The fish doesn't think because the fish knows... everything

I'm not sure how I feel about the fact that I've basically hired a driver. It's not how I usually operate. But Lola isn't just some chauffer I hired to make my life easier--it's more like I'm taking a short class in Balkan history and culture (or has he calls it, "our unculture") that meets in different places and the teacher happens to double as interpreter and also has a car. That's what I'm telling myself, anyway.

I could have made it to the tunnel museum on my own (the little cat was there again, and the manager/curator/whatever looks disconcertingly like Dennis Hopper--"He is Muslim, I am Serb, we are friends."), but I would not have made it to Lola's bombed-out former office at the huge park that's home to Sarajevo's World War II memorial. You know how the ruins of, say, medieval castles are nothing but stone and rocks? It's like that.

The southern part of Bosnia (when I say Bosnia I really mean Bosnia and Herzegovina, but I am a lazy writer) is Herzegovina. Sarajevo is in the mountains, but going south it gets reeeallly mountainy and, on my own, I would not have driven all through the mountains to see caves and waterfalls and cute little tiny towns and rivers that you can drink from. (Also, the tap water here is as good as in New York.) I'm a shitty driver and I would have spent the whole day lost or stalled. Also, I would not have had anyone to point out that the Croatian-looking flags flying from houses near the Croatian border are not really Croatian flags because there is no crown on the checkerboard, or to tell me that Bosnian Croats near the border want be part of Croatia but that flying a Croatian flag would piss off the government (somehow expressing the same sentiment without the crown on the checkerboard is ok), and that relations between Muslims and Croats are much worse than relations between Muslims and Serbs. And, I definitely would not have ended up with two CDs of pirated Balkan music, including Lola's favorite song, which is about a dramatic relationship between a man and a fish.

I think I've done ok for myself.

The way I see it

In the 19th century, some wealthy intellectuals decided that what the Balkans should really be was a bunch of nation-states. The problem with creating states, though, was that there weren't really nations, not in the Catalunya sense of the word. There was Serbia and Croatia and Albania, etc.; and there were Serbs and Croats and Albanians, etc. But Serbs lived in Serbia AND in Croatia and Albania, etc.; same with Croatians and Albanians, etc. It was all a mix, and everyone kind of lived everywhere. As far as a common language, the merchants and traders usually spoke lots of languages and the peasants, who were the majority of the population, were mostly illiterate. But language was what they decided to use as the basis for nationhood. The local vernaculars (is vernacular pluralizable?) didn't develop naturally into official written languages; rather, there was push to formalize the spoken Balkan languages to create the appearance of nationhood as a pre-requisite to statehood. The 'nations' then started work on a national identity, which hadn't really existed before, and a national literature, which really hadn't existed before.

Like I've been saying, this shit is confusing. I would not bet Gabe's life that everything above is 100% accurate, but it is at least an accurate description of my understanding of how things happened, based on the few books that I've read. Anyway, I only brought it up to explain why I wasn't surprised that all of the art in the National Gallery here, with the exception of two icons, is from the 20th century. There is some nice 20th century Bosnian art (paintings), though; nice enough that it seemed a shame that I had the place entirely to myself. So much to myself that I had to start fucking with the lights before a guard came and turned them all on (and then promptly disappeared again). I guess it's also not surprising that, given a fairly small population and only about 100 years, there weren't a lot of discernible periods or movements in Bosnian art. (I guess it's also possible that most of the art is in some other gallery and I'm full of shit.) Rather than by type or period, the paintings in the National Gallery are organized by color. There's a blue room, and a red room, and a purple room, and a brown room... You get the idea. I liked it. I also liked most of the paintings, so it felt like I was walking through some imaginary super rich, super cool friend's apartment, rather than a museum. Except for the icons. The imaginary super cool friend would think icons are hideous, just like I do.

Mixed up muddled up shook up world

Lola is a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend. He (yeah, he) is also my tour guide. He came highly recommended. He's a historian. He was also a translator for the UN and NATO during the war here. He started out as some kind of gunner, but the gun broke (something broke, anyway) and while it was being fixed the UN guys somehow borrowed him from the army for the rest of the war. He showed up to work the next day with his Kalashnikov and got yelled at by the UN guys. "What the fuck, man? You're not a soldier anymore!" And so he translated for pretty much the entire war.

He has a house on the outskirts of the city, where he lived with his Dutch wife throughout the war. ("I told her 'Go back to Holland.' She said 'I am your wife, I'm staying.' I told her 'If you ever win the lottery you better be saying the same thing.') When the war started he decided that, times being uncertain, he better drink all his alcohol. ("At the beginning, every day I'm drunk at work. After that, I had to drink moonshine.") I'm not trying to make light of anything, but I do appreciate that he's kept a sense of humor.

Anyway, he showed me bombed-out buildings, of course. He took me out near the airport where fighting was really heavy (lots of snipers), and he kept pointing. "This was Serb territory; this was Muslim territory; over there, Serb territory." It all looked the same to me: indistinguishable and full of holes. (For a lot of the war, the only way out of the city that wasn't through Serb forces was through an 800-meter tunnel dug under the airport runway. That tunnel is a museum now, but with odd hours. While Lola was figuring out it was closed, I made friends with the cutest, tiniest, sweetest little cat ever. I couldn't even get a good photo, because he kept climbing on me.) I asked if the state gave any help to the people whose homes had been destroyed and he laughed a little bitterly. "State. State is only for politicians, not for people."

The war was complicated. After telling me about it for a while he said "It is too confusing--we go back to history," and took me to the ruins of some thousands-of-years old Roman baths (there are hot springs nearby). They were pretty neglected, and full of beer bottles. "If this was in France it would be national monument," he said. "But look at how we treat history. Like shit." He also showed me Kirk Douglas's Olympic residence and the former NATO headquarters, in a beautiful old building that's still abandoned over a decade later (as is Kirk's old house). Nearby, the empty hotels Austria and Hungary stare each other down like some kind of bad sad joke. Lola says they will all eventually be renovated and used again, but that bureaucracy plus the mafia makes things slow. "Slow as cancer," he kept saying.

From there we started going up (Sarajevo is in a valley). We stopped for coffee in a little village at a little restaurant where there was another little cat. I'm pretty sure Lola was rolling his eyes at me. From there we want waaay up, so far up that there was still snow and my teeth chattered, to Hotel Rajska Dolina which is where Ratko Mladić (former Bosnian Serb commander, current international fugitive) stayed during the war and where Lola translated when Ratko met with NATO people. Lola talked his way into Ratko's old room, 104, and I sat on his former bed. From there we went to Pale which is where Radovan Karadžić, the other big bad Bosnian Serb, was headquartered during the war. ("Now he lives in Hague.") Lola showed me where Radovan stayed, and where he and Wesley Clark traded hats, and "the bridge to which he chained the people so that NATO would not bomb it." Joder.

Oh, and he also showed me the US Embassy, known here as Guantanamo. It really does look like a big scary prison.

Wham bam thank you

If there's one thing they do well here in the former Yugoslavia, it's name their currency. The Bosnian BAM isn't quite as great as the Croatian kuna but still, I like it. If there's one thing Bosnia in particular does not do so well, though, it's make it easy for me to spend their fun-named money. I arrived at the train station to no ATMs or currency exchange places, which eventually led to a big fight with the taxi driver and my getting screwed in three different currencies. (Mostly my own fault for believing the shit he was telling me, but I was tired and flustered and he was big and bald and scary.) Then when I finally did get some BAM, it came from the ATM in units of 50. The first thing I bought was 2 BAMs' worth of internet, so I got yelled at for not having change. Joder.

I didn't play harmonica at all on the train so today was supposed to be a performance day. But then in rained. So I played by myself in my hotel room (sorry, other guests). I made the new rule that if I'm going to play by myself in my room, I have to learn something new. One of the songs in my set list is Heart of Gold (sorry, Mom), which has harmonica solos, but I learned the melody not the solos. So today I learned the solos. They are firmly in the beginner level. There was the slight catch, though, that the song is in G, but I play it in second position on a C harmonica. So the tabs are for a G harmonica (they came from the internet--my ear isn't that good), so I had to convert them all to a C. It doesn't entirely work because I can't play all the right chords on my harmonica (I'm pretty sure even a really good harmonica player can't simultaneously blow on one hole and draw on another), but I think it's close enough. And, it was fun. Music is pretty great, even at the beginner level.

9.56 to Sarajevo

If you're ever going to read almost an entire short history of the Balkans in one sitting, let me caution you against doing it on a near-empty 12-hour train ride when you don't speak the right language and your phone doesn't work. First off, it's complicated and confusing, and on the aforementioned train you won't have the internet, or anyone to ask or, in my case, even good maps to look at. I wanted to ask "Did I misunderstand something, or is that completely absurd?" about 40 times, but there was no one to ask. (I also had a lot of "How come I didn't know that?" moments. I wish I knew more about the world.) One thing that's not confusing, though, is that it's depressing as hell, and that's the big problem with reading it all alone on the train: There's no one to make you laugh and remind you that the world isn't so bad. Whine. Don't worry, I didn't throw myself from the train or anything, but I did really want a drink and a hug at the end of the trip. (And a proper toilet--why do train bathrooms always smell so terrible?)

Only the first two cars of the Budapest-Sarajevo train go all the way to Sarajevo. The Hungarian cars are air-conditioned; the Bosnian cars are not. Which was fine, it wasn't super hot, but I guess it's dandelion season and with the windows open the train kept getting blizzard-y with dandelion (or whatever flower) fuzz.

And that's all I have to say about the Budapest-Sarajevo train.

Ooooaaaaaaah-ah-ah-ah-ah!!!!

I went to the opera. (The title of this post is supposed to be opera singing, in text form.) I'm not entirely sure I like opera, but it seemed like the right thing to do. Especially when I saw it was Evgeny Onegin, which is Pushkin. I didn't love the story, but what can you expect from translated poetry, really? Until I get around to learning the language myself, I'm willing to trust generations of Russians on this one. So anyway, opera. I've only seen one other opera, Don Giovanni, and I thought it was gaudy and silly. I did like the singing, I just sort of hated everything else about it. I liked this one much more. The performance was a lot less cheesy, for one thing. And they did some interesting things with the lighting and the costumes. The first act was all green; the second was red; the last was black and white and gold and silver. (Sort of like in the movie Hero, if I'm allowed to compare Russian opera with Hong Kong cinema.) Oh, and the singing was good, too. How would I know good opera singing from bad, really, but the blowhard opera buff in my box was also impressed. He tried to tell me that "Hungarian is second cousin to Russian" (it isn't) but even so, someone who travels across oceans solely to see opera can probably tell good singing from bad. Oh, and it was super cheap. The blowhard says opera here is state-subsidized. I think I paid about $30 to sit right next to what he called the king's box. The only downside was that I couldn't follow the plot much at all. Above the stage was a big screen (you know those screens that lit-up words made out of dots move across? I forget what they're called) that showed the words (supertitles?), but they were in Hungarian. And the singing was in Russian. Oh, well. Like I said, I didn't love the story anyway.

I also played harmonica for a bit in a square near the opera house, my most public performance so far. Two little kids may have been alternating between watching and hiding behind a bench, or maybe they were just playing. And someone talked to me. She was speaking Hungarian so I can't entirely rule out the possibility that she was telling me I rock, but I'm pretty sure she just wanted directions.

At least I feel bad about it

When I don't speak the right language (e.g., Hungarian), sometimes other languages come out. I've been saying da instead of yes, even though Russian is not at all related to Hungarian and it's been 20+ years since the Russians were making non-Russians learn it (and yes is one of the four Hungarian words I know). I've also taken to asking for ein ticket, since some people here (myself not included) speak German. If the conversation gets confusing, I sometimes replace ok with vale (Spanish) for no good reason whatsoever. Conversations don't get confusing that often, though, because most people here speak English. I get so holier-than-thou annoyed with the English-speaking tourists in most other places who can't be bothered to learn even a few words of whatever the right language is. If I were staying here longer or if I had any affinity whatsoever for learning languages or if English weren't sp prevalent, I would make an effort to learn. Honest. But for five days I'm really not even trying. I'm sorry, Hungary.

In other news, it was Day 2 of public harmonicizing. This time I sat on a bench, with people around. Not any kind of main square or anything, but there were people. They all ignored me. I wasn't expecting applause, or a crowd to gather or anything, but still I guess I was sort of surprised by the totality of their indifference. At least I didn't get booed.

This is UN heritage site and shit -- meaning it is officially a beautiful road.

Budapest is really Buda and Pest, separated by the Danube and connected by lots of bridges (11, I think). I love the bridges. They're all different and pretty and you can walk across them. One is green and pointy and one is white and rectangle-y and another looks like the Manhattan bridge plus the Arc de Triomphe with lions at the ends. Paul Theroux hates people who start their description of a place with what they saw out the window as the plane landed but, just for the record, the river and bridges looked really nice from above. Something I didn't notice from the plane is that Buda is hilly and Pest is flat. Weird.

It's really a beautiful city, and I don't even mean that in a pejorative way. Not beautiful-but-sterile, not beautiful-but-boring, just beautiful. I haven't explored too many neighborhoods, but at least in the center you can pretty much look in any direction from anywhere and see something pretty or interesting or that makes you go wow. The Four Seasons Hotel reminded me so much of (toned down) Gaudi that I had to take about 20 photos of it. And there are castles. Not that Budapest is the only place that has them, but I'm sort of a sucker for that particular kind of fairy tale shit. The street with all the embassies is pretty fabulous, too. Embassies always make me feel like I'm somewhere important.

I have a favorite Hungarian artist now. His name was Jenő Gyárfás. (Not only do Hungarian vowels sometimes have accents, sometimes they have two accents. Joder.) His work reminded me of Goya, and the people in his paintings mostly look crazy or shifty or possessed. Sometimes that happens because the painter wasn't very good (I've seen a lot of deranged-looking baby Jesuses), but I'm pretty sure Jenő knew exactly what he was doing.

Also, the bread here is often sausage-shaped, which makes me giggle.

If I had someone else's voice

I've always thought I could be a great blues singer, if my voice weren't so terrible. Last summer I started on the seemingly more attainable goal of learning blues harmonica. It's a lot harder than I thought it would be. You have to do weird hard things with your tongue. My teacher admires my determination, if not my skills, so in that vein I made the rule that on this trip I have to play at least every other day. And, because I like to torture myself, I'm going to play outside. In public. In front of people. Yikes. Maybe it will help with my stage fright. (The one other time I played in front of people--two easy solos for some drunk supportive friends--I nearly had a meltdown.) The pressure to not suck should make me practice harder, anyway.

My Hungarian debut was not all that memorable. I thought I would sit on a bench by the river but then there were no benches so I settled for the top of the railing to some steps to the footpath of a bridge. There was a street below so I'm not sure how far the sound carried or who could really hear me. Easing into the whole audience thing, I guess. I did get honked at a few times but who knows, maybe they just liked my hair or something. The good news I guess is that even though I felt sort of awkward, it wasn't terrifying. It's a start.

Worst part of fishing is worm

I pretty much never talk to people on planes. But on the flight here I was too hung over to read The Economist anyway, so it was ok that my seatmate Laszlo was super chatty. He told me that a Red Sox fan could not possibly feel the pain of a Cubs fan. He told me about how he is Catholic and also atheist, and that the best part of fishing is the drinking. ("Worst part of fishing is worm. Putting the worm on the hook. I hate worm.") He also told me about how, at age 17, he smuggled himself out of Hungary rather than join the army. Some kind of forged passport that got him out through Belgrade and Ljubljana to an Italian refugee camp, where he promptly acquired a wife and baby ("nothing else to do"). A year later he came to New York with 18 years, $30, a wife, a baby, and no English. He took his $30 to the nearest bodega to get milk for his baby ("I know this one word, milk"), but didn't know enough other words to realize he was buying powdered milk, which he then had no idea what to do with. He's doing fine now, though, so we were allowed to laugh about it. He taught me how to say yes and no in Hungarian, so now I've got four words in my arsenal (including thank you and beer). He also taught me how to say fuck ("Did you know Hungarian has most curse words of any language?"), but then kept shushing me when I repeated it and now I forget how to say it. Joder.

So I made it to Budapest. And, based on a sample of two, Hungarians are pretty great.

Here goes

This blog was supposed to start yesterday. But then I had Bloody Marys (Maries?) for dinner and gate-checked my little notebook and didn't write anything. I also haven't taught myself Russian, or mastered the harmonica, or learned the intricacies of Balkan history. So, as I bum around eastern Europe for the next few months, I've got some work to do.

I'll try not to be boring.