The Blue Monkey Review

I'm sitting in a bus headed from Podgorica to Niksic, listening to the weather forecast on the radio. I know some of the words now, and all of them seem apt descriptors of today's weather. Snow, cloudy, rain. At one point I hear Niksic mentioned and in the same sentence petdeset osam, i.e., 58, and I know they aren't discussing degrees Fahrenheit. It snowed last night in Niksic, and the day promised to be cloudy and perhaps rainy as I left. "Could 58 refer to 58 centimeters of snow?" I wondered, and not entirely whimsically since it had received twice that in the few days before I arrived a month ago. But, no one runs screaming from the bus and I am encouraged to see that the bus driver does not announce that we will all stay in Podgorica tonight.

I spent much of the day traveling, taking a bus from Niksic to Podgorica, and then from Podgorica to Cetinje. Cetinje had been the capital city after Montenegro became an independent kingdom in 1878 (as a result of the Berlin Congress). Another failure of imagination had left me unable to believe any place could have more snow piled up than Niksic. In Niksic snow is everywhere, still covering many of the sidewalks and offering pedestrians the choice a crunching through granulated snow or finding traction where the cars do. But in Cetinje the snow is everywhere and it is far higher than in Niksic, piled higher than me in most places.

As a consequence of this I only managed to see a few of the interesting sights in the former capital--the royal palace and some of the abandoned embassy buildings, the Spirit of Lovcen monument and Cetinje monastery. Everything is closed, of course. It is Sunday, it is winter, and the snow makes every movement difficult. Still, I will certainly return to Cetinje in better weather, and on a weekday.

All of the most impressive buildings, the monastery excepted, date to the 19th century. As Janko has told me more than once, Montenegro really didn't have cities until almost the end of the 19th century, and few then. The Montenegrins spent too much of their time fighting the Turks, and Cetinje served as the final stop for most of the failed invasions. They burned down the entire city in 1714 before retreating, though that makes a less spectacular story than the invasion in 1692 when they broke into the fortress only to have the defenders blow up the entire building.

The bus makes very little progress before three middle-aged men in overalls get on. One ends up sitting next to me and immediately asks me something. He has to repeat it before I figure out that he wants to know if we are "going by way of the new road?" I am processing his words and trying to formulate something helpful in response, but in Serbian "by way of the new road" is novi putom, and several years of studying Spanish make it impossible for me to hear this without having it sound strange. And, I don't know if we are going novi putom or stari putom, so I'm useless to this guy. But at least we communicate, though he becomes fairly quiet when he realizes I am not exactly fluent.

In Cetinje I'd had the usual, daily kinds of exchanges. I had coffee at the Yellow Moon Café (not a translation) and then at the Korzo Café. I know enough now to order from the snack menu. The meals here include more food that I eat in a day, and more meat than I eat in a month. From what limited traveling I have done, I judge this to be the most meat intensive diet I've ever encountered. Janko, who is a vegetarian, says offhandedly that there are probably 10 vegetarians in Montenegro. The only others that I have met came from the U.S. or western Europe.

The bus rides between Cetinje and Pdgorica, and Podgorica and Niksic offered me better views of the landscape than I've had before. Much of the snow has melted until you are close to the two mountain valleys where Cetinje and Podgorica lie, so I had a better sense of the terrain. Much of the mountain soil has eroded away, and especially near Cetinje the mountain passes reveal sheets of rocks, one layer on top of another but each layer clearly marked with horizontal fissures. From a distance it looks like a careful child has staked building blocks.

The soil lost from the mountain slopes makes its way into the valleys, I suppose, giving Montenegrins fertile land where they produce an abundance of fruits and vegetables (the reason kiwi fruit costs so little here is that it is grown here). But the rich soil itself is not so abundant. From the bus window I could see some valley floors, with stone or concrete block houses topped by tile roofs. The flat land at the bottom of the valley was subdivided by many fences, leaving plots that looked like they were the size of large gardens. Some parts of the the valley were terraced or graded, but these did not climb the sides of the valley the way it would near an Inca city.

The bus back to Niksic makes steady progress and I can see busses coming in the opposite direction. I finally convinced myself that whatever 58 referred to, it wasn't the amount of snow that had fallen on Niksic. I also notice two girls sitting in a seat on the other side of the bus aisle. They doze leaning on one another, and later wake up and fool around very affectionately. If I were riding a bus in New Jersey or Pittsburgh I'd assume they are lesbians, and way out of the closet. But I don't assume that here. In fact, according to On the Go, homosexuality is treated with hostility outside of Belgrade. But girls here express affection and friendship for one another in clearly physical ways, as I've noted before. This applies to a lesser extent to boys, but even so they lack inhibitions about closeness that would result in peer sanctions in the high schools of Westmoreland County, PA.

We finally arrive in Niksic and it appears no snowier than when I'd left. I get up and shuffle along the aisle when one of the girls taps me on the shoulder and asks me something. I don't expect this and react even more cluelessly than usual. I can't even tell if she is talking to me in Serbian. She points at something and all I can guess is that she saw me leave my wallet on my seat. More clueless-ness from me. She gives up with a smile, but I say, "Do you speak any English?"

Her friend responds, "Oh, yes. Where did you buy your shoes?"

"I bought them in the states," I say.

"They're great!"

These Vasque boots, with their Gore-Tex lining, have been great. In spite of walking daily through slush, puddles, and moving water, my feet and socks remain dry. Conditions here can't compare to the Inca Trail, but, at least when I was on it, the Inca Trail was dry. But, I never thought of them as making a fashion statement. I thank her for mentioning this.

Posted by at 3:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Today (Feb. 18) I attended a presentation by Craig Dicker who is an American diplomat but who is also deeply involved in the current reform of European higher education. This presentation provided an overview of the Bologna Declaration but dealt in more detail with the implications of Bologna for language education in Europe. This interests me deeply, since here I am a part of European education, no matter how briefly. But, I am also an administrator part of whose duties involve language programs. And, I'm a student of language as well. In addition to the purely education features of the Bologna reforms, however, it seems to me that they will drive changes in the political economy of European education.

The major elements of the Bolgna Declaration are the following:

*adoption of a system of clear and comparable degrees, including the adoption of a "Diploma Supplement";
*adoption of a system based on two main cycles--undergraduate and graduate;
establishment of a system of credits--such as the European Credit Transfer System--as a means of promoting student mobility;
*promotion of mobility by overcoming obstacles to the effective exercise of free movement;
*promotion of European cooperation in quality assurance; and
promotion of common European patterns in higher education.

In general terms, the Bologna Declaration of 1999 provides a vision for higher education reform in Europe. National education systems sign on voluntarily, but by signing on they make a commitment to carry out reforms by the year 2010. To me it seemed that the Bologna reforms would make European higher education very similar to the system in the United States. It will establish two tiers, a lower three-year program and a higher- level program of two years. Some systems already use the term Bachelor and Master degrees. But the reform will entail reducing some current lower-level programs and perhaps enhancing the higher-level programs. In Montenegro we currently have a four-year program at the lower level. I don't know how our graduate programs work.

More fundamental than distinguish the types of programs will be establishing a credit system. Currently in many European universities testing makes up the key to earning a degree. Consequently, tests and degrees are separate. You take a course, then you take a test. But if you fail, you can take the test again. And again. In the new system, courses will carry specific credits and the test will be part of the course. If you fail the test associated with the course (and you do get one additional chance, including in my course this semester in American Civilization) you must repeat the course to earn the credits.

The goal of moving to a credit system, however, is probably the fundamental goal of the Bologna movement (at least, this is what Craig told us and he seems to have a lot of experience with this). Credits will be transferable, and consequently students will become highly mobile within European higher education. Students can take courses in Montenegro, for instance, then transfer those credits to an equivalent program in a university in Spain and continue their degrees there.

But, in order to make credits transferable, coursework and programs must become far more transparent in terms of their requirements and levels of achievement for successful completion. This will sound very, very familiar to anyone in American higher education, especially anyone in administration. All programs will now go through a process of European-wide accreditation, and each part of the curriculum will have to meet peer review standards. This does not mean programs will be standardized, but any element of a program will need to make sense within the goals established by the program faculty and the university.

Transparency means formulating goals in terms that, again, will seem only too familiar to American academics. An English program in Niksic must have clear criteria for admission, clear rationales for each of its courses, and clear, measurable standards for achievement within the program. After two years of study here, for instance, I might not have all the requirements for an English degree at a university in Germany. But my credits will be accepted there and I can make up required courses lacking in my program. Under the new system, if I earn a bachelor's degree in an accredited program here, I can enter a master's program in the same field anywhere.

My cause for concern about European higher education is that this will create as free market for talented academics. Eastern European and Balkan scholars will be sucked into Germany, France, England and the other wealthy countries. Craig dismissed this as a concern. Why not? he said. As I as ee it the problem is that it potentially deprives students in poorer countries of better scholars from their own countries. Well, we have to deal with the ownership society at home, so why should the Europeans be exempted?

It is interesting, again because it is so familiar to the part of me that is the administrator, that one of the goals of this thorough reform of the system is to make graduates of European educational programs more employable. We strive for that employability goal in all of our programs at Seton Hill University, though how well we meet that goal remains a question for us. What do European employers look for? At least in Romania, according to Craig, the main skills that employers seek are computer skills, knowledge of Romanian commercial law, and facility with English language. Take Romanian law out of the list and these are the same skills that a vice president at a major U.S. firm told me he wants in new employees. [In fact, a high level of verbal skill appears so regularly in the requirements of employers that we should probably scrap all of our current curriculum and remake it all with language skills built in from the beginning.]

This was a presentation to teachers in an English language program, so much of it dealt with how to evaluate student achievement in a language program. Again, I found the topic very interesting. One of Craig's most telling examples concerned a university in a Balkan that I won't name but which was not Montenegro. All first year (first semester) and third year (fifth semester) English students were tested in oral and written proficiency, and the instruments were evaluated by outside experts. What they concluded was that there was no significant difference between the two groups. Clearly, this comes as bad news for any program. This suggests (more than suggests) that programs need to examine their instruction and their goals, and they need to establish means of evaluating student achievement that will be both transparent and transferable.

We had a little time to look at the Common European Framework Standards for language proficiency. Unfortunately, I had to leave for my first Serbian class to find out how little I knew of Serbian grammar. But the standards provide a good example of a valuable rubric for language learning. This could become a powerful instrument even for language programs in the U.S., most of which follow ACTFL guidelines for language proficiency. But U.S. students will sometimes need to match skills with European students. But I also wonder if these levels could find a useful role in evaluating English language skills in our Humanities programs at home. Would most of our students meet the C1 level of accuracy that requires that they consistently maintain "a high degree of grammatical accuracy; errors are rare, difficult to spot and generally corrected when they do occur"?

I know it sounds like I'm making trouble. But reality knocks at the door right now. U.S. universities will soon enough have to meet the demand that they demonstrate how good a job they do at what they claim to do.

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Note added Feb. 19: Today I went to a workshop for teacher mentors at the campus here in Niksic. Craig was there and we talked a little more about the Bolonga Declaration. He said that initially the U.S. Department of State opposed the reforms, seeing it as a way for European higher education to become more competitive with American higher ed. Right now there are hundreds of thousands of European, Chinese, Indian, and Japanese students going to study in the U.S. every year. This is an area where the international system clearly favors the U.S. But, with Craig's prodding, State has supported the movement toward the new system. American academics participate in helping set up European accreditation systems.

Posted by at 9:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here are three things that you can see everyday in Niksic that you won't see everyday in Greensburg, PA:

Girls who are friends hold hands. You see them everywhere, arm in arm or hand in hand.

Friends greet each other by kissing. Girls kiss girls, boys and girls kiss, boys kiss boys. What applies to children applies to adults.

They put ketchup on their pizza.

-----------------------------------
"Most of your students have guns, or at least their families have guns," Nina tells me.

"Well," I reply, "that would apply to most of my students at Seton Hill University." I tell her that public schools in Pennsylvania close on the first day of hunting season.

"Really?" and she gives me a look that says, "What a strange place you live in." Nina, like me, is from California. Her family, like mine, did not exercise its right to bear arms at home. She continues, "But here they still grow up believing in blood revenge." That is, if someone harms your family, you have to kill them. I admit that in Pennsylvania we don't have that, at least not generally. "And they shoot guns into the air to celebrate." Live ammo? "Of course--anything else wouldn't be right."

We are talking in the Piccadilly Café, in Podgorica (where I have returned in spite of the continued bad weather--the roads, at least, were better this time). Nina has already taught English in Podgorica for a semester, in the economics and law faculty. But in the three years preceding this, she has taught in Uzbekistan, Korea, and Bulgaria. So her observations about Montenegro are sharpened by her experience of other cultures.

"Did you choose Montenegro?" We both ask the other more one or less the same question. For both of us it turns out that Montenegro, more or less, chose us.

It is quite an education to spend the day with Nina. As we walk around the central area of Podgorica, a city of about 170,000, she expresses her confidence that we will find a place for coffee and later for lunch. "The whole city is a café," she says, "that's all there is to do here." We walk across a wide stretch of the city in about twenty minutes, cross the main square (which functions now as a parking lot) and through Hercegovacka Ulica, a pedestrian street of shops and cafes. We attract a lot of attention together. She's someone who makes Montenegrin heads turn. She's a California girl, so of course she's attractive (Beach Boys? Hello!). But Montenegrin pause in their conversation to look not because Nina is Californian, but because she is also Korean.

"Do you feel kind of exotic here?" I ask.

"Yes, and it feels very strange. It isn't so bad today because I'm with a white person. But when I walk around on my own people look and even say things to me. Children will stop playing and run after me. I feel like they are making fun of me." In Bulgaria, she tells me, even though people noticed her, they would never let on that they noticed.

We talk about the insularity of the country. It's hard to get here, for one thing, but the people seem to live in a kind of bubble that separates them from many of the currents that Eastern Europe and even other parts of the Balkans have felt. One of the currents that has transformed Europe since the 1960s is the growing diversity of European society. Parts of Berlin and Paris are overwhelmingly Muslim, and people whose parents came from Africa now speak German, Italian, French, or English as their first languages. You would never mistake the Frankfurt airport for JFK, but the mixture of Germans working there whose parents never heard of Adenauer or even Willy Brandt is striking. None of this applies to Montenegro. A small number of Chinese live in Montenegro where they operate little Kina Butik filled with inexpensive clothing. But the only sizeable minority here is the Roma (Gypsies).

The race issue has made an appearance as a topic in my class. One student asked me if it was true that black people in the United States have to live in separate communities.

"That's true in many places," I tell her.

Another student volunteers that the same thing exists in Montenegro, with the Roma. But that's different, said another. They want to live that way.

I didn't know enough to comment and was uneasy about exploring the topic at that moment. But I cannot very well teach American history without discussing race. Some of these issues will come up again.

Later on we meet Goran joins Nina and I. He teaches Serbian at the campus in Niksic. Goran lived in the United States, in Knoxville, for a year. He likes the United States very much, and has even become an advocate for Knoxville. He points out that it had an important part in the film Pulp Fiction.

"So, did you choose to come to Montenegro?" he asks soon after he sits down. Once again I explain the mysteries of Fulbright selection.

As we talk Goran also asks me what I think of the library in Niksic. Well, it has its problems. The collection is a little long in the tooth. And then there's the problem about the card catalog. Goran explains: "They moved the books from one place to another, but they lost the catalog. And they don't make a new catalog." For Goran this is a sad joke, especially as he compares the Niksic library to the libraries at the University of Tennesse. But Goran also has ideas about new classes and even new curriculum, and he hopes to have time to make some of these things happen when he finishes his dissertation. To make his program more up to date, more like a western program, he only lacks time, help, and almost all other resources.

As the taxi driver said when I first arrived in Niksic, "It's not really Europe. It's Montenegro." That sums up a big part of my impression after three weeks. Montenegro seems so familiar in so many ways, yet at the same time baffles my expectations.

Posted by at 1:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The road from Podgorica rises 400 meters to reach Niksic, from a fairly warm valley to a mountain valley. The climate change is much more dramatic than the change between Greensburg to the ski in Somerset county. In the 35 minutes that we've been on the road so far, we've gone from the rainy flatlands turned into wetlands from a night and morning of rain, to snow covered mountains rising or falling away depending on which side of the road I look at. I'm in the back seat with several hundred dollars worth of Fulbright-purchased books for the library in Niksic, and in the front with the university's driver is the dean of the faculty in Niksic.

All of us remain pretty quiet as the road keeps going up and getting worse. Wet snow keeps falling and we know there is much more of that in Niksic, which we left only a few hours before. The air temperature has become warm enough that the wet snow begins to give up its moisture to the atmosphere. Fog rises off the low-lying areas to our right, but it also rolls down from the mountainside to our left. It becomes as foggy as it used to get in spring in southern California, when headlights were almost useless. Snow covers the road, and I notice that there are no tracks on either side. We can only see a few yards ahead of us as we approach the first of four tunnels that you pass through to reach Niksic. We enter the tunnel. Everything goes black.

----

The trip to Podgorica had been planned on Sunday. I needed to go to Podgorica, the judicial capital of Serbia-Montenegro, to pick up four boxes of books that had arrived for me at the U.S. consulate. Janko called the university driver to arrange to take me. "On the authorization of the dean, I can drive to the states," he told Janko. As it turned out the dean was already planning to go into Podgorica on Tuesday for a meeting at the main campus. Tuesday morning, though, I woke up to snow. Heavy snow. I waded through snow and slush, walking part of the way behind the World War-vintage that is one of the city's snowplows, its bed still filled with firewood. The university driveway, when I reached it, was a carpet of snow with two deep ruts cut by tires. I assumed that prudent people like the dean would call off the trip.

I had not yet met the dean, Bojka Djukanovic, do I didn't know who I was waiting for in her as I stood in the outer office with bustling. Soon enough, though, a small, energetic woman walked in. We briefly introduced ourselves to one another, she took my arm, and we were off. She tells me in Slavic-accented English, so everything she said sounded like a line from the remake of The Third Man that my life has become. "I think we will have quite an adventure going to Podgorica today."

We walked out the front door of the faculty building and I looked around for the all-terrain vehicle we needed. Two vehicles sat in the snowy field that had taken the place of the parking area. One was a jeep-like car, a four-wheel drive wagon. The other was a Renault, one of the little ones that get 50 miles to the gallon. It was new when Yugoslavia still existed. Bojka tells me, "This is not the university car, but the driver thinks it will be better for driving in the snow." I think, "That jeep will be at least be able to get out of the driveway, but god knows what the roads down the mountain are like." Then we walk down the steps. Bojka gets into the Renault.

The driver, at least, whose name is Tomo, inspires confidence. He clearly is descended from the race of heroes that Rebecca West's Serbian informant described: "No child here says, 'I want to be a builder, or a doctor, or a carpenter,' though some want to be chauffeurs because to them it is still a daring and romantic occupation." Tomo has worked for the university for 28 of his 50 years. He's a big man who fills up his fourth of the Renault. Dark hair, leather jacket--he could be a KGB agent. Somehow, he maneuvers the Renault out of the driveway and onto the snowy roads of Montenegro.

The trip to Podgorica went smoothly enough. We sailed into the flooded roads behind the main university campus about an hour after leaving Niksic to drop the dean and another administrator at their meeting. Then Tomo and I set off on our errands. I managed to retrieve my books from the heavily secured consulate, and Tomo took care of other university business that involved picking up an Italian professor and then dropping her somewhere.

We talked, of course, or at least we communicated. Tomo spoke no English at all, so my Serbian was stretched to its limit. We gave each other our ages and our children's ages, determined that he had traveled to Romania and Hungary and that I was divorced. "Well," he said, waving his hand in as airy a motion as the Renault allowed, "there are plenty of women here."

"I have a girlfriend," I said. Actually, I told him both that I have a female friend and a girlfriend, trying to make sure that he understood that my girlfriend isn't a girl.

He considered this new information, then said,"You can have one in America and one in Montenegro." We both laughed at the absurdity of that proposition.

And then it was time to pick up the dean. We enjoyed coffee in the rector's meeting room. The coffee here is potent--jak, as they say. It is as close to drinking raw coffee as you can imagine. In fact, it's closer. The dean and I had our only chance to talk about our teaching and scholarly interests. And then we were off.

----

For what seemed like seconds but perhaps less than a second, everything turned to smoky dark gray. And then, even though we could still not see the road, we could see the outline of the other end of the tunnel. We exited the tunnel and though conditions seemed about as bad, they became no worse and slowly became only horrible. Tomo turned to the dean and with a laugh and a motion of his hand said something that I imagined was, "We just keep going."

Posted by at 4:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

A mass of cold air continues to sit on top of the Balkans. On Tuesday of this week the high temperature in London was 11 C (about 52 F) while in Istanbul it was negative 4 C. That's just wrong. But the thaw continues here, albeit slowly. Our weather has reached the high 30s F for the highs, and it is consistently sunny. Thanks to the use of earth moving equipment, there are now long stretches of road with visible asphalt. Even so, the thawed snow freezes at night, making walking a continuing adventure. And every day there I see at least one car stuck in the snow.

The big adventure here, though, is the encounter between two cultures. When I had my first class on Monday (two classes, actually, with a total of 70 or 80 students) I wanted them to give me impressions they had of the climate and terrain in the U.S. from movies or TV. Instead they started offering views about American culture. "All we see is violence. I don't believe it." "They have really good cars." Clearly, a teachable moment. Next week I will see what they make of Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.

But I also have to keep putting myself into this culture, and the most valuable tool for that is a language I don't speak. If you are keeping up with the Chronicles, you already know the matter of the heater purchase. Exchanges like that become possible whenever I leave the apartment. I get lots of looks that say, "There are sounds coming out of his mouth, but no words." In return, I reply with a look that says, "I'm just a nitwit who didn't take the trouble to learn your language" and then I usually say something wholly unintelligible (i.e., in English) and resort to some lame gestures: "I...want...buy...this/one."

Little by little, I'm acquiring some usable vocabulary. Serbian is a formidable language. It has a shortage of vowels but eight declensions for its nouns. So, my progress could generously be described as deliberate. Usually a word only becomes really fixed in my mind when I misuse it. So, after my first meal in a restaurant I asked in Serbian for "the vill, please." Look of confusion from the waitress, then she said in Serbian, "Oh, the bill." Shopping the other day I asked for cheese using the word kir, except that the word for cheese is sir. Fortunately, kir has no meaning that I know of in Serbian.

But I am always aware of danger of misplaced phonemes. A phoneme is a sound unit that carries some meaning with it. So, change a phoneme and you get a new word, as in the change from hit to sit to bit. In the cases above, one sound made bill and cheese into something that made no sense. One slip of the phoneme, and you could be talking about something you don't want to bring up. In Serbian, one sound separates the word for signing your name to the one for emptying your bladder. One or two sounds take the word for person or customer and makes it the word for shit.

Still, I can only improve. Right? The other day I was hailed by an older gentleman as I was leaving my apartment bloc. Maybe he was drunk, but he wanted to talk and it turned out he is my neighbor. After a short time a woman walked by and soon became part of our chat. They wanted to know where I was from, what I was doing in Montenegro. The exchange of all of this took far more work and patience than appears on paper, but somehow they made themselves understood and I did too. The woman wanted to know how much I paid for my apartment. I told her 300 euros (it's really 350) and she gave a look of shocked disbelief. She didn't say if she thought that was a bargain. We just didn't have enough language in common.

Posted by at 6:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We always say, "No problem." But there's always a problem.
--Najo

After one week I'm just beginning to have a sense of what it means to live in the Balkans today. One of the most commonly used phrases here is Nema problema, "no problem." But people here know, when they use it, that they are either offering a solution or else dismissing the problem that exists. As in, "nema problem, we'll do it this other way" or "nema problema, I will just ignore that and live with it." Life here is not unbearably hard or harsh, as far as I can tell, but it is difficult for most people.

Unemployment and low wages obviously plague the region. I've mentioned before that professionals, even physicians, have monthly salaries in the hundreds of euros. Housing is chronically in short supply. Most people live in apartments here, and you can see apartment blocs everywhere. Some have the dull, gray concrete look of Communist-era worker housing. Some blocs, like mine, are in pastel colors (though often some of the plaster has fallen off--and, by the way, my bloc of apartments is known as Palestina, "because of all the problems there" according to Janko.). My apartment, or flat, is quite nice--it is about the size of a lodge that the girls and I stayed in near Glacier this summer. Sitting room, kitchen/dining room, bathroom and bedroom. The computer and desk, where I'm sitting now, are in what must have been meant for a pantry. For me, this is plenty. But not only do whole families live in apartments the same size as mine, their grown children with spouses also sometimes live with them there.

My life hardly qualifies under the category of hardship. My Fulbright stipend allows me to rent this flat from Najo, who works at the steel plant here. (To make the extra money, Najo rents a room from friends so he can rent the flat to me.) But most things that I want to do here take a little extra thought and effort. So, for instance, shopping has become one of the main pursuits of my life. I go out almost every day. Little shops are everywhere. None of these will have everything that you want, even in the single category of groceries. The largest market in town would fit into the video rental section of most Wal-Marts, and although it has a counter for cheese and meat it does not carry fresh produce. Other shops carry produce, but there is no way to predict which produce or in what condition. So, you keep shopping. I had to go to half a dozen stores before I finally found facial tissues (what they call Kleenex, in Mexico). Every little shop has a rack at the front where you can leave your shopping bag from the other stores so that stuff you've already bought doesn't get mixed with stuff you will buy.

Practice improves your performance, in shopping as in most things. The best kiwifruit that I've found are sold right on my road, by a man who works out of his car. Yesterday I bought three large ripe kiwi from him, the kind that you find at Giant Eagle only when you are lucky. He weighed them on a scale suspended from his hatchback. When he told me the price it was one of those unusual moments when I understood what he said, but I didn't believe what I'd heard: thirty euro-cents, about 40 cents in American.

My best example of the need for persistence in the Darwinian struggle to find the stuff you want is my search for a heater. A single electric space heater provides most of the heat in my apartment. That works for the living and dining area, but does nothing to modify the cool air at the other end of the apartment in the bedroom. I spent several days sleeping on the couch while I hunted for a heater during the day. There are quite a few electrical appliance places in Niksic, but most of these seem to specialize in lighting fixtures. Or, they had heaters that didn't suit my needs. Finally, though, I found a large store with a variety of electrical appliances. And, in fact, the place had just the kind of heater I needed for only a little more than I expected to pay. But when I told the sales clerk that I wanted it, she fired back some questions in Serbian. What I think she wanted to know was, "How large an area do you want to heat?" We will just have to hope that is what she asked, because otherwise God only knows what she must have made of my response, which was to more or less pace off an approximation of the area in her store. She gave a look that seemed to say she understood, and then she refused to sell the heater to me. That much, at least, was clear. Why? My best suppositions are either a) this heater won't heat that large an area or b) we don't have this in stock. (Just so you are not worrying about me, I found another heater shortly thereafter, and I have now occupied the bedroom.)

I also feel that I'm participating in the life of the people here when I do laundry. Like most people living in Palestina and other apartment blocs in town, I have a clothes washer right in my apartment, in the bathroom. Of course, I'm only doing laundry for one person, not for two families. So once I figured out how to work the settings on my machine, everything went smoothly. To dry clothes, however, everyone in Montenegro seems to use the air drying method. Again, no problem. My mother dried all of our clothes that way for years when I was a child. However, I was a child in southern California where it didn't rain and where it never fell below freezing. But since I arrived in Niksic, the temperature has only rarely crept above freezing, and my laundry day was not that special day. I could pretty well predict what would happen, that my clothes, hanging in the wind on a line on my balcony, would freeze solid. But I left them there in the hope that some force of nature unclear or unknown to me would transfer moisture from my garments to the Montenegrin atmosphere. This was a case, though, where I actually already knew all of the relevant physical laws. My clothes froze solid, turning into stiff flags marking the American occupation of one flat in Palestina.

As with most things in the Balkans, there is a way around. My synthetics dried pretty easily in the bathroom, though I didn't have a place to hang up everything. So I strung dental floss from the shower-head holder to a convenient hook to make a drying line for my socks. The space heater in my living room has a nice flat top. It worked well as a kind of drying board for the heavier fabrics. By the end of my wash day, all my clothes were more or less dry. Nema problema.

Posted by at 4:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

It"s not really Europe. It"s Montenegro--Taxi driver.

In trying to identify distinctive cultural features, I am always aware that they will be mixed in with social and economic characteristics of a particular place and also with universal human behaviors. But I do think it is possible to claim some activities as more beholden to one or another of these forces. So, for instance, when you mix large piles of compressible snow and idle young males, you are going to have snow projectiles flying around at odd moments, mainly in the direction of idle young males but also as pleas for attention in the direction of seemingly indifferent young females. I think we can agree that this is a universal human behavior, probably linked to ice-age survival mechanisms. And you can study this behavior in Niksic today if you have a chance to come here.

On the other hand, the behavior set that causes English people to line up at the least provocation never found its way here. When I made my way to the bank a few days ago to cash a traveler"s check, I looked for the nearest line and took my place in it like a good soldier of commerce. But people kept coming and going (which was strange because I didn"t have a sense that many of them were waited on) and just walked up to the counter. When I finally made it to the counter, people came and stood next to me rather than behind me as God ordained. There are yellow lines in Montenegro that you might assume you should wait behind while previous customers are served, but, like the no smoking logos, they have no meaning here. I don"t think that this is uniquely Montenegrin. I have dim memories from 30 years ago of people crowding around counters to do various kinds of business, and that was in more than one place in the Balkans. Maybe the English contribution to western civilization (like the generally disregarded pedestrians having the right-of-way) is the exception here, and line-standing behavior has to be assimilated just like crude and violent behavior at sports.

But how do I explain the large piles of trash on the street corners? I have assumed that trash pick-up broke down as a result of the snow, and I can only hope that it resumes before we have a thaw here because these piles are impressive. But it is also clear that Montenegrins never had a "Keep Montenegro beautiful" campaign. Whether it was my parents, my teachers, or the TV adds of little girls putting litter into trash cans that shaped my value system, I know that since childhood I have felt an "instinctive" aversion to putting trash anywhere else but into a designated container. Imagine my mild distress, then, when last Friday about midnight I looked in vain around the rail car for a place to dispose of the individual sanitary wipe that Vera handed me as we were all settling into our cramped accommodations. Naturally, I didn't make a fuss about this and just waited to see what my three companions did with their wipes. As the train pulled out of Belgrade station, they all took turns tossing the napkins out the window. I'm ashamed to admit what I did.

Vera, Zenl, and Janko P. are all educated, middle-class people who are clearly well assimilated to European norms. But, faced with a lack of resources, they invoked local custom, one that I've heard about often enough to believe Montenegrins are not overly scrupulous about litter. I hasten to add that they also are good examples of the generosity that I have also heard ascribed to Montenegrins. Of course, I haven't met that many Montenegrins, but 100% of my small sample could easily fit the description "open, friendly, and helpful." Janko A., my department chair, has a slightly jaundiced view of his homeland and often criticizes attributes that he considers "Balkan." But the other day, as I sat with Janko and his girlfriend Zorica, I described how well my traveling companions had taken care of me. Janko agreed that Montenegrins would go out of their way to help people. Then he stopped, obviously bemused, and asked, "Have I said something positive about Montenegro?"

There is yet a third generalization about Montenegrins that I will have time to explore through further observation and study. Even the other Yugoslavian people (Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, Slovenian, Bosnian, Albanian) view Montenegrins as lazy. I don"t have much to go on here, though there do seem to be a lot of people out on the streets in the middle of the day. Of course, I"m out on the streets too. But on one of our walks Janko pointed out that the people shoveling snow off the sidewalks were gypsies. "They offer to do it for 5 Euros. Yesterday I heard one say that he made 100 Euros," which is a lot of money in a country where a monthly salary for a professional is 200 to 500. "But the Montenegrins would never consider doing it. They are too proud."

Laziness? Pride? To explain values so obviously contrary to modern trends, I'm tempted to invoke the four decades of Communist government in Yugoslavia. That hardly holds up under inspection, though, since the northernmost former Yugolsav republic of Slovenia is quickly integrating itself into the western capitalist system. Croatia is probably not far behind Slovenia. Montenegro, though, never experienced the formative movements of western culture. Whether you attribute the Protestant ethic to the Reformation or to the commercial revolution that followed hard upon its heels, Montenegro was exempt.

Instead of getting reformed or getting rich, Montenegrins resisted the Turkish invasions of the early modern era. Much of this mountainous country remained free from Turkish rule until the early 18th century, and even then the Turks had a tenuous hold on the land. The warrior ethic bred of endemic warfare and resistance probably shaped the character of people here more decisively than anything else. "A soldier must be vainglorious," an informant explained to Rebecca West in the 1930s "And since the men in front of them were Turks who were often really prodigious fighters, there was no end to the fairy-tales that the Montenegrins had to tell to themselves about themselves." Vainglory, or what Bertram Wyatt-Brown calls primal honor, has only a modest claim on contemporary, middle-class western Europeans and Americans, when it has any hold at all. An alpha-male might take pride in his ability to intimidate other people, but if he doesn't earn a decent living, his status will diverge sharply from his self-love. But in a culture that values primal honor, pride or vainglory "will not permit them to have any other characteristics, except a little cunning...for to be perfectly and absolutely vainglorious you must hold back from all activity, because you dare not ever fail at anything."

The value system of pride and vainglory led to an aversion to labor, or, more precisely, to the kind of systematic and conscientious labor most in demand in modern economies (the kind we call the "Protestant" or work ethic). This is a hilly, heavily forested land, not a place where farming would likely lead to much wealth, and at any rate, "farming used to be done chiefly by their women, since they (the men) were always at war or resting between wars, and no work interests them." When Yugoslavia became a state in 1918, Montenegrins had no clear role in the economy of the kingdom and no marketable skills. "So they pester the government with demands for posts as functionaries and for pensions...(but) there is no need for so many functionaries, and if there were these people could not perform their functions, and God Himself, if He had a knife at His throat, could not invent a reason why they should all have pensions" (quotes from West, pp. 1009-1010).

Well, as you can see, I have an interesting few months ahead of me.

Posted by at 9:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Best wishes and welcome to Montenegro, a country of great natural beauty,
difficult everyday life, numerous problems, and open heart.

Janko Andrijasevic

In writing about Montenegro, I"m assuming that my readers will not have many preconceptions about this place. When I first received the Fulbright scholarship I began to tell people that I would be going to Montenegro. I work at a university, and most of the people I know have some (or a lot of) higher education. I am sure that most of my friends could tell you the difference between the Georgia that Sherman marched through and the one that Stalin came from. Many would have no trouble telling you at least what continent shelters Burkina Faso. But very few of the people I shared my news with had a clear idea of where Montenegro is, let alone what it is.

So, to work. Montenegro is currently in a federal union with Serbia. It is surrounded by Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, and Albania, but it also has a coastline on the Adriatic. Until the Congress of Berlin recognized it as a sovereign state in 1878, Montenegro had been an outpost of the Ottoman Empire for several centuries. There are Muslims living here still, and Niksic, where I live, has its own mosque as well as its own Baptist church. But most of the people in this country are Orthodox Christians. They speak a language very close to Serbian, but many prefer that you not call their language Serbian.

You can take the Monte in Montenegro seriously. When I awoke Saturday morning in the train from Belgrade, I looked out on a scene that might have come from a travelogue for a tour of the Alps. Or, with the heavy covering of snow and the sparse vegetation that I could see, it might have been the Rockies. When my traveling companion said that we were almost in Podgorica, I had a little trouble accepting that because we were still surrounded by mountains. But Podgorica (the capital) like Niksic sits in a relatively flat mountain valley. Traveling from Podgorica to Niksic by bus was about like traveling from Cuernavaca to Taxco by bus, except that everything here was covered by snow.

I do not remember if I have mentioned the snow. In the two days before I arrived in Serbian airspace, Niksic received a meter (that"s right, one yard and a little more) of snow. In my three days here I have yet to step foot on the soil of Montenegro, and have barely even seen the country"s asphalt. Snow either sits in high piles next to the roads and buildings, or it is hard packed underfoot. Last night on my walk back home I saw some of the local snow removal equipment. It was a World War II vintage truck with a plough in front. The truck itself was loaded with cordwood. Niksic looks like some kind of Serbian fantasy of the North Pole. Individuals and families crowd the roads, slipping and sliding in the same space where the cars are looking for traction. You see parents pulling children in little sleds.

I"m becoming more and more familiar with the town. It is not large. The population here is about 50,000, a little larger than Greensburg. But it seems like a much smaller town. I have the impression that most people here, like myself at the moment, live in apartment blocs. Once you leave the apartment blocs, the commercial buildings are fairly small and there seems to be a lot of open space. The square in the city center is very large and open (though currently covered by three plus feet of snow). But there are some large buildings. The town has quite a modern looking hotel, though Janko, my department chair, tells me that the new part does not operate. A very large building near the center of town was built at the end of the Communist period, but was abandoned because there were no funds to continue to turn it into a commercial center. A large high school near my apartment building is abandoned and looks like a haven for drug addicts.

Niksic has a reputation in Montenegro for being tough. It is an industrial town, with the brewery and the steel mill the largest employers. And even though I can"t see it because of all the snow, Janko P. my traveling companion of last week, and Janko A. my department chair, assure me that Niksic is dirty. Montenegro, generally, is a poor country and clearly doesn"t participate, yet, in the dynamic economic growth to the north and west of it. My predecessor in this Fulbright chair told me that Montenegro was about ten years behind Croatia.

What does it mean to be behind the times? Yesterday I went to cash a traveler"s check. I"ve done this for more than thirty years on four different continents. But here in Niksic I had to visit two different banks to complete this transaction. (Just imagine that. A bank that blithely sends away a customer and his 1.5% margin of profit .) The cashier who finally took care of me seemed very unsure of various aspects of the transaction, e.g., she seemed to believe the "city" designation on the check should have stated the city where the check originated. But this extended example is to make a point--Niksic has no infrastructure for tourism. That"s right, none. Nema, as we say here.

A final note. Janko P., who grew up in Germany in a Montenegrin family, would refer to "downstairs" in our conversations. I could not, at first, figure out what he was talking about. "Downstairs they know I have an accent," he said, and I thought, "Who? The servants?" But it finally clicked. Downstairs is Montenegro. I don"t think anyone else uses that term for this place. Just Janko P. And me.

Posted by at 4:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)