I generally try to keep my parents apprised of my international boundary crossings, and with this in mind, I emailed my mother on Tuesday morning to let her know that I would be going to Macedonia in the afternoon.
I had packed my bags, fixed my computer, purchased snacks and water, borrowed new books from the American Corner, and changed all of my Serbian dinars into more easily convertible Euros, long before the driver, N., came to pick me up at 4pm.
We drove thirty minutes to where the road intersected the north-south highway, and parked the car by a Socialist-era motel where N. speculated that Serb refugees from Kosovo are currently ensconced. The line of laundry drying on one balcony, the yellow-paper-covered windows, and the despondent-looking young woman staring at her cuticles did not counter this impression. We walked up a cracked path, past the buildings, and up the winding exit ramp to stand on the side of the highway and wait for the bus.
It is not technically quite legal for the bus to stop and pick up passengers from the side of the highway -- nor is it uncommon. Because I would have had to go the full two hours to Belgrade in order to catch a bus that, two hours after leaving that city, would pass my original starting-point, my colleague called the company and made arrangements for it to stop on the side of the road so that I could hop on.
The sun beat down on the asphalt. A tour bus went past the exit ramp, stopped and backed up and turned off the highway. We pressed against the guardrail. A hitchhiker in a black collared t-shirt mopped his brow, stood with us for all of three minutes, and then moved further down the highway where he was soon picked up by a truck. Wildflowers danced in the wind. The sun went behind a cloud. Another bus passed. The sun came out from the cloud. Somewhere, a dog urinated.
I observed that the sky was quite lovely.
N. commented that Serbs used to be a proud people, but now the pride has been taken away.
I glanced at my watch.
N. asked if I had been to Macedonia before. I shook my head no. "It is a lot like Serbia. The people are friendly. The country is small and poor. And they also have problems with Albanians!"
Semis laden with logs, plastics, ice cream, whizzed by.
I asked N. what he meant.
N. folded his arms while slouching, and fixed piercingly blue eyes on me, before describing the history of the First World War, complete with dates. Granted, it was a bit hard to follow as the dates were not always clearly indicated and included some from 1389, some from 1991, some from 1945, 1970, and 1915. N.'s grandfather had been in the Yugoslav Army from the end of the Second World War until 1980. Serbia liberated all of the Balkans in the First World War. Serbia became a nation at Kosovo. Governments in Europe and the U.S. used to respect Serbia. All people in the Balkans were once Serbs; the Croats are just Serbs who converted to Catholicism and the Muslims Serbs who converted to Islam. During the war in Bosnia, Tudjman and Milosevic initially had an alliance, but later there were alliances between Croat and Muslim forces against the Serbs, between Muslim and Serb forces against the Croats, between the Croats and certain Muslim forces against the Serbs and other Muslim forces.
N. was in the army in 1994 and 1995. He was on army service in Kosovo in 1999, while NATO bombed Serbia. One of his good friends in the army died in Kosovo. "Serbia could say that Kosovo was not a part of Serbia, but Kosovo can never say that it is not a part of Serbia, it is where Serbia became a nation."
He lit a cigarette, and alleged that the Albanian mafia is the strongest in the world, and that the reason the international community recognized Kosovo was because American politicians were bribed by the Albanian mafia. (I have heard conspiracy theories before, but this particular one was new to me.)
There was, notably, nothing in this discussion that justified or began to explain the ethnic tensions, except for the argument that all Muslims in this region only converted to appease or to curry favor with the Ottomans.
I chose not to point this out.
Finally, a bus marked with the right company appeared. It disappeared just as quickly, without stopping for me.
We waited for another twenty minutes, in addition to the hour we had already waited, and then went back to the car. I picked a stem of Queen Anne's Lace. It was crawling with tiny ants. Soon, my white shirt was, too.
We drove back to town in a silence as sedate as N.'s hour-long discussion had been impassioned.
I took a cold shower, and went to a lakeside cafe with a friend from the town and a girl from Lithuania.
Later, I tried to sleep, but heard a scratching in the wall that I became convinced was a mouse. I went down to the front desk, where a large mustached man gazed at me confusedly - 'Ne Engleski.' I took a pencil and a piece of paper and drew a picture of a mouse with a long tail and large ears, and ran my fingers across the desk and the wall. This only served to confuse him more. We went up to my room. There was no noise. He tried to tell me that it was just the water pipe - by pointing at the water pipe and then at his ear. I shook my head - and was unable to sleep for most of the night.
Upon my morning arrival at the office, one of my colleagues commented that she had called the bus company, which had assumed full responsibility for forgetting to stop for me. Startled, I commented that of course they were responsible for it. She pointed out, though, that she was surprised that they also recognized that, since admitting culpability is unusual for companies here.
Then, this afternoon, we took my bags and put them in the car and went back to the exit ramp and did it all - short of the part where the bus didn't stop - again. I sat next to a peroxide blonde secondary-school German language teacher who was en route to visit her cousins in Skopje. They just moved back to Macedonia after living in Seacaucus, New Jersey, for twenty years.
The bus was ancient, as buses go. It was orange, with threadbare orange curtains hanging limply from the windows and dusty upholstery. It was run by the Sputnik Bus Company. The bus had a DVD player, which was showing a movie about the Cold War. (Any irony seemed unintentional.) Every time the bus hit a bump in the road, which happened frequently, the screen would freeze and go black and then, flickering, resume. The movie was subtitled in Serbian. It was just as well that it was not dubbed, since the radio played Serbian folk music all the way to the border, when it began playing Macedonian folk music.
No one on the bus used headphones or read or played video games. The passengers talked to one another and to the drivers and the conductor, or they slept. Meanwhile, the drivers and the conductor smoked continually. A young child wheezed into my ear. An old man exuded body odor. The border crossing seemed interminable, and my seatmate whispered that there have been problems with drugs being transported through Belgrade to other countries, and that they were inspecting the bus especially carefully because it had Belgrade license plates.
The bus rounded a bend in the road, and Skopje spread before us: a half-moon in the sky, city lights sprawling toward the horizon, and a massive illuminated cross which must have been located on a nearby mountain, but which seemed for all the world to be hovering between the moon and the city. My seatmate's Seacaucus cousin helped me to find a taxi, as it turns out that my phone's prepaid Serbian SIM card does not get service in Macedonia, and I arrived at my free wi-fi equipped hotel.
I had packed my bags, fixed my computer, purchased snacks and water, borrowed new books from the American Corner, and changed all of my Serbian dinars into more easily convertible Euros, long before the driver, N., came to pick me up at 4pm.
We drove thirty minutes to where the road intersected the north-south highway, and parked the car by a Socialist-era motel where N. speculated that Serb refugees from Kosovo are currently ensconced. The line of laundry drying on one balcony, the yellow-paper-covered windows, and the despondent-looking young woman staring at her cuticles did not counter this impression. We walked up a cracked path, past the buildings, and up the winding exit ramp to stand on the side of the highway and wait for the bus.
It is not technically quite legal for the bus to stop and pick up passengers from the side of the highway -- nor is it uncommon. Because I would have had to go the full two hours to Belgrade in order to catch a bus that, two hours after leaving that city, would pass my original starting-point, my colleague called the company and made arrangements for it to stop on the side of the road so that I could hop on.
The sun beat down on the asphalt. A tour bus went past the exit ramp, stopped and backed up and turned off the highway. We pressed against the guardrail. A hitchhiker in a black collared t-shirt mopped his brow, stood with us for all of three minutes, and then moved further down the highway where he was soon picked up by a truck. Wildflowers danced in the wind. The sun went behind a cloud. Another bus passed. The sun came out from the cloud. Somewhere, a dog urinated.
I observed that the sky was quite lovely.
N. commented that Serbs used to be a proud people, but now the pride has been taken away.
I glanced at my watch.
N. asked if I had been to Macedonia before. I shook my head no. "It is a lot like Serbia. The people are friendly. The country is small and poor. And they also have problems with Albanians!"
Semis laden with logs, plastics, ice cream, whizzed by.
I asked N. what he meant.
N. folded his arms while slouching, and fixed piercingly blue eyes on me, before describing the history of the First World War, complete with dates. Granted, it was a bit hard to follow as the dates were not always clearly indicated and included some from 1389, some from 1991, some from 1945, 1970, and 1915. N.'s grandfather had been in the Yugoslav Army from the end of the Second World War until 1980. Serbia liberated all of the Balkans in the First World War. Serbia became a nation at Kosovo. Governments in Europe and the U.S. used to respect Serbia. All people in the Balkans were once Serbs; the Croats are just Serbs who converted to Catholicism and the Muslims Serbs who converted to Islam. During the war in Bosnia, Tudjman and Milosevic initially had an alliance, but later there were alliances between Croat and Muslim forces against the Serbs, between Muslim and Serb forces against the Croats, between the Croats and certain Muslim forces against the Serbs and other Muslim forces.
N. was in the army in 1994 and 1995. He was on army service in Kosovo in 1999, while NATO bombed Serbia. One of his good friends in the army died in Kosovo. "Serbia could say that Kosovo was not a part of Serbia, but Kosovo can never say that it is not a part of Serbia, it is where Serbia became a nation."
He lit a cigarette, and alleged that the Albanian mafia is the strongest in the world, and that the reason the international community recognized Kosovo was because American politicians were bribed by the Albanian mafia. (I have heard conspiracy theories before, but this particular one was new to me.)
There was, notably, nothing in this discussion that justified or began to explain the ethnic tensions, except for the argument that all Muslims in this region only converted to appease or to curry favor with the Ottomans.
I chose not to point this out.
Finally, a bus marked with the right company appeared. It disappeared just as quickly, without stopping for me.
We waited for another twenty minutes, in addition to the hour we had already waited, and then went back to the car. I picked a stem of Queen Anne's Lace. It was crawling with tiny ants. Soon, my white shirt was, too.
We drove back to town in a silence as sedate as N.'s hour-long discussion had been impassioned.
I took a cold shower, and went to a lakeside cafe with a friend from the town and a girl from Lithuania.
Later, I tried to sleep, but heard a scratching in the wall that I became convinced was a mouse. I went down to the front desk, where a large mustached man gazed at me confusedly - 'Ne Engleski.' I took a pencil and a piece of paper and drew a picture of a mouse with a long tail and large ears, and ran my fingers across the desk and the wall. This only served to confuse him more. We went up to my room. There was no noise. He tried to tell me that it was just the water pipe - by pointing at the water pipe and then at his ear. I shook my head - and was unable to sleep for most of the night.
Upon my morning arrival at the office, one of my colleagues commented that she had called the bus company, which had assumed full responsibility for forgetting to stop for me. Startled, I commented that of course they were responsible for it. She pointed out, though, that she was surprised that they also recognized that, since admitting culpability is unusual for companies here.
Then, this afternoon, we took my bags and put them in the car and went back to the exit ramp and did it all - short of the part where the bus didn't stop - again. I sat next to a peroxide blonde secondary-school German language teacher who was en route to visit her cousins in Skopje. They just moved back to Macedonia after living in Seacaucus, New Jersey, for twenty years.
The bus was ancient, as buses go. It was orange, with threadbare orange curtains hanging limply from the windows and dusty upholstery. It was run by the Sputnik Bus Company. The bus had a DVD player, which was showing a movie about the Cold War. (Any irony seemed unintentional.) Every time the bus hit a bump in the road, which happened frequently, the screen would freeze and go black and then, flickering, resume. The movie was subtitled in Serbian. It was just as well that it was not dubbed, since the radio played Serbian folk music all the way to the border, when it began playing Macedonian folk music.
No one on the bus used headphones or read or played video games. The passengers talked to one another and to the drivers and the conductor, or they slept. Meanwhile, the drivers and the conductor smoked continually. A young child wheezed into my ear. An old man exuded body odor. The border crossing seemed interminable, and my seatmate whispered that there have been problems with drugs being transported through Belgrade to other countries, and that they were inspecting the bus especially carefully because it had Belgrade license plates.
The bus rounded a bend in the road, and Skopje spread before us: a half-moon in the sky, city lights sprawling toward the horizon, and a massive illuminated cross which must have been located on a nearby mountain, but which seemed for all the world to be hovering between the moon and the city. My seatmate's Seacaucus cousin helped me to find a taxi, as it turns out that my phone's prepaid Serbian SIM card does not get service in Macedonia, and I arrived at my free wi-fi equipped hotel.
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