"And sometimes you realize you are holding a serrated potato"

Its the first time in about three weeks I have had a moment to sink into a chair and hide behind my computer, ear buds in my ears, eyes glued to the screen, fingers tapping away on the key board to the scent of hot lemon infusing into my tea. It would be a difficult and time consuming task to relate to you, lovely readers, the chronological, logistical happenings of the time that has lapsed since my last blogger monologue. So lets start with this: I couldn't begin to count my lucky stars. It's like that new Katy Perry song, I think fireworks are exploding out of my chest (let me just say, never would I have ever thought I’d say such a thing about Katy Perry…)

The first two months I was in Croatia felt like jumping off the 45 foot cliff into the spring-filled rock quarry south of St. Louis, except I jumped much more willingly. Even if I wanted to pause, turn, grasp on to something, I just kept falling knowing eventually, through no action of my own, I would hit the water, sink a bit and then bob to the surface, hopefully no bruises in tow. Okay, so maybe that is slightly melodramatic, but I really struggled with the logistics of what I was doing, what were my goals, how do you construct a meaningful life in a foreign place going off a few good leads?

Well, at some point I hit the water and bobbed to the surface. Things still take some dog-paddling and the effort of swimming strokes and encouraging words from the shore-side, but ultimately I am really happy with how things are going and a large part of that happiness required the solidification and validation found in Katie and Annie's trip over the sea into my alien-life—that until this point had been a bubble, obscured even to myself by its isolation from the people and things that contextualize myself and my own life. Place, history, and culture are indispensable when attempting to analyze the present and I think that even happens in our everyday life when we uproot to some place new, some place without our personal histories, or stories of place, and our own micro-cultures. I suppose the point of this rant is that Annie and Katie’s presence here in Zagreb was not only fun and games

(which, of course, there was plenty of) but an opportunity for a third party who is knowledgeable in these aspects in my own life to evaluate the inner workings of my life in Zagreb. It was a sounding board I had been waiting months for, a simple nod of a head that says, ‘it makes sense, not only here and now, but in your narrative’. I am always pro compartmentalizing and trying new things and pushing your boundaries, but have you ever read book where a plot point doesn’t fit, its an anomaly and not in a surprising or refreshing way? What I strive for is an anomaly that upon stepping back actually creates a richer text, a complicated and delicate weave.

Okay. I am getting lost in words.

The quick and dirty:

Katie and Annie met my buddies here in Zagreb. They adored each other and we think things like “Lets meet again on the beaches of the exotic and distant Florida”…

They spent a good long Saturday with the family I hang out with once a week and did arts and crafts, ate a giant yummy meal and drank several cups of the most delicious Turkish coffee one’s taste buds could imagine.

We met with my advisor for a social coffee and a bit of Cockta (the coke like beverage produced in the region) and spoke of things like scooters and universities.

We café hoped, including the famous Booksa, Sedmica, Kolaz and even my neighborhood favorite, Lusso (where we indulged with “topla cockolade” a giant cup of hot pudding served in a mug with a spoon).

We embarked on a map-less journey of the placid, magical, and empty of other travelers (with the exception of 2 Malaysian business men) of Plitvice lakes.

Side note: the photos in the blog post below are from the lakes. If one ever has the opportunity they are worth the trip. The water is more clear than drinking water and trees that have fallen in have grown fur coats of moss and their branches twist into the depths, making one imagine there is a world on the reverse side of the lake, that eventually those same trees grow out of the water on the other side and if only you could dive deep enough you’d emerge into something unknown. Then, you stumble across the waterfalls, which are bustling around and through the curving wooden pathways which sit almost flush with the still parts of the lakes. The water transitions from green to blue to some indescribable color depending on the angle of the sunlight, changing dramatically in the afternoon light. Annie was convinced it was a land of magic. We breathed in deeply the cool, clean air, and I think it cured me of my wretched cough. At an unmarked wooden hut perched on the edge of the woods we flagged down a bus coming from Zadar and returned to Zagreb with tired feet a new treasure of pristine water to take home to the states.

We day-tripped to Ljubljana where we encountered the famous dragons, identical chocolate shops with different packaging, coffee in a castle, some stylish-3d glasses and a veggie delicious lunch.

We hopped over to Budapest, empty of expectations (except maybe the misconception of more bulbous architecture). In Budapest we ate fried dough with garlic spread, topped with sour cream and cheese. I highly recommend this tasty treat, but once is probably enough. We were duped by its tasti-ness and devouring such street food two days in a row, my friends, makes you feel like you are sweating dairy fried in grease. However, it was all okay because we also spent a day pool hopping in a Turkish bath. Swimming outside in almost freezing weather while steam emanates off the micro portion of your body above water is lovely and magical. The indoor pools contain different minerals and are kept at different temperatures, including some cold pools for plunging and several saunas of varying temperatures. You leave, your feet frozen from the ground but your body melting like butter, skin sheen and pores open, and lungs ready to inhale the menthol found in some of the saunas. As wonderful and bizarre and enjoyable the baths were, my most favorite part was the old Hungarian men playing chess in one of the outdoor pools and next to them a young boy arms folded on the cement part with his head perched gently on crevix of his elbow gazing at the game. I imagine him trying to follow the moves, figure out the tricks, all the time the memory already being constructed amidst the fog of the steam slowly rising into the night sky.

[plain old traveling tips about Budapest: we stayed in a great hostelà homemade hostel. Go to the museum of terror, it’s done well and gives a glimpse into Hungarian modern history. Bring a bathing suit. Take the free tour. Eat Langoos once (the fried treat). Eat at Hummus Bar, delicious falafel. Go to a ruin bar. Meet nice people!]

INTERMISSION...

A collision of worlds is a nice and reassuring thing.

Dođi!

Sorry for the mystical disappearnce. Please expect a return to life on the internet soon. The upcoming Ker-Plunk post will include all sorts of magical adventures, including dragons, magic water, nymphs and more...stay tuned!

i am living in a deep slumber

Doing work late into the evening feels nice. Feels like home. Makes me miss whispers (the coffee shop in our library). I have been trying for months now to force myself to work in the middle of the day. Guess what...apparently the sun makes me want to twiddle my thumbs. So here is to the night, and productive hours, and feeling better thanks to a magic drug called MAXFLU.

cheers!
Emily

a little more food for thought:

"To recgonize gender as a social pattern requires us to see it as a product of history, and also as a producer of history...I defined gender practice as onto-formative, as constiuting reality, and it is a crucial part of of this idea that social reality is dynamic in time" Connell.

"The Balkans are experienced as a road between two points endowed with identity and substance. Moreover, this is not the road for the roads sake; this is rather the mythological road-deprived of substance, meaning, form and even space distance. This is a space to be traversed as a deep slumber without dreams and memories." - Dimitar Kambourov
(Im not quite sure Ive wrapped my head around this guys writing yet, but it sure sounds poignent.)

Being sick in bed really is no fun. My head hurts too much to study or read heavy stuff and yet i feel like a bump on a log when I just bum around on the interenet all day. But, in line with my attempts to be a better me, I'm trying to take care of my body. Rest. Rest. and more rest (and loads of water...) In the mean time I found a funny-interesting article: The Study of Man (or Males) in the NYTIMES. Read up and tell me what you think.

Also, i made jello and my croatian roommate tried it: his vredict, no good.

cat on a hot tin roof.

There are often humorous occasions for learning cultural norms. Take being sick for example. After a day in bed my kind roommate convinced me to take my temp. I'm stubborn when it comes to that kind of thing. I believe my body knows what’s best for it, including a mild temperature, which slowly boils away all the tricky germs inside this wreck of a body. Luka brings me a thermometer, I look at him a bit apprehensively assuming it must of already been washed because he didn't suggest washing it again and began the slow procession of the silver tipped thermometer to its uncomfortable place of work: Under the tongue. Little did I know despite its similar appearance and assumption that these things are done relatively the same across the globe that in Croatia never would anyone ever put a thermometer in their mouth! What are you doing? Luka said, or something to that effect. I blushed with embarrassment, well where else would you put it? Uh, in your armpit. Well. I guess you learn something everyday.

also this is from wikipedia: In Russia and former Soviet countries, the commonly quoted value (normal body temp) is 36.6 °C (97.9 °F), based on an armpit (axillary) reading.

The year of the mandarin oranges.

2011.

I returned from Belgrade on a long train ride, leaving a land of snow and smog and returning to a city of orderly trams running on schedule. The ride is long. Six hours. When you buy a train ticket in the Balkans you are paying for the transportation, for moving from one place to another, you do not pay for a seat or luxury, but the simple act of relocation. There is no nostalgia to riding trains in Europe-only good sense. It's cheaper than the bus.

My train back from Belgrade was packed to the brim with people. My traveling companion and I made reservations because I saw it happen on my way to Belgrade...people standing, crouching on their bags, hovering in the section by the bathroom puffing cigarettes out the window. For a mere 3 euros you can avoid such Eastern European in convinces. We hunkered down only after resigning ourselves to seats that weren't really ours. We shifted ourselves, put bags above our heads, cookies on the table, nestled down for the trip. She drifted in and out of sleep and I read for many hours. Still locked into a mental vacation, I spent the train ride reading the Best of American Writing, 2010, intermittently glancing guiltily at the people who stood at the end of the train car. The train seats were packed with young people, on their way back for classes or heading home from weekend trips for the New Year. (Is there something driving that need to be somewhere different for the New Year? A psychological break? An attempt to mark change in ourselves with change in location? Why do we always try to draw such strong parallels between place and person?)

However, the people standing and crouching and smoking were mostly an older crowd with long fancy coats and traveling bags. People who knew the stops in between big cities and the time the train would really arrive rather than what the train company had printed on their yellow timetable posters. It was a club of small jokes based on living through an era I can't imagine. It reminds me of the women on the train I met on my way home from Jefferson City last August, the women who told me "You can't live in the past. You have to think about the future, and since that hasn't happened yet, well then all you have is the present." I haven't thought about her in a while. I imagine if I could speak better Croatian this conversation would have repeated itself on my many long journeys and encounters with the older and wiser. It was never that she had said anything ground breaking, it was that she was there living the same philosophy. Cute as a button. Probably in her 80s, traveling. And time keeps passing. I suppose that is what is on the brain: The concept of time.

I am often frustrated by the way hours slip by, the ways we mark time in days, hours, sunsets and sunrises (no, I won't break out into the song from rent) but the bigger question is what is a reasonable way to pass that time? How do we as individuals deem quality time, well-used time, wasted time, part time, paid time, free time, time that drags and time that flies? How do we find time bending on to itself, overlapping by the reoccurrence of old faces, remembered places, and goals that seem damn determined to remain unfinished?

I'm in Belgrade for New Years. Those of you who know me know what Belgrade means to me, how it opened my heart and touched me in some cheesy kind of way.... (Ways I have thought of describing it: I felt like I was sinking to the bottom of the ocean but the pure oxygen felt so good and the fish here are more brilliant colors anyway... or I found a secret part of myself that had been hiding around the world waiting for its discovery, kind of like horcrux from Harry Potter...or maybe... it was just the excitement and the energy of a city shifting, big shifting, not just the building of a new sports stadium kind of shifting...) ah-hem. Back on topic...

I'm in Belgrade for New Years. Those of you who know me know what Belgrade means to me, how it opened my heart and touched me in some cheesy kind of way. It's nice to be back, although it’s with new people and there is snow and it is freezing in a-I-am-worried-about-my-pinky-toe-falling-off kind of way. I took the train in, sleeping most of the way, only waking up to get my passport stamped and peer into what seemed like unending whiteness where the snow and fog battled and somehow destroyed the horizon in the process, leaving only the serene to quench any expectations. I arrive to a warm apartment filled with faces of people who act like family. If you added up the hours we had spent together it is remarkable how natural it seems, in Colby's words, to wake up and talk and eat breakfast together. Why, what else would I be doing on the New Years?

Katie's apartment is in a neighborhood that perpetually smells like sulfur. I haven't figured out why or even if it is bothersome, it is simply a fact. Her apartment is 5 floors up. Its cozy, with carpet on the living floor, a comfy foldout couch, a stocked kitchen, and a couple of books on the bookshelf. Its covenants our little motley crew is composed of world travelers to whom sleeping on a warm floor is hardly a burden.

We vote on a party in a home novi-Belgrade rather than paying an entrance fee to a club or money on booze at a bar. The main square was having some event, but the cold staved us away. After a precious pause for stretching (yes we had a stretch circle) we headed out to the last stop on the number 7. Across the frozen river and sinking bridges that connected the barges, past the old dilapidated buildings, to a part of town where the streets get wider and the buildings look newer. We rode the tram till we were the last ones left. We pile out, spotting the drug store that served as our landmark. I think the 9 of us weren’t really sure what to except out on the edge of a bustling city, giddy with thoughts of new years, slipping on the ice, and happy to be with each other for the night.

I knew some people from DAH may be at this party, but I wasn't sure it was the same people I knew, however, I walked in and spotted familiar faces, faces that seemed like from a dream I could never recreate. Hugs, hellos, and remember-me-conversations transpired and then the night was lost to eating burek, drinking punch, mild dancing, fireworks getting tossed off of balconies and an epic tram ride back to Katie’s, complete with new friends and a content sleep on her apartment floor. And viola, hello 2011. Somehow, it was a new year, and I was with new people, but time had folded over on to its self and as I walked out into the early morning it felt like any other early morning, the crisp scent of snow, and the quietness of 4 am.