How the other half travel

We are spending a lot of time in Novi Sad at the moment, for reasons that I won't get into here.  As a consequence, I sometimes need to travel from Novi Sad to conferences, as I had to do yesterday when I traveled to Trieste.    This is one of those funny distances (600km) that probably would be best to drive, but as I need to fly from Trieste to Germany, I couldn't take my own car; renting was impossible - no company seemed able to offer a pick-up in Serbia / drop-off in Italy option; the train options were insane: 19 hours and five changes; flying options were similarly crazy: 16 hours and two changes.  The only thing left was the bus.  We checked and yes, indeed, there are buses from Novi Sad to Trieste (every other day) and the journey is between 9 and 10 hours normally.  How hard could it be?  Coaches, at the best of times, are uncomfortable things, and they are worse when you are over 2 meters tall. The company said that the buses are pretty empty this time of year, so comfort wouldn't be a problem.  Great, I thought.  For a mere 50 Euros I got a ticket and arrived at the bus station in Novi Sad at 16.30; bottle of Knjaz Miloš and a couple of Viršle in pastry from the Pekara, I felt the right little Yugoslav Gastarbeiter.

Despite assurances to the contrary, the bus was stuffed to the gunnels - not one spare seat.  Mixture of people of all ages, though no children at all.   Everybody, and I do mean everybody smoked at every possible instant, though mercifully not on the bus.  I'm not exaggerating either.  Everybody.  At one point I thought some older ladies who had, like me, sat on the bus to avoid the weather during one of the numerous pauza cigareta, were also not smoking, but in fact they too soon went outside for a fix.   It's not that this surprises me particularly as most everybody smokes in Serbia, just not those in our circles, and I'm used to at least somebody not smoking in a crowd of nearly 50 people.  

Anyway, the haze of smoke aside, the journey wasn't too bad. Bit uncomfortable, but endurable.  It was very interesting to see the transition of people from the typical Balkan personalities to those of the subdued foreigners.  In Serbia everybody was on their mobile phones and talking rather loudly, but by the time we did our first border crossings everybody got a whole lot quieter. Maybe it was just getting late, but I was pretty certain a timidness was creeping in to everybody's demeanor.  

When we drive with a German car and EU passports across these borders we are very often just waved through without any check at all.  The crossings yesterday, by stark contrast, were the longest I have every experienced.  In a rather bizarre twist of Yugoslav fate, the only crossings needed are in the former Yugoslavia: first to Croatia and then from Croatia into Slovenia (and thus into the EU so none more required).  Each crossing involved everybody getting off the bus twice (once to leave the old country and again to enter the new country), and twice we had to go with our luggage.   We didn't stop at all in Croatia (not even to pee) which a fellow passenger told me was to help the border crossing out of Croatia being easier (i.e. to avoid questions).  The border into Slovenia involved each bag being checked quite thoroughly and even a frisking of each person (or at least looking inside the coats).  Nobody made any comments or complaints and I could see in peoples' faces as we waited this kind of nervousness and hope that everybody gets through lest we all have to wait for hours for one person to go through some kind of official rigmarole.   The Slovenian woman doing the checks was ruder or at least brusquer than anybody I have had search me before, and I couldn't help but feel sorry for these people who are at the mercy of their former comrades for entry into a part of the world that essentially cannot exclude me.  Not since I was travelling around eastern Europe in the mid 1980s did I experience border crossings like this.  The journey time should have been six hours, but for these crossings it was nearly eleven hours.

My mother-in-law has made this journey (or at least one similar: Novi Sad to Heidelberg) about a dozen times to help us look after the kids.  If anything, she prefers it to flying as at least she is in control of the ticket buying process (being savvy with neither internet bookings nor credit cards).  Since yesterday I have a whole lot more respect for what she goes through each time.

Various thoughts on films about the last Balkan wars

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

A new level with Serbian or Croatian or Bosnian or Montenigrian

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

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

Krk village micro-economy

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

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

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

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

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