That river...

I keep thinking about that river in Albania. Big, fast moving, and chocolate brown. And the Albanians wading through it with their fishing nets. When I say big, I mean big like the Snake river in Oregon.

The last forestry grant I wrote in California was for a little stream in No. Cal. It was about 20 feet wide, ran clear and was filled with trout and salmon. It was considered impaired, because the banks were steep and prone to erosion-- extremely common and completely natural in that area (and all over California, since it's so tectonically active). The only way to stop erosion is to stop plate tectonics. There were also quite a few cattle crossings. So the rancher got $40k to build 100 feet of cattle fencing and set back the banks in a few places. What a ridiculous waste of money and time. The only reason we wrote the grant in the first place was to get on the good side of the Department of Fish and Game so the guy could have another vineyard.

I've read up a little more on the Albanian forestry situation. During Hoxha's time the government logged a lot and didn't replant, due to lack of resources. There was (and is) still a lot of illegal logging, and logging for firewood. The peace corps did some forestry programs there but it's not clear how much they accopmlished because the projects were stopped six years ago when anarchy broke out after the economy collapsed.

Sveti Sava

Sveti Sava
Originally uploaded by mylittlepony3.

This is one big hram (church). The outside is finally finished after over 100 years of building. I didn't like it as much as the smaller churches and monasteries in Serbia, but the Serbs are very proud of it.

More singing...

Last night one of the girls in the dorm showed me a book of song lyrics she had-- 107 pages of old Serbian songs. She paged through them and made a list of the her favorites so I can copy them down. She was singing some of them to me, and at one point she started crying, when she was singing a song about Kosovo.

I have to say that I really couldn't have had any understanding of the Kosovo problem unless I had gone to Albania. I had to go there to understand how different Albania is from Macedonia and Serbia; how absolutely devastated the country's natural resources are. I can't remember if I said this before, but the tree line literally starts at the Macedonian border. The rivers are filled with silt. Someone told me that the soil in Albania isn't good for growing trees, but really-- I don't believe it the soil could change that much just going over the border to Macedonia. I don't know if you can blame the Hoxha government or the people themselves. Somehow, the former Yugoslavia managed to get through communism without ripping their environment to shreds. Not that Serbia and Macedonia are perfect or anything-- 80% of Serbia's forests have been cut to create grazing in the last 100 years.

So I was talking about Kosovo-- almost all of the Serb and Roma population have been driven out of Kosovo by the Albanians. I met an American lawyer last week who has been working in Kosovo for the last 4 years. Basically, the UN was evicting Albanians from Serbian homes in Kosovo so the Serbs could move back. Not surprisingly, no one is moving back. He says the current projection is that Serbia will lose Kosovo by March.

In light of this it's easy to see why Serbians resent America for bombing Belgrade. If Mexico decided to annex Southern California on the basis of the high population of Mexicans I'm sure we'd retaliate as well.

Comments (constructive ones, of course) are welcome-- my intention is to give my honest impression of the situation, not to bash Albania. And I realize my perspective is skewed since I'm living in Belgrade right now.

The Serbian Blues

I've decided that learning a language by speaking it is like trying to build a house and live in it at the same time. You can't use vocabulary without grammar; you can't use grammar without vocabulary; and mostly you end up doing a lot of swearing. People love to teach me swear words, though I try to avoid using them because I know how dorky foreigners sound when they swear in English.

There's another American here from Pennsylvania. Her fiance is Serbian and she's hoping to get a job here one day and relocate permanently. I don't think I could ever do that. Though I will miss waking up every morning and looking out on the Sava from my dorm room. And I'll definitely miss jogging through Kalemegdan. It's a park built around the old fortress. Running through it I feel like a kid on Tom Sawyer's island or something. There are a thousand rocky old paths and staircases and bridges to explore.

No Trubaci allowed

No Trubaci
Originally uploaded by mylittlepony3.

Zec za rucak

Zec za rucak
Originally uploaded by mylittlepony3.

Jessica and her fiance were nice enough to invite me over for rabbit...

And the walls began to sing...

So I'm staying in the Prebogslovkom (theology) studenski dom for now, because it's cheap, and guy who was supposed to give me a place to stay has been typically Serbian (slow) in getting back to me.

I got back to the room last night and I was reading my Serbian grammar book, sitting at the desk by the window. And I heard singing. Of the old serbian kind. So I open the door and listen in the hallway... nothing. Open the window... nothing. Listened at the doors of the other rooms of the hall... nishta. It was like it was coming from the walls. Then I went upstairs and found the source-- the room right above me. I knocked on the door and introduced myself in bad Serbian to the three singing girls who were, coincidentally, just getting yelled at by their neighbor. I told them they could come down to my room to sing.

Turns out one of them is from Bosnia and they were recording themselves singing for family back home. She also ended up recording me speaking english-- apparently I'm the first American she's ever met.

National Museum

Nat Museum
Originally uploaded by mylittlepony3.

This statue of Mary and the Christ child is from a monastery in Kosovo. It is said to be over 1,000 years old. Legend has it that this statue fell down from the heavens and landed gently under a tree near the monastery.

Belgrade, II

During her visit to Belgrade right before WWII, Rebecca West wrote, "I feel as though I had travelled a long distance to see a sunset which is rapidly descending under my eyes into a night of foul weather". I feel like I've woken up here at the other end of that long, disastrous night. The industrialization of Serbia and the other countries of the former Yugoslavia has manifested itself as she foresaw it. All over Serbia there are huge factories built under communism that were sold off or went under after Tito died, leaving "empty shells" as she predicted. The exploitation and exportation of natural resources that was taking place in her time has been replaced by a drain of intellectual resources as the educated youth here escapes to countries with jobs.

The soul of the culture seems to have survived. A distinctly Serbian closeness and cameraderie. Maybe it's just a matter of survival in a poor and historically unstable country.

It's interesting to me that the physical symbols of the culture haven't been used to create tourism the way they have in other places. Guca isn't known like Oktoberfest, for example. And none of the tourists I met seemed to know what ajvar or cevapcici are. In Croatia I met a couple from Britain who remarked to me that Croatia didn't seem to have any unique cultural identity, in that they couldn't think of a food or product that was distinctly Croatian. Then they told me a story about a bizarre dinner they'd had that I really think was distinctly Balkan in it's bizarreness. They were in a town in the north of Croatia and they asked the waiter if there was any chicken on the menu. He said there was only one chicken dish. It turned out to be a chicken wrapped in an egg omlette and then fried again. They nicknamed it "chicken in an egg jacket". Why you would want to do this to a chicken I do no know. Anyway, I've run into so many uniquely strange things here that it seems to be a defining factor of Balkan culture: you never know what'll happen next.