The American War

I was with a group from the seminar in the lakeside city of Struga last night, for the opening of the popular Struga Poetry Festival. During the opening celebration, fireworks were launched and as they burst over head, one of my friends - a 20 year-old Serbian girl from Nis - covered her ears and said to me, "This is just like the American War. They bombed Nis, I remember it all, I was 10."

She was sort of joking with me, of course - she doesn't hold a grudge against me personally, nor really against America. It didn't seem like she had much of an opinion at all, it was just an event that happened during her lifetime.

But it's still strange for me to think that those images of American planes over Bosnia, American troops in Kosovo, and American bombs falling on the civilian centers of Nis and Belgrade in Serbia. . . well, those things happened just a few hundred kilometers away, to people that I eat dinner with every day.

Seminarot za Makedonski Jazik

I've been at the Seminar for Macedonian Language for the past week, and will be here through the end of August. The above picture is the view from my hotel balcony, overlooking lake Ohrid.

It's been a really great time so far - there are students and professors from Russia, Poland, Belarus, Germany, Belgium, France, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Romania, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia, Greece . . . and of course, America, studying at various levels of the Macedonian language.

Fish-cicles

Macedonian grocery stores have frozen food sections. Normal frozen food sections, with boxes of chicken-patties and vacuum-sealed sterile shrimp and ice cream. This is fine, this does not bother me.

What does bother me is that, though 90% of all the food is prepackaged like any other frozen food, there is invariably one bin - maybe two - of unwrapped, unlabeled fish or chicken parts. Frozen solid. Really, next to the frozen pizzas, you'll see a big bin of just plain whole fish, frozen so hard that some of them have cracked in two or three parts. Or a giant bin of chicken legs and wings, unbreaded, unpackaged, frozen solid.

What do you do with this? I mean, most people shop at markets that are right next to their houses, but do some people drop an unwrapped frozen fish in their grocery bags and walk two blocks in the Skopje heat, praying it doesn't melt completely before they get back to their freezer?

I'm going to get a picture of this. I just don't think you could believe me otherwise.

The Wal-Mart Effect

I've heard from my numerous Peace Corps acquaintances about the huge adjustments that one has to make when returning to the United States. Peace Corps volunteers are gone for two years, and aside from those lucky enough to be placed in crumbling Eastern European capitals - Skopje, Sofia, etc. - they live in extremely rural villages or collapsed industrial centers. The stores that exist are tiny - one room in a house converted into a a grocery, a one-room clothing "boutique", or a simple kiosk with the goods outside and the seller behind glass. Skopje, however, has several malls and shopping centers, as well as numerous supermarket chains. Most of the larger cities in Macedonia have some sort of open-air mall, and usually a small-but-recognizable chain grocery store. For the most part, however, the big-box retailers that Americans (and to an extent, some Western European countries) have come to love are almost nonexistent. So, when these Peace Corps volunteers return to America, they experience something which might be called "The Wal-Mart Effect", where one is completely overwhelmed by walking into a big-box retailer for the first time after returning home.

Earlier this summer, I had a mini-Wal-Mart-effect experience. Skopje is a fairly developed city, and a ring-road around the city was recently completed. I can't remember the occasion, but someone took me out to the edge of the city where all of the new development is taking place, to a store called "Huba-Mart". I really can't describe the feeling when I walked in, it was so. . . strange. It was a huge, over-air-conditioned pole barn, with the sound of shoppers echoing off the polished concrete floor. I was overwhelmed with the smell of various plastics, tinged with potting soil, paint and varnish.

It was the Macedonian "Home Depot". As I walked through the aisles, I experienced a strange mix of revulsion, nostalgia, and bewilderment. It was like a waking dream. I almost lost it when I turned a corner to see a row of drip-coffee machines and filters. I needed nothing, but my mind was reeling - "LOOK AT ALL THE THINGS YOU CAN BUY!"

The best approximation I can think of would be the scene in that David Bowie classic, "The Labyrinth", where the girl - that was Jennifer Connelly, right? - entered into what she thought was her own room, with that crazy hunchbacked lady trying to trick her. Everything looked the same, but it was just ever so slightly off. . . and then the girl breaks the mirror, and realizes it was all just an elaborate fantasy.

I walked outside, into the parking lot with the freshly mowed grass and the highway exit ramp, and I desperately wanted to break the illusion - "THIS CAN'T BE MACEDONIA! YOU ARE LYING TO ME!" I still get chills thinking about it. . . it was just so creepy. So out of place. And right afterward, we went to a giant Vero grocery store, which is attached to a gas station and a McDonald's. It didn't help my feeling of American consumerism-bizarreness, but it didn't make it much worse. . . at least the giant grocery store had racks of ajvar and Turkish coffee to remind me that I was just in globalized-Macedonia.

Now that I've booked my plane tickets home - I'll be back on October 22 - I think more and more about that Wal-Mart effect. That overwhelming air-conditioning. . . the sickly flourescent lighting. . .the rows and rows and rows of STUFF, all kinds of STUFF. . .

It just seems so foreign, so strange. It'll be impossible to avoid, I know. . . but I'll give it a shot.

Macedonian Dialects

The diversity of dialects in Macedonia is really amazing. This is a country of 2 million people, yet there's a good chance that someone from Skopje won't really understand someone from Strumica, who won't really understand someone from Bitola because of accent, slang, and other differences. The formal, standardized Macedonian language is based on the dialect from the middle of the country - somewhere between Veles and Prilep. The Skopski dialect differs by including a great deal of Serbian, and dropping certain consonants - 'shto' (which means what) becomes 'sho'. Entire verb endings are dropped in the Strumica dialect, which is closer to Bulgarian. And no one outside of Bitola can hear people from Bitola without laughing. . . perhaps imagine a Boston accent.

By far my favorite dialect, however, is the one spoken in Macedonia's premier wine country, around Kavadarci and Negotino. It has the usual drop of consonants and different accenting of words . . . with the hilarious added bonus of nonstop profanity. Here is what Chris Deliso writes in the Macedonian section of the new Lonely Planet Western Balkans:

"Kavadarci's gregarious locals have one humorous peculiarity probably lost on outsiders: their good-natured profanity. Basic greetings are heavily soaked in swearing, apparently for its own sake - so don't blush when sommeone greets you by saying 'dojdi da t'ebam' (literally, come here so I can screw you)!"

He gives a rather more tame translation than the actual meaning. . . but you get the idea. Imagine a teenage girl's way of speaking - every other word is "like. . . ". Elderly, sun tanned, life-long grape pickers speak the same way, but with the Macedonian equivalents of the f-word, and various rude bits about your mother. A friend of a friend works in the Agricultural ministry, and had to travel down for an official government meeting with the head so-and-so's, foreign investors, and other important types, and came away shocked that the overwhelming profanity carried into the professional presentations. "And as you can see from these f**** graphs, if we don't improve our performance, then f*** your mother, we're in trouble." It's a rough translation, but without exagerration.

I crack up just thinking about it.

UPDATE

I forgot the funniest part of the government presentation story. Macedonian, like Spanish, has a polite or formal form of the verb, and an informal version. During this government presentation, the representatives from Kavadarci started cursing using the formal version of the verbs. Instead of "Come here so that I can screw you!", it would be "Please come here so that I can screw you, Sir." Now that's politeness.