The Blue Monkey Review

Right around Thanksgiving I received an e-mail with the subject heading ¨Worldwide Caution.¨ I thought it must be more spam, but checked it anyway. In fact, it was a message from the United States Department of State, by way of the American Embassy in Podgorica, Montenegro. The topic was the Avian flu, and what Americans abroad should do to prepare for an outbreak.

I suppose I don´t take this particular threat too seriously. SciDev.Net, however, notes that ¨the H5N1 bird flu virus has spread worldwide, and the influenza pandemic it could trigger will hit developing countries the hardest.¨ Keeping this threat in mind, and knowing what a thrillseeker I am, I suspect that my response to a local outbreak in a region where I was travelling would be to run like mad to the nearest international airport. But that brings us to one of the points of the caution from the State Department: ¨commercial airlines might drastically curtail or even cease operations.¨

So, I could be stuck. Not a pretty picture for those travelling. But, for those living abroad the caution suggests, in fact recommends, ¨sheltering in place¨ AKA ¨social distancing.¨ In other words, hunker down and quarantine the rest of the world around you. ¨Americans abroad should evaluate their situation and prepare emergency supplies accordingly (non-perishable food, potable water, medicines, etc.) for the possibility of sheltering-in-place for at least two and up to twelve weeks.¨

Two weeks! I can´t imagine how that could have worked in Montenegro. I went shopping every day. I would have had to load up cupboards with instant pasta sauce. Najo´s refrigerator could only have held so many bags of frozen veggies, and since these aren´t exactly abundant in a city where the green market operates every day, that means I would have had to buy up everything in stock at the one store in town that carried frozen produce. All of this just refers to how I would implement such a plan. I´m not even going to contemplate what it would have meant to miss morning walks and coffee on the korzo.

For those interested, I have included the complete letter from the U.S. embassy in the extended entry.

Continue reading "Worldwide Caution" »

Posted by at 9:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

¨I always thought European girls were different,¨ Aleksander was saying, ¨but on my trip to Serbia I met two Spanish girls who were like typical Montenegrin girls.¨ I was still enjoying the early afternoon of my first day back in Montenegro. I´d already managed to meet several former students at the university facility where I worked, and now I sat enjoying the company of Aleksander Bogdonović, his sister Ana, Dragan Lazarević, and Petar Kilibarda.

And here, probably no more than fifteen minutes into our talk, Aleksander waved this red flag in front of me: ¨Typical Montenegrin girl?¨ I couldn´t help myself.

¨What is the ´typical´ Montenegrin girl like?¨ I asked. That´s when I learned the new term.

Continue reading "Sponzoruša" »

Posted by at 9:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

On May 20, citizens of Montenegro (Crna Gora) will go to the polls to decide whether or not to continue the current federal relationship that the tiny Adriatic country has with Serbia. Those friends who still write to me often mention the “political situation,” which I assume means the growing debate and media struggle over this issue. Some strongly support independence, others just as strongly want to remain connected to Serbia. And some just as strongly don’t know.

Continue reading "Referendum in Montenegro" »

Posted by at 3:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

This evening I had two e-mails from people in Montenegro in my inbox. Both were forwards, one from a colleague and the other from a student—I was just an innocent bystander in their address book. What was interesting was that they were two different e-mail scams, the kind that you’ve probably seen many times over the years. The one was the “my daughter is desperately sick and you can help by forwarding this to everyone you know and sending in the equivalent of the cost of a postage stamp.” The other one was, “if you forward this to everyone you know Microsoft will send you ___ for every message.” Even with my rudimentary Serbo-Croatian I recognized the scams pretty quickly. But, I guess Balkan people are no more gullible than we are, just later at assimilating the internet.

If you are interested, I include the texts in the extended entry. If you read Serbo-Croatian, you can check and correct my summaries.

Continue reading "FWD" »

Posted by at 10:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Since my last posting I have been in touch with other friends from the Balkans. Robert Sullivan, a Fulbright scholar who taught in Niksic the year before I went there, wrote to me just today to tell me that two students from the Philosophical Faculty were killed in the train wreck. I'm including other responses to the disaster, so read on.

Continue reading "Train Wreck in Montenegro" »

Posted by at 1:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Monday, January 23 a train traveling from Bijelo Polje to Bar in Montenegro went off the tracks due to a brake failure and plunged into a 330 ft. ravine. As soon as I knew about the disaster, on Tuesday, I wrote to friends in Montenegro. Janko Andrijesevic gave a full account of the disaster in his response to me. There's been a terrible train derailment 10 km north of Podgorica. The driver lost control of the brakes, so the wagons slipped down a precipice. . . . 44 people have been reported dead so far, while 185 have been injured. many kids were on the train, they went skiing to a northern ski resort. five children are dead, about 30 seriously injured. Janko also wrote that an aggravating factor is the weather. The Siberian cold has struck us yesterday, so it is freezingly cold and windy.

I also heard from a former student, Aleksander Bogdanovic, who wrote more compactly: The tragedy took away 44 humen lives which is not the final score of death's cruel embrace. We have 3-days commiseration in here. His words make clear how heavily this tragedy has been felt.

A longer reflection on the impact of the disaster came from my colleague Zorica Ciric. I excerpt her note to me more or less unedited, because the intensity of her feelings comes across best, I think, in her breathless writing. [This is e-mail, remember, so inevitably very informal. Still, I think it is a powerful piece.]

it’s really a big tragedy for a small country as ours. ... u know how it goes with the bad news-they lie so that people wouldn’t panic 2 much. what can i tell... that’s life!!! but towns from the whole montenegro are helping, and also serbia and croatia offered help, so i hope the doctors and all other dealing with the accident will give their best in any way. the worst thing is that about half of the people from the train were children up to 16 years old.

i suppose the comment sounds cruel in the context of the accident we’re talking about, but my opinion is that if we don’t think about the ESSENCE of the things the world can’t be better.

Posted by at 1:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

About one hour into the JAT flight to Istanbul I began to think of it as the airborne equivalent of the Balkan Express bus. Like a lot of JAT planes, this one was propeller powered. It had seen better days. The plastic on some of the overhead bins had worn away and many of the signs on the plane giving helpful information about what to do in case of an emergency had faded with time. Plus, in the three seats contiguous to mine sat three Turks, two of whom were trying to finish a bottle of Jack Daniels before the flight ended and made persistent demands on the stewardess for ice. In the Belgrade airport I had been reading in Ivo Andrić’s Bridge on the Drina a particularly graphic account of the impaling of a Christian by the Turk who was charged with building the bridge. Maybe I wasn’t in the best frame of mind for sailing to Byzantium.

My mood deteriorated quickly once I actually stepped out of Ataturk Airport into the busy early evening in Istanbul. The money in Turkey comes in amounts that people referred to alternatively as lira and million lira (so for something that costs half a lira you might be given 500,000 lira in change) and I never actually figured out easy equivalents to dollars or euros. Before I finally reached my hotel an “agent” of the bus line had helped me find a taxi to the hotel and had also helped himself to a fee of about €25. By the time I had sorted this out I was in the cab and the driver was telling me, in German, about his eye problems. The driver has eye problems?

Continue reading "Istanbul" »

Posted by at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I am writing this just before my final exam. Students have been taking tests for a couple of weeks already. Even though my students are all in their first year and so part of the new system, many teachers have chosen to stick with a version of the old method. They have separate tests for the first and second half of the course, but these come a week or so apart. Those of my students who either didn’t take or failed my mid-term will take it again tomorrow. Everyone who wants a first or second chance at the final has the opportunity twelve days later. Stan Surbatović tells me that, while cramming is well-known in the U.S., it takes on a life of its own here. The word they use for it is a verb formed from the word for a military campaign.

In my class student attendance fell sharply after my mid-term. This actually made holding class easier since I didn’t have a large pool of socializers in the back. One week soon after the mid-term a small group of young men were apparently trying to improve their chances with some young women near the back of the room. It annoyed me enough that at one point I said, “Gentlemen, please, either be quiet of leave.” They settled down for a while but soon enough they began again. It hadn’t quite reached the point for me to tell them to go when one of my students addressed me. “Can you stop for a minute?” Then she stood up, changed to Serbian, and tore into the monkey-boys. When she was done, they were quiet. They left soon after.

The students who have come most faithfully are obviously the most interested or motivated. But they have also participated very well in class discussions. They’ve learned a lot, most of which I can’t assess on any kind of test. And, of course, I’ve learned as much from them. Maybe more.

Posted by at 1:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Readers should take the time to look at Ruth’s blog. She has a different point of view and she has written about many of our activities that haven’t made it into Blue Monkey.

Posted by at 1:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“Her face,” wrote Rebecca West in her characterization of young Montenegrin women, “is like a niche designed for a statue it does not hold.” One of my frustrations with West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is the over-elegance of its writing. What is one to make of this line? This is one of those cases where you want an example. And, once you have the example the whole idea makes sense. West makes the point several times that Montenegrin women are beautiful. And, while I can’t claim any expertise in the field of female beauty beyond a lifetime of study of the topic, I’d have to agree. Yet I’ve been struck, again and again, in talking to young women here that their outlook seems markedly less optimistic than that of their male peers.

Continue reading "Some notes on gender" »

Posted by at 3:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

If I had time I would go with you and show you the way. --Total stranger

Mobile phone companies here charge real money for air time. If, however, you use SMS, you can make 5 euros last a long time. So, when I use the phone here, it’s usually to send a text message, or to receive one. But what was I to make of the message I received last Friday night? “Going to alb tom. Want to go? Nina.” Alb? Albania? Of course I wanted to go. It took us another hour to work out details, using some actual landline telephone time. The problem with a visit to Albania is that, other than by car, there is no direct transit. It involves taking a cab to the border, then finding a bus, then doing the reverse to leave. In the end, we decided to rent a car.

Continue reading "Shkodra" »

Posted by at 9:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In Balkans, everybody hates everybody. –Student paper

I’ve wanted to write about the issue of “national identity” for quite a while, but I kept thinking that I didn’t have a clear enough insight or firm enough grasp of the issues. As I’ve continued living here and talking to both colleagues and students about the self-identity of various groups it becomes increasingly clear that people who live here feel ambivalence about these divisions and also recognize their ambiguity. Even in the Balkans it’s hard to understand balkanization. Still, this issue has pressing relevance for anyone here. At times in the recent past, this has literally become a life or death issue. In spite of its difficulty, national identity is something that that those of us from outside the Balkans need to recognize.

Continue reading "National Identity" »

Posted by at 6:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

I felt sure that once I began teaching I would form a special bond with certain kinds of students. The better students, of course, would find me challenging and understanding. I took it for granted that we would find a connection that would remain strong well beyond our relationship as teacher and student, and that these same students would invite me not only to their weddings and the christening of their children, but to their publishing parties and doctoral defenses. That some, at least, would recall our special relationship in a few brief words when they gave their Nobel prize acceptance speeches. Simple naivete would explain this belief, up to the time I began teaching. But I maintained this notion for years afterward, always assuming that in the next year or at the next kind of school or college I would find future great American novelists at my office door seeking not just advice but inspiration.

Continue reading "Crkva" »

Posted by at 1:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

One of the questions that no one has asked, so far, is, “How do you and Ruth spend your days when you are not traveling?” Probably Blue Monkey readers assume that I’m working non-stop, engaged in such pressing business that even the time spent writing for the thousands (uh, dozens?) of readers on the W W W must require sacrifices to the work schedule. Well, yes, I am glad you assume all that. But, as I heard a little girl tell her friends one evening, Nije tačno tako! [“That’s not exactly the way it is.”]

Continue reading "Korzo" »

Posted by at 1:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

When I first found that my Fulbright term would take me to Montenegro, my immediate thought was, “That means I can visit Sarajevo.” Any adult during the 1990s will remember the interminable siege there, the sense of helplessness that attached itself to the name of the city, and finally the relief when the siege lifted and something like stability returned to this region. If Balkan has come to stand for internecine feuds and ethnic hatred, then Bosnia is the Balkans of the Balkans. In fact, Bosnian refers to someone speaking the same language (more or less) that I hear every day on the streets of Nikšić but who worships at a mosque. His neighbor, who speaks the same language but who seeks eternal solace with the Roman Catholic Church will claim to be a Bosnian-Croat. And the neighbor of both these people who plans to be buried in a Serbian Orthodox cemetery will swear he is a Bosnian Serb. But, they probably aren’t neighbors any more. Since the war that added “ethnic cleansing” to the world’s vocabulary, Bosnians of all persuasions have become more separated than they had been for centuries.

Continue reading "Bosnia and Herzegovina" »

Posted by at 2:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I adore Belgrade. -- Goran

Ruth and I had met Goran in Podgorica two days before we flew to Belgrade. Although he is from Podgorica and lives there now, Goran did his doctoral work at the University of Belgrade. So I asked him about the city, what we should see and do, and generally how he felt about it. His typically restrained Montenegrin answer came immediately.

It’s easy to see why Goran, Ivana (the faculty Spanish teacher), Janko, and the other Montenegrins who have studied or spent much time at all have such affection for the city. During our three-day visit, Ruth felt pretty enthusiastic about Belgrade by the end of the first day. I have to admit that I wondered just how different my Fulbright experience would have been in Belgrade than it has been in rustic Nikšić.

Continue reading "Belgrade" »

Posted by at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Although in thinking about my teaching here what interests me most comes under the rubric of culture—values, attitudes, the way ideas are translated into life—in order to discuss my teaching I have to take a detour into an area that might seem distressingly procedural, administrative, even economic. How is my course organized?

Continue reading "Teaching 2" »

Posted by at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Road to Ratac

Ruth arrived this week. She didn’t fly directly to Montenegro, because that would have made too much sense. The travel agent in Greensburg could find no reasonable flight to Podgorica that didn’t cost a small fortune and/or involve an overnight stay somewhere in Europe. Montenegro Air didn’t inspire much confidence with my arrival experience, and they also don’t accept credit cards for travel arrangements (that couldn’t have anything to do with my posting on Commerce, I’m sure). I finally found a flight into Dubrovnik, one that still cost a lot but was hundreds less than anything else.

When look at your map of Montenegro, you will quickly see that Dubrovnik isn’t in Montenegro, though it is in a nearby part of Croatia. And you will also note that the shortest route from Nikšić to Dubrovnik is through Bosnia Hercegovina.

Continue reading "Dubrovnik" »

Posted by at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“How long does the bus to Istanbul take?” asks one of the foreign teachers at the faculty in Nikšić.

“Not that long,” Janko tells her. “But it is full of those guys you see with the clothes. Smoking all the time.”

The guys with the clothes? In fact, there are guys with lots of to sell in Nikšić and all over Montenegro. Before I came here Yaacov Lozowick, archivist at Yad Vashem, wrote to ask me if I was going to the Montenegro, the one where half the people were engaged in smuggling? Well, yes, that’s the one.

Continue reading "Komerc" »

Posted by at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Ponedjeljak

A strike demonstration had been planned for 10 A.M. in front of the main government building. So, instead of going to the USAID funded program office there, I was directed to go the building for RTV Montenegro. Once there I call the journalist who will be interviewing me, Jelena Bobicic. She is ready for me and quickly takes me to the news room where we find a table with a huge flatscreen computer monitor. Jelena leaves, but in minutes she returns with the cameramen and soon enough the translator joins us.

Jelena is young and very nice, and she is beautiful. But other than having her company for the half an hour that the interview takes, I’m not happy about it. I had discussed the questions with Irena, the woman from Breaker Point who set up the interview. I did manage to have her drop the questions about “high context, low context” cultures, but otherwise I am still expected to discuss issues related to business culture and communication. “What impact does diversity have on American business culture? Is this something that affects global markets?” Jelena asks me. I improvise. I say something about targeted advertising. A casual viewer who knows nothing about this topic will think I’ve wandered the globe studying this very issue. “How have new technologies shaped the use of English language?” I really struggle with this, something that is painfully evident when I see myself the following evening on TV. I give one of my now world-famous mid-sentence pauses that seem to be for emphasis but really signal a totally blank mind. Finally Jelena asks about youth in the U.S. and Montenegro, something I can talk about intelligently.

And then it is over.

Continue reading "Kako je u Crnoj Gori?" »

Posted by at 3:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Do you see now how dirty Niksic is? -- Janko

During my visit to Ulcinj, I made the acquaintance of Bernard. He is an Albanian Montenegrin, a former student of Cindy’s who graduated from the faculty in Niksic four years ago. Currently he performs civilian service at the school we visited in Ulcinj in place of military service. Bernard, who speaks excellent English, provides some sense of the serious young Montenegrins who must be spread throughout the country. He has taken conflict resolution training and has run workshops as a conflict resolution trainer. He participates in the yearly cleanup of Ulcinj after the tourist season, and writes a column for the local newspaper about current problems.

Cindy, Bernard, and I enjoyed an hour or so on the terrace of a café overlooking the beach in Ulcinj. Spring has arrived in Montenegro, so we could sit outside in ordinary clothing and exchange a little winter pallor for some ruddiness. As we talked, the topic turned to trash. “If we wait,” Bernard says, “we might see a man come and throw his garbage into the sea.” Sad as it is to report, trash heaps defile the beauty of both the beaches I visited this week, in Sutomore and Ulcinj. As a former teacher in Niksic told me, Sutomore is best “avoided during the beach season as it turns into a virtual cesspit. … all the beaches… become trash-strewn once people start going to them--empty plastic water bottles floating in great profundity all over the shore line, not to mention other obnoxious materials.” In spite of the efforts of Bernard’s friend, the environmentalist who organizes the yearly cleanup, Ulcinj residents continue to treat trash disposal cavalierly.

Continue reading "Trash Talk" »

Posted by at 1:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

“This will only take five or ten minutes,” Nenad tells me. He is the interviewer from state television and we are arranging ourselves in the meeting room at the American Corner (the American cultural center) in Podgorica. In one of life's bizarre turns, this is my second TV interview of the day. When I arrived in Podgorica a few hours before and walked across the central square (parking lot) a woman with a microphone and her cameraman latched onto me. “Ne govorim Srpski,” I told them, but to no avail. The fact that I could tell them I didn’t speak Serbian meant that I knew enough for their purposes. She kept asking me what I thought of Dukanovic, Montenegro’s prime minister, and my view on the referendum to determine if Montenegro will remain in union with Serbia. “I don’t know much about Dukanovic,” I said, and other things in my garbled Serbian. But in the end she got a sound bite from me, that I believed there should be a referendum. That should really advance U.S. / Montenegrin relations.

Continue reading "American Youth Culture" »

Posted by at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

"The worst school that I've been in is in Niksic. I was there in January last year and it was so cold that I had on my coat, hat, and gloves. That's how the teacher dressed, too. Periods were shortened to 30 minutes because it was too cold for the students." Cindy Rauth, a teaching fellow now in her third year in Montenegro, continues. "It was so cold that they left the front door to the school open. It made no difference. And the windows in the bathrooms are just openings with no glass." Thanks to Cindy's initiative, student teachers can now have practica in schools throughout the country, and she has worked during the last two years to train teachers as mentors for student teachers. I attended part of one of her workshops a few weeks ago and can attest that the training she offers brings all of the best practices from American experience to English teachers in Montenegro. But Cindy is also realistic, and a bit pessimistic, about the state of education here.

Continue reading "Ulcinj" »

Posted by at 2:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

On March 4 I left my apartment in Niksic at 6 a.m. and tramped over snow-covered roads, with snow falling all around me, to catch the van at the hotel for the Podgorica airport. Eleven hours later I walked out of the Monastiraki metro station in Athens. I was fairly tired by then, but I did note that it felt warmer outside on Athinas Street than it had inside the Podgorica airport.

Carol and I had planned several weeks before to meet in Greece for spring break. It is carnivale time in Greece this weekend. During the week we saw signs of clowns everywhere, and even some clowns. We saw children gathering for a parade, the little boys dressed like cowboys and their mothers dressed like Indians in short Indian dresses and with pointed high heel boots. A glance at the calendar, however, will show that it is not really spring. "We say here that March is the cruelest month of winter," a pharmacist on Hydra told us. The bathing suit in my suitcase was the one piece of clothing I never used. And Carol ended up buying two different sweaters. But, with the exception of one very gray and rainy day, we had a mix of sun and clouds. True, we had some short showers on our drive along the southern coast of Attica to Delphi. And, it did almost turn into snow just as we reached Delphi. Still, we had nice enough weather on Aegina for Carol to convince me that we should rent a scooter for a mad dash from one end of the island to the other and back. Chilly, yes. But still a blast. From the perspective of winter in Pittsburgh, or in the mountains of Montenegro, the weather was nearly perfect.

Continue reading "Greece" »

Posted by at 1:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Clan 1: Prof. John Spurlock iz SAD-a, angazue se za saradnika-lektora za engleski jezik na Filozofskom fakultetu, a poslodavac se obavezuje da za izvrseni rad plati odgovarajucu nadoknadu.

Of everything that I"ve written about so far, I have said less about teaching than just about anything else I"ve done since arriving. So, as my epigraph I insert clause 1 of my contract just to demonstrate that I really do work here. (It lacks some of the markings that are used in the Latin alphabet in Serbia and Montenegro--I just haven't found the right ASCII characters yet.)

For a variety of reasons, I find it harder to offer any valuable ideas about teaching here than about other experiences. For one thing, I am not teaching what I would call a lot. I have two sections of one class, and these meet one day a week back to back. So, from 3:30 to 6:30 I'm presenting to my class. And then we do not see one another for seven days. But I think behind my hesitation is some kind of performance anxiety. I came here to teach, and after 25 years (and counting) it should be something that I do well. And the topic of the course--American Civilization--is so familiar to me that I have no trouble organizing lectures except that I have too much to say for the time provided. But if I'm going to say something about teaching American history it should be something profound.

Then again, maybe not. Let me follow the good example set by Pedablogue and simply talk about some of the class activities.

Continue reading "Teaching 1" »

Posted by at 7:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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.

Continue reading "Montenegrin Bus Ride" »

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.

Continue reading "European Educational Reform" »

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."

Continue reading "Podgorica 2: Cultural Differences" »

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.

Continue reading "Podgorica 1" »

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.

Continue reading "Talking the Talk" »

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.

Continue reading "No Problem" »

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.

Continue reading "Culture and Civilization II" »

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.

Continue reading "Downstairs" »

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

It"s 11 at night and I-m standing in the train station in Belgrade, Serbia. Twenty-four hours before I"d left Pittsburgh, and I"m conscious that I haven"t changed clothes since then, including my briefs and socks. The weather at the moment is below freezing, and I haven"t had more than a few broken hours of airplane sleep. It occurs to me I had visited Yugolsavia 30 years before, and that my train had wrecked and derailed. That was more comfortable than this.

Continue reading "Getting There" »

Posted by at 5:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)