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Thursday, 15 May 2008

Well the surgery recovery is actually going better than I had expected, which is nice. I mean, I still haven't figured out a reasonable liquid diet, but I'm sure I'll come up with something. Today I went over to the best friends' to borrow their blender, so hopefully that will increase my options. But, since this is gross, let's not talk about it anymore!
Since I'm back to sitting around getting better, I've had lots of time to read all the latest on the aftermath of the elections last Sunday. As I mentioned previously, western media outlets proclaimed this to be a major victory for the pro-EU, democratic parties here in Serbia. However, upon further consideration, I have to say that that interpretation is misleading at best. First of all, if you add up and compare the various pro-EU parties (DS, LDP) versus the nationalist ones (SRS, DSS-NS, SPS), then they kind of came out even, with a slight advantage to the nationalists. The only reason this is seen as a victory for DS is because of their increased share of the vote over the last elections (and the Radicals corresponding decrease). Honestly, I think in the end these are the worst possible results for Serbia, because no one party/obvious coalition got any kind of stable majority, meaning whatever government comes out of this will once again be weak and unable to do anything worthwhile for the country. Worse still, no matter what coalition ends up ruling, all parties will be able to blame others for whatever failures may occur, and no one will claim responsibility for anything. I almost think it would have been better for the Radicals to pull a decisive win, just so someone would rule this country for once. We'll see I guess.
The latest news is that it looks increasingly likely that DS will form a coalition with SPS, aka the party of Slobodan Milosevic. In any other year, this would have been unthinkable. Local media is full of DS leaders explaining how their platform is close to SPS's if you really think about it (with twisted logic), and how the parties could have a great future together. I suppose it's true that SPS has changed a lot in the past few years, and in fact some of their leaders have come out and said they think it's important for Serbia to be a part of Europe and everything, but it just seems like such a turnaround that it's all kind of hard to swallow. I guess they're still in talks though, so we'll see if this coalition ever comes true. At least it seems pretty clear that Kostunica is out of the picture (finally).
So, I know this is probably tedious, but bear with me for one more interesting tidbit! My favorite part of this whole DS-SPS thing is that it all seems to depend on one particularly fascinating Serbian politician - Dragan "Palma" Markovic. Palma is perhaps best known for his relatively recent television interview in which he claimed to have listened to Beethoven and Chopin live in concert as a child and later stated that there are no homosexuals in his local town of Jagodina (gayromeo.com says otherwise). It is this fine example of tolerance and intellectual fortitude who has been the strongest advocate for SPS (his United Serbia party was on the election list with them) to work with DS in parliament, with membership in the European Union as their primary goal. Unbelievable. Turnaround isn't even the word for that. I guess this once again proves that there is never a dull moment in Serbian politics (although after reading this, I'm thinking you might just disagree).

Wednesday, 14 May 2008

We interrupt this (ir)regularly scheduled election coverage to bring you the story of that time I got surgery in Serbia. No worries, it's not as scary as it sounds.
So, although I was supposed to get this operation last night, I ended up going this morning after someone came in with an emergency problem yesterday and they had to reschedule me. No big deal. Last night I used the opportunity of my pre-surgeryness to actually go out to dinner for once, and with the new friends! We went to BaBaReBa, which is really not their style at all, but they were nice and put up with it just for me. In the end I have to admit they do have a point about the hordes of sponzoruse who started arriving as we were finishing up. Oh Serbia.
But anyway, back to this surgery. The procedure (which dealt with restoring my lower gums in case you're interested) was supposed to take about 15 minutes, but ended up being close to an hour and a half. With that in mind, I would like to bring you a list of things you never want to hear during surgery:
- Oops... oh it's no big deal.
- Oh no! Oh my god, if I had dropped that I would have killed myself.
- I wish I were as good a surgeon as Dr. So-and-so.
- Are you sure this doesn't hurt?
- Man, I have never seen someone bleed this much in my whole life.
- Let's just wait for 10 minutes and see if it stops bleeding.
- Where is all the blood coming from?
It was enough to make me wish I didn't speak Serbian. So, in case you haven't figured it out, the surgery took so long because apparently I bleed too much. My bad. Despite appearances (and the very occasional yet conspicuous lack of gloves), the doctors were very professional and I'm overall satisfied with how they treated me. Unfortunately though, I found out at the end that I am not allowed to chew or use my teeth in any way for SEVEN DAYS. As in, an ENTIRE WEEK. Do I have a blender? Nope. Do I have any idea how I'm going to survive for the next 7 days? Not really. Am I still going to Subotica this weekend, where everyone else will be eating delicious rostilj while I cry into my cream soup? Hell yes. I've cancelled class for tomorrow and my teaching at the high school on Friday (which I feel EXTREMELY guilty about since it was going to be my last day), but I refuse to be kept in the apartment for 7 of my last 15 days in this country. I might not be able to talk, but hopefully starting tomorrow I will at least be able to walk around and enjoy the spectacular weather.
That's pretty much that. What else is going on, you're wondering? Well, I did have one noteworthy encounter this week with a friend of Natasa's (the director of my school). It seems she's a lung doctor headed to a conference in Slovenia in a few weeks where she'll have to present in English, so she wanted me to give her intensive classes for my last few days. I said no (for once), but since I'm still a pushover at heart I told her I could meet her for coffee a few times and have informal conversations if she thought that would be helpful. She did, so we met at Teatar for an interesting afternoon of grammar mistakes and awkward questions about whether I think Serbian girls are the most attractive in the world. Overall she was actually relatively fun to talk to, just because of her "I used to be a punk you know" personality, but she was continually trying to impress me with how rich she was, which got old fast (like when she ordered an obscene amount of ice cream for us even after I told her I had just eaten). All in all I'd meet her again if she called me, although I still refuse to plan grammar lessons for her. This is of course assuming I will be able to talk at all before I leave. Ahhh two weeks!

Sunday, 11 May 2008

And the results are in! (Drumroll please...) It turns out the Democratic Party pulled a surprise victory out of nowhere, making it unlikely that the Radicals (aka nationalists) can form a government!!! This is big news for Serbia. Personally, I was totally shocked at the results. First of all, I expected more for the Radicals, and second of all, I expected more for LDP (the most liberal party). Either way, it seems pretty clear that a (slim) majority of voters have expressed their desire for Serbia to join the EU. Hopefully that'll actually happen one of these days. The best friends were so excited to hear the results, they said they might not even have to move to Canada afterall. I kind of still hope they do, but only because that means our chances of hanging out would increase by a lot.
So, since everyone was happy with how the elections turned out and wanted to celebrate, we all went to that party at the fortress. It turns out I had no problems getting in despite not having the "I voted" finger-stamp, since my friend Nadja explained my situation in her sexy smoker's voice. I had a good time and everything, but I have to say this was pretty much a caricature of eurotrash parties if you ask me. The DJ (probably called DJ Marko or something) even played one song whose lyrics went like this:
I just want to move my hips
And to kiss and smell your lips
While I keep riding on your dick
I know my thoughts are very sick
Over and over for half an hour. I continually try to explain to my Serbian friends that part of the reason techno music isn't as popular in the States is that the lyrics are generally so awful and ridiculous that we could never take it seriously. This would be the perfect example of that particular phenomenon. Kiss and smell your lips? I mean really. I have to say, even though I'm glad we went out and everything, tonight made me that much happier that soon I'll be back in America, where we don't stand for such nonsense. Our popular songs make much more sense. Or something. Maybe one of these days I'll actually go out somewhere that has music I would actually enjoy dancing to. Maybe.
UPDATE: I found out over the weekend that the DJ at the fortress actually was called DJ Marko!! I pretty much died laughing when I heard, but the best friends didn't get it. Oh Serbia.
Election day has arrived!!! Yes, it's the moment we've all been waiting for, and it's finally here! Of course, since polling stations are still open there are no results yet, but in approximately two hours we should know who has made it into Serbia's parliament. As the BBC article points out (although I'm still shocked they misspelled Zemun), these elections are particularly important as Serbia decides what to do about Kosovo and how much to cooperate with the European Union. Then again, every election in Serbia is hailed as "the most important since blah de blah," so I'm sure this won't be the final word. In fact, my prediction is that this election will be so close between the various democratic and various nationalistic parties that no one will be able to form a decisive coalition and whatever government ends up existing will be fatally weak and unable to do anything. Why would I think that? Because that's what's happened in every other Serbian election since the assassination of Djindjic. Maybe I'm wrong though. We'll see soon enough.
So what am I doing for election night? I'm heading over to the best friends in a few minutes to watch the results, and then rumor has it that there's a party at the fortress we might hit up. The only problem is that in Serbia (like a lot of countries) they stamp your finger with something once you've voted (so you don't vote twice), and in order to get in this party you have to show your "I voted" finger. Obviously, I didn't vote. We're hoping the bouncers will be sympathetic to my citizenship status and let me in anyway, but you never know. Then again, knowing Igor and Dane they'll probably get distracted by other amusements and won't want to go out anyway. We'll see.
This weekend I ended up staying in Belgrade with Ljilja and Desko almost the whole time. I planned just to go on Saturday with Igor to give him moral support during his English test (which he says went well), but in the end it was nice weather and Desko has all the latest info on the elections, so I decided to stick around until this morning. It was mostly a typical visit, with one unusual trip to a cosmetics fair to visit Desko's sister-in-law (whose looks continue to amuse me). I also got to spend the day on Knez Mihajlova with Igor, which was particularly interesting because of elections-shenanigans (which had to be clever since technically parties aren't supposed to demonstrate/have commercials 48-hours before polling begins). There was also some big environmentalist demonstration, but no one was paying attention because, well, it's Serbia.
In other news, I had one of my last days in Karlovci on Friday (my actual last day is this week, but this was my last time with that group of classes). I'm definitely ready for that to be over. I thought for my last class I'd have the kids debate whether America has its own unique culture or if it just takes culture from other places (the former obviously being true and the latter being the generally held view of Europeans). Of course, they all took the typical European stance, but whatever. Then, in some of my classes when I had time left at the end I asked them about the problems between Serbia and the US, and how they could be fixed, and I was shocked at some of their answers. One girl told me that Serbia and America could never understand each other because they have different moral systems, and when I asked her to explain she said that Americans believe it's ok to bomb other countries while Serbs find that unacceptable. Can you imagine?? Serbia has had 5 wars in the past 20 years!!! This girl has clearly never been to Sarajevo. Or Dubrovnik. Or any one of a number of places within 200 kilometers of the city where she's spent her entire life. Unbelievable. I kind of wish I had said something, but my number one Balkans survival rule is never argue with closed-minded nationalists, so I let it slide. I mean, I'm not defending anything America's been up to recently, but still, if there's one country in the world we can favorably compare ourselves to it's Serbia.
On that note, it's time to go see if Tomislav Nikolic is the new prime minster. Let's hope not!

Thursday, 08 May 2008

In exactly three weeks from this moment, I will be in a car driving down I-95 from Dulles to Kitty Hawk. Inconceivable.
In the meantime, life goes on here in Serbia. I've been hanging out with Igor a lot, frequently in English for aforementioned language test reasons, but the best part is we've started a new trend of going out for coffee in cafes downtown instead of hanging out at his or my apartment. Makes for a nice change. Plus we get to people watch and comment on them in English as if they don't understand (which, unfortunately, they all do). Last night I also had a reunion with best friend #2 (Dane), who I hadn't seen in forever. He seems pretty much the same though. It's weird to think that me not seeing him in "forever" means a week and a half, but pretty soon it'll be months and months before we get to hang out again. What will I do without the best friends??? Ok, I'm done being sentimental.
The exciting news of the day is that I made an impromptu trip to the dentist with Rade this afternoon. I'd been planning to go for a while, since it's so much cheaper here and everything, but just hadn't gotten a good recommendation yet on where exactly to go. So today after class I called Rade since I had the whole day free, and his answer was "Well, my friend just went to this one place and said it was good... want to go right now?" So we did. It turns out I actually have to have some sort of operation, which was fully explained to me but I'll pretend like it wasn't in the interest of not grossing you out. It's nothing serious, but apparently they recommend I not eat spicy food for about 2-3 weeks afterwards. Considering I live in Serbia, I don't think that'll be a problem. I'll be damned if I'm not having Mexican within 24 hours of arrival in the States though, surgery or no surgery. I have to say though, those dentist-chair conversations are even more awkward when (a) it's in a foreign language and (b) they find you particularly interesting and want to ask all sorts of questions about why you're studying Serbian and where your parents are from and everything. Yeah, I'm really ready for that to stop.
In other news, there was more talk today in gay blogdom about the Eurovision contest here in Serbia and whether it'll be safe or not. It seems the UK government is pretty convinced it won't be, which I might have to agree with. Some fascist groups have apparently said they plan on targeting people they think are gay Eurovision fans, which sounds pretty ridiculous (especially since the gay fans are likely to outnumber Serbian fascists by a large margin), but also makes you wonder. I have absolutely zero confidence in the Serbian police, more because of the recent embassy attacks than the often-cited 2001 gay pride bashings. I mean, I like to think of Belgrade as cosmopolitan and everything, but nasty things seem to happen there repeatedly, so you really just never know. In the end I'll probably be staying in Novi Sad (mostly because I couldn't care less about Eurovision).
What about those elections, you're wondering? Well, there's not much new to report other than a predicable last-minute scramble for parties to get their message out. My favorite campaign moves here in Novi Sad have been SPS's message wall at Trg Slobode (which is mostly filled with anti-SPS messages), and the Vojvodina Party's giant balloon with their best-ever campaign slogan ("Tacku na pljacku" - something like "put a period on the robbery"). I still call a win for the Radicals though. Sorry, Serbia... maybe next time?