Monthly Archive for April, 2009

The Quest For the Missing Camera

On April 26, 2009 from Montenegro. 1 Comment.

We just don’t give a shit.
—Lemon of Macedonia on Balkan social values

The bus for Podgorica left Sarajevo in a deep gorge carved by a white water river that cut out tunnels in the cliffs and left standing rocky spires with green wigs of shrubbery. One of the window panes was filled with glass that vibrated with the bus like an oscilloscope hooked up to a death metal song. Mountainous ridges, green and brown with pine and cedar and oak, fell away into meadows and pastures shattered by the abandoned ruins of houses and by piles of tires and rubble, the ground patched with cumulus shadows.

On the border between Bosnia and Montenegro, scrawny green tees climb up from the turquoise water of a reservoir into the folds of slate cliffs, which open to rolling green highlands, then sheep-speckled pasture rimmed with scree and firs and snow-capped hills.

That is where I lost my camera. The Bosnian border guards took our passports and spent an anxious 10 minutes checking them. It always takes a while to get mine back, since the same people who have no problem pronouncing Salihamidic cannot say McDonald. Anyway, we moved ahead to the Montenegro border, where more guards checked our passports and went through our bags. While this was happening, I realized I did not have my camera.

I looked around, then turned to the four college-aged guys who were sitting near me in the back. Up until that point they had been noisily blasting a Yugoslavian radio station and joking around. When I asked them if they had seen a camera anywhere around, it became their personal quest to uncover the missing artifact.

One of them began interrogating me about the camera and where I had last seen it with a forensic scrutiny he must have gleaned from CSI while the other three searched the floor, upturned the ragged seat cushions, and felt around the overhead shelf. This proved fruitless.

“I’m sure it will turn up,” I said hopefully.

“No,” said one of them. “If you don’t find it now, it is gone.” He started explaining the physics of bus locomotion to me, and how when the bus slowed the camera would slide toward the driver, where someone might have stolen it, but much of this very technical exposition was lost in translation.

I was not taking this seriously enough, so they all started yelling at the bus driver, and one ran up to the front of the bus and had the driver stop on the side of the road so we could make a more thorough search without being interrupted inertia and bad highway maintenance.

“Jon,” they said, “look in your briefcase again. If it is not in there, someone may have stolen it.” I looked, and there it was, a glittering prize under my notebook and tattered Balkans guidebook. “We found the camera!” they yelled.

For the next few hours we were best friends. They were from Montenegro, and their names were Damir, Wally, Dennis, and Denis. I explained my trip and why the hell I was in Bosnia and where else I was going.

“You must be careful in Russia,” said Denis. “Many terrorists.”

“Jon, tell the truth: Did you think we steal the camera?” asked Damir from the back seat.

“No. You seem like honest guys.”

This did pacify him, and we talked about books and movies (“Michael Bay! He is great director!”) and bemoaned Montenegro’s misfortunes. “We are so behind. So behind America,” he said, waving at the shallow gorge out the window, which was as wide as the Grand Canyon and carpeted with firs. A few brick homesteads peeked out like breakers, but it was largely untouched.

“We have natural beauty,” Damir continued, “but no industry; no economy; no culture. Since Greater Yugoslavia dissolved, we have nothing.”

Damir went to talk to the only girl on the bus and the other three, by shouting, howling, serenading, and throwing things onto his head, did their best to embarrass him and thwart his courtship.

When we docked in the Podgorica bus station, they shouted, “Hurry up Jonnie!” and invited me to visit Ulcinj, a one-time pirate haven near the Albanian border, and stay with them someday. “I have girlfriends coming from Sarajevo. Two girlfriends. One for you.”

Kotor (40)

From Podgorica, which is a dump, I went straight to Kotor on the coast, which someone in Herceg Novi told me was cool. A minibus left 20 minutes later. We drove up switchbacks on one side of a huge coastal cliff and down more on the other, and I looked onto familiar Dalmatian ridges and the glittering blue sward of the Adriatic.

Kotor is an old triangular-shaped fortress town that sticks out into Europe’s most southern fjord with small, unnamed streets that you learn by heart after an hour of aimless wandering. Courtyards of canopied cafés surround old stone churches, of which there are a number disproportionate to the town’s small size. There is a big castle complex on the ridge above the town, and I spent most of Friday climbing around on it and on the rocky hills behind it with the carefree zeal of a fifth grader.

It’s a big vacation town for the rest of former Yugoslavia, which is how I met Lemon from Macedonia and a lot of young people from the other Balkan states, who pretty universally speak English.

I stayed in Kotor with a severe woman named Branko Kralj who owned a little boutique across the street from her apartment. She was very entrepreneurial and had ten beds, not including those occupied by her two children, who were older than me and did not seem at all happy that I was there. Her son rolled his eyes everytime he saw me on his way to the television.

Red Roses of Sarajevo

On April 23, 2009 from Bosnia & Hercegovina. 2 Comments.

There was once a land called
Bosnia
A fasting a frosty a
Footsore a drossy a
Land forgive me
That wakes from sleep
With a
Defiant
Sneer
—Mak Dizdar

The parks in Sarajevo double as graveyards, though the clean white obelisques that mark Christian burials are kept separate from the slanting mushroom-headed plinths of Islam, which look unfathomably old, stained by dirt and weather. There was nowhere else to bury the dead during the four years under Serbian siege (1992-5).

I went to the Holiday Inn where all the journalists stayed, it being the only hotel still open at the time. It’s on the Zmaja od Bosne road, a wide highway that goes from the city to the airport, and that was affectionately renamed Sniper’s Alley during the siege. Serbian marksmen in the hills targeted civilians, who had to run through the marked sniper zones on their way to work, school, church, or the sparsely supplied grocer.

It’s vertiginous and unreal to see a city so recently affected by war, where many bear the physical scars of the conflict and everyone has a veteran’s cold disillusionment. Everywhere are bullet-holes, piles of rubble, and collapsed buildings. The Serbians targeted cultural landmarks, and the Bosnian National Library remains half rebuilt.

The most colorful reminders of the war are the Sarajevo Roses, which look like splatters of red paint on the sidewalks. The Bosnians filled in the scars of mortar shells with a red concrete resin to make a rose-like shape.

Sarajevo is crowded, polluted, overgrown, bombed out, boarded up, and still alive. It’s twice as big as the long, narrow Miljacka River valley that it has been crammed into, and stone Bosnian houses with red rooftops creep up the sides of the forested hills that were once a haven for mortars and sniper teams. Signs warn pedestrians to stay on the pavement, since thousands of landmines remain undiscovered, and to be careful of packs of stray dogs, which is unfortunate because the hills are beautiful.

For all this, Sarajevo is a charming city. I stayed in a hostel in the Baščaršija old town, which looks like a Medieval marketplace. There are streets for leatherworkers, for carpets, and for artisans who make pots and stoves and more delicate items out of metal. With a chorus of tinking, metalworkers chisel crosses, florid arabesques, and the images of sacral buildings into plates, cups, and coffee sets of copper and brass and silver that gleam on wood shelves behind the alley’s glass walls.

The minarets and domes of Turkish mosques, the competing riot of Arabic prayer songs that drift over the smoky city five times a day, and the storefront displays of mannequins bearing hijabs and Eastern sensibilities all remind that this is as much a Muslim city as a European one, with as many Muslims as Orthodox Christian Serbs, and five times as many of those as Roman Catholics. They say Sarajevo is the most Eastern city in the West, and the most Western city of the East.

Anyway, I stayed in a little hostel, in a cheap single room with cable TV, a phone that wasn’t plugged into anything, and all the comforts of a monk’s cell. Downstairs Bosnians drank coffee and played checkers and Counter-Strike 1.6. I don’t mind sharing accomodations, but it was exquisite after my all-night bus ride across the howling mountain tracts and sleepy black towns of barking dogs to lie down on my bed — which was really more of a couch with a sheet on it — under the glow of a trans-Atlantic Celtics-Cavaliers game, and fall asleep.

I spent most of my waking hours walking around the city.

I went to the Skendereji courtyard and watched dozens of old men encircle a chess board half as big as a basketball court. Some stood on the nearby dumpsters for a better view. They argued with each other and shouted unsolicited advice to the two contemplative players, who moved the bucket-sized pieces with a fencer’s flourish when performing some trick.

There’s a lot of stuff going on — I just missed “Mortal Kombajni [Kombat],” a drama by Dino Mustafich — and a lot of cool bars like Club Bill Gates, the Pirate Bar, and Cheers. I sat out the frequent downpours in cafés and cheap restaurants, drinking Bosnian coffee (which they serve with the grounds) and eating hearty Slavic fare and Turkish pide. I looked at the homemade guns and terrifying stuffed animals at the National Museum and the History Museum. I climbed up the remnant walls of toppled fortresses at the top of the hill on the city’s western end and wondered at the crowded cemeteries.

On Tuesday I went to the Sarajevo brewery (their well provided much of the city’s water during the siege) with two Americans I met, one of whom became enamored with the titanic beer steins.

“I’ll give you 30 marks for this,” he told the serious Bosnian waiter.

“No.”

“How much do you want for it?”

“It’s not for sale.”

“How much would you charge if I broke it?”

The waiter smiled and said, “I would beat you to death.”

“What if I just stole it?”

“I will take glass now.”

Ten Thousand Words

On April 21, 2009 from Bosnia & Hercegovina. 0 Comments.

Ummm uh I uploaded a bunch of pictures. Here are some of them.

Vienna, Austria

Lee3 019

Budapest, Hungary

Lee3 063

Zagreb, Croatia

Zagreb (13)

Split, Croatia (plus Trogir and Solin)

Split (32)

Dubrovnik, Croatia (plus Herceg Novi, Montenegro)

Dubrovnik (31)

Sarajevo, Bosnia

Sarajevo (69)

No Straight Roads In Croatia

On April 18, 2009 from Croatia. 0 Comments.

One knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.
—Paul Fussell

I was at the Budapest train station last Friday when I decided to come to Croatia, which is strange because I woke up with the vague determination to go to Transylvania, Dracula’s Carpathian home.

“How much for a ticket to Braşov?” I asked the stocky ticketress.

“Boorrla?” she asked, rolling R’s and crushing vowels in a way impossible to transcribe. Everyone I asked pronounced Braşov, Transylvania’s biggest city, with a different enunciation. I still don’t know how to say it.

“Yeah,” I said.

She tabulated the price of my trip, including variables for age, class, and further destinations on a solar powered calculator.

“15,209 Forints.” That’s about $70 dollars.

“How much for Zagreb?”

Calculating. “880.”

“Then I guess I’m going to Zagreb.”

She wrote out the ticket by hand with a sheet of carbon paper under it so she would have a copy. Computers are overrated.

Zagreb, the Croatian capital, lounges in a flat valley enclosed by the Alpine foothills of upper Illyria. The city center is neoclassical in a postwar concrete kind of way. Big sheets of stone are missing from most of the weathered buildings, revealing brick and mortar. The suburbs look like Palo Alto. Greening trees and stuccoed houses with roofs of sangria-colored tile line the wide avenues, plied by fleets of tiny German and Japanese autos. Generally ragged gardens buffer the tightly packed houses, but it feels like there is infinite space.

The Croats make this familiar landscape unique. The men swagger around asking for cigarettes and sit at streetside cafés chatting pleasantly over powerful espresses and glasses of water like magnanimous mafiosos, Italians who never took to the Renaissance. They are liberal with car horns and loud voices. Women are wiry and wily with passing spells of dignity and sound like they started smoking in utero.

I made the mistake of coming to Zagreb on Easter weekend, when the city shuts down. The only food available are the Croatian staples of espresso, beer, and ice cream, as well as McDonald’s, which maintains America’s 24/7 no holiday doctrine in the face of strong local resistance. If you have not prepared for Easter weekend, then you have to starve. I was ready to leave, and after two buses did not show up, I got on a late one that drove down through the Croatian highlands and south on the coast to Split.

I stayed with a woman named Anna who I met at the bus station with a sign around her neck that said “Rooms” in four languages. She looked like a clay golem in a purple sweater, a green skirt, and a brown wig. Anna walked me through the fantastically exotic streets of the nighted coastal town to her apartment and told me about Split in between yelling at people she knew.

“Anna like Split, yes? Anna love Split. It is a nice town. Poor town. No money money, yes? This is Caritas. You eat eat between 10 and 2, yes?” She started eating out of one hand with the other. I didn’t know what she was talking about. It looked like a pharmacy.

I said, “Da,” which is what I learned to say whenever confronted with Croatian inexplicability.

The next morning Anna shouted, “Jonnie! Jonnie! Jonnie!”

“Yeah?”

“You sleep nice?”

“Yes, I slept very well, thank you.”

“Good Jonnie.”

Then she went back into her room and clicked all 1800 deadbolts into place. Her lair is more secure than NORAD.

I left Anna’s apartment to explore Split, which is someone’s dream of the Adriatic. The old town surrounds the ruined palace of the Roman Emperor Diocletian, which once abutted the clear water of the crescent bay but now stands fifty meters back to leave room for outdoor cafés and palm trees. The high wall, with its gates and towers, is all that remains of the old palace, other than Diocletian’s Mausoleum — the Christian massacring Caesar’s tomb is now a cathedral — and the substructure, once a garbage dump and now a subterranean market. Pizza shops, ice cream parlors, cafés, and little fashion boutiques have found places in the old wall, which makes Split look like a movie set. The inside is filled with bars, Roman ruins, and narrow streets of slick marble, the outside surrounded by gardens and tented market stalls.

With your back to the palace, the bay curves out to either side, cruise ships on the left and a forest of yacht masts on the right and a rectangular glass building that stands out like an abscess against all that red and white. Split blankets half of the long Dalmatian peninsula, the other half being a hill too steep to build on. Houses climb halfway up, but the rest is forest and stone steps with a Croatian flag at the top and a sunset on the other side.

Split is a city colored by hanging laundry, by lounging and yowling cats, by Croatian arguments, by ethnography museums, by cyprus, lemon, orange, olive, and palm trees, and by Vespas, some made entirely of duct tape.

I went to a bar with some people the next night, when halogen illumination turns Diocletian’s Palace into something like an Aztec temple. The bar was on a balcony over the ocean, and some sort of Croatian Ranchero music piped over the speakers. It sounded just like Mexican music, with a little less accordion. Croatians have a strange affinity for Mexico. They have a lot of restaurants with Mexican names that serve Mexican pizza, which has corn, olives, and mushrooms on it.

Anna made me coffee before I left for another coastal town. “Anna need big black coffee,” she told me. We talked for a while about family and where I got my money money, but ran into problems. “No capito. Small English,” said Anna. “Where you go Jonnie? You come back, come to Split, call Anna, okay?”

The nauseatingly serpentine highway from Split to Dubrovnik winds around the coves of the Dalmatian coast and passes under mountains and through little red and white villages wedged in the green slope between the water and the sheer slate cliffs above. The houses go up in rows like stadium seats, and all their balconies face the Adriatic, which on that clear day was a calm, blue expanse. Distant islands and the receding ridgeline seemed to float on the water, buffered by white mist.

The inner hills are rocky scabs patched with green, sparsely populated and dotted with clear lakes and canals and with ivy-splashed stone towers. Ubiquitous Roman and Medieval foundations demarcate family gardens. These hills open up into wide river valleys and neat haciendas.

Dubrovnik is an old fortress town of narrow stone streets, overgrown with orange trees and laundry, on a square peninsula ringed by a 30 meter wall, which opens on the south to a noisy harbor of argumentative fishermen that feeds a thriving fish market near the bus station. I got a discount on a single hostel room in the New Town, on another peninsula a few rocky coastal kilometers north of the Grad, the Old Town. The land here soars up over the clear watter in green-swabbed vistas marked by dead fortresses and parking lots. The New Town is in a valley between two wooded peninsular bluffs that stick out into the water like mandibles.

From my hostel, I walked 200 meters down a cobblestone street shaded by palm trees and canopies for the tables, chairs, and couches, to the little sand bar beach in the middle of the west-facing bay. Everything happens outside here. Restaurants, bars, cafés, and markets spill out into the sunny streets. It’s nice to just sit and enjoy the scenery.

So basically I spent the last week reading in the shade, taking bracing Adriatic swims, drinking coffee and beer on patios, eating pizza and ice cream, and ruminating over Roman and Medieval ruins. I guess I’m on vacation.

Budapest, Szeretem

On April 10, 2009 from Hungary. 0 Comments.

We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.
—Jawaharial Nehru

Hungary is very cheap on the Döner Price Index. The DPI is the best way of judging cost in a European country, since every country has some variant on the Near-Eastern döner/schwarma/gyro/kebab. Berlin and Vienna, where a savory wrap costs €2.80, are the median. Munich and Salzburg are pretty expensive at €3.20. Budapest, though, sets a record at €2 flat. The quality is a little worse — the döner is literally thrown together — but the acrobatics involved in the split-second preparation make up for the food’s jumbled composition.

Food here is excellent. The Hungarian staples are sausage, potatoes, and noodles with heavy doses of salt and paprika. It’s good for curing the hangovers that inevitably follow consumption of cheap Hungarian wine, which is so awful that they usually mix it with coke.

Hungary is on the borer of the old Soviet bloc. After the communists departed, leaving behind concrete and glass Proletariat apartments, a self-deprecating irony, and a metric ton of Kalishnakovs sold for bottles of vodka, the re-liberated Hungarians ripped up the star-shaped beds of red flowers, sent all the Lenin statues to a huge stockyard a few miles down the Danube, and elected all the communist party members back into their new democratic government. Way to go!

Buda and Pest from the Buda hills.

I took a free walking tour my first full day here, and the guide took every opportunity to exercise her newfound freedom of speech: “Here is the building for the government finance bureau. Three-thousand people do the work that 1,000 could do. It is very big, very expensive.” She then told us about the Hungarian national sport — dodging taxes — and showed us an old oil-burning Soviet car from East Germany that became a symbol of national pride, representing clandestine freedom from prying eyes.

Budapest has two sides: Buda and Pest. Buda, meaning water, is built into the limestone hills west of the Danube. The palace is there, as are extravagent Turkish baths and luxury accomodations. Pest, which means heating system, collects smog in a flatland on the eastern side. It has bustling markets for hearty Hungarian food, the Jewish Quarter and the largest synagogue in Europe, and the Parliament building, the offspring of a Turkish mosque and a gothic cathedral, and a flag that has a hole in it where the communist emblem used to be. They built a Municipal Concert Hall which looks great but has acoustics so horrible that no composer will take his work there. They hold raves in the basement and are in the process of leasing it as office space. Pest is much better than Buda.

The subway here was the first in Europe. The rickety old trains accelerate like F-1 racecars and then slam on the brakes so even the stolid Hungarians are thrown around the car. Charlie Brown’s teacher announces the stops. It does not help comprehension that Hungarian is the most messed up language after English — Central Asian roots with a little Finnish and German sprinkled in to make it more confusing. For example, “Thank you” is “Köszönöm szépen.”

If you get ticketed on the Budapest Metro, just give the cops a US address. It costs them more to file the paperwork and send it to the states than they would get from a paid fine. So they don’t fine you, and you get to ride the Metro for free. This is also one of those places where you have to negotiate the price before you get into a cab to avoid paying $50 a mile (or 11,000 forints, if you go by Hungary’s inflated currency).

Enough background. Yesterday I visited one of the Hungarian bath houses. They have traditional Turkish ones, but I went to a more modern variant that was more like a water park with saunas. Saunas range from 50 to 80 degrees Celsius. Some have herbal scents in the oppressive air, and some provide fountains of ice that you’re supposed to rub on yourself. Or that’s what other people did. I’m not too keen on bath house etiquette, but I did learn a little at the Roman bath in England. I knew to jump into the freezing pool after soaking in the 40 degree mineral water hot tub or sweating in the sauna.

On Wednesday I went caving. The limestone hills under and around the Buda side are riddled with holes carved by ground water and are a popular tourist attraction. I went with some people I’d met on a bus up into the hills to a cabin next to the highway. Our cave guide was a Hungarian named Laslow. He was wearing a felt jumpsuit when he introduced himself and looked ridiculous. Later we all put on canvas jumpsuits to keep the mud off, but he still looked ridiculous since he had a butane candle on his forehead in addition to the miner’s headlight.

Laslow's helmet torch.

When we were geared up, Laslow led the eleven of us across the highway and down into a gully, then unlocked and opened a metal door into a manmade tunnel with a thirty foot ladder that went down into subterranea. The limestone walls were cool and wet with underground humidity that turned the dust into adhesive clay. The caves ran 100 meters deep, but in some places tree roots pierced cracks in the roof and dangled worthlessly overhead. Once we saw sea shells embedded in the clay like decorations in a cheap hotel room.

“You must not think that cavers are old men with glasses and beards,” Laslow told us defensively, and he proceeded to describe the free-spirited youth of cavers. He always had the ladies go first when we moved out. At first he said, “I am a gentleman,” but later he told us the real reason: “It is good to let the ladies go first so then you can watch the bum.”

At one point Laslow showed off by climbing up a tall, narrow part of the cave like Spiderman. From the top he wedged his knees into the wall and slid down the bare rock, then stopped halfway and climbed back up. Later he shimmied through a hole in the rock that looked too small for a fourth grader. The ring was called the Pooh Hole. A lot of spots in the cave have names — the Library, the Elephant, the Giant’s Hall — and some are more insalubrious than others.

“This cave is called the Birth Canal,” Laslow announced at one of the narrow parts of the cave where we had to crawl on our elbows and bellies. In case some people were confused, Laslow clarified, “It is called the Birth Canal because it is tight.”

“I am a gentleman,” said Laslow, “but when men are away from the girls, their girlfriends and wives, for a long time, we become very vulgar. That is why they call us. . . men.”

Our three hour tour took us over one kilometer of the underground labyrinth. We had to crawl for about thirty meters of this. The group was all young, fit people, so Laslow took us on a longer route through some pretty difficult obstacles, including one of the narrowest passageways in the Budapest caves.

The tunnel was shaped like an inverted triangle with a deep, narrow rut along the bottom. A person could fit in the top half only if she turned on her side. To complicate things, a rock like a shark’s tooth stuck up out of the ground at the entrance. So to navigate this tunnel, we had to keep ourselves elevated above the rut and worm into the passage on one arm, with our right arm wedged against the stone ceiling, and then push ourselves forward with our feet while taking care not to catch a shoe on the shark’s tooth or wedge it in the narrow rut below, or to lie down or catch our helmets on something, because then we would be stuck.

“Where is Jon?” Laslow asked after explaining this. He was asking because we were lying side-by-side under a slab of rock, like cigarettes in a case. Everyone between me and Laslow laid down so I could see him.

“Jon, you are very tall. You must keep your bum up and raise your. . . your bum to make it through. You won’t be able to bring your foot in until near the end. Don’t get your foot caught and don’t lay down.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t worry, it is easy.”

“Sure.”

Well my turn came and I squirmed and shoved and twisted into the mud-slick rock until I knew I was stuck for sure, only I wasn’t and kept moving. The passage went straight like I said for a meter and a half past the shark’s tooth. Then it widened a bit and curved right 90 degrees onto a shelf a foot off the floor, with the ceiling a foot above that. Like a worm I turned and pushed my chest onto the shelf, and with my arms I pulled my legs out of the clinging triangular chute and into the chamber beyond. Only then did I exhale.

Laslow talked while everyone caught their breath: “Some people can make it physically, they just get mentally tired and lay down and say, ‘I am stuck.’ That is why I go first. I show them I can do it so they believe it can be done. I know it is silly, but if you believe it can be done you can do it, too.”

It was pretty easy going after that. We climbed back out and came into a familiar part of the cave, then headed back toward the ladder and the world above.

“Ohp, here comes a cave monster. I hope a female,” said Laslow. An old man with a thick grey beard came around the corner. He looked like a miner in a Disney movie, and he and his two friends strolled through the crowded passage faster than I move through a city street. “Nope, today I have no luck.”

“I think we lost someone.”

“No everyone is here God damn it. Haha, I am joking. We only lost two people yesterday. Haha.”