Category: My Balkan Holiday

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Episode I: The 141 to Union Station

For most Americans living outside the east coast’s metropolitan areas, riding a train is an event.  It is a luxury for those in surfeit of both time and money, and its inefficiency, especially in the vastness that is America left of the Mississippi, further relegates it to “vacation” status.  There is a reason Disney’s monorail – an absolute bore of epic proportions – remains one of the most traveled rail systems in the world.  If you are an American and you are on a train, then chances are you’re on vacation.

Mine, then, officially begins as I’m sitting on my backpack, fleece zipped up against the Baltimore chill on a Thursday morning, waiting for the 141 regional from BWI to DC’s Union Station while sizing up the Asian fellow next to me.  He sits down on the bench, two shopping bags, a shoulder bag and wheeled overnighter beside him, and strokes a few black, wispy hairs hanging from his chin.  Alan – his American name – is a Chinese MBA student in his first year at Penn State, and he’s returning from a Spring Break trip west where he visited LA, Disneyland, Universal Studios, the Grand Canyon, and Las Vegas, where he scored a pair of Timberlands at an outlet mall.

“How much do you think these cost,” he asks me.  I offer up $60 and he responds by raising his eyebrows and gently fingering a small “Gore Tex” tag sewed into one of the seams.  I do not bite, and stick with $60.  “Eighty dollars” he says, and though I feign surprise, lips pushed out and mouth corners turned down, he has a bigger point to make.

“Do you know how much these cost in China?”  I do not.  “Two hundred dollars.” He then exposes the tag on the tongue’s interior, revealing the words “Made in China.”  Alan laughs like this might be the funniest, most outrageous thing he’s ever heard.

A north-bound train approaches, interrupting Alan’s laughter, and he excuses himself as he stands up to take a picture of the oncoming engine.  “My first American train,” he says, quickly snapping photos.  He asks me to guess how many pictures he’s taken on his 5 day trip – Alan likes to make me guess things – and I err on what I think is the highside:  “twelve hundred.”  Alan pauses, then says “five thousand.” He follows with more raised eyebrows, sucking his tongue against his teeth in that Asian conversation filler that can indicate emphasis, assent, or the Chinese version of an American “um.”

After finding out I’m in the Army, Alan says he too was a Soldier, for ten years.  He also says he was in “IT,” and I immediately peg Alan for a spy.  I’ve been reading too much of The Atlantic lately, and am seeking adventure, so it is not a difficult leap for me to make.  Alan doesn’t help matters when he opens his laptop to show me his vacation photos, his screensaver an SR-71 Blackbird flying over the Sierra Nevada’s.  As any halfway decent spy, Alan must sense my shift in mood, and he explains away the rookie spy move with an “I like airplanes.”  He asks me what he should do in DC, and I start into a list of museums and monuments he can see for free and over a short time period.  The Smithsonian – there are eighteen, not counting the zoo – plus the Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson memorials, the Viet Nam vets memorial, the Korean, one of my favorites.  Alan listens politely and then asks “how can I get into the Pentagon?”  I quickly tell him he’s not allowed, but my Walter Mitty imagination subsides as he begins cranking through his vacation photos.  The incredible tediousness of other people’s pictures spans cultural divides, I conclude, and I think that if Alan is a spy, he is either awful or exceptionally good.  He realizes the pictures are boring as well (“these are kind of boring”), and I think that if Alan wasn’t trying to hack into my computer, we might just be friends.  May we achieve peace by boring the snot out of each other with left clicks and mouse pads.

I leave Alan at Union Station, after first taking a few pictures of him with his camera, and exit out the west side of the building to DC Metro’s new bike station, a small but beautiful glass building that looks like the breaching back of the Loch Ness.  I go inside to take a look, and am greeted by a guy sporting a shaved head and a ridiculously good Mark Twain mustache that parts to reveal less than perfect teeth but a great grin when I mention the sifaka Lemurs, two-pound circus freaks that run in loping strides, arms longer than their legs and held erect above their heads whenever they’re on the move.  They leap between razor-edged spires in the Tsinghy de Bamarah nature reserve in northern Madagascar, where the bike worker has told me he just returned from two years in the Peace Corps doing “environmental stuff” – compost, gardening, water recycling – and he’s staying in DC to continue his efforts.  I wonder how hard it is to get to Madagascar, but then he’s pulled away by customers, and I suspect our conversation is as good as it’s going to get anyway.  Besides, I can see the Irish Times directly over his left shoulder, and with a day to kill, it is calling to me.

The permanently sticky table-topped Irish Times is what an American dive bar should be: sedate, local, cheap and decidedly irreverent.  Tacked up around the bar are what must be over a thousand patches from fire and police departments around the country, and though there is Guinness on tap, the only top-shelf liquor I spy is a dust-covered bottle of Tanqueray.  The chalkboard specials are Meatloaf, $10.95; Cold Meatloaf, $8.95.  I wonder if it will be free if I wait around until Monday.  An oil painting of John Wayne in an Indian chief’s headdress and a Warhol knockoff of Margaret Thatcher acknowledging a crowd, Crime Wave scrawled above the painting, frame a television, where Georgetown is about to beat Syracuse in the Big East tournament, and the heated rivalry explains the gathered Thursday afternoon crowd.  It is equal parts older drunk white guy and late-twenty yuppie black guys (Georgetown University: 6% black; Georgetown Hoyas basketball team: 82% black), but Syracuse is Syracuse and beating them brings many a DC foe together.

A DC dive bar is as good a start to a trip as anywhere else, but the next 72 hours do their best to dampen my spirit.  I am flying on the cheap – free military rotators to Germany, and maybe Kosovo if I am lucky enough to time them right – and I am getting what I pay for.  An eight and a half hour flight on a C-17, sitting upright on cargo-strap jump seats and facing south the entire time while my plane flies east; seven hours of German rigidity while I unsuccessfully attempt to get a cash advance on my credit card, sans a pin number; connecting commercial flights in Frankfurt and Zürich, where my lack of sleep and irritability get the best of me and I quickly tire of the uniformly cheap leather-jacketed, hair-metal band coiffured European youth.  My imagination, too, kicks in, and I suspect they are all heavies for second-rate Russian mobsters.  I don’t fear pleather-wearing western european youth, but I do Russian mobsters, second-rate or otherwise, and I put my nose back into my book.

Finally: a two am arrival in Thessolinki, Greece.  The town was named for Alexander’s half-sister, and he himself was born near here, prior to making almost all the known world his own.  Here too, I start my own adventure, mine north and west for ten days rather than east for ten years.  There are still arguments as to what incessant need drove Alexander to leave his home in Macedon, where he stood to inherit a kingdom and a lifetime of luxury.  Perhaps it was a determination to prove himself worthy to his father, King Phillip II; perhaps a need to justify his mother’s explanation of his birth as the product of the midnight visit of a God serpent.  Regardless, I find common ground in the need to explore, the need to experience life in order to justify it, the need for anonymity in an effort to somehow improve upon the familiar.

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Episode II: Tasos the Buffalo

Thessaloniki, Greece

Fickle are the emotional meanderings of solo travel, and touching down in Greece after almost two days of frustration elevated my spirits substantially.  I had only to get to the station to catch the next train to Skopje, and after talking to a security guard, had only to find a bus to take me there.  Outside, a double-length city bus is waiting, and as I get on as the only occupant, I ask the driver if this goes to the train station.  He smiles and gives half a head nod.  I am not confident.

“Train station?,” I ask again.  He downgrades the smile to a befuddled grin, adds a shoulder shrug and does away with the half head nod.  I try my limited German: “Bahnhoff?”  Again, same response.  Eff it; it’s late and I am tired.  I open my hand to reveal a stack of change, the first of many times I entrust my money to the honesty of strangers, and he gives the universal hand-and-arm signal, that touching of pockets usually reserved for able-bodied beggars and methadone addled youth that says “sorry, no change.” It is my turn to shrug and half-smile, and I take my seat for my own private ride to the I’ll know it when I see it Thessaloniki train station.

For the first ten minutes, I am alone.  But the airport is on one side of the second biggest city in Greece, the train station on the other, and two a.m. on a Sunday morning in any big city can quickly turn into a side-show.  There are the typical black leggings and mini skirts, plus face piercings and fake leather jackets, faux-hawks and vodka residue emanating from twenty-something pores. Admittedly, this is just a single, long stretch of road in a big city, but she is not pretty.  Graffiti is the theme of choice, and it blankets the square, angry stanchions holding up building after building of six- to eight-storey cut-out structures on either side of this main drag.  It is a bit shabby, I suppose, to personify a stanchion, but if you saw them you would think that building is mad at something. Through the windows and opened doors of the bus I see a man driving his moped the wrong way down the narrow sidewalk; a giant dog lays sprawled in front of a store entryway, guarding it through intimidation more than skill; a young man and woman, she a midget and arguably a cross dressing one at that, board the bus at one stop and get off at the very next.  The city outside the window goes by in stops and starts; nothing on this road seems to be built outside of the 1970’s and they are a blur of geometrical, unspirited grayness.  Even the dilapidated government buildings look more Disney Land Haunted Mansion than Foundation of Democracy.

It turns out I do not, in fact, know the train station when I see it, and the bus driver unhappily stops a block and a half past my stop after I muscle my way to the front of the bus to tap him on the shoulder.  It is nearly 3 a.m., and the train station, battered and dirty, is not open.  Dated font Greek block letters above the entrance doors foreboding, a few homeless men and apparently at least one other early traveler, she with an old hardside suitcase, gather under the overhang and out of the wind and chill. In front there is a plastic-blanketed shop selling snacks and porn, the man behind the narrow sliding plexiglass window confirms for me that this is the train station. I ask if I can catch a train to Macedonia from here.

“Yugoslavia?,” he bellows.  He is portly and bearded; an unkempt but kind face. “No,” I answer, clearly missing my cue, “Skopje.”

“Skopje is in Yugoslavia,” he says sternly, though I have no doubt he understands my intent. He is giving me a lesson.  “This is Macedonia.”

Though we stand (he sits) in current day Greece, this was once Macedon, home of Alexander the Great and the kingdom of one of the greatest empires to ever govern the earth.  Greeks are justifiably proud of their history – Herodotus, perhaps the father of history, was from here – and so me calling Macedonia “Macedonia” has touched a nerve.  The new Macedonia, or the more geeky “FYROM” (the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) has been a country only since 1991, and the Greeks, or more specifically the Macedonian Greeks, are not happy about it.  I buy a beer, an Amstel Light tallboy, exchange introductions, and then ask Tasos about Kosovo.

“Yugoslavia?,” I ask.  He answers yes.

And Bosnia? “Yugoslavia.”

“Montenegro?” He looks at me over the top of his glasses.  “Yugoslavia.”

I ask where Alexander the Great was from, and he answers “that goes without saying.”

I laugh, crack open my beer, dig my fleece cap and gloves out of my backpack, pull them on tight, and look over the newspapers.  I have noticed, in the short time I’ve been in Greece, that all the anglicized versions of Greek words look to me like some variant of “Vasili Tasikos,” prior to five minutes ago the only Greek guy I knew.  I drink my beer quickly and buy another, again holding out a palm of coins to Tasos and letting him take what he needs.  I stand next to the ice cream refrigerator, cold but out of the wind so warmer than anywhere else.  A homeless guy and I share a 10 meter cheers over our Amstel Lights.  There is warmth in unity. I pepper Tasos with questions until he finally, during a pause, says “Jack, come inside and get warm.”

Tasos Vouvolis – he says his last name means buffalo – has been working here at his uncle’s shop for almost ten years.  He is also a plumber, but says business is not always good, so works here on weekends. His English is good, his voice the temper of an ascetic rather than a non-native speaker reaching for words. Tasos talks about the Greek economy; his concerns that because Macedonia has unfairly taken the name Macedonia (Tasos prefers they left it to history), who knows what else they will take; about Gypsies; about America and our wars.  A man buys a porno mag, Tasos first puts it in a clear bag but then switches to a non-transparent black bag because the man “is shy.”  He comments softly on each customer: he is a country boy, he is a methadone addict, he is a taxi driver, he doesn’t know what he is.  I count the different number of cigarettes Tasos has for sale, and come up with 267.  He teaches me “neasa kala” as a farewell – be good, be well – I teach him “keep it real.” It matters not that I never talk like this; “keep it real” will leave Tasos in good stead whether he travels to America or sits here for the next ten years and talks with the occasional American.  I run across the street to buy Tasos and I a snack. I do not know how Europeans continue to get away with putting a fleshy pink hot dog in a croissant and calling it a breakfast pastry.  Tasos serves me Russian tea, and then it is 5:30 a.m. and the train station doors open and though I am already feeling only goodness, the opening of doors has lifted me.  I am on my way.

**************

I count six people waiting for the Thessaloniki to Belgrade train, though I will get off in Skopje, Macedonia.  The train waits for us, so covered in graffiti I mistake it for scrap, cars waiting to be cannibalized for other, functioning trains.  An official looking man directs me to stop taking pictures and then tells me this is the train to Skopje.  It is a rolling museum, urban modern art on the outside and communist bloc remnant in.  But it is clean, and empty, and I can sprawl out in the darkness facing forward, my shoeless feet resting on the seats in front of me, marking the beginning of the rows of seats facing towards me, ambidexterity on rails.

I drift in and out of sleep, I am a moderate insomniac despite, or because of, two bedless days on my feet and closing my eyes only on airport and airplane seats.  I wake to slivers of sunlight coming in through the right hand windows, cypress trees outlined against a rising sun.  A man comes through the train to ask us for our papers, and as I begin to shuffle through my back pack he lazily throws his left hand at me, letting me know not to worry about it.  He is a universal bureaucrat, not a greenhorn looking to make his name but a man beaten down by years of repetition and nepotist supervision, he is a casual participant in the process.  He does not need my ticket; he practically regrets his authority.  I am clearly a foreigner and a paying customer, and there is no reason I would be sneaking into his country when his experience says I should be sneaking out.  At the lonely Macedonia border I spy a Nirvana poster and hope it is both the literal and the figurative.

Two hours later I deboard in Skopje, and a man immediately accosts me and offers a taxi.  He says he was a translator for the Americans and KFOR for ten years.  I tell him I would rather walk, that I like the feeling of a pack on my back in an unfamiliar city.  He asks if I need a hotel, I tell him eventually, and he says he is not familiar with the Hotel Eventually.  This is, I think, a good beginning.

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Episode III: Climbing Jacob’s Ladder

I exit Skopje’s train station, ignoring all calls of you need a taxi but still curious about the professional courtesies of underemployed taxi drivers.  They stand close together, smoking cigarettes and talking until someone walks by, disengaging from each other long enough to shout out four or five you need a taxis. Some are more aggressive than others and will crowd you for a few steps, quietly pointing out the folly of you walking somewhere when you could oh so easily get in my taxi.  Very cheap.  But I continue on, doing my best to discreetly carry my two-inch thick guide book, as if the back pack and tan cargo pants somehow aren’t enough to give me away.

After ten minutes walking the wrong way and one solicitation for directions to the city center, I arrive in downtown Skopje to see a city under construction.  Skopje has a walled Old Town, but the new town has fences as well, seemingly around everything.  At my hotel (the Hotel Square, a “Unique Solution”) I ask the young man at the desk about the all the work going on.  Alexander tells me it is new government and international money, and they are not only restoring infrastructure, but building monuments as well, “to Alexander and King Phillip II.”  Perhaps Tasos’s fears weren’t misplaced.

I check in, drop my bags, and ask Alexander for dinner recommendations.  He tells me only to “watch out for small gypsies,” saying “watch” with that throaty “hwa” sound for which no character exists in the English alphabet.  I go out, promising to keep my eyes peeled for small gypsies, and find a city all to myself.  It is a Sunday in the tourist off-season, but I am exhausted so it is just as well.  I eat, read about Alexander, and drink several of the local beers before dragging myself to bed.  Skopje TV, after hours, turns into a soft-core pornography telethon, and there on my television screen are several not-small ladies in varying stages of undress and all wearing hands-free headsets.  They are apparently answering caller requests, unimaginative ones at that, though clearly talking far more to one another than to lonely men on the telephone.  It is sad and a bit pathetic, on many counts, and though I am exhausted, I watch it until I see one of them turn around on the couch she’s sitting on, placing both hands on the back of the couch and causing it to break, her and the girl next to her tumbling over the collapsed couch and away from the camera and into a girl standing upright behind them, frilled buttocks and camisoled shoulders everywhere.  Perhaps the callers aren’t so unimaginative after all.

I wake, early and refreshed, and cross the Vardar River over the six-hundred year old Stone Bridge and into the Carsija, Skopje’s old town.  People are up and about and moving with a purpose, everyone bypassing a red-panted yellow-jacketed older man with darker skin and shoulder length oily black hair.  He stands erect, looking straight ahead but at nothing, hand extended and palm up, distinguished all the more so for his colorful clothing in a black denim city, stark; a cigar store Indian on a centuries old Balkan bridge.  The Carsija is centuries old as well, left over from the Ottoman Empire, and has been the cultural center of the city since around the year 1400.  It is alive this morning, children and adults alike passing through on their way to tend to Monday’s activities, though the lack of tourists allow the adults time more social than business.  I pass by idle shoe-shine men, unambitious watch and trinket stands on the cobble-stoned streets, groups of men gathered for coffee.  I spend the day in the Carsija, drinking coffees, eating stewed lamb and kebabs, baffled at the dizzying number of jewelry shops, and envying the camaraderie of the Pit Bazar, the farmer’s market.

In the afternoon, on my way back across the now packed Stone Bridge, I am accosted by three or four adolescent, slightly soiled children.  A boy stands in front of me, blocking my way, one hand holding his stomach, the other alternating between touching his lips and holding his cupped palm out to me.  He feigns mute; his face is dirty, hair matted down and clothes shabby, face distorted to indicate his near-tears hunger.  I am not sympathetic, I saw this kid in the Carsija, early morning, his frosted-tip hair massaged into a faux-hawk, running and laughing with his friends, I had made a mental note that here was a trouble-free kid, trendily dressed, who I could place in just about any city in the world and he would not look particularly out of place.  But now here he stands before me, tragically without voice, nutrition or hair product.  I tell him I am on to him, that I saw him earlier, and that he should ply his wares elsewhere.  No matter his English skills, the tone is clear and he immediately gets the gist of what I am saying.  He quickly switches tactics to flattery, smiling and grabbing my chest, one hand on each pec, telling me how strong I am.  He follows with a bodybuilding pose down, and though I laugh, I am not moved and I tell him to “beat it.”

And then he turns on me.  Sliding one step to his right to let me by, he relieves me of a banana, jammed into my backpack, quicker than alligator jaws.  I am alerted only by his laughing friends, and I turn to see him just out of reach, cradling my banana like a baby, cooing to it, rocking it, letting the banana know everything will be OK despite its switch of parent.  I want to grab him by his Adidas jacket and dangle him over the bridge.  He is not intimidated, and now he holds the banana seductively, kissing it lightly, provocatively, eyeing me the entire time.  His handling of the banana, a sick pederast version of licking the last piece of candy so your friends won’t eat it, gives him the win: the banana is his.  I turn and continue across the bridge for home.

I return to the Hotel Square and tell Alexander about my interaction with the locals.  “I told you,” he says, “to hwatch out for small gypsies.”  Alexander then tells me that if I see a gypsy man I should punch him.  I start to laugh, but Alexander is serious.  “If you are walking and you see a gypsy man, and he is maybe one or two man away from you, you should go to him and punch him.  In the face.  It is okay.”  I am not entirely confident in my gypsy-identification skills – in my mind they all look like Little Steven – and though I’m not sure how the justice system works here in Macedonia, I am not comfortable using “I thought he was a gypsy” to vindicate a hate crime.

****************

The next morning I plan to rent a car and drive to Ohrid, a mountain lake town in southwestern Macedonia two and half hours from Skopje.  At the rental car agency, a Donald Sutherland look-alike takes my credit card and driver’s license; he wears a thick brown rolled-neck cardigan, rectangular tortoise shell glasses hang from a chain around his neck.  His beard and hair are the yellow-gray of a chronic smoker, he gives the passive air of intelligence of a liberal arts college professor.  I ask for a map and he gives me a cartoonish, 3D folded version of just Skopje, and in Cyrillic at that.  I ask for one in English, but he only says it is no problem, Ohrid is “that way.”  Ohrid, in Cyrillic, looks enough like “Oxpna” that I am willing to take my chances, so I get into a car so small I am sure I can lift it in any emergency situation, turn on the radio to hear the tail end of Alphaville’s “Forever Young” followed by an accentless American voice proclaim that I am listening to “MACEDONIA’S NUMBER ONE RADIO STATION” and make a left turn onto the busy streets of Skopje.

There is something to city driving, particularly when you are accustomed to a short, relatively traffic-less commute, and city driving in a foreign county is especially exhilarating.  I dodge pedestrians, speed past Yugos and dive in and out of lanes, here letting a faster car pass me, here moving out of the way of an oncoming bus in the suicide lane, here deftly avoiding the cars parked half on the sidewalk, half in the right-hand lane: I am dialed in.  And the car man is right, Ohrid (Oxpna) is, in fact, that way, and soon I am on to the empty, melting-snow wet E-65 highway first to Tetovo and then Ohrid.  The sparsely-treed mountains, early spring snow and village towns look enough like my own Sierra Nevada’s that I wonder if they are close in latitude (I find out later they are less than 100 miles apart), and I immediately feel at home.

The city of Ohrid is on a lake of the same name (again, Nevada: Lake Ohrid is a visual twin of Lake Tahoe, or Tahoe of it, and they both sit half in one state and half in another), and people have been living here continuously since 400 years before Jesus was born, his influence to spread here to Ohrid some 900 years later.  The city has been ruled by Greeks and Macedons, Bulgarians and Romans, Seljuks and Normans, Ottomans and Serbians, and most recently Yugoslavs under Josep Broz Tito, but it is, at its innermost, ecumenical – a 5th Century Ottoman traveler noted 365 chapels within its walled Old Town.  There are several still standing today, and I have my choice as I again have a centuries-old city to myself.  I walk into the curtilage of the Sveta Bogorodica Perivlepta, an Orthodox church constructed in the late 1200’s.  There are cats – Ohrid is, as many of the cities I visited, overrun with cats – but no other humans as I walk once around the outside before entering the church itself.  I pay, and the woman behind the plexiglass – Jana Popaska, Doctor of History – asks me if I’d like a guided tour.  I accept, and watch as Jana clips on a laminated badge, presenting her as a “UNESCO Tour Guide.” She steps outside the booth and shows me the badge, as if to eliminate any confusion as to who is guiding and who is being guided.  She wears a white and black leather jacket, too much make-up, long black hair braided in two strands down to her waist, and her enthusiasm is infectious.  The interior of the church is covered with frescos painted in 1295, Jana tells me, by the painters Mikhail, Carlos and Nikolai, and for the next thirty minutes Jana holds my rapt attention as she covers the frescos, the church, Jesus, love, politics, Bulgarian tourists, God, and the state of the economy in general.  We stand in the center of the church, and rotate slowly in a clockwise direction as Jana first whispers the titles of each of the frescos and then follows with a description.  The Birth of Jesus, she whispers, then practically shouts EXPLANATION!

I gather my thoughts, but it is not a request, it is a declaration, and Jana explains to me The Birth of Jesus (EXPLANATION!), doing the same with The Burning Bush, The Death of Jesus, Jacob’s Ladder, The Death of Mary and several others, following each whispered title with an emotive explanation.  Her emotion would shame any other tour guide, her idolation of Joseph evident as she tells me he was 87 years old when he married the fourteen year old Mary, treating the child as a daughter and not a wife; her sadness clear as she, near tears, recounts the distraught Mary upon learning of the death of her only son.  She whispers Jacob’s Ladder, then explains that though there are many explanations, her favorite is that of Saint Gregory, who described each rung as a year in life, ascension from earth to heaven possible only by living a life of virtue, by striving to love my fellow man and to worship a loving God.  There is no Serb she tells me, no Croat no Muslim no Christian no American no Ohrid and no anything except for the love of life, and a loving heart and a loving God.

She ends abruptly, as if someone else had been giving me the tour, and apologizes for her voice which she says “sounds like a musician.”  She tells me she had taken a pill a little earlier to make her happy but she fears it has only made her crazy, and I tell her no, your voice is just like music.  We part, Jana telling me she will pray for me and will ask God to protect me wherever I go in the world.  I tell her thank you, and that I think, after today, I need it a little bit less.

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Episode IV: The Road to Pristina

I return from Ohrid, turn in my rental car and hustle to the Skopje bus station for the three-hour ride to Pristina.  I hand over a wad of denars to pay for the ticket, my stomach rumbling as I begin to feel the inner-workings of those last two for-the-road macchiatos having their way with me.  I would like to avoid a public bathroom, but I may not get a vote in the matter, and now, it seems, is not a time to be choosy.  The Skopje bus station shares a men’s room with the train station, is poorly lit, dirty, smelly, and guarded by a ruffled elderly man charging 10 denars (about 20 cents) for the right to pass.  He has an arm’s length of toilet paper, if you so desire, and Cyrillic reading material as well, and inside the broken-locked stall is a simple porcelain-lined hole in the ground.  I enter, hesitate, and reconsider: this is clearly not for the fainthearted.  But I came seeking adventure, and if it presents itself as a Balkan train station bathroom, so be it.  I pay the man, leaving my backpack at his feet, and decide against taking in my headlamp – there are, no doubt, countless things in the world worse than what awaits me, but at this point none come to mind, and I don’t need illumination to help with my evaluation.

With both mind and other processes clear, I board the bus and focus on things more important.  The short ride to the Macedonia-Kosovo border is mountainous and winding, but once across, Kosovo opens into a vast basin, the Sharr and Goljak Mountains on either side cupping a brown expanse blending the Dukagjin and Kosovo Plains, the road running through it like a daisy stem, a few houses interspersed here and there among the detritus of post-war life, wood and metal and cinderblocks and trash; oh my the trash.   Plastic and garbage line the highway from the border to the Pristina outskirts, strung-together colorful like polyethylene prayer flags, modern-day bread crumbs marking the trail to progress.  There will be progress at the end of this line, no doubt, environmental regression traded for economic progression.  People who produce so much trash are people who can afford something else.  Poor people use everything, then reuse it, but the people who leave their trash here, on the side of the road, have the luxury of selection, and either have nowhere else to put their waste or simply do not know what tomorrow will bring.

We rumble ever closer to Pristina, the rubble and scrap now forming piles, now moving back away from the road, now behind buildings, now gone completely.  In its place, progress.  Development, advancement, chrysalis, a flowering; and that’s what Pristina is, a flowering at the end of a daisy-stemmed road, the city practically blows up before me.  Shiny new boxy mirrored buildings, stuccoed and glassed, I’m at the industrialized outskirts, and then car dealerships every third building, Mercedes Benz, Volkswagen, Porsche, Hyundai, Citroen, Skoda, all here, buildings so new they must have been waiting at the international border on the backs of idling tractor-trailers, half on this truck, half on that one, Caution Large Load truck in front and back, impatiently waiting for the Kosovo Grand Opening.

Pristina is a frenetic mess, but things are clearly happening.  The city itself has been here since the fall of the Roman Empire, but Kosovo has been an independent nation only since 2008, and even that is dependent upon who you ask – the Serbian Prime Minister, Kosovo being a former state in his nation, has said that as long as Serb people exist, Kosovo will be Serbia.  Kosovo shares a border with Serbia, and was a Serbian state until 1999 when NATO airplanes, many of them American or American funded, bombed Serbia until Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslavian President at the time, agreed to withdraw Serbian troops from Kosovo.  It is an intensely sensitive and complex set of facts to an American ear, though I find Kosovars, many of them self-described Albanians, see it in fairly simple terms.  I am told, among other things, not to enter Serbia from Kosovo unless I came from there first, I am told to avoid northern Kosovo, where Serbian enclaves are still in abundance, I am told, more as a challenge than as a question, you are here on holiday, when I say “I am here on holiday” (illustrative is the number of pages – four – Lonely Planet dedicates to Kosovo.  By comparison, Latvia gets fourteen).  I visit the Gracanica Monastery, a few miles south of Pristina and six hundred eighty-nine years old, and find it guarded by a KFOR Swedish machine gunner.  I ask him if there is ever trouble.  “There is occasionally trouble,” he answers.

But that is for yesterday, and Pristina is for today.  Apart from the Grand Hotel, prominent both for its size and location near a busy intersection and for the industrial grime shower-stall stains all over its facade, every building seems new.  Pristine Pristina.  I find a side alley hotel, boring and fungible outside but spotless and tasteful on the inside, the black-and-white suited owner selling me on the in-room jacuzzi and wireless internet, though he is marginally contemptuous when he learns I don’t have a laptop.  My room is equally pastelled parts Stevie Wonder and Queen Elizabeth, and after dropping my bags and having a cappuccino, I head into the city.

I walk the packed sidewalks, everyone going to or coming from, knee-high boots and jet black hair and Jackie O sunglasses ubiquitous.  Urban Pristina is a maze and has accumulated as much trash as the suburban, so I try to look up instead of down.  The streets are unannounced, the concrete structures new and unpocked, the old ones aged or bombed beyond recognition or shrouded in scaffolding and I only get my bearings after stumbling upon the caged and bubble-wrapped National Public Library.  It is unlike any other building I have ever seen.  I eventually work my way back the direction from which I came, and soon realize I am woefully lost.  Not an unusual occurrence, and typically intended, but my internal gyro is effected by further bad luck: it is St. Patrick’s Day, and I seem to have found the only city in the world without an Irish bar.  Again, a cappuccino; again, a request for directions; again, helped by a stranger.  I am practically walked back to the Hotel Begolli, and after taking my first bath in about a decade, the terrible European techno-pop blaring beyond the point of recognition from the jacuzzi radio assuaged by multiple Pejas (“Kosovo’s Finest Beer”), I sleep, dreamless, the streets outside my window quiet.

I leave Pristina the next morning, on a bus and via Bil Klinton Boulevard, heading for Peja, or Pec, depending on your Albanian or Serbian point of view.  It is a beautiful town at the base of the more beautiful Accursed Mountains, and I waste the day away on a rooftop bar reading about Alexander and Henry Adams and talking with my waiter who has a friend in New Jersey and two girlfriends in Pec and would like to go to America, but it is so hard to get a Visa.  It is easy if you are American, he says, you can go anywhere you want to, your passport is like a get in free card but it is very hard to get into America.  I tell him that it is, I suppose, all a matter of timing and that he’s just a little late, a few hundred years ago his ancestors could pretty much go wherever they wanted.  This appears to be of little solace.  But a few hours later I am reminded again what it is to be American, and this time I am humbled: it is midnight, I am on a bus and leaving Kosovo for Montenegro, and at the international border a guard is saying Josep, Josep, until I realize he means me.  “Joseph?” I answer, “Morse?” And he, from the front of the bus, leans his big bus-driver hatted head towards me and says “Josep.  American.  Come here.”  And my first reaction is an internal should I bring all my things because this might be bad. I should bring all my things because this might be bad but I leave my pack in my seat and go forward, the guard tall and stern.  “You are here on business?” he asks and I say no, holiday.  “Holiday?” I hear, for not the last time.  “Holiday?” Yes, I reassure him, I am here on holiday and then the man says I have a brother in New York and my sister lives in Utah.  Utah! Utah! and I am safe.  “Utah is a long ways from Kosovo,” I offer, and then tell him I am from Nevada.  “Nevada,” he says.  “You have good horses.”  And I am overjoyed and I love this Kosovar border guard, at midnight, the day after Saint Patrick’s Day, on my Balkan holiday.  We do have good horses, I answer, and beautiful mountains and a star-filled sky at night and a high desert that smells, after it rains, like earth brand-new.  He hands my passport back to me, and I take it, but he doesn’t let go.  “God bless you,” he says, “and God bless your country for defending Kosovo.  God bless you and God bless America” and I find myself not knowing what to do with all these people asking God to bless me.

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Episode V: Life on Loop

The Peja to Podgorica to Kotor bus careens through the night, a corkscrew path on a narrow, snowy mountain asphalt road laid down in dynamited wadis, rock edge and tree branch seemingly inches from my window, an occasional car, to my astonishment, passing untouched between me and the rent earthen walls.  My sleep is arrested by the spectral blue halo around the small television screen showing infernal Balkan techno music videos on loop, an indecipherable chorus of coo coo, coo-ya ticky, cooya crooch cooya ticky.  Also, by thoughts of my Kosovar border guard.  A disclosure: I felt sheepish when he asked God to bless me.  He thanked all of America for helping his nation, his people, and after a hair-triggered response of warmth, of unconditional gratitude, I thought: what must it be like to fight for a country?  Not for an idea, or a cause, or as a proxy or a prophylactic or for resources or religion or politics or freedom or any of the other entries on the unending and ever-growing list of Reasons a Man Has Ever Killed Another Man.  I mean for a country.  For a home, for a piece of land where you can be left alone, unbothered to pursue your God or no god or grow a family or simply to stand on a piece of earth and say this is mine and it belongs to me and I will not let you move me from it.  What must go through a man’s head when he is threatened, when he hears the monsters coming and that he must decide, just one moment to decide, run or stay and fight.

The road straightens perceptibly, the mountain ranges backed up now and I stare at the ridgeline, the jet black mountain (Crna Gora, Montenegro, Black Mountain) discernible from the jet black night sky only by a burlap-thick blanket of stars, Orion so big and so low I think he might pounce rather than shoot.  Slowly the stars recede, coo coo, coo-ya ticky, and now that middle-light, the grayness that closes in just before you pass out, revealing surreal soft edged, fragmented rock formations on the sides of the road, piles emerging from the ground like a stone prairie dog field.  The bus drives over one last pass, darkness gone but the sun not quite out, and before me the translucent teal blue water in the Bay of Kotor.  It fills an ancient riverine canyon; from the top the bay looks like a headless angel, wings spread slightly not in flight but in pronouncement, but from the shoreline the limestone scarred cliffs surround it so steep and high a claustrophobic would be searching for the exit door.  The old town at the base of one side is Brothers Grimm handiwork, here in some form since two hundred years before Jesus died, and though it is still the center of community life, it is seven-thirty a.m. and I am told we are not open until nine.  I walk, a mile or so, around the far peninsula and sit on a concrete pier, watching sunrays come over the ragged mountain like searchlights, dust in the morning sun.  A single fisherman sits, untangling his nets, a single pink fish at his side.

On my walk back towards town a new Mitsubishi SUV pulls over, a youngish man in a baby-blue hooded sweatshirt and giant designer sunglasses offers me a ride into town.  He is Bosko, a Business Tourism and Economics professor in the next town over, but here today for his other job as the president of Kotor’s Young Social Democratic Party.  I ask about the economy (“the man is the sailor, the voman spends the money, there is nothing else”) and about his politics (“I am a Democrat, Social is for pocketbook only”).  We park just outside the city walls and walk towards the five-hundred year old north city gate.  Bosko is talkative and insanely kind, he has already promised me internet access, tea, and a phone call to his friend who owns a nice apartment for rent just outside the gates.  I now notice his sunglasses are decorated with costume jewelry; his pants, crisp navy denim, are too tight for his prematurely pear-shaped body, and he carries what could never be mistaken for anything other than a purse.  We walk through the gate and into the first courtyard, scattering one dog and forty or so cats like pigeons from a charging child.  “She,” Bosko says in English and pointing to a woman hosing down a sidewalk in front of her store and feeding the felines, “is the Cat Voman.”  They exchange hellos, Bosko shifting to his native tongue and then quickly back to me in English, speaking continuously, right hand flailing, making lefts and rights in narrow cobblestoned alleys, me following him like a May-December Charlie and Willy Wonka.  I have no idea where I have come from nor where I am going.

Then, a magic door: A violin from an open window behind me (the music school), Bosko turns the keys and we are inside.  A clean, red-heavy office that Bosko tells me is sinking, the whole town is sinking or sucking water up; pictures on a bulletin board of public service events Bosko and his fellow Young Social Democrats have sponsored; a giant flag of a rose, presumably their party logo.  Bosko immediately brings me tea, handing me a small lemon I’m supposed to eat whole before taking a drink (me: “what do you call this little lemon?”  Bosko: “we call it a little lemon”), then biscuits, then the internet.  A woman sticks her scarf-covered head into the door, deferential; Bosko dismisses her, turning to me and saying “Gypsy voman, she makes too many children.”  He then brings me a bottle, displaying it like a proud waiter, telling me it is Pelinkovac, a regional liquor that smells to me too much like Jagermeister, then pouring it into a dentist office spit cup.  “This,” says Bosko, “is delicious,” and I think I might be either drunk or a skin shirt by noon.

Bosko directs me to the main square while he attends to party business, I sit in the sun and drink a coffee and contemplate the kindness of strangers.  In Peru, a man and his young daughter picked up Mac and me, our thumbs extended on a whim upon our realization we were miles from where we needed to be and out in the heat of the sun.  The man’s daughter had to roll down the window and open the door from the outside, balding tires and vinyl back seat cracked, speeding asphalt exposed through the rusted floor boards.  America too: in Denver, a stranger gives two of us a late-night ride home when there are no taxis; in Tucson, a Honda CRX pulls over for us, two drunks walking, plus a guitar, plus a giant dog, a multi-species clown car.  Kindness universal.  Coo coo, coo-ya ticky.

*****************

The towering mountains immediately behind Kotor are nearly perpendicular and dominated by 9th century fortress walls; it, in turn, dominated by a closer to perpendicular mountain behind it.  I want to climb to the top, and ask Bosko if it is possible.  “You cannot do it,” he says, “the steps are wet and it is not safe.”  But Bosko has a purse, and “it is not safe” is rarely a reason not to do something.  The passageway from the Old Town is easy to find, and the next morning I begin my climb, walking first under a tightrope clothesline, shirts dangling in the shadows, then through an open wrought iron gate, then through a thick, waist-high stone channel.  My Sub Pop t-shirt grants me entry past three modern-day Montenegrins, still guarding the fortress walls.  All are smoking, two have the long stringy hair and despondent, black sheen of gothic youth, they share a forty ounce malt liquor.

“Are you from Sub Pop?,” the first asks.  “I fucking love the Fleet Foxes!”  I tell him I am not from Sub Pop, but that I too love Fleet Foxes, and we begin to swap bands.  We both know Gomez, and Band of Horses; I tell him Seattle is a great city and that he could hear all sorts of incredible music there.  He leaves me with The Middle East and I leave him with Visqueen, music an international language, along with math and football, the non-American kind, and love, of course, and this brief exchange has made up for all the awful discothèque house music I’ve been subjected to over the last week.  I continue up the path, stopping now and again to take in the cloudless views of the Bay of Kotor.  There are, I read, 1,350 steps leading to the San Giovanni castle at the top of the fortress walls, and I step on as many of them as I can find.  The view from the top is spectacular, but checked by thoughts of men carrying rocks up earlier versions of the trail I just climbed.  What man had a vision to create castle walls on perpendicular slopes, and what men built them?  What forces were so dastardly, so fearsome, that it prompted a minor king to build a miracle to protect his kingdom?  My Kosovar border guard again; this fortress so inconvenient, so cumbersome, and seemingly protective of so much nothing, that I think men must have built just to build, have attacked just to attack, defended simply to defend.  There is a book titled War is a Force That Gives us Meaning and I think that yes, perhaps war is a force that gives us (some? most? men?) meaning, it allows us to say this is mine and it belongs to me and I will not let you move me from it.   The ties that bond men during conflict, Chris Hedges writes, are so strong as to bestow upon those fighting a meaning for life; the communal feeling gained from shared violence, from the preparation for war to the threat of death is a power even bigger than living simply to live, and I think that I must be standing upon the manifestation of this idea.  There seems to me no good reason to build a fortress here, and no good reason to attack it, yet these walls exchanged projectiles and changed hands from the 6th Century all the way until the end of World War I; this mountain upon which it sits ready, history tells us, to change hands once a man, again, decides here is where he would like to stand.  Coo coo, coo-ya ticky, war on loop.