My Pakistan piece is still incomplete, so here's an old one from New Year's '05...
Well folks, just got back from Macedonia, “Land of the unsightly facial lesions” to coin a phrase. Yikes, that place still can send a shiver up your spine. This trip brought together all the things I hate most and love most about the Balkans. It really could not have been better. I thought I might write a bit and you can see if any memories come back to you as they did to me.
As international travelers are aware, the US has enacted a policy of “pushing out” our borders, checking passengers and cargo at the point of origin, long before it reaches our shores. ID and security checks for flights to the US are just as rigorous in other countries as they are in the US. You don’t have to remove your shoes to fly from Zurich to Amsterdam, but you do from Zurich to Chicago. You can feel the reach, the influence of the US before you even take off. But the people of Balkans have been doing this for years. I felt as is we were there before we even got on the plane. Standing in line in Zurich, we were surrounded by the usual Balkans array: a sea of bad leather jackets and fake fur, greasy twerps with close set eyes fidgety from too much caffeine, heavy set mafiosi with leather jackets over their adidas track suits, aging bottle blond wives loaded with duty free shopping bags, young punkers heading home for the holidays, old babas returning alone from visits to ex-pat relatives and all of them with way too much carry on luggage, pushing to get on, no order in the line, no patience. And this is still in Zurich mind you. Once on the plane, it was a zoo. People sitting anywhere, carry on luggage just left on a seat, arguments breaking out over who sits on the windows and who on the aisle, smokers lighting up, people refusing to buckle up, and on and on. And of course, my favorites, the rousing applause when we land followed immediately by people standing up and opening overhead bins before we are even off the runway. Welcome to the Balkans.
We arrived on the 31st, but owing to a late departure from Chicago, our bags did not. I had to head out in the mid-winter Balkans gloom to the Bit Pazaar, the Skopje gypsy market to pick up spare socks and underwear. Once there had to make our way along the sidewalk of broken concrete and crumbling asphalt through rows of upturned boxes piled high with “strike-anywhere” firecrackers and roman candles of decidedly dubious quality.
As we turned the corner, I stopped to survey the whole scene. A riotous mass of people and vehicles and market stalls, people jostling, buying, selling, arguing, drinking, eating, smoking. Puddles of stagnant, oily blackwater were everywhere; runty, mangy dogs sniffed around the periphery as old men in soiled skull caps kicked them away. The dark air was heavy with bus exhaust, smoke and soot, fly ash settled on everything and the air resounded with honking horns, grinding bus gears and squealing brakes and regular explosions set off as product demos. Random piles of burning garbage and thick clouds of smoke coming from the dumpsters completed the scene. Honest to god, it was like some little Balkans version of hell. The welded sheet metal and angle iron shop stalls with their chipped green paint were overloaded, as usual, with every imaginable kind of household good and clothing, all of it cheap Turkish and Asian knockoff goods: “SOMY” electronics and “Durcel” batteries and “Dail” soap and the like. They had virtually everything except cotton socks and boxer shorts. After digging through piles of flip-flops and plastic kitchen utensils, I finally located acceptable underwear and we went home.
Home, in Skopje these days, is my brother-in-law’s mother-in-law’s house, a 4 room place in the Albanian section of town he shares with his wife, two sons, mother-in-law and sister-in-law. Add in our three, and there were nine people in the four rooms. Somehow we all fit and no one had to sleep on the floor. Don’t you just love the Balkans?
We went out to the New Year’s celebrations in the city center, an event designed to celebrate the completion of renovations to both the old bridge and the main square. The square has been repaved and was decked out for the celebration with a canopy of lights, several neon palm trees topped off by a lighted Christmas tree in the center of the whole thing. Although well lit, it was alas, poorly amplified so the sound was fairly lost in the crowd. The fireworks, however, were great, a full 15 minutes of booms and sparkles and bright flares lighting up the Skopje night. We went home happy, accompanied by the gunfire usual for these events in this part of the world.
“Skopje became a big city” declared the proud headline the next day. Unfortunately, they didn’t realize how right they were. It seems one of the bullets fired into the sky came down and lodged in the chest of a young woman, eventually killing her when the city hospital didn’t identify the problem fast enough. This quickly became a major political issue with politicians blaming each other on TV for the tragedy. As a veteran of the Chicago Bulls winning seasons in the 1990’s I saw this happen all too often. Welcome to the big city, folks.
Once our bags arrived we were able to make our way to Kriva Palanka, my Peace Corps site and my wife’s home town. This trip brought back all kinds of memories, good and bad. With no clothes, I had not showered since Chicago, intimidated as I was by the bathroom’s wintertime open windows in my host’s home and the hatbox-sized water heater. The rooms were always either too hot, too cold or, by some physics defying miracle, both at the same time. As they came off the line my clothes were frozen solid. I had to make that anguished nighttime decision, “Do I stay barely warm here in bed with a full bladder or do I make a run for it and freeze for 20 minutes while I warm up the bed again?” There was cold food, cold radiators and cold weather inside and out. Somehow, I am not really sure how, they did manage to keep the beer warm. I had truly forgotten how awful the Balkans can be.
On the good side, Skopje is undergoing a building boom and several (not all) of the old concrete shells that seemed to be sitting there forever have been finished. Lots of new apartments are going up and a few new hotels and many new shops have opened. As I said before, the main square is newly paved and the old bridge is completely renovated. A bit of the charm is lost, but the walking surface is smoother and wider and the whole thing just has a better look. There’s still a lot of trash on the streets and urchins, as usual, abound, but all in all the place looks better than it did even a year ago when I left. The seething anti-Americanism has abated somewhat due to the Bush administration’s recognition of Republic of Macedonia as the official name. This was followed quickly by Russia, China, most of the former Soviet Union and several banana republics. A few EU countries are making noises about recognition this year. Of course there were several folks I talked to who were sure the US had caused the tsunami in the Indian Ocean. Whatever.
Daily life is the same, though. The food hadn’t changed. At all. Ajvar everywhere. Nor had the rakia. My father in law’s homebrew can still peel the enamel off your teeth and make it feel like you’re being poked in the eye. From the inside.
Unfortunately the growth in new car ownership seems to have stalled, as has the replacement of older socialist wheels with newer European models. Several new car stores have closed. Tied to the Euro, the denar is going up fast against the dollar making things a lot more expensive for us dollarized tourists. An overvalued currency also encourages spending on imports and on foreign travel, something Macedonia, starved for investment and local spending really doesn’t need.
The worst thing is the general dissatisfaction among my friends. The new Social Democratic government appears to be every bit as corrupt and rapacious and yes, murderous as the last Nationalist one. You’ll remember that the last government decided to demonstrate their solidarity in the war on terror by dragging some poor Pakistani unfortunates, themselves victims of human traffickers, to the hills near Albania, shooting them, dressing them in Albanian rebel uniforms and inviting the US Ambassador to see how the brave Macedonian police uncovered and disposed of an Al Qaeda cell RIGHT HERE IN EUROPE!! If you read carefully, though, you’ll see they got the order wrong and shot them BEFORE putting on the uniforms.
The perps of that little incident are now in jail, but the new government, while leaning on a Chinese immigrant who had just opened a restaurant, miscalculated. The guy pulled a knife and killed one of the mobsters before his partner shot the restaurant owner. As bad as they were, the Nationalists only picked on the big guys. The Socialists, it seems, are leaning on everyone. And the attitudes of my friends, most of whom are pretty positive thinking people, have all gone south. Hard to find an optimist in Kriva Palanka these days.
Another disappointing situation was the public dispute about giving aid to the tsunami victims. The general consensus, in public, on TV, in the papers seemed to be that since Macedonia is poor, they didn’t have to give anything. It was only when it was pointed out that the people of Indonesia and Sri Lanka and India and the rest of the Indian Ocean rim had contributed generously to relief after Skopje’s 1963 earthquake did wallets begin to crack open a bit. Not everyone felt this way, but enough to make it an ugly situation. Not their best moment, for sure.
So, does this bring back any memories, all you old Balkans hands?
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