Last night I gave the second half of a presentation on culture shock at the American Corner in Skopje, an information center, library, and all around awesome symbol of my country. The people there put huge amounts of effort into offering presentations, workshops, and materials to help people get jobs in the US, study in the US, or just learn more about the culture and language. I think it’s excellent soft diplomacy.

Anyway, the presentation was split between me and a Macedonian, Igor, who had studied in the US. He gave a general overview of culture shock, and then I related some of my particular experiences of it here in Macedonia. What was interesting is that some of the symptoms Igor cited where things I hadn’t even realized I’d been doing. In the discussion afterwards, some of the Macedonians who had lived abroad pointed out more things that resonated with my own experience. They also pointed out that it’s hard to understand just how pervasive and involuntary culture shock can be if you haven’t lived abroad yourself. I’m just going to run with that and list off some of things I’ve done or felt here that are probably part of culture shock.

• Excessive anger about minor inconveniences: I have more than once been inappropriately ornery at my roommate about fairly small things. Friends and family have also had to hear me rant with nearly sputtering rage about such matters as “they make you pay for ketchup!” or “cars park on the sidewalk!”
• Sudden intense feelings of loyalty to your own culture: I look forward to every Sunday when I go with the other Americans to one of the local expat bars and watch football. Here’s the thing: I hate football. I never watch it back in the States. For that matter, I don’t watch any sports back in the States. Here though, it somehow makes me feel more essentially American and less homesick. My roommate has pointed out that, even when I’m talking about distant American government functionaries or matters wholly unrelated to myself, I’ll say “we” instead of “they,” stressing a shared membership that he finds puzzling. It’s probably part of this symptom.
• Overeating or loss of appetite: Both, actually. Some days I forget to eat. Literally, I just forget about it. And then other times I’ll be ravenously and insatiably hungry the whole day.
• A need for excessive sleep: I’ve been fighting this one recently, because it started to get a bit ridiculous. No one needs ten hours of sleep daily.
• Feeling sick much of the time: I’ve already ended up in the hospital once, and that turned out to be a legitimate infection I needed treatment for, but I’d just ignored this one too because I’d had so many other random maladies that couldn’t be traced to anything specific before it. For example, one day I was feeling totally fine, if rather stressed out, the entire day. I came home, ate the exact same things I normally eat for dinner, got on the computer to do some work, and inexplicably started to feel queasy. That queasiness turned into an upset stomach so severe that I stayed up till five a.m. vomiting every twenty minutes. Then, magically, the upset stomach disappeared. I had no fever, no other complaints, I was suddenly the peak of health again (though still stresed). It was literally one day perfect, that night more violently ill than I’ve been in years, the next morning perfect. I suspect it was actually just a physical reaction to the culture shock stress, though I could be wrong.
• Exaggerated cleanliness: I actually don’t mind this so much, as I tend to like neat spaces, but am not very good at keeping things organized or clean under normal circumstances. Here though, I clean almost obsessively. It makes me feel like I’m taking back control over my personal space, after spending the whole day being off balance and constantly on my guard interacting in a foreign culture. For some reason, it hadn’t occurred to me that this sudden change in my cleanliness could be a product of culture shock.

These are just the things that I was surprised to hear associated with culture shock. The rest you’ve already probably read previously on this blog, if you’re a regular reader. The upside to all these downsides of being abroad is, when you have a good day, you have a really excellent day, as yesterday’s post testifies. It’s kind of like a high. Everything is new, everything is an adventure, and there’s no time to be bored.

That’s definitely worth it.

I usually post here when something strikes me as particularly weird or interesting in my experience. But I’m afraid that might give an overly negative impression of how I feel about Macedonia, since what surprises me in this country often frustrates me as well.

So, to put it briefly, I just want to make sure you know that I love this country. Absolutely love it. I’m having a no-holds-barred blast living here. Every day I meet fascinating people who broaden my perspective and give my mind an almost endless supply of new information to contemplate. I am extremely lucky in my circumstances and I’ve been given the chance to pursue my grandest, most fantastic ambitions with very few barriers left in the way. I am generally welcomed and respected by people here. Macedonian citizens often go out of their way to be kind to me and accommodate my needs and quirks. Americans and other English-speaking foreigners have welcomed me into their social circles and done their best to blunt the edge of the loneliness that comes along with living in a country distant from your home. Some days here I want to give up, go back to bed, and wait till tomorrow to try again, but the good days are nothing short of magnificent.

Deciding to study the Balkans and travel to Macedonia to do research is probably the best choice I’ve ever made.

Just so you know, when I gripe about some of the everyday petty stuff here, it’s just venting. It’s just an attempt to get it off my chest so I can get back to enjoying the hell out of my time here.

University classes here have taken some getting used to.

The initial hurdle was managing to find the classes at all. Organization at Ss. Kyril and Methodius seems haphazard at the best of times. Professors negotiate class times with students, with both locations and hours subject to change (sometimes multiple times) even weeks into the semester. Combine this with the language barrier and an infamiliarity with the various European university-specific terms for things roughly equivalent to ‘lectures,’ ‘labs,’ ’seminars,’ and ‘optional sessions’ and I found myself in the wrong place at the wrong time more than once.

Once I actually got to the classes, I encountered two extremes of teaching. One was simple dictation. The class remains dead silent while the professor lectures, or sometimes just reads from a book, and takes down his or her every word. There’s no participation involved. Students don’t seem to be able to clarify any points they missed or take any opportunities to test their understanding. Evaluation depends on reciting back what was dictated verbatim. It is, at the very least, dull.

The other extreme, which I’ve found both more informative and more frustrating, is an extremely open, collegial style. Professors interact with students like they were having a conversation. A loud conversation. A yelled conversation, really, since there are usually almost a dozen side conversations at nearly yelling volume going on at the same time. Students drift in and out of participation with the main lecture, often turning to their friends to start talking about something else. Occasionally, everyone’s engaged by a particular question, but this leads them to all yell out answers at the same time. Since Macedonians are not reticent about raising their voices, this can be nearly deafening. Professors have difficulty commanding everyone’s attention, and I’ve yet to experience a silent classroom. Turn-taking does not really occur.

All the chaos means that students sometimes show only nominal involvement with the proceedings. Almost no Macedonian ever shuts off his or her cellphone, whether in a meeting, at a concert, or at a lecture. And I’m already used to Macedonians interrupting any occasion to answer a cellphone. There does not seem to be a strong social pressure against this. Nonetheless, I was still aghast to see Macedonian students more than once not only let their cellphones go off loudly in class, but then answer them and start to hold a conversation. To be fair, with all the noise this doesn’t really make that much of a difference, but to me, that shows a serious lack of respect for the professor that I wouldn’t expect at the university level.

Some of my American friends here have pointed out to me that I may be seeing this from a rarified perspective. I went to strict Catholic schools for first through twelth grade and to a university famous for its dedication and rigour at the upper education level. I’m sure there are plenty of classrooms in the States where students answer their cellphones in the middle of a lecture too (or at least try to). But still, we are not talking about high school classes, where you’re still dealing with teenagers and all the social malfunction that implies, or lectures with several hundred people in them, where the professor might not even be able to see you. These classes I’m in tend toward twenty or thirty students, maximum.

I am reacting to limited data, it’s true. I’ve only attended three different classes. I don’t know what the teaching style is like outside the Philological Faculty (although I know that the conference paper presenting style of Macedonian professors in several different fields tends toward “Sit at the podium, read straight off your paper, and never ever make eye contact”). The status quo doesn’t seem to engender all that much rage or angst among either the professors or the students. And I certainly can’t generalize some of the disrespect or disinterest I’ve seen to all Macedonian students. There have been plenty of times when some student in the class has made an attempt to quiet the others in response to the professor’s frustration. The loud, boisterous quality of the discussions tends to marginalize girls in the classes, but it’s kind of cool to see such unrestrained disagreement. The loudest person wins out, but the professor still has the authority to correct wrong statements.

So it’s a dynamic whose complexities I’m coming to recognize. Still, I think a little more learning would go on if there was a little less fashion-magazine reading/food eating/conversation holding in the classroom. I’m rather stodgy about education. Get off my lawn!

The last few days for me has been a lot of paperpushing.

I’ve been applying to change the type of scholarship I receive from the Rotary Foundation to better reflect my actual situation here (which involves pitching my research project and a projected budget and getting various written assurances from advisers here in Macedonia) and I’ve been continuing the multi-month process of putting together graduate school and fellowship applications.

It’s kind of quaint, actually, to say that this is ‘paperpushing.’ There’s definitely paper involved (which has to be printed out, filled out, and scanned back in at an internet café to be sent in lieu of a working postal system here). But mostly everything is done over the computer now, filling in forms online and sending out automatic e-mails and payments to request the delivery of whatever documents are needed.

So ‘paperpushing’s not quite right, but ‘datapushing’ makes it sound too gee-whiz and techno. It’s still a grinding timesuck, albeit one that I’m willing to put up with. Even one that I can derive a small amount of satisfaction from. There’s a feeling of achievement in getting all of the bits of finicky detail and specialized essay-writing correct that I’d describe as akin to solving a puzzle. It’s the sort of work that I can actually feel exhausting my brain (for all its mindlessness), but I still kind of imagine myself winning a game.

Or at least keeping even. There’s no reason to be sure everything won’t come crashing down all around me in missed deadlines and typo-strewn forms and unsent documents. These are exactly the sorts of tasks that indulge my anxious, catastrophising side (which, it should be admitted, has been getting gradually worse). My beleagured friends will attest to how often they’ve had to tell me to just relax over stuff like this. They’re right, but I have to plead a certain amount of helplessness. I can shut up about the panicky worry, which is really what I should do more often, but it’s still there whether I talk about it or not.

Anyway, doing all this has been reacquainting me with some of my professors’ accomplishments in the process of getting their information for recommendations. It’s the sort of stuff that makes me almost nauseated with humbleness in comparison to them. Obviously, they’re all older than me, so they’ve had more time, but still, it’s daunting stuff! I mean, listen…

My professor Alan Yu, native language Cantonese, came to the US and documented an endangered American Indian language. Then he wrote a book about infixation. A whole book. Do you even know what infixation is? Yeah, that’s how much more he knows about it than you.

My professor Lenore Grenoble went out to Siberia to hang out with reindeer herders in order to study Tungusic languages in contact and survived Russian cuisine in the process. Then she tossed off a book on deixis.

My thesis advisor Victor survived a bleeding ulcer that would have killed him if he hadn’t passed out in front of his teacher’s door, going to class despite feeling terrible. At home, no one would have found him in time. He toasted that same teacher’s retirement ceremony with a poem written in English, Greek, Hebrew, Macedonian, Serbian, several varieties of Albanian, a couple of dialects of Turkish, Bosnian, Romani, Romanian, Gagauz, Vlah, Moldavian, Bulgarian and Old Church Slavonic.

I cannot imagine myself ever being as cool or as accomplished as these people. Seriously, I cannot. I’m not an objective observer, but from my perspective I feel like I’m just barely puttering along, getting almost nothing done and certainly nothing of any consequence. I’m having a great time, but the path from the level I feel myself to be at (haphazardly informed about linguistics, sort of okay at Macedonian, not at all okay at Albanian) to their level (made of awesome and triumph) is daunting as all hell.

But here’s the one good thing about seeing such an impossibly steep ascent: I want to be worth these professors’ time. If working harder, paying attention closer, doing more at least means that I’m not wasting their time and attention, then that’s good enough. That’s achievable. And the rest I can worry about later.

There are things you don’t realize you miss until they slap you in the face.

It doesn’t rain very much in Skopje. I think it’s rained three times total the three months I’ve been here, and never anything more than a drizzle. Macedonia in the summer and fall is a rather dry country. But yesterday there was a little precipitation, enough to annoy me since I never think about taking an umbrella when I go out.

Today, as I was walking home, I felt particularly good and I couldn’t put my finger on why. Then it hit me and I stopped stock still.

I’d missed the smell of grass and leaves and asphalt the day after a rain. It’s fresh, fertile, the smell that makes me think of growing things and a slow, careful, cautious, but determined drive toward life. It’s rare enough here that I’d forgotten what that smell was like, that it had been missing from my sensory realm. I hadn’t even realized I’d particularly liked that smell.

This country reacquaints me with such basic things.

Skopje is not a pretty city.

While I do think that Skopje is beautiful, it is definitely not pretty. Words that immediately spring to mind when I think of the cityscape: grey, blocky, concrete, polluted, bizarre, dirty, shambolic, hostile. The old Skopje was mostly destroyed in an earthquake in 1963 and redesigned by a Japanese architect according to Communist tastes (and budgetary constraints). Since Tokyo is also remarked upon as a particularly ugly city (and from experience there I can see the resemblence), this did not turn out well.

But there is oppressive, irritating ugliness, and then there is magnificent ugliness. Ugliness so unabashed you are helplessly charmed by it. Ugliness accomplished to perfection, executed with masterly percision and grace. Ugliness as it should be. That’s Skopje to me, ugliness so bad it’s good, but it’s hard to pick out any choice examples without showing you the whole city.

This place may give you a good idea of what I mean though.

Ss. Cyril and Methodius University

Jutting block towers, curiously placed archways, utter indifference to any sense of comfort or welcoming ambiance; this is the university.

It’s quite thematically coherent, actually. Each building is a unique variation on the same harsh theme. I guess crushing your will to live beneath the mighty hammer of Industry and Progress is one way to encourage a scholarly mindset.

The whole complex gives me the feeling that I’m living in a brutialist utopia of The Future! With concrete rocket ships powered by the Will of the Proletariat!

At the center is a courtyard that the faculties of law, economics, philology, philosophy, and the administrative center surround. There aren’t really any benches or anywhere to rest though. Just one big expanse of asphault and the occasional stray dog.

There’s a statue in the courtyard of St. Cyril and St. Methodius, the founders of Slavic literacy. They devised the Glagolithic alphabet for Old Church Slavonic (the Slavic equivalent to Latin) and used it to translate scripture and proselytize to the Moravians. Since they came from Thessaloniki, which at the time (and indeed up until the twentieth century) was a Slavic-speaking city, they’re considered an integral part of Macedonian national heritage and thus lend their names to the university. Ironically enough, St. Cyril and St. Methodius did not invent Cyrillic, the alphabet currently used in Macedonia and some other Slavic-speaking countries such as Russia. Rather, it was invented later (by who is still controversial) and named after St. Cyril in honor of his contributions.

This is the entrance to my faculty, the philological faculty “Blaže Koneski” (who was the codifier and standardizer of the modern Macedonian language).

When you come into the atrium, you’re immediately greeted by a big staircase and more tubular concrete fantasmagory.

They try to spruce it up with some plants, which probably die off rather quickly from all the lingering cigarette smoke. During busier hours of the day, those perches are packed with smoking students. No smoking signs are all over the place, incidentally. I once saw a janitor feebly demand two students put out their cigarettes. The only response he got was eye rolling and more vigorous smoking.

There’s a café where the students gather to cluster around tables, smoke some more, drink coffee and eat fast food. Like in almost every restaurant and café in Macedonia, the staff comes to you to take your order. But there’s a healthy dose of surliness with the service to keep it student-budget appropriate. There’s also a slightly cushier, closed-in faculty section I’ve been invited into to talk with professors (making me stand out as the only student in the area). Walking into there is like walking into a fog of smoke. It makes the rest of the atrium look like a poster picture for the beauties of smoke-free public spaces in comparison.

This is the philosophy faculty’s student registration center (each faculty has its own registration). In Macedonian, studentski prašanja. For some reason both the philosophical and the philological faculties’ student registration centers are extremely fancy. It’s disconcerting to have a regal oak door in the middle of a run-down, concrete atrium.

There’s an upstairs with more seats and always plenty of bustle, since this is where a lot of the faculty members have their offices. Students are generally in a panic trying to hunt down professors to ask questions. Professors lock their doors and the main faculty office is behind a passcode to keep themselves from being bothered. To be fair to the professors, students seem to have no qualms about barging in on conversations or office hours to interrupt everything with their question, so it makes some sense to keep doors locked. Professors even have to lock the doors to classrooms to keep students from walking in twenty, thirty, or even forty-five minutes late without a hint of contrition. But it means there’s always a mass rush for the professor when he or she leaves the office/classroom.

It’s not unusual to have a bunch of reproductions of statues from antiquity scattered around government buildings. This is part of the propaganda warfare with Greece. The state university is just another division of the government, so your requisite statues make their appearance.

So ugly it’s beautiful. Gods bless Skopje.

I figured I’d show you two places I regularly visit here in Skopje. They’re visual opposites of one another. One is homey and organic and intimate and sort of floppy, falling apart at the seams. The other is official and industrial and depersonalized and rigid, built to endure through bombings. They’re highly flawed places and I’d expect plenty of Americans to be put off by either. But I enjoy spending time at both.

New Age Café

From the street it looks like you’re entering through the gate of some kind of small farmhouse. The sign is an old school wooden one, the type that hangs from inns in fantasy stories, with an all-seeing Freemason eye like the one on American currency.

The first you notice coming in is the pond. Yes. The pond.

There are trees growing from it and little decks, almost like tree houses, sitting atop the water that you reach by plank paths. Teenagers like to gather on the cushions and smoke. Interestingly, the spots are popular with both Macedonian and Albanian speaking groups. Usually I hear only one language or the other at any given café.

This is one of the two geese, who waddle around and squawk with annoyance every once and awhile. They’re mean little rascals and they’ll hiss if you come near them. Since they have a persistent habit of putting themselves in people’s way, this happens often. They’ll charge you, threatening to bite, but if you aim a kick at them they’ll back off, shrieking unhappily but otherwise leaving you alone. They also defecate all over everything when they get the chance.

This place could never exist in the US. Any American health inspector would shut it down so fast you wouldn’t even be able to read the closing notice on account of the sputtering, incoherent outrage of his handwriting. That’s sort of why I love it.

It has neat little nooks and crannies that you can snuggle yourself into.

The furnishings are actually rather cushy, in a disheveled sort of way. The inside is even cushier, but it’s dark and smoky and difficult to photograph, so you’ll just have to imagine the same sort of arrangement, but in dim light and surrounded by hipppy knick-knacks and alchemical bottles.

Most of all, I like New Age because they serve Turkish coffee. Most café waiters will react with unconcealed horror if you try to order a Turkish coffee. How could you stoop so low as to imply that they would serve such premodern, stupid village stuff? Are you implying that they’re not sufficiently European? How dare you! Look at the sophisticated furnishings–straight from Denmark! And listen, they’re in tune with the tastes of the times and are playing that rocking new Kate Perry hit, the one about the hot lesbian make-out. Turkish coffee… for goodness sakes! Wouldn’t you prefer a nice macchiato or, better yet, a Nescafé™?

As it turns out, I really don’t like coffee-flavored, sugary milk concoctions and I absolutely detest Nescafé, so the answer is no. I usually just get an espresso. But what I really want is a Turkish coffee, which New Age has in abundance. Or alcohol, if that’s your fancy. But no cappucinos, macchiatos or americanos… that would ruin the vibe, mean. It’s all about the good vibrations.

Good vibrations I’m sadly insensitive to, but quirky decor, some fantastical grunginess, and good Turkish coffee is an easy way to my heart.

Hey, so have you wanted to post a comment and found that you couldn’t?

This is because I’m kind of an idiot, and despite having multiple people note to me that they’d tried to post a comment and couldn’t figure out how to do it, I never checked what the site was like when I was logged out of ‘admin.’ My bad. Sorry guys.

As it turns out, it was impossible to post a comment, because the settings I accidentally chose required you to register AND disabled new user registration. Thus zero comments.

This has been fixed. No registration needed. If you’d like to comment, please do!

Americans, at least lefty Americans like me, tend to be allergic to government-sponsored propaganda. That the government would be spending money to influence opinion abroad is accepted as a necessity of foreign policy, but that the government might be explicitly advertising a certain position, using public money, is viewed with more suspicion. Not that such propaganda doesn’t happen in the US. From the fairly accepted, such as public school curricula, to the unsettlingly explicit, such as the “Mission Accomplished” debacle, the American government sponsors forms of propoganda intended to forward a certain view of itself among the citzenry. But what the government does not do, as far as I’m aware, is buy billboard advertisements for anything other than military recruition or emergency preparedness.

So it is unfamiliar for me to see government-sponsored propaganda on billboards here in Macedonia. But what makes it weirder is that I cannot, for the life of me, figure out what it is the Macedonian government is trying to propagate.

A series of advertisements with the catchphrase “Free your heart!” (Oslobodi go srceto!) have appeared all over the city. At least one of them kind of makes sense, but the other two begger reason. What exactly is the government trying to tell its citizens to do here?

Free your heart by drinking coffee and eating fruit with your family! Sponsored by the government of Macedonia, which thinks you don’t get enough vitamin C in your diet.

Free your heart by making out with people in the park. If you lack a make-out partner, maintain the aura of romance by spreading your arms and yelling “I’m flying, Jack!” Sponsored by the government of Macedonia, which is totally down with kids making out in the park as long as it’s heterosexual.

Free your heart by participating in preppy/metalhead/thug friendship societies and playing rock-paper-scissors. Sponsored by the government of Macedonia, which respects its citizens’ fondness for Metallica AND fussy private school uniforms AND keeping it stupid fresh, yo.

I’m afraid I’ve been somewhat delinquent in keeping this blog updated. Which is unfortunate, because it’s been a rather crazy two weeks worth a retelling, but precisely the craziness prevented me from doing so.

To summarize: I climbed a mountain with some friends, started my classes at the university, attended a Rotary Club meeting and finally found myself an academic advisor, got very sick, was taken to the hospital, and got better.

The hospital visit deserves at least some details.

Fortunately, I had just left my thesis advisor’s apartment when it become clear I needed to see a doctor. He, his friend, and his wife drove me to the state hospital and were extremely kind and helpful. I do not want to unfairly malign Macedonia here, because I got quick and totally adequate care, but that hospital was not someplace I wanted to stay any longer than I needed to. The bed sheets were stained and torn, there were bugs on the ceiling, everywhere things were crumbling and falling apart. The doctors and nurses themselves had some stains on their scrubs and very, very worn wicker crocs on their feet. In the bed next to mine there was a prematurely-aged, very sick looking woman in village dress that probably hasn’t changed since the last century. She was wrapped in a sheet, like a corpse. She moaned occasionally. I’ve rarely been so thankful for something as I was for the verdict that I didn’t have to stay the night.

The place was clean (my thesis advisor tells me it’s vastly improved over many years ago when he last visited there) and I would’ve been much worse off if I hadn’t had somewhere to go. Again, the doctors were totally fine as far as I could tell. They seemed about as nervous as I was about the situation. I didn’t let them know I spoke Macedonian at first (if something horrible was wrong with me, I wanted to hear them say so honestly thinking I couldn’t understand them), and they were talking about how awkward the situation was since I was an American. My advisor had made a point of telling them I was a Fulbright student, so they were worried the Unholy Wrath of the American Embassy would descend on them if something went wrong. Funny that both they and I were nervous about the exact same thing: what’s going to happen with this foreigner in front of me?

The consensus (a higher ranking professor needed to see me again this morning to make sure) is that I have a bacterial infection. It is extremely painful, but not particularly dangerous since it was caught fairly early. I’m on rounds of antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, and painkillers and they’re doing the job. While until Sunday I was living more or less from each round of painkiller and anti-inflammatory pills to the next, with periods in the middle where I was partially functional again, I’m much better now. If I was going to get ill here, better acute but relatively harmless pain rather than something painless but life-threatening.

Living in Macedonia has been a rollercoaster of phenomenal days and catastrophic days so far. Going by that, I’m looking forward to about a week’s worth of well-earned utter awesomeness on the horizon.

And now, hopefully, more regular updates as events proceed.