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.