't as trendy as they could have been. Last time I was in Novi Sad the shop had closed down. And apparently (see www.zekstra.com) it has now morphed into something else - seemingly unable to resist the onslaught from Zara and the Gap - it is now a part of MaxMara/Diesel. Young Serbs now want trendy, foreign disposable clothing instead of home-spun goods that last for years.

I don't know if there is a happy ending to this, and maybe this whole little rant is just a function of me getting older, but I was encouraged the other day to see, here in Germany, a fix-it shop run by some Turks in one of the Heidelberg suburbs. Apparently these kinds of things can come back if the need arises, and I hope that I can finally get that busted toaster fixed.

A man's best friend for learning Serbian

2008-03-30T22:08:00.012+02:00

She has Hungarian nationality, but her parents were Serbian. She was raised by a Hungarian/Slovak couple and their children, and, since she moved in with us, she is the best thing to happen to my spoken Serbian for a long time, giving me hours of helpful practice. Though some would call her a bitch, she is a joy to behold, great fun to be with, eager to learn and try and taste everything, and she is, of course, our new puppy.

Monica (or Monitsa or just Moni) really does understand Serbian. And I don't mean Serbocroatian or Serbian/Croatian or Serbian/ Croatian/ Bosnian/ Montenegrin or Naški or anything else neutral, I mean proper Serbian dialect. A recent Croatian visitor - indeed a linguist - who visited us recently here in Germany was shocked, and even mildly impressed, to hear my correct and distinctly Serbian (even Novi Sad) vowels when I would say sedi (and not sijedi or sidi or some such) - for sit down, lezi - for lie down, dodji (come here), dole/gore (down/up) and ne about eight hundred times per day. I have also learned several kiddie, giggle-inducing verbs that one never learns in books, such as kakiti (kakati in Croatian I discovered) and piškiti for the things that Moni likes to do mostly outside, but occassionally on G's precious Turkish carpets or in my shoes. Gristi describes what she does with her teeth to my feet when I'm taking my shoes off causing me to yelp, and when she's misbehaves, we call her glupi psu - crazy dog.

What is most convenient, however, is that G. speaks Serbian to the dog as well, which makes a nice change. I'm been trying for years to get her to speak Serbian to me, but it takes a certain patience to speak Serbian to a learner, especially one pushing 40, so after a few frustrating sentences she usually gives up and switches to English. However, even the most impatient people have more time when speaking to somebody who is furry and 12 weeks old. And it seems that most everybody wants to speak their native language with small animals. So Moni and I, we learn Dog Serbian together.

The fact that other people (i.e. in Germany) don't understand isn't a problem. Indeed, I'm glad to have somebody else who speaks this handy-dandy language that G and I sometimes use to speak to each other when we want to discuss somebody's weight, smell, clothes etc. And if Moni understands sedi when I say kaki most people will be impressed that such a young dog does what she's told.

I wonder: does her little puppy brain deal with case? Is it Monitsa or Monitse? Or does it matter, since when do you ever use anything but the vocative with a dog? And while we are on the subject of Serbian confusion, we bought her a house yesterday, i.e. a kuća, and she is a puppy (or cub), so kuče, making her house - that is the puppy's house is kučetova kuća. The houses house? The houses dog? And yes, I know, I'm a dunce for making a song and dance about it, but my "ch" sounds are primitive, so my ability to hear the difference between č and ć is about as easy as differentiating the English names Dan and Den for a Serbian native speaker, meaning that I don't know whether it is the dogs house or the houses dog. Probably doesn't matter to her.

Which reminds me of a Serbian book, that I tried to read: Kuća Mrtvih Mirisa. So lots of genders, lots of cases in there, I can see that, I'm not that stupid: all those endings and what not - I read about all that malarky somewhere. But the problem is I don't know if it means the dead smelly house, the smell of dead houses, or the house of dead smells, or even the house that smells dead. Blimey, I think Moni and I will need to attend an intensive course, or perhaps I should just stick to Dog speak. Braaaavo, Dooooobra.

Croatia with the Serbs

2008-03-23T09:46:00.012+01:00

I first visited Croatia in the summer of 2004. Not such an odd thing for a Canadian living the Europe: like most people, I had heard about it as a place to visit, and it was supposed to be great, relatively cheap, sunny with nice food and people, so why not? What was a little odd was who I was traveling with: three mostly Serbian people from Novi Sad, my girlfriend and her parents. Now, there is quite a lot of traffic in to and out of Croatia, so I can't really be 100% sure, but I was pretty damn sure that we were the only people who were in that part of Croatia in a car from Novi Sad, complete with Serbian passports, the little Serbian flag on the license plate and everything. Indeed, I saw only one other car from Serbia the whole month that we were there, a Belgrade license plate on a car tucked away in a parking lot in Pula.

My other half had been back to Croatia a couple of times. Like many of the former Yugoslavian diaspora, she had a lot of friends from different former provinces, and had been the past two summers on sailing trips with various Croatian friends, but she hadn't dared to be as conspicuous as all of this - flying in with just one passport check, but no other obvious symbols to give her away. Coming from Novi Sad, and being something of a true polyglot herself (six languages and one of them is Hungarian) she blends very quickly. Add the odd "j" to your words, and remember to say Kruh instead of Hleb nothing can really go too wrong.

Anyway, back to our 2004 trip. I must admit I was a bit nervous, given that I had also heard all kinds of opinions, mostly from people in Serbia, which I had visited several times already, about why it wasn't a good idea to drive to Croatia: they would vandalize your car, beat you up, etc. Actually, nothing of the sort happened and indeed, it was rather the opposite.

Virtually everybody we met in hotels and restaurants was very glad to see us, or rather them, as normal tourists like myself were obviously part of the summer furniture. People of her parents generation generally moaned (as +50-somethings often do) that things weren't as good as they used to be, and that the new customers (Germans, Italians) weren't of the same ilk as the old Yugoslavs. At one point over ribice in a restaurant in Punat, on the Island of Krk, her father explained to me, in his charming, if a little broken English, that "We are having a very nice time". I think the pleasant surprise, combined with nostalgia must have been almost overwhelming.

A little later, we went to Brijuni, which was Tito's summer residence - an Island off the Istrian peninsula. There, we saw a play about the former Yugoslavia, set inside the prison island of Goli Otok. The play seemed good: we moved around from scene to scene inside the ruin of a fortress that served as the prison, and apparently all the actors were dead famous, but, of course, I had never heard of any of them, and understood almost nothing. Blah blah blah mi blah blah blah mislim blah blah blah dobar blah blah jeste blah blah nije. But quite an experience. After the performance there was a little party, I was asked to escort G.'s mother (who was feeling a bit timid) over to a group of people singing old songs, and eventually the singers worked out that she wasn't precisely one of them, and once again there was the usual charm and exchange of jokes about the mad old Communist days.

Other odd things happened on that trip. For instance, one day we were driving along a narrow road on Krk, and, as is very normal, a big German registered Mercedes was coming towards us, not giving way. I began my usual curses about the discourteous German drivers, when the window of the Mercedes rolled down, and a head popped out that was decidedly not German. A dark-complexioned man in sunglasses, with a rough beard looked out and said "Eh, Novi Sad" and then did something with his hand. Three fingers - thumb, index, and middle finger - points towards us. G.'s mother did the sign of the cross, her father laughed heartily, and when I asked what it was, G. said "he was just doing something stupid". Obviously, he was giving us the three fingered Serbian salute. I realised that we weren't, in fact, the only Serbs there, but that plenty of Gastarbeiters from Germany had probably been sneaking into the country for years. It reminded me of what an American once joked to me about Canadians in the US: "they can walk among us, almost undetected".

I've been back to Croatia now about a dozen times, and we've bought a house there that we are slowly beginning to renovate. I love the place, and love the people. It isn't all good, of course. In certain parts of the country one encounters people who really really don't want to hear that one is from Serbia, such as the Taxi driver who had "Croatia forever" tattooed on his neck. And in a later trip, another person from Novi Sad had his car vandalised - if it could be called that: somebody stole his license plate, probably wanting a souvenir. But such things could easily have happened in London, and indeed a lot more besides.

But on the whole, things have been event free as far as Serb/Croat relations are concerned. Indeed, I think I overheard some of the first ice-breaking conversations between Serbs & Croats regarding the wars. Last time we were there (September) we were sitting on the terrace at night sharing a glass of wine with our hosts. G's father was telling the story about the bomb-shelters in Novi Sad. The synopsis was the the mechanism for opening/closing the blast doors on the shelters had stopped working, and they thus needed to use a Tractor to close them. They had to draw straws for the hero who would have to sacrifice himself for the sake of the others, and he bravely agreed he would go outside, close the door, and then die (a hero) in the bombing. It was only then that the others wondered how they would ever get out of the shelter. The Croats related the story about how the New Croatian Army toured the island to familiarize the people with the implements of war. They threw a single grenade into a field, and when they turned around, the entire village had disappeared, having fled in terror. Neither of these stories was uproariously funny (though perhaps in another blog I should try to explain my understanding of Balkan humor), but I could see how both people were carefully observing the other to see whether the subject matter was acceptable, and it was clear that the slightly over-enthusiastic guffaws were as much about relief as humor.

On mixed-up language centres

2008-03-21T09:31:00.010+01:00

Like many people, I once tried to learn Spanish. Not such an odd thing to do, since nearly half a billion people speak it, with speakers on every continent, and most importantly perhaps, tens of millions of speakers in the US, which I visit regularly. And being honest, I once had a Spanish flame. Whether I was/am fluent is probably a thing of perspective. In the sense that Canadians from Alberta say they speak French because they studied it for four years in high-school (but couldn't order a coffee in Paris) I am utterly fluent. But in the typical European polyglot sense of "I speak a little English, would you like to debate the finer points of philology?" I am hopeless. Nevertheless, there are actually people in this world that I only speak Spanish with, or at least I did until they picked up English out of their own work-related necessity, so I guess I am functional, but not great at it.

My Spanish began to go wrong when I began to attempt the mega-impossible: namely speak the not-so-common-to-learn Serbian language. And it went wrong in a big way. The problem was that every time I tried to speak Spanish after beginning to learn Serbian, I ended up throwing Serbian words into Spanish sentences. Tengo malo hambre. Quiero cafe samo. That sort of thing.

Now, even the most ignorant person linguistically probably knows that these languages are not related. Yeah, yeah, sure, I know they are Indoeuropean tongues, but then so are English, Sanskrit and Albanian, and only an Academic, in a sweater with holes in it, would think that knowing one would help understand another.

People who have tried to pick-up more than one new language will understand, and probably won't see what the fuss is about - this is normal, and something you get over as you get better at the languages. But there are other languages in my brain that don't suffer from any interference problems: I do speak German pretty well, and I guess my French is about the same as Spanish, and I'm not just being a silly English-speaking Canadian: I have used it and it does work, sort of. It seems that whatever space Spanish occupies in my brain (and not the space for German or French), is now being over-written by Serbian, and it doesn't seem to get better as I improve my Serbian. Rather my Spanish, albeit already atrophying from lack of use, is degrading all the more rapidly.

My reasoning for this is simply that Serbian just sounds so much like Spanish. And there are also a vast number of words in one language that are words in the other, but that mean something else. Consider:

Serbian = Spanish (English)
Isto = Mismo (The Same)
Mi smo = Nosotros somos (We are)
Čiste = Limpio (Clean)
Wiz = Chiste (Joke)
Malo = Pequeño (Small)
Loš = Mal (Bad)

And on and on and on. Is it bad, small or sick? Is it clean or a joke? Is it the same or are we something? Argh.

What's more, many Serbian words simply sound like they easily could be Spanish: Samo, Isto, Dobro (Alone, The Same, Good), which is a far cry from the equivalents in (say) Germany: Allein, Gleich, Gute. No chance of interference there, or so it would seem.

And to augment my frustration, I must suffer the indignation that Serbian native speakers also don't see what the fuss is about, even when they speak Spanish. How could you ever mix up Mi smo and Mismo? You dunce.

A few years ago, some perhaps over-proud Serbs in Cambridge were saying that Serbian/Croatian speakers were the only people who can truly pick up Spanish and speak it like a native. I don't know where on Earth such a fact would come from (did somebody study this?), and frankly, if you can't say "th" I don't see how it would be possible to speak Castillian Spanish perfectly, but I could nevertheless see their point. It must just be a slight shift in the brain, the sounds (anyway) come flawlessly. Ovo es malo interesantno, no?

And while we are on the subject, does anybody else get confused by cyrillic/latin ambiguities? Mecapa or Mesara? Hypo or Nuro? Novi Sad or Hobi Cat? Argh....

Krompir or Kumpir?

2008-03-20T10:30:00.013+01:00

What does a Turkish Kebab shop have to do with the former Yugoslavia? Well something anyway. Yesterday we walked across the river to what we consider to be the one decent place to buy food in our typical German suburb - namely a little Turkish restaurant, complete with Turkish television and the usual friendly service. As I ate, I noticed that they had recently bought what appeared to be an oven for baked potatoes. The only original sign on the machine was in English, and frankly hard to understand for a native speaker: a half-washed out picture of what was probably a potato with cream cheese and chives, with the word "Baked". For clarity, the Turkish owners had added their own label - Kumpir - to clarify things for customers. Not exactly the same word, but recognisable enough: Krompir is the Serbian word for Potato. Which brings me to one of my favorite subjects regarding Serbia and generally all southern parts of the former Yugoslavia: Just how Turkish everything still is.

For those not well versed in Balkan history, some basics: most people know about the collapse of Constantinople in 1453, and how the Ottoman Turks kept on going, eventually reaching the gates of Vienna, and laying siege to it twice if memory serves. However, between Constantinople and Vienna lies virtually all of the Balkans, from Greece to Croatia, and the Turks stayed there, at least in Serbia, Bosnia & Macedonia - for half a millennium, and they left there mark on everything. Drive south of Belgrade and you immediately see a difference from (say) Vojvodina or Croatia, which the Turks only occupied briefly, or not at all. In South Serbia one finds Persian carpets & low-tables in the cafes, darker complexions, and frankly a more oriental feel.

One of the quaintest surviving marks is the fact that many of the words for things related to civilised comforts - pillows, carpets, good food, etc. - are still Turkish. Jastuk (pillow), Krompir (potato), Burek (pastry), and many more that I ought to compile. Makes you think that the Serbs didn't really have many creature comforts before the invasion. Which, of course, is probably at least partly true. The Turks were the great civilisers of their time, bringing exotic foods from the orient, the virtues of cleanliness, and education. Ok, ok, I know they were not always the kindest of overlords, but then times were rough back then. Anyway, given the relative quality of the Turkish lifestyle relative to some of the neighbors - imagine if the Serbs had instead picked up cuisine from the Germans - I think the remaining marks are fundamentally a good thing.

Inspriation to do what I set out to do with this Blog

2008-03-19T10:56:00.009+01:00

Sometimes it takes an outsider to get you to do what you always intended. I had originally sought a blog so that I could vent my various feelings about the former Yugoslavia, but as one can see, I've done nothing of the sort.

In any case, looking on B92, the sound-as-a-pound news network in Serbia, I found a blog from Rosemary Bailey Brown (an American living in Sombor), and realised that somebody had beaten me to the blog. Actually, she is far more deserving of this, since she has taken the ultimate step of actually moving to Serbia with her Serbian husband. A few Emails later, and a prompting from her, and here I am.

So, erm... where to begin? I think there is a certain legacy at the begining of such a thing - old memories and stories, etc. - that must be dealt with first. So perhaps over the coming weeks, while I am at least a few weeks away from my next Serbian experience (a visit from the in-laws - don't get me started), I can try to do just this.

Probably I need to explain myself first. I'm from Canada, but I've lived in Europe since 1990, ten years in England, and the last seven in Germany. I'm a scientist - molecular biology actually if that means anything - and the reason I'm interested in the former Yugoslavia is deeply personal. The love of my life comes from Novi Sad, which is the capital of the former province of Vojvodina, in the northern part of what is now Serbia. Vojvodina is a bit like Kosovo in the sense that it lost its autonomy by becoming effectively part of Serbia, but in truth it is far more Serbian than Kosovo. Having said that Vojvodinians rather pride themselves on a certain ethnic diversity. Serbs are clearly the majority, but there are tens of thousands of Hungarians, Romanians, Slovakians, Roma/Sinti, and Ruthenians. Indeed, G. is part Hungarian herself (her father is half Hungarian from Bečej in the north of the province) and she spoke it until she was six at school. With all this diversity, Vojvodina isn't such a bad place to speak Serbian as a learner, since many people also speak it imperfectly and you are just as likely to be taken as some odd minority as an actual outsider. (And while we are on the subject, as a gigantic Canadian with blue eyes, Vojvodina is the only European place where nobody seems to be able to tell at a glance that I'm an outsider)

Anyway, I digress, but I tell you all of this for a reason. My perspective will necessarily by rather biased towards a more Serbian one, but not so baised as I think I would be if she had come from (say) some proud, pure Serbian village 100km south of Belgrade. I should also say that we have bought a house in Croatia, mostly as she spent so many happy childhood summers there, and because we both love the country. I have never been to Bosnia (though I want to go, and indeed love Kemal Monteno i Sarajevo Ljubavi Moooojaaaaaa), Montenegro, Kosovo or Macedonia, and have spent only brief stints in Slovenia on my way to Croatia or Serbia (but like what I've seen so far).

The overall thing about the former Yugoslavia is that any foreigner who really experiences it as I have simultaneously falls in love with it, and feels an enormous sense of sadness about what has happened there. So necessarily this blog will fill with stories of both kinds. Two things that my significant other said to me in the early days of our relationship - when visits to Serbia/Croatia would be in a kind of fog of half-caught snippits that is typical of anybody learning such a moon-man language - illustrate this point exactly.

Before my first ever visit to Novi Sad, when everything had been booked, including a complex series of flights from Edmonton (Canada) via Frankfurt to Belgrade, she started to question whether I should come at all, commenting that "It is very sad here". I couldn't really understand, since I was all ready for anything - I expected a town something like Torrelavega (a grubby industrial town in Northern Spain) or Runcorn (ditto in Northern England), but was very pleasantly surprised. But I know now that she was expressing a feeling that things were so much worse than they were. Than they could be. She had seen her town disintegrate from one of the loveliest places in southern Europe into a mess of broken buildings, bad roads, rubbish on the streets, homeless people, and nothing really to sing about.

A few months later during our first visit to Belgrade proper, we were in a book shop (looking for a copy of Ivo Andric's books in English) when we found an old promotional book for Yugoslavia, complete with pictures of Lake Ohrid and the Croatian coast, and she pointed without showing a lot of emotion at these panoramic pictures of breathtaking beauty and said "this is my country". Again, the quixotic nature of her comments are all to typical of the way people in the former Yugoslavia think. She was expressing the complex feeling that comes about when a country you once loved in its entirety had torn itself to pieces, leaving nothing but old books collecting dust in a Belgrade bookstore.

Equally, I am always taken aback by how friendly everybody is in these new countries. It baffles me that a few politicians managed to ruin everything, and that we in the west never did more to teach what is, after all, a group of pretty similar people in terms of behavior and appearance, to live peacefully together. But whatever, and what is done is done.

Anyway, I think I'll post a more sensible story next time. But perhaps I can leave this one with probably the most relevant quotation about the former Yugoslavia that I have ever come across.

"How is it possible.... for this country to become stable and orderly and adopt at least as great a degree of civilization as its closest neighbors, if its people are divided as nowhere else in Europe? Four faiths live in this... land. Each of them is exclusive and from the same soil, but the centre of the spiritual life of each of these four groups is far away, in a foreign land, in Rome, Moscow, Istanbul, Mecca, Jerusalem, and God alone knows where, but at any rate not here where the people are born and die. And each group considers that its well-being is conditioned by the disadvantage of each of the other three faiths, and that they can make progress only at their cost. Each of them has made intolerance the greatest virtue. And each one of them is expecting salvation from somewhere outside, each from the opposite direction."
-- Ivo Andric, The Days of the Consuls

Dovidjena for now.