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 The exploitation and exportation of natural resources that was taking place in her time has been replaced by a drain of intellectual resources as the educated youth here escapes to countries with jobs.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.