concerning my future

confidentially, i'm sort of freaking out.

i really would just like to go back to belgrade for a while.

where to next?

i think i want to go to ecuador now

Keep up with the PragueBloggers

Nicole noted rightly that I don't post to PragueBlague as much as I used to. When we were in Prague. Well, that's because I started a new blog. And, you know, we're not in Prague anymore. Now I'm in Brooklyn, working at a vegetarian restaurant, living with Joe and Brooke, and spending all my free time trying to Beat Jeremy Coon.

Chatting with Nicool

Nicole and I aren't in Prague anymore. It's just a fact. But last night we chatted over Friendster, and I felt transported to another land, another time, another place. A land more magical, a time more ancient, and a place more friendly. Welcome back, Nicole. Welcome back.

kristen and me outside of tito's grave in serbia

also- this is us in front of the blue mosque in turkey

chronological list of the countries i visited this trip

england
czech republic
germany
poland
austria
romania
hungary
slovenia
croatia
(austria again)
turkey
bulgaria
serbia
bosnia
(croatia again)
italy
belgium

rhys doesn't write anymore.

rhys?

and adjustment

i woke up at 6:30 am, because, well, that's 2:30 pm in the place i just was.

i keep trying to put my door key in upside down.

the waiter brought us our bill without us having to hunt him down and ask for it and my subconscious reaction was to think that he was trying to get rid of us, but, oh yes, that's how people do it here. i remember.

i paid for groceries with credit card.

people speak in the language i know.

whenever i have an inclination to use the computer, i can.

i don't know anybody here. i've gained about 6 pounds, which really isn't so bad when i think about the shit i've been eating. although i would like to get rid of it anyway.

i LOVE my dog.

being west

i'm home.

i didn't sleep for three days.

i was on airplanes or in airports for 27 hours straight. and for about 18 just the day before that.

belgium is/was a disaster. the taxi drivers drive mercedes and take credit cards and charge 38 euros for sixteen kilometers. i am never going back to belgium.

i will write more when i am properly awake.

meanwhile. i'm happy to be sitting at my computer in my bathrobe, although i very much miss the former yugoslavia. oh! i got an email from our bosnian hostel friends today!

oh yes, and i have strep throat again.

moving west

into...

1.hordes of tourists (western, american brits etc.)
2.complications (how the fuck do we get to venice from here without spending inordinate amounts of money? how will i get from venice to brussels?)
3.mean ladies (the woman we are renting a room from is probably satan)
4.expenses (how much is this internet costing?)

we're in dubrovnik. it is probably the most pictaresque city. i can't say i'm too in to it, though, for the reasons listed above. i think i would've loved it four or five months ago. in fact, i think i would probably be obsessed with it. but i just came from bosnia, and before that serbia, and this is just too too pretty for me right now. sarajevo was pretty, but in a different way.

i mean, i'm being a grumpy pants because i'm a little tired and sick. i like it here. but i want to go back east. but right now i have no time left on the internet and i've lost too many blog entries to prepaid internet sessions running out. i'll explain more later.

dear kss- let's go a traveling.

from an email i wrote to darling

no time to write a real entry, so i am copy-pasting from an email i wrote to my dear friend kristen darling.

sarajevo is too touristy and mostar is full of dead people. i am in the shit right now. i am in mostar, and this is the middle of the world and the middle of conflict and peace and death and life and i'm all caught up in it and i'm feeling so much all at once that i'm dizzy and might fall over any minute. we are renting a room from man who can't be any younger than 250 years old. we befriended a dog who was inhabited by the spirit of a bosnian croat who died in 1992 or 1993, but no earlier or later because this dog was trying to show us things, show us what happened here. this place is full of death. and also life. because people who live in birmingham alabama and want to become business men and make money so that their children can drive jeep grand cherokees instead of bicycles and eat steak for breakfast don't feel life the same way as someone who walks past mine-infested ruins on their way to work or has seen their neighbors' head roll of their bodies in a real honest to goodness i
hate you so much i could kill you war. the dead people here
are really really dead and everyone else is really really alive.

i am a war tourist and i feel bad about it, but at least i'm feeling
it. you know? at least i'm seeing the buildings now from my safe
distance in time and i can take these images with me to alabama, where i will be less alive, maybe, but also safe and happy.

sarajevo- a whirlwind post

sarajevo is easily one of the most beautiful cities i've seen. we drove in on the bus at sunset and the houses were turning on their lights and you could see the mosques next to the churches next to the temple, and from the hills (because sarajevo is in a valley), it looked so peaceful. it was a scene from an anime film, or a disney claymation film, or from a well-illustrated graphic novel. are you catching my drift? kristen cried. i cried too, but as i mentioned earlier, it was just because i didn't want to leave belgrade. belgrade belgrade.

but sarajevo makes me antsy. i don't know if it is just because it is belgrade, which is the best place and i never wanted to leave, especially after watching the sunrise over the danube with the angry bojan barge-bartender, but even before, when we were just walking down the pedestrian street, that was packed with people (not tourists!) from the early afternoon to the late evening EVERY day (tuesday, wednesday, whatever). this city was so full of life. belgrade belgrade. the way you say belgrade in serbian is beograd. that's a bit prettier.

in the center of the city is an old citadel that was destroyed forty-four times or something like that. most of what remains was reconstructed by the austrian-hapsburgs and also the turks in the (i think) 18th century. i don't have my guidebook in front of me, so my facts could be wrong. anyways, it is a massive complex in the center of the city with the ruins of defensive walls and old moats (that are now tennis courts) and museums and tunnels and green green parks with people everywhere sitting and talking and playing chess and being old or being young and laying on the crumbling walls by the sava river with their shirts rolled up past their stomachs to catch the sunshine eating icecream and popcorn and drinking fizzy lemonade and smiling and smoking and speaking serbian with one another and making lace, selling lace, selling buttons that say 'i heart yu' with a picture of the yugoslav flag and shirts with josef broz tito on them because he was yugoslavia, but then he died, and kristen and i saw his grave too. and we were the only ones at his grave, besides two older ladies and lots of strange statues and the people who worked there. but his grave was in a garden inside a building with grass inside under a roof, but not a green house. and then we went to a museum with all the gifts that tito ever received from countries around the world, which were mostly swords and folk costumes. and there was also the military history museum (but at the kalemegdon citadel) where they had pieces of an american jet that they shot down and also the uniforms of the captured soldiers and all sorts of bloody weapons and some kosovar skulls and also pictures of serbian civilians who were killed by NATO bombs in the outskirst of the city of beograd. one picture was a street vendor whose head was rolled back and blood was coming out of it blood was everywhere and his blood was spread around him like his vegetables that he had been selling a few minutes before. little pieces of cabbage next to his inanimate body. cabbage is everywhere in eastern europe. really, everywhere.

and can you understand why this place made me feel so intensely happy and also sad? it was so beautiful and so bloody. these people have blood on their hands, but also sorrow. they are sad. but also alive. i have never seen so much singing and rejoicing and dancing in a place (just on the street!), but they also know war. there were ex-soldiers my age who had killed people and they were drinking at the bar on the danube that we were drinking at. we met one. he had killed a incompetent sargeant who was sending his friends to their deaths and then they called him a war criminal and so he fled to south africa and then the dominican republic and now he's finally back in serbia, because that's where he wants to be, because that's where he is from and that means something here. i say i am from alabama, but it doesn't mean much because i don't feel like i'm from alabama. i feel like i am from my family and my house, which happens to be in alabama, which is a place that i have been visiting and observing for 23 years but where i don't really fit. kristen and i decided that we are misfits. and i want to find my serbian soul-mate, bojan, who said that the people in serbia were happy and sad and angry and stupid and everything all at once adn this is how i feel all the time, but he feels like he fits in serbia and i feel like i fit nowhere really, which isn't all bad, really, and part of me wants to find bojan and take him with me around the world so that we can be misfits together and then wander the world in mutual lonliness, but then also he would cease to be the concept that i've made him, as a person who represents many more people in a place that represents more than the present (anything but the present, according to bojan) and it also represents more space than is in its geographic boundaries (and that is the problem, isn't it?), and if i took bojan away it would not work at all. because he is serbian and all i am is not exactly alabamian.

what i'm saying is that i love serbia, or at least belgrade. these two countries-- they are made of the same stuff. but one of them seems prettier and sadder (that's bosnia) and the other seems more real and angrier (and that's serbia). they are both terrific, of course. but i think that really i just need to learn serbo-croatian so i can come back here and communicate with more people.

guest entry (a few days late) from kristen about sofia

Currently I am in Sofia, Bulgaria. We arrived last night via train. Somehow we ended up in the train compartment full of the most disgusting and lecherous men in the country. But then some of them left and we made friends with a young guitarist who played us Mozart. We had spent the three previous days in Sozopol, on the Black Sea coast. It was rather boring because there were not that many people there and everyone we met couldn't get enough of bad-mouthing the Roma. But the food was good and we got some rest. I seem to have left my wallet in Margarita's house, but she is supposedly sending it, so it should get here tomorrow.

Sofia is very interesting. It has given me a completely new perspective on Bulgaria. Not to pass judgment on a whole country, but I had been getting rather melancholy energy from this land. Last night when we arrived I had a strange feeling I was entering a kind of netherworld and thought that perhaps Sofia would be more of the same. But, in fact, it is quite lively here. Sofia is certainly changing and beginning to look a lot like many western European cities I've visited. As in other parts of Bulgaria, people make very good use of public space. But there is something underneath the glitz that is very East Bloc-ish and extremely dark. I don't mean this in a bad way. There is just some intense darkness. There are an abundance of bizarre, tortured looking statues. There is the 20 foot head with a slash in its skull as well as a number of starving corpses throughout the city. There are also an inordinate amount of swastikas everywhere and in front of the Alexander Nevsky church someone was selling a box with Hitler painted on it. Someone else was also selling old photographs, and I purchased a funeral scene that I like very much. The whole walk up to the church is thus rather eery, and the suddenly sinister-looking sky only intensified this mood. The church itself, which was built to honor those who died fighting the Turks in the late 1800s, is the darkest and perhaps most morbid place I have ever been. There was very little light at all and there was something very peculiar and unsettling but also really beautiful about it. Clutching my funerary photograph, I stood in a spot on the floor where the tiles met and formed a circle and closed me eyes. I am not sure what this means, but for a long time afterwards I was not sure if I was in Satan's palace or the Nevski church. I am not sure they would be separate buildings. I thus like Sofia immensely.

We are staying at Art Hostel, which is indeed somewhat artsy. Last night we went to the bar downstairs to get our complementary welcome drink and stayed there for entirely too long. Nicole met a sketchy Brit (another football tourist... and we thought we had left all of these fanatics behind in Istanbul) who would not leave and then I talked to a bunch of slimy others, including one Bulgarian boy with three nostrils whose first words to me were, "Canadian women are even more beautiful than Polish women." I think he had some mental problems, and his gay mohawked Macedonian lover eventually got jealous and forced him to leave. Cheers for Kristen, the international gay weirdo magnet. Then some kid from Georgia with a wife and a girlfriend who are not the same individual told me he loved me. I finished up the night with a hunk of chicken at 4:30am. I was awoken early by the Polish theater troupe staying in the room next to mine who felt inspired to perform a muscial at 9am and then some asshole composer's musical alarm that continued to go off every 10 minutes despite his absence.

We were going to head to Macedonia next, but I think we are going skip it and go to Belgrade for a night and then on to Sarajevo. I am most excited to be in Bosnia-Herzegovina, so my eyelids are sweating beads of anticipation at this very moment. I am enjoying the East Bloc very much, though the people are hard to get to know. They are not very friendly in a superficial way, though of course there is a lot of heart underneath it all.

Someone spray painted the word "sorrow" in English on the side of a building next to this one.

the balkans

i never have time to write emails, blogs, and also be in the balkans at the same time.

i need to say this though:

i think i have finally found my place. i fell in love with and in serbia. i met a boy on a barge and he is so angry and also happy and full of life and also tragedy and so smart and thoughtful and we didn't even kiss, but if everyone in the balkans is like that then i want to meet them all.

i cried when we left belgrade; kristen cried when we saw sarajevo. we are in the center of the world. this is it.