Sickness

It has been awhile since I updated. I spent last week doing a lot of writing to finish up the reports that I was assigned to compile, and somehow between the mental focus demanded by that coupled with a busy schedule of meeting with friends here, I didn't have time or energy to update this.

I was going to write today, but I've been felled -- "there is a virus going around Serbia," one of my colleagues comments. She had it last week, and I probably picked it up from her or from one of the many other people I've shaken hands with. It's not as bad as it could be, but I'd still rather not be sick my last few days here. This only struck me Monday night as I was walking back to my accommodation after going to a picnic organized by a friend for the disabled youth he works with; two of them had had birthdays that week. (A post is definitely in order about this and will hopefully be forthcoming.)
Anyway, I was walking back and my spine began to tingle ominously and, a block away from my apartment, I started to wonder if I would be able to make it back. Fortunately I did, and was asleep by 9.30, woke up once and was feverish. This morning it felt as if someone was twisting a knife into my intestines and I was very dizzy. The knife-twisting is not constant, but frequent enough that it is a blindingly incapacitating moment or two until it passes, which made it rather difficult during an interview today when it struck and which probably means that I won't be able to do the last couple of interviews that I had hoped and planned to do today. No one seems to know what this 'virus' is called. It's horrendous.
I hope that I am better tomorrow -- it is my last day here.

Thievery

I was sitting in a restaurant that serves Bosnian national cuisine, where I had gone at 4pm to eat a late lunch and to do some writing. It was barely 9 o’clock and, after having filled ten pages and consumed both lunch and dinner, I was beginning to think of heading back, and of whether a stop at a café en route should be in order, and of what a quiet and relaxing evening it was proving.
A small boy, with pale skin, yellow hair, and a light-blue tracksuit that matched his eyes, came into the restaurant and held out his hand asking for money. I shook my head no; I only had 12 marks, and needed them to pay for my meals on Sunday, since exchange offices were closed and withdrawing cash from an ATM cost an extra fee. It would already be difficult to budget. I edged my wallet closer to me and rested my fingers on it. The boy, who was about ten years old, made a circuit of the restaurant. There were only three other occupied tables, one by a man who was slurping soup, one by two older men who were reading newspapers over dinner, and one by a couple on a date. (I wrote something in my notebook about how here, Gypsy children were not the only beggars.) The boy went to the young couple seated at the far end of the restaurant, and opened his eyes very wide; the woman gazed at the man, who smiled at the boy and pulled out his wallet and gave him a coin. (I wrote something about how the little beggars could usually count on the men who wanted to impress their dates with their benevolence, and suspected that the children were masters of sizing up such situations.) The boy headed toward the door. I continued writing, until I noticed a bit of sky-blue hovering at my elbow and had a prickling in my neck and looked up. There was a man beside the boy, wearing black, with close-shaved hair. Something was not right.
What happened next seemed even at the time to be in slow motion. A hand grabbed my wallet from under my fingers at the same time that I turned to look at the boy. The man froze for a split second, caught in the act, and then darted for the door. I leapt up from my chair and dove after him. One of my sandals came off in the restaurant, the other in the street. The man came to a corner and stopped. He looked back and saw that I was still coming, looked completely shocked, and kept running, and I sprinted behind, my toes springing from each stone.
We were in the center of the city. There were a lot of people. They saw him running. But they stared at me. And did nothing.
I could see him and could see that the gap between us was narrowing and I knew exactly how I would bring him down because I could already see that I could take him and my fingers itched to grab his shoulders and flip him and just recalling it sends adrenaline coursing through me.
He turned away from the main street down a street by the mosque and I followed, closer and closer, and then he turned down a dark alley where no one else was.
And at the same time that my brain knew which part of his back to apply leverage to it and I craved it… I was wondering why I was chasing him, since there was not much money and nothing irreplaceable in the wallet, and decided that it must be because the keys to my apartment were in it, but was already speculating that there must be a spare set, and although I put on a burst of speed, I stopped when he went down the alley because it would have been nothing short of stupid to follow him there.
I walked back down the side street and as I came to the intersection with the main street, some Gypsies who were selling DVDs from the top of a cardboard box stopped me and started speaking Bosnian to me and I shook my head and that was when they tried German. I do not know how some Gypsies in the center of Zenica spoke fluent German; there was a man and his wife and a child, and the adults were hardly taller than my shoulder, but they asked if I had caught him, did I get my wallet back, and when I said, ‘Nein,’ they began tsk-ing and saying how bad that man was and it would be alright, I shouldn’t worry about not having caught him, because they knew who he was and where he lived. The Gypsy man said something about how the man had been in prison and/or was a drug addict and/or I don’t know what else because my brain was distracted and not entirely registering the words, but he shook my hand and introduced himself and said that his wife would call the police, and the Gypsy woman, small-boned with an ankle-length skirt with a fanny-pack around her waist, where they kept the money from sales, unzipped the pack and pulled out a cell phone and started asking passers-by for the number of the police.
At this point, I had stopped caring about the wallet and was just a fascinated observer. It was my impression that Gypsies usually held no truck with police, avoiding them when possible, just as they did not really try to have anything to do with non-Roma, but these two people were extraordinarily concerned for me and I was amazed that they, unlike anyone else who had been on the street and witnessed the chase, took the initiative to try to set things right. And it was equally impressive to see that even when the Gypsy woman was trying to help me and asking people for the phone number of the police, most of them ignored her entirely and continued walking past, which caused some frustration for her. Finally one man barely broke stride to call back a number, over his shoulder, which she dialed, and spoke.
While we waited for the police to come, I retraced my steps along the street, was concerned that I did not see my shoe anywhere, wondered why in the world someone would have stolen one sandal from the street in such a short period of time, but once I got back to the restaurant I saw that someone had gone out and retrieved it, and the young man who had given the boy a coin was standing in the door waiting for me and also did not speak English, but one of the newspaper-brandishing men did, and they all asked if I had caught the man and if I had gotten my wallet, and the man said that it was alright that I had not because the young man knew the name of one of them, and he knew who they were (‘It’s a small town,’ he said), and they were calling the police. I tried to explain that the Gypsies had also called the police and that I needed to go back to them to talk with the police there and then come back. At the word ‘Gypsies’ he looked very skeptical, but I nonetheless went back to that corner. I saw the young boy in the blue tracksuit ahead of me. The Gypsy woman saw that I saw him and caught my eye and put her finger to her lips and motioned me to come over to their side of the corner quickly, and once I was there, she and her husband indicated that I should stand, not in the center of the street with them but at the side with the husband, to not raise the boy’s suspicions or make him think that I recognized him. (Although, really, if he didn’t want to be recognized he should hardly have been wearing such conspicuous clothes – then again, perhaps ten-year-olds don’t think of such things.) The Gypsy man explained this to me in German and asked me what was in the wallet, had I lost my identification, and looked as relieved as I was to know that my passport had not been in the wallet. The policemen came surprisingly quickly considering all of the extenuating circumstances (it being the Balkans; the call being made by Gypsies). Neither spoke English or German. The Gypsy man began translating between German and Bosnian, and then both of the Gypsies started talking rapidly in Bosnian about what had happened and what they had seen and who had done it. I had to go back to the restaurant to speak with yet another policeman, and at the restaurant the young man and the older one both spoke with the policeman about what they had seen and who it was. The older one stayed to translate. The policeman asked what had been in my wallet. He seemed baffled that I had chased the thief for twelve marks, a lot of other people’s business cards, my state and university identification cards, my Bank of America ATM card, and my keys. Upon hearing that my keys had been taken, the older man was very concerned and asked what I would do, would I be able to get into my accommodation, would I have a place to stay. The policeman asked if I wanted him to fill out a report; the older man explained that in these countries, if someone goes to the authorities and says that their identification was stolen and they need a replacement, they have to have an official report of it being stolen. The policeman and the older man both said that it was likely that they would recover the wallet, reiterating the size of the town and the known identity of the thief. I was and remain highly dubious, suspecting that they only said that because I was a foreigner since, really, he would probably have taken the 10 mark bill and maybe the coins (and, if he found it sandwiched between the business cards, my BoA card) and tossed the wallet away, but it was an interesting brush with law enforcement nonetheless.
After the policeman left, I called one of my colleagues and he drove to meet me outside of the office with his girlfriend and another of our colleagues. He bought thirty minutes of internet time so that I could contact my family and check up on the BoA regulations for freezing an account, just in case, and then withdrew 20 marks from his bank account for me to use today, and also made a detour to show me where one of the town’s seven Catholic churches was. They had been worried to get my call and asked several times what exactly had happened. ‘I am from the Balkans and nothing like this has ever happened to me,’ said one. (No wonder, since they probably sensed that I was a foreigner and thought to take advantage of that.) ‘I would expect something like that to happen in Skopje, but not here.’ (This is also true, Skopje feels somehow more of a place where this would happen, for reasons I can’t entirely pinpoint.) My parents called later that night, and I got to speak with my family for the first time in two months
Before meeting my colleagues, I had gone back to thank the Gypsies profusely. They seemed quite startled that I had even thought to do so. I am still very surprised by their willingness to help me – perhaps as members of a group that has been marginalized so often, they felt some sympathy for my situation, or perhaps because the young blond boy had been begging, as so many Gypsy children do, they wanted to differentiate themselves from the thieves (as mentioned above, one of the things that had struck me about the boy was that he was not Roma, and I have not seen anyone asking for money in that way who is not Roma; the thief was also not Roma). I do not know. I do know that I would almost gladly have had twelve marks stolen in order to witness briefly that moment of marginalization when everyone walked by, ignoring the requests for the number of the police. I would actually like to see them again and to talk with them and to try to understand why it was that they made such an effort to help me.
Finally, I am so glad that I had not yet folded up my ten pages of journaling and placed them inside the wallet, where I typically carry my loose pages of writing, and that I had no such writing in it; I would have cared much more about those, because unlike everything else, they are irreplaceable. After hearing my story, one of my colleagues commented that the thief must have been taken aback and scared to see me running after him, because women do not run after men here. Although I generally strive for cultural awareness and try to blend in wherever I am, I was not about to let some person just pick up my wallet and leave and not do anything about it. He must have been so sure that he was getting a lot of money, or something valuable, because I was chasing him. I have to laugh at the effort he went to for nothing, and imagining his face once he got down the alley and opened it up and realized it.
One final note on why I am able to be so calm about all of this: I always try to not carry any cash or anything irreplaceable on me, both home and away, and especially while traveling, I spread out my cash – carrying just a little in my wallet, and spreading the rest through my bags and pockets, very rarely shoes, and the most important things next to my skin – i.e. while on any of my train trips, my passport has gone in one part of my bodice and the bulk of my money and my credit card in the other. When I am in a town, if I have any reason to mistrust my accommodation, I also carry those items on me; otherwise, the passport stays well-hidden in a bag. One person I met, who coordinated study abroad programs, advised us to ‘keep it in your pants’ – he had a sort of slim pack that fastened around his hips and fit under his waistband. For years, I was extremely hesitant to use wallets at all because they seemed to me to encourage the concentration of all of one’s important cards and much of one’s money; this was even before hearing about friends who experienced thefts of their wallets. It is easier to travel confidently, and also to be relatively trusting of people one meets, if one has already precluded the possibility of major theft and the abuse of any trust. Whether or not you ‘keep it in your pants’, it is a good idea to not keep it in your wallet if it is not something that you are prepared to lose.

Bosnian Cuisine!

The food is delicious in Bosnia. I had enjoyed the meals I’d had in Sarajevo last year, although between the interviews had not had time for many proper meals and often just ducked into a café for some strong coffee and an occasional piece of baklava. There was one particularly good Ottoman restaurant, and a cozy, off-the-beaten-path bistro with wonderful Italian food.
Since arriving here, I have had by far the greatest number of consistently good meals, be they soups or cevapi or dolma, far more than in any other ex-Yu country so far. Seated before a plate of steaming dolma, one can easily imagine the skeptical suspicion with which the Serbs would have viewed Ottoman cuisine; it is by no means as straightforward as most Serbian food. There are spices, and mixed flavors, and food chopped up into tiny pieces and put inside of other food, such as dolma, which is far more than just stuffed grape leaves – different varieties include peppers or tomatoes or, incredibly, translucent layers of onions, containing ground meat and rice. The attention paid to flavor could only have been revolutionary.
It will be an effort not to live in restaurants here; although to be fair, my culinary experience in Serbia has seldom included traditional food, nonetheless, after months of fried meat cutlets and such gems as the Karadjordjevic steak (ground meat cutlet wrapped around cheese, breaded and deep-fried and served on a roll with cabbage, tomatoes and cucumbers) and so much pork, Bosnian food reminds me of the feeling I used to get after swimming underwater and holding my breath for a second too long and bursting to the surface.
That first welcome gasp of air?
That is Bosnian food.

Bosnia

‘So, do you like Bosnia or Serbia better?’ my colleague asked, laughing. We were gathered around a table outside of a café; a batch of cevap had just finished grilling and we were wrapping the tiny sausages in warm bread.
I laughed back, responding, ‘What kind of a question is that?’
And realized, a split second later, as an expectant pause wore on, that it was the kind of question to which an answer was expected.
So of course replied that both were nice, but in different and incomparable ways – except that the cevap was better in Bosnia. (Something, incidentally, that is not contested by Serbians.)
Nonetheless, it typifies at least one element of my time here so far. Another colleague has been introducing me to the people I am about to interview as, ‘Our colleague from Serbia,’ or, ‘Our colleague from K.’ to the point that one person began speaking to me in Bosnian and then asked, puzzled, ‘Why are we speaking English if you are from K.?’ A lot of people have been asking why I was spending so much time in Serbia?
These questions are posed guardedly, and there is a certain reserve to our interactions that I have not experienced elsewhere. To an extent, it is unclear if this because I have spent a month in Serbia, or because I am working for yet another NGO (there has been so much international involvement in Bosnia that many people are weary of it), or because of some other cultural factor. I am disinclined to believe that it is the latter, simply because I did not encounter this in my last visit to Bosnia.
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Until this summer, I had spent more time in this country than in Serbia (just five days more, but compared to the two days that had been spent in Belgrade, it was a sizable period), having taken a train alone to Sarajevo last spring upon the conclusion of a study tour in Brussels and Strasbourg. On that trip, I spent three days in Sarajevo and two and a half in Brcko, interviewing various employees of foreign NGOs for a research project.
I had been met at the Sarajevo station late one night by a German girl with shorn, dark red hair, who hustled us to a taxi, which brought us to the apartment that she and her boyfriend occupied. Once inside, we sat in the darkened living room. A massive dog sprawled at her feet. She poured a beer, took a pull from the first of many cigarettes, and described her own first visit to Sarajevo. J. had arrived at the station not knowing anyone, and after making it to a hostel, had met friends of an acquaintance and through them her boyfriend. She took a drink of beer and expressed her dream of writing children’s books. For half of the year, she worked as a waitress in Germany, thereby earning enough to come to Sarajevo for six months to visit her boyfriend and to write her stories.
The boyfriend was in a band that was highly ranked in Bosnia; within moments, people began arriving with instruments, went into an adjoining room and began practicing the same bar of music over and over. The girlfriend of another band member came into the living room and lit a cigarette. The flame briefly illuminated here stringy, coal-black hair, parted in the center of a white scalp and hanging limply about a fleshy, pale face, thin-plucked eyebrows and a pierced chin. In a room lit only by the orange glows of the cigarettes when one of the women inhaled, she began reminiscing about the war. Her mother had died before fighting broke out. Her father took her out of Sarajevo and they fled to Belgrade, where they lived until the war ended. ‘My name is Fatima, and with that name, I lived for four years in Belgrade,’ she said.
While walking to the center of the town the following morning, clutching a map the musician had sketched for me, I noticed the shrapnel scars on the side of the building.
The next night, I stayed with E. and N. They had just been married the previous year, and N. had been fighting some health problems from which he had only recently recovered. E., whose heart-shaped face and spirited blue eyes were framed by golden hair, told me how they had met a few years before.
Theirs was a mixed marriage; N.’s family were Croats, E.’s were Muslims. During the war, he had come to Sarajevo and worked as a journalist, to the disgust of some of his extended family, who wanted him to join the Croat army but, N. said, ‘I did not believe in war.’
E.’s family had been affected by the siege; a piece of shrapnel had flown into her father’s skull and lodged in his brain. Now, she said, ‘There are days when he remembers, and he knows us and who we are, but on some days he does not. We never know what kind of a day it is going to be.’
Both E. and N. worked full-time. She had recently been promoted to a customer service job at a large retail store. He had opened his own business and was working long hours there. He drove E. to her job in the mornings, and brought her back in the evenings. She cooked dinner, sat in the apartment watching American television shows subtitled in Bosnian to practice her English, and waiting for N. to call. Sometimes he would come and they would eat together, but sometimes he would only be back at night after she was asleep, and other times would come to get her from the apartment in the evenings and bring her to his office, so they could at least be together while he worked. It depended on how much work there was that night.
N. said that it was difficult to run a business. He had several international organizations as clients, but was experiencing problems trying to expand to a local customer base, because some in the Muslim and Serb communities were reluctant to do business with a Croat. N. had one colleague. S. was very thin; his sandy hair stood on end and he moved gawkily. He had been a refugee in Sweden, during the war, and had only recently returned. He spoke no English, but expressed general goodwill by singing my name and ruffling my hair in greeting.
One night, while waiting for N. to return, E. and I walked to a corner kiosk, where she bought coffee and dish soap and, excitedly, two small cartons of chocolate mousse for us. A television show about a psychic detective played in the background as E. listed the countries she dreamed of visiting, someday, if there were money. N. had traveled to the United States while working for a company after the war, but he observed that there were still problems, even there. He said that there was nothing special, nothing was different anywhere else, people struggled to make ends meet in every country, and they were better staying in Sarajevo where living was cheaper. E. was not convinced, but they had purchased and were in the process of renovating their apartment, themselves – she had picked out a sea-green and burnt-orange color scheme – and so for the time being were settled.
On my last day in Sarajevo, N. gave me a wrapped bottle of rakija that had been made in someone’s backyard (upon return to the U.S., I would notice several Bosnian gnats floating in it), brought me to the bus station and helped me to get my ticket to Brcko.
Brcko was the town in Bosnia that, at the time of the Dayton Agreement, neither side wanted to give up. It is located at the joining of two rivers, so had a good position for trade. In the end, because it could not be decided which entity it should be a part of, it was determined that it would be internationally administered for a limited period of time, after which arbitration as to its status would occur. The mandate of the international authority, however, was repeatedly extended due to continued problems determining Brcko’s proper status. I arrived at the bus station amid pouring rain, after a six hour journey in which the bus had climbed up mountains and stopped regularly at any building on the side of the road with a sign for pekara (bakery) – the five old men who were the only other passengers would get off, buy food, smoke cigarettes, re-board, and continue arguing. Some horrible crimes were committed in Brcko during the war, confided an acquaintance, and many bodies were dumped into the river after people were killed in a nearby factory. After the war, one of the first actions of the international administrator was to encourage the return of Muslim refugees – he organized an effort that went, block by block, to find the original residents and encourage them to come back. It was one of the more effective such initiatives. Nonetheless, Brcko continued to be split, with Muslims living and working on one side of the river, and most Serbs living and working on the other – this effectively meant that half of the town had signs in Latin lettering, and the other half in Cyrillic. There was still much resentment between the groups, and every now and then Serbs would begin movements to, for instance, re-segregate the schools so that Serb and Muslim children would be educated separately. (I do not know what the current status is.)
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Do I prefer Bosnia or Serbia? I still cannot think of a good way to answer that question. Both are complicated, intriguing places that I can only dream of some day understanding. Nonetheless, it has been strange and surprising to perceive a difference between my interactions of last year, when I came from the West, and this year, when I came from Serbia.

Back to Bosnia

The weather in Belgrade was sweltering. Trickles of perspiration dripped down my back and beaded on my neck. My face was flushed by the time I returned to the bus station. The walk had been pleasant enough, and certainly more so than being ensconced at one of the non-air-conditioned 'restaurants' at the station -- if one must spend just two hours in Belgrade, one may as well spend them in one of the city's nicer areas. The bus ride would take seven hours, and the pleasantly long international air-conditioned journey was a nice prospect.

The bus left from Gate 20-something, on the other side of the station, and it was a bit difficult to find it. I paid the conductor 50 dinars (slightly less than a euro) to stow my bag under the bus (baggage is not always included in the price of the bus tickets, here), and then boarded.
The bus had a padded vinyl ceiling and walls. It was apparently an old German hand-me-down, and a sign at the front requested passengers to please not speak to the driver while he was driving. Other signs included numerous umlauts and an abundance of exclamation points. A solitary sticker affixed to the dashboard, just above the gear shift, depicted two clasped hands and proclaimed 'USAID'. Whether the USAID donation had been to give the bus to Germany as part of the Marshall Plan, or to bring it from a German junkyard to the Balkans, was unclear.

The conductor and driver solicitously directed me to sit in the first row of the bus, by the door. Neither spoke English. The only other passengers were three elderly ladies, who sat in the middle of the bus; when the bus stopped by the side of the road after leaving the station, a couple more people boarded. (Presumably it may be cheaper to board the bus after it leaves the station, rather than having to pay for the token to enter the boarding area at the station, but I'm not sure -- regardless, virtually every bus that leaves Belgrade seems to stop at that place, and passengers board and pay cash to the conductor directly.) The driver said something just as we pulled out of the station and gestured toward the ceiling. He only spoke Serbian and a little German, no English, and the word he used was not German for air-conditioning, but I inferred that the system was broken and quickly realized that they had seated me next to the door because there was air-flow there. The door stayed open for almost the entirety of the trip. At first, there was a good breeze coming through, but it quickly got very, very hot.

Looking to the bottom of the stairs, I watched as we crossed and recrossed white lines and tried to convince myself that the lines must be painted crookedly, even while recalling a problem with one of my family's cars such that it would not go straight if the driver did not turn the wheel. Then, shortly after leaving Belgrade, the driver exclaimed loudly to the conductor, lifted his hands in the air and demonstrated as the bus glided across two lanes to the shoulder of the highway. From then on, he would periodically remove his hands from the wheel, apparently just to see how far the bus would go if he was not steering.

We came to the border with Bosnia and waited for the guard to come check the handful of passengers on the bus. He was surprised by my American passport, studied the cover, looked just as intently at my face, and began to leaf through the passport and to examine and to comment to the driver about the stamps on each page; my Swiss visa was especially interesting to him. He then left to run a check on the passport. I opened my small bag of 'Bake Roll Crisps' and offered it to the driver, who enthusiastically took three and rolled his eyes at the border guard's retreating back.
We paused at Brcko. By then we had been on the bus for nearly five hours. I felt overheated and lightheaded. The driver motioned for me to come have coffee with him and the conductor, which we did at a hole-in-the-wall cafe by the side of the station. As we sat at this cafe, the driver pulled out two cell phones, and one of the passengers gave him a cell phone, and they began to swap SIM cards between the phones, and while he was struggling with the card mechanism under one phone's battery, he nudged my arm to ask for help, for me to extract the card, and gesticulated toward his hand. I dazedly removed the card and then realized that he had been indicating that the first halves of the first three fingers on his right hand were missing.
It was like something out of Hitchcock's 39 Steps, even though I have never watched the whole movie.
I got back onto the bus and realized that he was shifting gears with the mutilated hand.
A little while later, he closed the doors during a rainstorm and I could not breathe. That was even before we started driving past small industrial towns and places that smelled of burning garbage. He later opened the doors again and turned on a radio station that was playing wailing folk music. I recognized the beginnings of a tension headache, watched the so-many-diminishing-kilometres-to-Zenica signs, hoped that I wouldn't have to persuade the driver to stop so that I could expire on the roadside. When we finally arrived, I barely managed to get off and say goodbye to the driver and conductor and was just looking around for a quiet bench and a trashcan when I heard my name being called and turned to meet one of my Bosnian colleagues, who brought me to his friend's car; they were picking me up from the station to bring me to my apartment. Once there, it was two cold showers and several hours of pacing back and forth (it hurt my head to sit or lie down or otherwise remain stationary) before I was able to consider keeping down a buprofen. It was a very long night.

When I arrived at the office this morning, still feeling fragile, my colleagues greeted me happily. The colleague who met me had apparently been in contact with the head here and said that he had never seen anyone look so shaky getting off a bus. (He may have noticed that I rather rudely hastened him out of the apartment so that I could rush to the bathroom.)

Belgrade

I left K. yesterday morning on a bus and arrived in Belgrade just before noon. My bus to Bosnia was not scheduled to leave until 2pm, so I decided to take a short walk around, ostensibly in order to exchange some of my Serbian dinars for Euros. [While the Serbian currency would probably not have posed a problem in the Republika Srpska, I suspected it would be easier to get the Euros changed in the Federation -- and my destination was in the Federation. It may not seem like such an important thing, but I vividly recalled having bought two postcards and stamps in Sarajevo last year, and then traveling to Brcko, where I was unable to mail the cards at a conveniently located post office because it was a Republika Srpska office -- and my stamps had been purchased in the Federation. Even though the RS and the Federation are technically two entities of the same country, their administrations seldom cooperate smoothly with one another; this can understandably provoke questions such as, "When is a post office not just a post office? When it is an opportunity for a highly politicized statement." (The Federation post office was not as conveniently located to the city as the RS one, so my cards were eventually sent after my own departure from Brcko, when my contact there next happened to pass it.)]
Aside from the money-changing, I also had a personal motivation for taking a walk around Belgrade.
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The first time I visited Belgrade, the visit that sparked my interest in the Balkans, was on a holiday from an internship in Western Europe. I was en route to Istanbul, disembarking from my trains at three cities along the way. I knew nothing about Belgrade, aside from recollecting its prominent presence in newspaper headlines, and was curious to experience the city.
My train had arrived at the Belgrade station at 5am one December morning. It was not an auspicious beginning. The air was grey and condensation lingered; the weather was chilly; the oppressive smell of burning chemicals wafted around the city. The tourist information office at the train station did not open until 8am; the exchange office was likewise closed; no one at the station spoke English and there were no maps available. Although I had been in contact with a university student who would be hosting me for my time there, I did not have his phone number and would need to find internet to get it from my e-mail. The Belgrade station is on the corner of a street that is a main thoroughfare to enter and leave the city; there were taxis, buses, tankers, semis, cars, motorcycles, bicycles and trams all jostling for space in the six-lane road.
I was afraid to cross the street, had no idea where I needed to go and no one to ask, was wary of venturing out alone, was tired and chilly and overwhelmed. I was also willfully ignoring all of that, as well as the creeping thought that it had been a mistake to come, and why had it ever seemed like a good idea to stop in such a terrible place. I was determined to make the most of whatever there was, and to find a way to do it, and also to look purposeful, to avoid hassle. Standing near the ticketing area, I noticed some confounded-looking backpackers and engaged them in conversation. One was a loquacious lawyer from Texas on his holiday. The other was a British girl with short maroon hair and a Lonely Planet guidebook that had maps she couldn't read to a hostel she wanted to stay at. We set off together; the Texan, seeming quite struck with the Brit, endorsing wholeheartedly her directionally-challenged suggestions as we passed bombed-out buildings and eventually took a break in a park while the two tried to re-read the map. I told myself that it was better than waiting for three hours in the station for the tourist information center to open, or roaming the city alone, but was skeptical and unconvinced. We finally made it to the main pedestrian zone and then to the hostel, in spite rather than because of Lonely Planet. After getting my host's information, I went in search of the correct bus that would take me to Studenski Grad, or the dormitories where students live, in Novi Beograd, the newer part of the city.
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The bus station in Belgrade adjoins the train station. Upon arriving, I went to the train station and stood in the same place that I had when I'd first arrived in the city twenty-one months before, acknowledging to myself for the first time how hesitant and underwhelmed I had felt that morning, and realizing that I did not feel at all as nervous on this visit.
It was empowering to sense the difference. This time, I felt confident, I knew where I was and, roughly, its relation to other places in the city. I felt as at home in the Belgrade station as I do these days in the Port Authority, and I did not feel fear at the prospect of finding a bank at which to exchange my money. I decided to change the money and then to walk on up the hill to the pedestrian zone, where I meandered around cafes and side streets before stopping at the Hotel Moskva for a refreshing mineral water. I bought another bottle of water and some 'Bake Roll' chips (bagel chips) at the corner Maxi and then went back to the station with fifteen minutes to spare.

Zenica, Zenica

In the former Yugoslavia, Zenica was known for two things: its prison and its steel mill. The former housed some of the worst criminals in the former Yugoslavia; one famous song describes how much the protagonist hates this town, where he has been jailed. ‘No one has ever escaped from it,’ one person boasted. The latter generated a large amount of pollution, smelled unpleasant, and employed hundreds of people from the town. Before the war, roughly equal numbers of Serbs, Croats and Muslims lived in Zenica. During the war, the Bosnian army had troops there, and the town was not attacked or subjected to the same ethnic cleansing attempts that plagued many other towns because ‘they knew the army was here.’
‘After the war,’ he said, ‘the first crime was privatization.’ During the process of privatizing the nationalized companies that largely constituted the Yugoslav economy, most buyers were either political cronies of company management or the management itself – but of course, to achieve a management position for such a company, individuals had to be well-connected in the Party. If the buyers did not fall into one of those categories, odds were good that they were international businessmen. This was how Zenica’s steel mill was bought by an English businessman of Indian descent, who owns a number of similar enterprises throughout the world. There was corruption: those local people who had the funds to buy the companies were the same people who had been in charge during their nationalization. Production from Zenica’s steel mill was slashed, and workers laid off. There were few alternate employment options for them.
The evening after I arrived, I sat on a ledge outside of my apartment and wrote in my journal as the call to prayer sounded from the white minarets that dot the valley.