Day 1
On route to Mostar-Prishtina,Kosovo, the week prior
I made it in safe and sound. There was a kid on the plane with braces who asked if I was Finnish. He asked me whether the sandwich meat that they gave us was pork or turkey. He gave me the braces smile and explained, "we're Muslim." It was turkey.
One interesting thing about Kosovo already-six women greet you at the runway in neon vests. One of them is holding a vacuum, but I don't think they're purposefully picked and put there as "eye candy."
Initial impressions of Prishtina:
Lots of open grassland on the way in, red poppies and half-built brick houses. The UN is ever-present here. From the second you get off of the plane, UNMIK officers are the ones checking your passport. Everything's calm though. It's a slow city. And not enormous, I saw most of it just by walking around today. I went to the National Museum which had some great archeological stuff. There're some beautiful old mosques here too, emphasis on the OLD(-as-hell). They're great. We passed by the scene of the violence in March looked like a Terminator 2 movie set--an overturned skeleton of a car was an added touch.
Nicole, who I'm staying with is really cool. Some of her local friends took us out to a club last night that had live folk music. It was a mix of local tunes and American covers, with a cello, violin, guitar, and a big avocado-shaped sitar-like instrument. It was, I hate to say, almost polka, but somehow it was great--fast paced. Not quite Dick Dale, but it had that quick rhythm like Spanish guitar players use. I half-expected Antonio Bendaras step out from behind the speaker cabinet doing flamenco.
They gave new meaning to Nirvana's lyrics from 'Come as You Are' when they sang it..."come as friend...no I don't have a gun..."
Day 2, 3
I'm in Gjokova, Kosovo right now, the land of the stray dog. We picked one of them up off the street because it was too cute and helpless. I barely know the girl that I'm travelling with but now it's like we have a kid together. Haven't decided what we're going to do with "Kofi" the mongrel yet. It actually is a good metaphor for the to-be government and the peacekeeping operation here--ultimately nobody wants to take responsibility. There's a bit of squalor here. I just walked by a garbage dump/ river that had a pipe pumping blood and guts into it from the butcher's shop.
There were two calves waiting there turn on the front step.
There're lots of half blown-to-shick buildings but most of them have scaffolding around them and are in the process of being rebuilt. You can't really tell which are the rivet holes and which are the bullet holes. The only advertisements here are the UN's friendly propaganda or cigarette adds. In Prishtina, the capitol, I walked past a quarter mile, literally, of stacked cigarette boxes in the market. Last night we went to dinner at a riverside restaurant for trout. I'm going to take my next homecoming date there. The river was flooded so you could look down from where our table was (which used to be the balcony I guess) and see the bar under water.
You can cross the country (or non-country as it were at this point) in half-a-day. I saw a whole nation of empty brick houses that are mostly finished, minus the windows. After 50 miles of seeing the same thing around the next bend, you wonder "where are all of the people that are supposed to be living here?" In the cities now I guess.
You see a lot of farmers out in the field--storybook characters some of them--swinging scythes or cruising along in a horse-drawn carriage made out of an old tractor frame. Nicole's friend calls the bike-sized tractors "Kosovo Harleys." I've never met him but I can tell he's kind of an ass, though I thank him for loaning us his car. Still, I'm not sure how happy I am to be driving a ride with a "Proud to Be and American" sticker on the back of it through the Balkans. And it's an English car with the steering wheel on the wrong side.
We bought some Albanian rap music and jammed to on our way to Prisden, which has been the highlight so far. It's a town on the Albanian border. Nicole was raving about how beautiful this Orthodox Serbian parish was, how she'd met these friars who had beards down to their feet and how they were rebuilding it by hand, doing all of the ornate wood work themselves, and selling handicrafts in order to raise money for the project.
We drove by it and couldn't park because access was blocked off with barbed wire. You weren't even allowed to take pictures...the whole place had gone up in flames in March. All of the ornate woodwork that she'd admired and been raving about was ash. Nicole was pissed, driving along the canyons roads, going "people are such ASSholes..." The worst thing about it was that the KFOR (peacekeepers) are smack, right there on the premises. But, they left their post when the shite hit the fan and just let the ragtag insurgents do their thing.
The last time Nicole had been Prisden, everything had been pristine, but when you walk along the river now and you look up, there's a big scar of scorched houses running across the face of the hill.
I've seen some cool armored vehicles, but fortunately nothing is being put to use. It's really tranquil here, especially outside of the cities.
Prisden was all young people and cafes. It's more Turkish there than in other places so there are more mosques per capita, and old bathhouses, etc. It's really one of those places where you could sit around, drink coffee and write a book--and smoke if you're like the locals:)
I'm drinking Schweppes "Bitter Lemon." It's good but it's an appropriate taste for this town.
Day 6, 7
I just spent the last few evenings in Plovdiv and Melnik, Bulgaria. We did a drive-by of Macedonia. Nicole insisted that we stop in Skopja, Macedonia for to eat at a spagetti place where the waitresses idea of being dressed up is quite different from ours in the U.S. Okay, she told me about it and then I insisted that we go there. It wasn't as shocking as the hype-just black skirts and fishnets…and good pizza. I like people's sense of style there. It's purposefully '80's. I've seen several pairs of leg warmers.
Some of these cities seem like big clumps of crappy communist architecture, until you park and find the plaza, then they're charming as hell. We can't read the cyrillic alphabet. I can a LITTLE-the education I gained being part of the Greek system in college finally paid off for something : )
We went to the oldest mosque in the Balkans in Plovdiv. I had a spiritual experience walking around on the rugs barefoot. I then had a somewhat less spiritual experience outside when I almost stepped on a hypodermic needle in my flip flops.
There are quite a few places claiming to be the oldest mosque in the Balkans but I believed what the tour guide was saying after seeing the inside of this one--even though it now has a coffee shop built into the side of the building (no joke). Plovdiv's a strange mix of the old and the new. For example, there're remnants of a Greek amphitheater that look down onto from the street level. Sharing that space, as sort of a viewing platform, just 10-feet from the old stones, is a discotech-?!
We drove by the Roma district in Plovdiv. I really felt like I was in the pages of a National Geographic. Needless to say it made my neighborhood in Harlem seem like Malibu. I accidentally exposed my film prematurely, but no matter, I'll never forget it.
Melnik was…hm….romantic. It was tucked away among vineyards. Idyllic. The landscape, if I haven't mentioned it yet, looks JUST like Montana. I feel like it all might fake, like the moon landing. We THINK that we're in the Balkans, but really we're just outside of Bozeman. In proof of my theory, I looked on the map and there's even a city in Bulgaria called "Montana," Bulgaria.
While on the subject of romance. I had a romantic moment yesterday. We bought a flower from an old senile woman, who was using her senile-ness to trick us by not giving us change for $10. So we walked away with our $10 flower and decided we had to get our money's worth, so I looked for the prettiest girl that I could-which is damn hard choice to make it Plovdiv. My perfect flower-girl came strutting up-tall with blonde wavy hair…
Anyway…One fun thing about driving with an offensive driver when the steering wheel is on the wrong side of the car is that every time she wants to pass the car in front of her (which is often), YOU are the one hanging out in the middle of the oncoming lane staring at the grill of the semi truck, knowing full well that the person with her foot on the gas sitting next to you can't see that truck from her vantage point and without you screaming, "NO! NO!," there's no way that she'd even know whether it was clear to pass: ) I'm going to miss hanging out with Nicole.
I loved how she had a field day taking photos of village people in Melnik. It was like she was trying to collect them all-"OH, OH, old woman with a donkey! I don't have that one yet!"-snap, snap, snap.
Day 11
I'm in Sarajevo now. I like our crew of Builders for Peace volunteers. Everyone seems pretty personable.
So…I just spent the evening drinking Chivas Regal with a Franciscan Father
and a Bosnian pop singer...
Tito's granddaughter hosted a BBQ for all of us, where I met Marko Orsolic, a big
funny OFM Franciscans. Three of us from the program left early with him to go see the
ecumenical center that he has put together. It's called the
International Multi-religious and Intercultural Center (IMIC). One Muslim,
one Christian (Marko) and one Orthodox man work there together.
He gave me a couple of books that he's published and some info about the
center. One of them is a pictorial about Franciscanism and Franciscan art in Bosnia.
Marko took us out to a place called The Go Go, a swanky coffee bar that
has a history as a having been the popular hang out of Yugoslav stars back
in Sarajevo's cosmopolitan heyday.
After he had a drink he told me that he could really use some money for
his International Day of Peace event this year. IDP is something that I was working on with Franciscans International this last year. The event that he put together in Sarajevo
last year had 20,000 attendees!--which carries a lot more weight in this
environment then it does in other places, since things aren't as stable as they
appear to be on the surface here and futures aren't very optimistic.
It was often hard for me to communicate with this guy, but I feel that we
were thinking along the same lines. He brought us downstairs to show us
the board room where people from the three religions meet to work out
their issues and "strategize"...there was a room next door set aside as a
practice space for a punk band! The Franciscan youth movement here is
really strong. Kind of in the vain of my Party for Peace event in NY, they put together
concerts here to address topics. They had a poster up for rock-against-facism for example.
Marko's the last person you'd expect to say "ya the rap
music here was better before the war" but I get a sense that everything here's intergenerational. You can go to a nightclub with a fifty-year-old man, for example-which I'll get to in a second.
On our way to the IMIC checked out the Franciscan church here. It's
painted red on the outside. It's old a beautiful. Mass had just finished
so there were three young friars standing there, all under the age of 30.
The way of doing business here is great--sitting and talking is part of
the lifestyle. This is why we ended up having a capachino with Father
Marko afterward, which then became scotch when his pop singer-turned-lawyer
friend showed up.
As we were walking out of the cafe finally at 10:00 (on a Sunday), Pop
Singer, goes, "so should we head to the discotech then?":) Of course…so we did.
The girl behind the counter at our hotel had insisted that we go to this
very place "Bachacheech," the most trendy nightclub in town. Last night,
however our Bosnian friends were like "no, that place is too snobby, we
can't get in unless we're VIP." Some Sarajevans definitely have a
snobbish streak. So I thought we still couldn't get in because we weren't
VIP but Pop Singer says "yes that's the way it is, BUT we are important
people...I AM VIP." It was great rolling in there with Father Marko:) It's always
best to have a Franciscan priest as part of your entourage when you go
clubbing:)
It's cool too, being a small country, you can be in a cafe and anyone is
bound to be there. Our hosts were like, "that guy over there is the most
famous guitarist in Bosnia, that guy over there's a famous song writer."
The band was playing cover songs, and the guy who had written the original
was incidentally sitting there in the audience-?!
There ends my story, but another great short one...
I ran into a friend of mine in Vienna on my way here. I saw a UW hat on
this guy's head and went to talk to him. It ended up being my buddy
Brett, my former pledge brother from Zeta Psi, who I'd joined the
fraternity with as a freshman. It turned out that the "Zetes" as a
chapter were a bunch of abusive wierdos in my book, especially with how much they
held grudges. One former pledge had gotten email threats and all kinds of
stuff. Needless to say, when I dropped out, Brett and I didn't hang out
much. We became enemies-by-association. It was really appropriate that
he and I would meet again on a flight to Sarajevo, a city where people who
once saw each other as brothers, turned against each other, and now are in
the process of reconciling. He moved to Utah recently and is marrying a
Bosnian girl that he met in Vegas. Sarajevo's a hell of a place to go if
it's your first time outside of the US. That was his situation though.
In many places, you can see this place as a microcosmic example of what's
going on elsewhere in the world--the class of religions and the misuse of
them at the hands of politicians. You see all of these brand spanking new
mosques that the Saudis are building, which is a kind of aggression in a
way. It has gotten people concerned about the Muslimization of
Bosnia--but as Marko said to the group at dinner, "nobody worries about
the Christian Taliban here" which is a more real threat. There are very
few Wahhabis in Bosnia. The Orthox are who people feared. At Marko's church, they are beginning to have protestant services. There's also a group of Baptist missionaries from Kentucky or somewhere in Mostar right now. I wonder if they know what they're doing. Are they guilty of the same thing that the Saudis are. Do people here need more religious ideology brought in from outside to further confuse things?
This would be a great place to study semiotics, especially in terms of religious symbols,
but the symbol war is everywhere, even in the bathroom, where SFOR peacekeeping
"advertisements" are posted above the urinal every time you go to pee.
And it's really interesting to see how much money goes into reconstructing
their religious symbols here. Even our project is about that to an extent. It makes me
hope that in the process of rebuilding this religious buildings, we're
not reinforcing old barriers between people. There's a certain vanity in
it all. Some of the new religious monuments are being purposefully built
one meter higher than the one across the street. Some of the BIG crosses
on the hillside necessitate the use of helicopters in their construction.
Meanwhile, the education system is a joke, let alone the political system,
and any other number of systems.
What about the people themselves? They need the benefit of "reconstruction" in a lot of
ways as well.
There was a psychologist at our barbecue and we were all amazed because our
friends here had told us, "there are almost no mental health professionals
in Sarajevo." Back home, we go to a shrink when we
break up with a girlfriend. I saw a guy on the plane with a piece of his
forearm missing, which looked conspicuously like a scar from having been
tortured. I doubt that he's been seeing a shrink. Hm...
It's about 2 am, so I'm calling it a night.
I talked to a guy today who offerred to take me on a ride along for a clearance operation-! I'm going to call him when we get to Mostar. There's an FMAC mine clearance center there, so
hopefully it's something I can do easoily on a weekend. Actually I'd like
to come back to Sarajevo next Saturday. This is our last day here.
There're a few things I didn't get to that I wish I could have, like
meeting with my pal Alicia's Mennonite friends and following up with some women's
networks that I have info for--been picking up a few interesting bits
about human trafficking.
Day 12
I'm in Mostar Bosnia now. This is my new home. It's a wreck in some places but also has sort of a strange Miami feel to it. The buildings seem too bee either brand new and painted watermelon green, or they're bombed out rubble.
It's a head trip to almost stumble on a mortar holes on the way to the bar, but Mostar has the greatest social scene. Everyone sits around in the cafes and drinks coffee all day. We have an Italian-style villa right on the river and all to ourselves with a key to the outside patio/dining room the size of a dagger. We're beginning work on a mosque tomorrow. We just finished surveying the site and we're meeting the 8 Bosnians that we will be working with later tonight. I'm looking forward to it.
We haven't spent time with many--ANY locals really, everyone just kind of watches us over their capachinos, sizing us up. They seem really friendly though, those that we've run into. There are even groups of girls that hang out in front of the mosques like groupies ("mosquies")- but I think it's the building itself that attracts them, because, as of now, Mike and I are the only two males. The mosque is a great shady place to hang out. The sun's inescapable and bright.
The Stari Most bridge is looking new and brilliant. Our next project will be helping to build the stage for the big unveiling of the bridge ceremony in July.
Day 14
Man the internet sucks here:) Part of the experience here is learning to "go with the slow." We cleaned up the graveyard today. We occasionally found a bone or a scorpion. I ended up pulling roots for most of the day. Some of them were like wrestling with bears. I was filthy by quitting time. It was great! Fortunately they tell me that dirt is one of the ways that you can cleanse yourself before entering the mosque.
I wouldn't mind doing some of the retouching that they're doing inside of the mosque if they'd let me.
Turned out that there's a women's clinic next door--explaining the groupie phenomenon.
My new co-workers are cool. Most of them are guys and there names all
start with A: Amir, Adnan, Armel, etc. In a pinch, you can always use
"A-Dog.": )
We were given clearance to walk on the Mostar bridge today. It was
gorgeous. I'm still bummed that I won't be around for the unveiling
ceremony since I'm out of here on the 26th. They're still working on
the finishing touches, so it won't be open to the public until sometime
next month. Part of our job is to start building the stage that the bands
will play on for the big event.
Day 16
It's been a good day. Ezra--one of the girls in my group--and I have been working on our video/ media project. We're doing some interviews tomorrow with one of our Bosnian friends who's a bit too talkative but an excellent story teller because of it.
I tell him he looks and sounds like Adam Sandler:) Hopefully he takes that as a compliment.
We're clearing land now for the stage for the landmark opening of the bridge. I'll be glad to have had a hand in it. It's a huge deal here. It's sort of the opposite of the Berlin wall coming down--on a smaller scale...if that makes any sense.
They're having a week's worth of concerts and events. Actually there's a small concert in the park about to happen down the street. I'm going to stop by it on my way home. We have an evening tea date to interview the four Turkish guys that are painting the inside of the mosque. Three of them are brothers. They all look alike and none of them speak English.
I was putting tools back in the mosque earlier today and they invited me over to have tea and talk about soccer at a makeshift under the scaffolding.
It's interesting how much of a conversation you can have when you don't even speak each other's language. Somehow we talked about the game tonight--which is big news Croatia versus England-about Istanbul and about Alev, the Turkish girl I used to date at the UW-and we understood each other.
Fortunately, Ezra is from Turkey, so she can translate for all of us tonight.
The no-rush mentality has continued to rub off on me here, which feels nice, so I'm going with that groove.
I've been corresponding with Nicole in Kosovo to make sure that our dog Kofi has a good home. Good news: she's going to keep her, so I won't have to ship her to the states.:) I had to look into import permits and quarantine policies this week, just in case, but fortunately her falling for the dog became the an easy solution to "what to do with the orphan?"
It's been nice to have some alone time. Last night I walked around and shot a whole roll of Mostar architecture while the sunset was putting wicked lighting effects on the clouds.
We spent this weekend seeing the night spots and BBQing with our co-workers. I started talking to the girls at the mosque today, because I realized I literally hadn't talked with anybody outside of my circle of work pals since I got here. I guess it's easy to create a bubble and get caught in it when you go abroad.
I think that some people in the group may be going out to Gracernica on Saturday to see our other operation site and hang out with those students, Tom, and Bob. It's so great that the group leaders there are named Tom and Bob:)--we must seem ultra-American when people hear that one.
I had some good talks with Bob in Sarajevo. I may even want to interview him for my Experiential Learning class this fall. He's a teacher who has been organizing trips to Russia for high school kids for years. He even wound up in Chechnya at one point. When I become a teacher next year, I hope to be able to bridge the classroom and the outside world the way that he has.
Day 17
Today we interview Amir about his life. He's full of insight and humor but his stories were sobering. I'll let them remain on the video but will retell one that wasn't on there: a man was hiding in the awning above what is now Amir's doorway during WWII. The man was sick and farted out loud while the Ustasha were searching the premises. An old lady that lived there took credit for the fart and saved his life.
I can't imagine being the protagonist in any of the stories because they were grim but in the telling he made it easy for us to be able to pull out a scrap of humor, justice, or hope.
Armel took us swimming after work. The water is about the same temperature that I experience in Alaska but it was hooooot today. He's looking into going to college in the US. Martha advised
UMass Lowell as a good option. It's funny when I think that I was incidently just in Lowell a month ago and had admired their new school buildings. To think that now I'm in Bosnia and a friend of mine from here may soon be there...
It's interesting to hear about people's US/Bosnia connections. There was a French punk/techno concert in the park last night after the soccer game (Croatia lost) and we met a guy there from UW Madison who does music therapy here now;We were petting kittens during our break today that belonged a Bosnian guy who went to U of Vermont; The man who owns the cafe next door to where I'm sitting now spent ten years in San Francisco...
Stoner-like moment: I was in the shower just now...I know you're thinking, "where's he going with this;)" My shower's in our closet and only has a tiny window. I forgot to turn the light on. I was going about my soaping and looked down--with the sun setting and it hit the corner of the window JUST so, so that a single tear-drop-shaped beam of light was glowing on my chest, like a sniper's laser sight. We have one of those shower heads that you hold in your hand so I imagined momentarily that the beam was getting hot over my heart but then I looked down and realized that I'm forgotten where my hands were while I was mesmerized by the little spectacle--I was clutching the showerhead to my chest, hence the heat. It was just the warm water causing the sensation. One thing about Bosnia, it gives you a chance to notice strange moments, even if it's hard to explain them.
I'm not a religious man but I believed in signs--in the sense that as human beings we create signposts for ourselves. So I find myself ascribing meaning to certain chance events like the one I just mention. Maybe it means something cheesy like "follow the little fire in your heart": )
I'm thinking seriously about going to Turkey now. I want to learn all about the region.
Day 18
I have a two word vocabulary now "fallah" as in fallah-if-you-hear-me, which means thank you and "ciao," which isn't even Bosnian but they use it all of the time. The rest of the words that my friends taught me aren't suitable, so I go around saying "ciao-fallah-fallah..." and pointing a lot. I'm a master at Charades now. I'll kick my friend's asses at it when I get back home.
Mostar is the GREATEST place. I have a crush on a Muslim girl now named Shayla. I'm going to the beach this weekend with the US/Bosnian gang and then heading home for Marriage Fest '04.
Day 23
Hm…I'm definitely not on edge here as I thought that I might be--though the first few days were naturally an adjustment. Still I think I tend to lace my emails with grim irony. But, in actuality, I'm on cloud nine.
Mike and I went with our friend Odnan to a service at one of the mosques today. He looks like Johnny Bravo the cartoon character. Nicest guy I know. Everyone we've hung out with here's really inviting and down to earth.
We could only make out the occasional English word at the prayer session but Odnan explained to us that the subject matter was "is Islam a violent religion or not?" I felt pretty honored that he'd include us.
We tried to just sit politely and watch and played a little with the kittens in the courtyard. Every mosque seems to have them. We have two near our work site--Moo and Cucumber. I don't know how we ended up with those names--probably in a moment of heatstroke from working out in the sun all day, but now that I think of it, it's appropriate--one kitten for the meat eaters and one for the vegetarians. The American group is about half and half, which has made meals interesting. Sidenote: If I have to eat another piece of pizza I will take the pizza cutter to my jugular.
Day 24
Last night my friend Ezra and I we were walking around and were like, "wow, this is really the city of romance. There are so many couples walking around. I guess it makes sense that post-war, everyone's in baby boom mode. Besides being the Speedo-wearing capitol of the world (which unfortunate), I think that Mostar might also hold a record for the largest number of cafes per capita. The unemployment rate here (somewhere around 50%) doesn't seem like the worst thing in the world because at least people are spending their time socializing. The layout is geared for it. Mostar's like one would imagine parts of Paris to have been in its hay day. That's my take anyway. As Blakes says, "it's a combination between Milan and Tijuana."
We went to karaoke last night and took 3rd place for singing Don Henley's "The Boys of Summer"-!:) Our prize was a bottle of Jagermeister. Our group of Bosnian friends claimed it for us in our absence so Mike doesn't know that we won yet. We're going to surprise him. He and I had taken off early, assuming that we didn't have a chance in hell at winning--our competition had been a dozen quality performances of Bosnian tunes. They have this great genre called "turbo folk" that's pop/folk and everybody eats it up.
Mike especially deserves the trophy bottle tonight because he had never even HEARD Don Henley (or The Ataris) before we picked up the microphones:) But, somehow he pulled it off.
Tonight's my last night out on the town. We're all going to the Croatian coast in the morning for the day.
Everyone had been telling us this myth that Mostar's like Vassar College--there are supposedly 7 girls to every 1 guy. You see a lot of young women on the street, especially when you're out at night but it wasn't until yesterday that I believed it. Mike and I stopped at a courtyard cafe and were surrounded by literally 50-some women and 3 or 4 guys, including the waiter. It was uncanny.
I have a drink date later on with a great, pretty, smiley Muslim girl tonight. I wish that I weren't leaving town in 48 hours.
Day 25
I forgot to mention: I was checking out the karaoke list the other night and they only had one song by Johnny Cash but TEN by Wierd Al. I appreciate their wack musical taste. : )
We went for a nice dinner (highbrow) and then to be more plebian, we took the bottle of Jagermeister to the park and passed it around in a circle. It was a very much like being 16 in my home town of Federal Way. It was beautiful. That was my last night in Mostar. We spent the next day in Markanska on the beach. It was a perfect send off. I miss it already.
I'm in Budapest right now. My subconscious was ingenious enough to trick my conscious brain into thinking that I was leaving Bosnia today--when I was supposed to fly out YESTERDAY. So, I did fly out today, but as a bonus prize for the mishap, I got stuck in Budapest for 24 hours-- rock on.:
I'm off to check out the town. I'm feeling lots of love for my past few weeks and all of the new friends that have made it what it is.
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