Acceptable foreigners

It happened again, when we were out walking the other day. We ran into a neighbor we hadn't yet met, and got talking. When she heard my accent in German, she asked me if I was English, and when she heard I was Canadian, she entered into a typical enthusiastic discussion about the usual things: Vancouver is very nice, the Rocky Mountains are beautiful, I liked Montreal, etc. (frankly I can't remember which). She then turned to G. and asked where she was from. The answer came: "Original from Novi Sad in Yugoslavia", and you could see our neighbors face drop in disappointment, and all she could utter was a mild "oh".

Once again, I must emphasise that this wan't a one-off (see Not Speaking Your Mother Tongue), but was the latest of many examples where it becomes apparent that certain kind of foreigners are preferred over others here (as elsewhere). The fact that G speaks perfect, though mildly accented German, has lead to some comic situations. For instance, people often guess wrongly, and then ask expectantly and enthusiastically if she is, perhaps, Swedish, only to be again visibly disappointed when she turns out to be something else.

As to the preferences here, broadly speaking: Italian, French, Scandinavian, Swiss, British, Irish, American, Canadian are in the good camp; Russian, Polish, Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, Turkish are not. The first group can come to Germany, work at whatever they were originally trained to do, speak appalling German, while having an accent typically considered to be charming, and live in your neighborhood. The second group are generally to be avoided unless they clean your house, or do any number of less desirable jobs, and if they should move into your street, the typical grumblings about There goes the neighborhood are uttered, and gradually, as numbers increase, that part of town starts to be considered dangerous.

I don't particularly want to have a go at Germany. The other countries where I've lived have been exactly like this. Certainly all over North America there are race issues, and this aside, most people would be much more interested to have somebody from New York, London, Paris or Rome as a neighbor than one (say) from Novosibirsk, Guayaquil or Podgorica, this mostly being a question of who would be the more glamorous. The English, as a very general rule, often dislike, or at least avoid, foreigners, but probably have particular unfavorites, including (alas) Germans. I think the tendency to (metaphorically) round up a group of foreigners and consider them inferior, or at least project some stereotypes on them is sadly one of those things that all humans do. And inevitably this comes with some kind of ranking scheme as to who is better than whom.

There isn't a happy ending to this, at least not yet. But I was uplifted somewhat when we visited G's brother's student digs in Mannheim for his birthday party. Apart from the usual quaint student goings on - I honestly, truly, not-making-it-up, kid you not, there was a guy with a goatee in a Che Guevara T-shirt playing a didgeridoo - I was encouraged to see several couplings across the desired/undesired groups - German/Polish, German/Uzbek, etc. I often forget that Heidelberg, where we live, is the archetype of old Germany as clearly opposed to Mannheim, which is very much the new. And moreover, the new generation of people is much more open to multiculturalism than the old. Give it ten or twenty years, and perhaps all of this will become moot, here and elsewhere.

The Best Moments in Croatian Football

I've traveled often in Croatia with Serbs, as I've said before. I don't have a lot more to add this time, but the opening of Euro 2008 (the football competition I mean) last night reminded me of one humorous incident from two years ago.

I'm not a big football fan, but I do like to watch big matches, such as the World Cup, and I watched many games from the 2006 World Cup. During the beginning of the competition, I was again in Croatia, with G's parents. And one fine day, after a fine lunch in Stara Baška , G's father reminded me that it was time for the match between Serbia & Montenegro and Argentina.

Now, Croatia, like most places, went pretty silent when the national team was playing, and indeed most of the World Cup matches were on somewhere, but Stara Baška is a small place, and there was no sign of a television where we were sitting. After a brief search, I found one in a quiet interior room. G's father and I (of course, rather predictably, the ladies weren't interested) dithered about whether to ask the people running the restaurant if they would let us watch the match there.

I've said before that I'm a bit nervous about certain people in Croatia - almost a Don't mention the war kind of feeling - and in this restaurant most of the staff were men of my age, which places them among those people who are likely to have the strongest feelings (i.e. it was people of my generation who ended up doing most of the fighting after all). But they had been very kind to us, and we had tipped generously, and the customer is always right - dirty Serb or not - so we eventually plucked up enough courage to ask the Konobar, if we could, pretty please, watch this match quietly on their TV. He nodded and smiled, as if suddenly his suspicions were confirmed - a lot of people recognise G's parents' distinctive Novi Sad accents - and probably he had made some guesses already. He lead us to the room, turned on the TV and then left us, though I noticed upon leaving, he muttered something to another Konobar in the distance (e.g. I imagined: Hey Ivica, two Serbs want to watch their team get destroyed, or something).


The match opened, and any Serbian football fan must now remember the outcome with pangs of regret. It wasn't that Serbia had bad players, but they played very badly - rather selfishly I thought, and certainly all subsequent analysis of the team said that they weren't playing as a team. Anyway, after just 6 minutes they were down 1 goal. The Croatian Konobars came by smiling after this goal, and after the second goal for Argentina (31 minutes) they started to cheer. This continued, but by the fourth goal for Argentina, I was impressed to see the sense of sympathy that one football fan has towards another at times like this. Naturally, the Croats didn't want the Serbs to win, but 4-0 is a humiliation (in fact, we left before it worsened to 6-0), and the Žao mi je - I'm sorry - that came afterwards, even with a smirk, seemed touchingly heartfelt.

I was reminded of a humorous Viz comic that I had seen some years ago, entitled Best moments in Scottish football, which consisted of nothing but some of the worst moments for the English national team: David Beckam's botched over-the-top-of-the-goal penalty against Portugal in Euro 2004; David Seaman looking whimsically at Ronaldinho's goal from a corner in the 2002 World Cup.

But cynicism aside, after this little Serb/Croat exchange, I was struck by how Football, that great War substitute, was working its magic again. I'll definitely cheer for Croatia this month.

Getting to know Baka Mila

Former-Yugoslavs seldom want to talk about the past. And for somebody of Western Canadian extraction this is almost sacrilegious. By this I mean that we, in Alberta, have so little history that every nugget is savoured and honored. Quaint ceremonies I remember from my childhood include celebrating the Province's 75th Anniversary, and many cultural or heritage days when people show off where they came from, dressing like their grandparents and so on.

Just why Serbs, Croats, etc. don't dwell on the past is perhaps obvious. I think this was put most fittingly in the Thames Television Documentary Series The World at War as: Old men forget, particularly when it hurts to remember. With so much bad stuff lingering in the past, who wants to think about it, let alone tell some outsider all the gory details. For the curious, this can be rather disappointing or even irritating, but obviously one bites ones tougue.

Over the years, however, I've accumulated a lot of details about G's past, and particularly about her grandmother, that I hope will finally prompt me to sit down and get her to tell me everything. This will have to be done, I realise, by me, in my broken Serbian, perhaps coaxing the rest of the family to translate the hard parts. No matter how hard I try, G. doesn't really want to do it. And it will be difficult, since Baka has little patience for my Serbian - she's never left Yugoslavia, and often berates me for not speaking it better. Trebaš da uceš Robert - You need to learn. And as is so typical of people lacking a more worldly perspective, she shinks me quite the dunce for not speaking properly.

Despite having stayed in one country (that became six and soon probably seven) all her life, she has obviously had a fascinating, event-ridden life. I think most grandparents have a lot to tell, and I don't think mine were any exception, but there is something more in Baka - more than anything I've ever been directly exposed to. In Canada there is the occasional war death, and the odd farm tragedy, but we, of course, never had a revolution - at least not in living memory - whereas Baka lived through two. And life in Canada, on the whole, has been so darned good for people who either moved or grew-up there. Good stories always need a healthy dose of tragedy.

What I know about Baka is sketchy. I know that she was born in the late 20s in Srem, a part of Vojvodina, and mostly brought up in a rural environment (her brother still lives on a farm today). Like everybody else, her life was turned upside down when the Nazi's invaded the region during the second world war. Her father was taken prinsoner - I think he was in the Army, but I'm not sure - and I know that he died in Germany. This is because G. explained to me why she was laughing at something Baka's brother was saying, one day a few years ago:


You know, I'm getting so old, I can't remember anything. For instance, I can't remember the name of the City where father died. I remembered that it had something to do with fast-food: Pizza, Burek or something, but I couldn't --- ah, Hamburger --- Hamburg! that's the place.

It was later revealed to me that he (that's G's great-grandfather) had died apparently after being subjected to human experimentation. Now I suspect a lot of people would tell a similar story about a relative, particularly if they were feeling angry about the Germans (or even wanting mildly to boast), but in this case it was apparently admitted by the German goverment in the 80s, but any attempt to extract money (these people aren't stupid afterall) failed, as I was later told.

I then know that Baka, at 15 or 16, joined the revolution, which basically meant that she marched in the 40s with most of the others of her generation with Tito and eventually helped free the country from the occupiers, not to mention presumably at least being near to nasty masacres that also happened at the time. Along the way, she ended up meeting her husband to be, who was one of Tito's Generals. G' remembers him as a very old man, which he must have been since he was 30 or more when he married his teenage bride.

After the war, and because of her husbands elevated status, they lived very well. Apparently the General had been quite the bourgeois before the war, but (likely to save his skin) had given all of his fortune & property to the state, only to be given it, and probably a lot more back as a member of the upper eschelons of the Communist Party. I don't know much more than this, but it is incredible to see the kinds of hand-me-downs that Baka has given G over the years. She has, for instance, an incredibly chic Parisian jacket, dating from the 50s, that must have cost a fortune, is still in mint condition, and which G. still wears, and which is always admired, to this day.

I know as well that her husband fell foul, as so many others did, of the Communist leaders, and was on the verge of imprisonment when Tito died, and he was thus able to salvage something of his reputation and manage a peaceful retirement.

Baka herself is a rather traditional Serbian woman. She believes in maintaining an antiseptically clean household, and holds the tradtional notion that no meal is worthy of eating unless it has been the product of at least six hours of toil, preferably involving at least two 4AM mornings (for instance to make stock or Ruski Salat from scratch). However, there are signs of her revolutionary youth. Until her health started to fail (she's nearly 80), she cycled everywhere, and always (at least to me) seemed to sport clothes more suited to a Communist than a little old lady. The image of her on the bike always conjured up images of plucky Chinese revolutionaries.

I'm dying to know more. What was her husband like? What did he do? Why did he fall foul of the party? Did she meet Tito? Where did that Jacket come from? Was life luxurious for them? What happened on her march after the war? And most of all: what does she think of what has happened to the country to this day?

I know that she didn't like the break-up of Yugoslavia. I think she rather had that old-persons incredulity about it all (e.g. This can't be happening). I know that during the Nato bombing of her city, when G's parents spent a lot of time in her fathers company's office in Budapest, that she shunned shelters preferring to hold fort in the family house, even scaring off some drunken Nationalist who thought that he should have the house instead of these traitors. I know, in essence, that this charming old lady - who likes a tidy kitchen, who watches hours of Latin soap operas, who doesn't give much away, and who (let's face facts) doesn't have long to live - has a great story to tell. I just hope that I can coax it out of her and then do justice to it before it is too late.

Not speaking your Mother-tongue

As I said before, our dog speaks Serbian. I commented last time that this gets me into trouble in Croatia (sedi, sijedi, sidi), but I neglected to mention that it causes a rather obvious problem in Germany. We both traveled last week, meaning that we had to dump Monitsa in a dogs home, and though I tried to tell the keepers that Moni spoke Serbian, they didn't seem much interested in tailoring their Deutsch dog supervision techniques accordingly. However, the husband of the pair did mention that he understood a few words of Serbocroatian, since his mother was from Croatia. And by a few words, he meant and Dobar dan and Hvala and not much else. So his Mother tongue, was really his Father's tongue only, since he barely spoke a word of his Mother's.

I wouldn't have batted an eyelid had it not been that this was the latest of many examples of people like this I've met in Germany and to a lesser extent in England: namely, those who speak barely a word of one of their parents' languages. And add to this untold numbers of couples where one half does not speak the language of the other.

Now I currently work in a very polyglot environment. We work in English, live in Germany and come from everywhere. Only a few stray English people speak only one language, and even many of them try their damnedest to learn at least German. People are young, meaning that there are many kids about, and it often impresses me how many languages kids can learn simultaneously seemingly without too much incident. E.g. Tartar with Mother, Russian with Father, German at School, and of course English out of general necessity. It greatly surprises me, then, to see so many examples of second generation immigrants who speak nothing at all of their language of origin.

I often wonder what possesses people, moreover, not to speak their native language with their children. Or for that matter, how one half of a relationship has no apparent desire to speak the language of the other. How, after all, can you ever really understand somebody if you can't speak to them in your most comfortable manner? And what about all of the relations? These days people in (e.g.) Eastern Europe always speak English, or at least try to, but German is on the decline anywhere in the former Yugoslavia except the Croatian coast for obvious tourist-driven reasons. Speaking to relations is obviously important to form bonds with them, but even this doesn't seem always to change attitudes. In one instance, half-Serbian Germans actually spoke no word of Serbian despite having spent nearly a month every summer in Vojvodina with their mother's relatives.

One pattern emerges. The people in this category are not - despite being in cross-cultural relationships - usually very worldly. And I suspect that a feeling of envy runs through one half of the relationship at the thought that a child will speak a language that they have never bothered to learn. Maybe they think there is no point in learning a language - what use would Croatian be ever? (As a Canadian from Alberta, I certainly understand this rather redneck statement, since many simple folk feel this way about French) Or perhaps they think that two languages will confuse a developing child - advice from monoglot, unworldly grandparents might help to reach this conclusion. And if I can be permitted to add a sniff of racism to the argument, I have yet to see a case of a German/French, German/Italian or German/English couple where the children do not speak both languages.

Whatever the reason, I think it is a crying shame. I think that any language enriches a person, and even has practical advantages (Serbian or Croatian will ultimately help somebody speak/understand Russian for example). An opportunity to learn a language from a native early in life is not to be missed, no matter what theories, prejudices, hang-ups or insecurities a monoglot partner has.

On the silliness of language distinctions

We were in Croatia again, last week. Mostly we were trying to relax, but we spent a good deal of time sorting out our ruin of a house on Krk. Nice weather, good, if a little bit homogeneous food (I don't think I'll ever be able to eat lignje na žaru again), pleasant company. We actually brought the dog, which introduced an interesting complexity to my Canadian sensitivities regarding the whole Serb/Croat thing. Namely that one has to tell her sedi and not sijedi to sit down, and frankly, she doesn't always understand it if you say it the Croatian and not the Serbian way. Perhaps this will be food for thought for linguists struggling to distinguish the languages (if a dog can tell they are different languages, then surely....).

Anyway, I was going about saying quietly, or whispering sedi (puppies need to be told this very often of course), or just trying to use the Croatian sijedi a bit louder, with mixed results. I was probably more conscious, with my ever improving Serbian, that I tended to drop the ijs rather than use them, and it was obvious to anybody who thought about it that I had learned the language more in Serbia than Croatia. G makes few attempts to speak anything but her native Vojvodinian dialect, freely saying hleb, aerodrom, hiljada instead of the Croatian kruh, zračna luka or tisuća (for bread, airport, thousand). And indeed the way they speak in that part of Croatia is a bit of a deviation from what I think is standard Croatian anyway - they seem more inclined to ikavski (if that is what it is called): that is, Serbs say belo for white, typical Croats say bijelo and people on Krk and in Istria almost say bilo. G anyway says it is silly to worry about it, and being a Canadian, who has lived in the UK and now in Germany, and who stopped worrying about my English accent years ago (I think I now sound American), I did think it was a bit silly.

I cast my mind back to the first few words I learned in Serbian. I had bought my first book Teach yourself Serbo-Croat, and was learning Dobar dan and such like. G was on a visit to Novi Sad, and on the telephone had just excitedly told me Pada sneg! Pada sneg! to denote the fact that it was snowing there. I was, as it happened, presently on a skiing retreat with people from work, and when it snowed in the German alps I said to two Croatian colleagues Pada sneg. I was then curtly told that it was Pada snijeg in Croatian, and that I must remember that it was a different language. But my book, though it mentioned what it called Eastern and Western dialects, devoting about two pages to the differences, didn't make such a sharp distinction.

The above, I guess, is my way of introducing my general dilemma about the whole language issue in the former Yugoslavia.

As I improved in Serbian, I began to see that it was probably a bit of a stretch to call Croatian and Serbian different languages. As I've said before, I also speak German well, and also know Spanish, and as for English, these are languages with enormous variations in dialects. My once English wife found it impossible to understand people in truck-stops in my native Alberta, and though I'm fairly competent in high German, it is difficult for me to understand local-yokels speaking village Austrian, Schwaebian or even strong Heidelberg accents. I've never encountered any such difficulties in Serbian/Croatian, and indeed rather begin to think that the difference between them is more akin to American/British English than the seemingly greater distance between Austrian and German dialects. The Serbian/Croatian distinction would be similar in English dialects if one imagined that people in America, England & Scotland spelled words as they pronounced them (as is the case for Serbian & Croatian) - e.g. girl would then be gurl, gul and gerl respectively - it might be easier to say they were different languages, with all the practical problems that this would introduce.

Of course, people will take offense to this - I've certainly seen a lot of the vehement assertions in the discussions at Wikipedia on the subject of Serbian/Croatian or Serbocroatian. But I think the perspective of one who has come in as a naive outsider and (at least partially) learned the language(s) should not be cast aside without some thought. It is fairly easy to tell somebody ignorant about the language or the region that the languages are different - they will probably take it face value, and anyway they won't very much care. To them, all the languages sound like mumbo-jumbo and they wouldn't be able to distinguish Hungarian from Russian, and probably would label the whole lot as "Eastern Europe" and lump them all together anyway - geographically, culturally and linguistically. But when somebody has taken the time to learn the language, they immediately see how silly, and indeed impractical, it is to distinguish them. Why do I have to worry about how I address my dog? And take it from me, having learned a good deal of the language, I can't suddenly see (as perhaps my Croatian friends, who told me the sneg/snijeg distinction as evidence of divergence, expected) that they are so different, unless I start saying that I speak Canadian as a native and not English. It doesn't take a genius, at any rate, to see that the distinction is political more than it is linguistic. Very silly.

Silly also does mean impractical. I read in the Economist last year that many western publishers were just not bothering with translations in the former Yugoslavia since the nationalist fervor that boldly states the languages are different makes translation and publication a headache. Namely that the attitudes effectively partitioned what was originally a market of 22 million people into smaller pockets of people sensitive to missing or present ijs and minor differences in vocabulary. They mostly just washed there hands of it, until some plucky Bosnian publishing house saw an opportunity and began translating mostly English books into something neutral - more Croatian than anything else, since they are probably the most sensitive - but importantly without any l specific label of what the language actually was. All countries, whether they spoke Croatian, Serbian, Montenegrin, Bosnian, Istrian or God-knows what else, started eating them up, hungry for translations of books that otherwise might never be available to small markets. The article ended with a somewhat ironic quip that the Croatian government, eager to make Serbian entry into the EU easier (the much believed notion that it will be easier to go in together; or perhaps they just wanted to demonstrate good will to the EU onlookers), helped the Serbs with the thousands of pages of translation into the local languages needed for EU membership. This, of course, they did by sending several hundred word documents that, with a few find-and-replace operations, and perhaps a trivial change to cyrillic, would do well enough to satisfy the EU officials that the job was done.

Back to me. I guess what I now find myself doing is not worrying too much about it unless I'm in some place where I suspect that people are more nationalistic, or among people who have made some indications already that they feel strongly about it. I hold my tongue and try to add or take-away ijs as necessary. But frankly, I still think this is a bit silly.


I'll end this with something that I found very touching from another book I have called Colloquial Croatian and Serbian: A Complete Course for Beginners. This was written in 1998 by Celia Hawkesworth, an academic in London, who specialises in these languages and clearly speaks them having spent a lot of time in the former Yugoslavia, and shows a great devotion to these countries. Indeed, she has written the very best translations that I have seen of Ivo Andrić, the Nobel Prize winner for literature from the former Yugoslavia (ok, ok, he was a Bosnian Croat, who wrote in Belgrade mostly and died in Yugoslavia - better?). In the preface to the book, she makes an apology to those of her friends in the former Yugoslavia (Bosnia if I remember clearly) who had taken issue with her views on their language (the peoples of these lands speak the same language, the book opens with). At the end of the acknowledgments, she writes:

I am well aware that my attitude to their language is unacceptable to some of my friends in Croatia and Bosnia at this time, but I hope at least that those who use this book will learn to understand more than just the language.

This is certainly how I feel. When it comes to losing friends over those lost ijs and hleb/kruh distinctions, this is very silly indeed.

And incidentally, I notice that Dr Hawkesworth now publishes separate Serbian and Croatian language books. One wonders if this rescued the friendships.

The adages of old Serbian wives

An Old Wives' tale, at least in English, refers to one of the vast number of home truths that people tend to believe regardless of any hard evidence. Anyone who spends any time with their grandparents invariably gets a few of these thrown at them. Wikipedia names several classics: staying out in the cold causes pneumonia, chocolate causes acne, masturbation causes blindness, etc. In Serbia there are a good number of these, and for the benefit of Westerners new to the country, here are some of them, mostly suggested by a recent visit from a Serbian of advancing years:

1. Anything that is produced by hand by somebody you know is always necessarily better than anything that is bought in a shop.

This applies to wine, sausage, cheese, bread, chickens, fish, furniture, clothing, and frankly just about anything. The adage expresses itself by the need to bring said items, often illegally across borders, in order to save poor relatives stuck (say) in Germany where sausages are terrible (here is one of our sausages, made in the garage by our friend Milo) or to France where wine only ever comes from the shop and isn't provided in old, plastic water-bottles, as is the natural way for it to be served. How many times have I eyed with some longing the ubiquitous gift bottles of good wine from a shop (e.g. Vranac), only to then be offered home made wine of questionable vintage, colour and taste. I actually wonder if these bottles are ever opened, or if they are just past around in some tradition of re-gifting.

There is, at least in Novi Sad, also a tendency to travel great distances to buy individual items. For instance, a University Professor is a well known supplier of fresh fish, and he lives on the other side of town. When we protested that we could get great fish at the newly opened supermarket, the elders scoffed at us. It isn't fresh, so don't even think about it. The fact that the fish in the supermarket were actually alive in a tank didn't (if you'll excuse the pun) hold water.

2. Any meal that takes less than two grueling hours of toil in the kitchen is no good and not healthy.

We are a busy couple, and fond of quick meals in restaurants, or fast recipes at home for tasty meals. However, every time we try to impose such a recipe on visitors from Serbia, we are questioned about whether one can really eat (say) mushrooms if they haven't been boiled, sauteed, fried, soaked in fat, then baked.

This adage applies not just to meals, but to housework in general. I actually think that a lot of this is to do with a desire to be busy at home. My mother used to tell me that her mother, who was a housewife, would dutifully wash and polish the parquet flooring in a grueling four hour exercise each week, commenting that it was necessary to get rid of the germs. Heaven knows what she would think of our parquet, which I consider to be clean even if it only gets a fast clean once per week, and polishing, well, never. It's a wonder we are still alive.

3. Wet hair, even constituting a single drop of water on the head, will cause immediate life-threatening illness to a person if they set one foot outside, even in a sweltering summer.

I've been told this dozens of times, and the fact that I was a competitive swimmer in Canada for ten years, who twice a day would go out into weather that was as cold as -40 degrees with hair that was, for reasons of haste, almost never fully dry and managed to reach adulthood un-stunted (and in fact taller than almost everybody) is no argument.

I remember, in a mild winter in Novi Sad, after we had exited the swimming pool, something that habit means I can do in less than five minutes, I was sitting waiting for G. and noticed a number of swimmers who sat under the dryers for what I thought was a ridiculous length of time. Men with practically no hair dried their fuzz for upwards of ten minutes. I now understand that this was a habit enforced by constant warnings from aging relatives about the dire consequences of not doing so. There scalp must have been peeling off when they left, but Baka would be happy.

4. Not wearing slippers in the house, will lead to some kind of health catastrophe.

How many times I've been given slippers with a sense of urgency, and asked incredulously, in my own house, by visitors from Serbia (and Croatia to be fair) how I can possibly walk around without slippers on - just in socks or 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

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.