Common Sense and Whiskey

Balkan Update

Laurence Mitchell has been in the Balkans researching an update to his Bradt Guide to Serbia. See his writing and photography on his blog East of Elveden. Outstanding.

Trouble Everywhere, All at Once

The Middle East was the center of the universe last weekend, as the world watched the Egyptian election results and Syria's downing of that Turkish F-4. Tomorrow the North Atlantic moves to the center, with the Obamacare ruling on this side of the ocean and the 1,437th Euro summit on the other.

As the potential first country out of the Eurozone, you'd think Greece would be under enough pressure. But consider its geographical position.

To the east: The Aviationist blog has published a video alongside an article that contends that,

“It is almost a daily practice for the Greek artillery that its radars lock Turkish fighter jets as they illegally enter Greek airspace. However Greeks do not push the button….”

Hard to see how they sort that out anyway, since the distance between many Greek islands and the Turkish mainland is trivial. The island of Samos, for instance, lies scarcely a mile off the Dilek National Park on a tip of Turkish coast.

Then consider Greece's long unhappy relations with its northern neighbor, The Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia, a name Greece insisted on at FYROM's independence from Yugoslavia in 1991,  because it felt that "Macedonia implies a territorial claim by Skopje to a province in northern Greece with the same name." Not that anybody calls Macedonia "FYROM."

Now Macedonia and Greece are in an argument ... over license plates. RFERL suggests that this photo from the internet suggests that Greek officials are covering the Macedonian "MK" with FYROM stickers on cars admitted over the Greek border.

 

Break Bread with the E.U.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Croatians vote today in a referendum on the government's plan to join the E.U. If they vote yes, does Croatia get bread with a little butter crown?

 

That is so thoughtful.

Separated at Birth?

I know, I know, it could be just me, but I find the forced-happy über-resort genre as seen at the top (which we Americans all recognize from those never ending TV commercials), just ghastly. Sort of like a Disney cruise if you don't have kids.

But that doesn't make Belgrade's Genex Tower much easier on the eye, does it? Perhaps a rule of thumb, here: Let us all endeavor to avoid both monster resorts and anything designed in the Brutalist style.

Serbia: No Hurry to Change

Laurence Mitchell, who's soon off to update the Bradt Guide to Kyrgyzstan, writes this week about Serbia. He says that the National Tourism Organisation of Serbia's new promotional video does little to flatter the Serbian capital, Belgrade, and concludes that:

"Perhaps all (the) things that I hold dear are considered a bit too backward and Old Europe for the marketing people."

He and I agree that Serbia's (and the larger Balkan region's) Old Europeness is precisely it's draw. One of the great pleasures of getting out in the world is experiencing the 'apartness,' the dissimilarites to home. Let us not be in a hurry to make everything shiny and new. 

The River Danube at Belgrade.

 

 

Where to Go, Why, and What to Read.

Travel ferociously. Get out there. Engage people. Witness events. Explore the world. Bust a move. See all you can see. But when you’re at home and calm, sanguine and reflective, back in the part of the house where people don’t come unless you invite them, in that one little spot where only you rule, that’s where you can see most clearly.

Back there in that room, I saw our trip to Sarajevo as a conceit. We decided we’d go and see the aftermath of war and then we would think about it. And we saw the burned out houses on the airport road. We saw children at play beneath a hand-painted sign warning of “snijper” fire over there, in that direction.

We stood on a hill above town with an old woman and her little granddaughter and a vast field of Muslim graves behind them. We took pictures of SFOR soldiers (NATO’s ‘Stabilization Force’) taking pictures. And in the end, we didn’t really understand it any better. Or at least, we didn’t Glean Wisdom.

I read and read, before and after Sarajevo, and we went to see it, and we had a view of the bombed out parliament building from the Holiday Inn hotel, where we paid in advance, in cash, in Deutschmarks, right up front, for our entire stay.

The parliament building from the Holiday Inn, Sarajevo.

The elevator opened to carpet ripped by gunfire.

The main reconstruction work in Sarajevo was in busting down curbs and rebuilding them with wheelchair ramps.

We walked up and down the open air Markale market where a random, direct shelling killed 68, wounded two hundred on a rainy Saturday in February, 1994 – the bloodiest attack in the then twenty-two month long conflict. We saw bricks and mortar blasted from the side of the hotel next door. People bustled about the market that day, selling flowers, buying fruit, and we took it all in, but still we didn’t Glean Wisdom.

Macedonian Luxury

501 Places continues its series (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) about the Balkans. And last week the NYT ran a feature about Macedonia's wine country, which mentioned the Stonebridge Hotel "Among the several luxury hotels downtown" in Skopje, the Macedonian capital.

We've yet to get to Macedonia, so just planning ahead, I found the Stonebridge Hotel on TripAdvisor, where it's ranked ninth at the moment among Skopje hotels.

The NYT article called the hotel "intriguing" and the Tripadvisor comments run the gamut from "When you enter the hotel you say WOW! but when you enter the room you say HMMM." to "It is elegant and well appointed" to "Also slipers (sic) are good idea."

Consider the photo at left, which is from the hotel's main web page. It's not so much the comely lass and her businesswear. Just wondering about the busy businessman on his laptop. Maybe Macedonian men have unique postures. Or perhaps not all the rooms come with facilities.

See our photos from the region in the Former Yugoslavia Gallery and the Albania 1993 Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

 

A Month in the Balkans

Enjoying the stories of a visit to the Balkans on the blog 501 Places. Andy Jaroz at 501 Places is a thoughtful writer, whose articles are interesting in the first place. Now he's just spent a month in Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Hercegovina and Croatia, a part of the world more fascinating than most. You can read several articles about his trip now on 501 Places, and he promises there are more to come.

In 1993, after the collapse of the Enver Hoxha regime and shortly after Americans were again allowed to visit Albania, we spent a couple of days there. And after the war was safely over, we visited Sarajevo, then manned by the U.N.'s SFOR, or Stabilization Force. Our Holiday Inn bill was payable in cash in advance, in Deutschmarks, there were bullet holes in the carpet and the only construction in town was busting down curbs at intersections to build wheelchair ramps.

We have earnestly meant to make it back - but never have - so it's great to see Andy's stories now.

(See our photos from the region in the Former Yugoslavia and Albania, 1993 Galleries at EarthPhotos.com.)

Who recognizes Kosovo?

Who recognizes Kosovo? A bit over two years after its declaration of independence from Serbia, certainly not Serbia (whose cell towers inside Kosovo the Kosovar authorities summarily dismantled the other day). But Montenegro, the entity most recently departed from Serbia, does. So do fellow former parts of Yugoslavia, Slovenia, Croatia and Macedonia.

According to the Kosovo Thanks You web site, fellow-Muslim-former-part-of-Yugoslavia Bosnia & Herzegovina doesn't recognise Kosovo, though fellow Muslims in the neighborhood, Albania and Turkey, do.

The U.S. and Canada and all the politically correct Western European states are also in, and much of the Middle East and farther flung Islamic lands: The U.A.E., Saudia Arabia, Comoros Islands, Mauritania, Bahrain, Jordan. Just two countries in South America: Colombia & Peru.

First in: Costa Rica. Most recent: Swaziland. In between, an exotic mix of tiny, tiny island nations, including the Marshall Islands, Nauru, Samoa, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Maldives and Palau.

The map is here.

(See photos from several states in the former Yugoslavia - though not yet from Kosovo - in the Former Yugoslavia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)

Travel Around the Old Soviet Rim

Travel in former Soviet lands has a special place in my heart. When I first began to travel a little off the beaten path, in the late 80's and early 90's, the lands from the Arctic east of Finland to the Adriatic east of Italy, and all the way east to the Pacific Ocean, were in greater or lesser spasms of turmoil. Some of my fondest travel memories include wicked cold, gloomy trains and bad sausage - all part of the experience of travel in the dying Soviet Union.

With my own personal souvenir pieces of the Berlin Wall in my bags (that I had proudly chiseled from the wall myself), I spent the night on the floor of East Berlin's Lichtenberg Station in the first days of 1990, having missed the late train to Prague, where the revolution still surged ahead. From Tallin, Estonia, we watched Finnish TV with considerable alarm (and couldn't understand a thing they said) as they displayed maps of the nearby Sosnovy Bor nuclear plant's leak on 25 March, 1992. Once on a train bound for Moscow, I woke up with a bag of potatoes at my feet where my camera should have been. I found the camera several compartments down the aisle. I've forgotten what happened to the potatoes.

Here are a couple of new articles about trips around the former Soviet Union's still unkempt borders that you can take today:

- A few years ago we sailed across the Black Sea on a working ferry (not a luxury cruise liner), the M/V "Yuzhnaya Palmyra," from UKR Ferry shipping company, Istanbul to Odessa, Ukraine. This same company puts on what is probably a little more adventurous travel experience elsewhere across the Black Sea, from the Georgian port of Poti to the Ukranian port of Ilychevsk.

Read about it in the article The Ukraine-Georgia Black Sea Ferry is no package tour from georgiandaily.com, which starts like this: "The ferry connecting Ukraine and Georgia across the Black Sea is, depending on one's point of view, either a tourist experience from Hell, or one of the world's last properly adventurous sea voyages."

I'm in.

- This morning comes the BBC article Belgrade-Sarajevo railway reopens after 17 years. The former Yugoslavia wasn't part of the old Soviet Union. But when Russia's dominion collapsed, the former Yugoslavia was thrown into much worse paroxysms than much of the former Soviet space.

As the article puts it, in the 1970's & 80's "Golden Era" of Yugoslavia, "People could start the day in an Ottoman-style cafe in the Bosnian capital before taking an easy six-hour ride in comfortable carriages to party in Belgrade."

Put me down for that one, too.

*****

The book to read is Murderers in Mausoleums, Jeffrey Tayler's Moscow to Beijing adventure around the old Soviet rim.

(Top photo, of the UKR Ferry Shipping Company's M/V Yuzhnaya Palmyra at dock in Istanbul, from the Turkey Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. See also the related Ukraine Gallery and Georgia Gallery. Bottom photo, of a pedestrian street in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, from the Former Yugoslavia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)

"Don't You FYROM Me!"

We've visited all the "FYR's," former Yugoslav republics, except Macedonia, and have posted photos in the Former Yugoslavia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. There are obviously big challenges in the Balkans and some FYR's have more challenges than others. Macedonia has to fight one battle none of the others do - about its name.