Weird

An official question on the Macedonian driving test: what do you do when you’re leaving a village by car and about to enter a highway?

Answer: Stop and clean your tires.

Yes, we know that’s weird, here’s why: in all likelihood you have cow shit on your tires. It’s slick stuff, and if you deposit it on the highway, it might cause an accident.

Also, did you know all Macedonians have to learn CPR before they’re allowed to drive?

Americans would revolt. There’d be guillotines on mainstreet and DMV employees lined up around the block for execution. We wouldn’t want people being able to provide emergency aid in case of an accident; that’s socialism.

Every time I run into my landlord, he asks whether I’m eating enough soup and suggests I eat more soup.

Every time.

He says it’s good for my digestion. As is tea, which he wants me to drink every morning.

He is very concerned about my digestion.

“Soup! Soup!” he said raising up his hands and fixing me with a fevered gaze and it struck me that all Macedonian old men sound exactly alike.

I’m going to have a nightmare about hordes of men in identical tweedy flat caps chasing me through the streets as they yell inquiries about my soup-eating habits.

Penny Arcade, an American gamer comic I’ve read since the early Aughts even though I’m not much of a gamer anymore, threw in a random gypsy reference in today’s strip.

It plays to stereotype, but a lot of humor does without necessarily endorsing those stereotypes. I think it’s harmless and amusing if you like PA’s non-sequitur style. But I was actually more amused by what they chose to name the Mystic Crystal Spirit: Madame Romani.

Romani is the name of the Roma language in most dialects, but it’s actually an original adjective rendered as a noun (which is called substantivization). The full phrase is i romani čhib, “the Roma tongue.” Like Spanish or French, Romani has two genders, masculine and feminine. Čhib is a feminine noun, so the adjective takes the feminine nominative case agreement marker -i. If it was a masculine noun, like studenti in the particular dialect I’ve been looking at, the form would be o romano studenti, the Roma student.

This is all to say that Romani basically means “feminine Roma something,” with the something assumed to be čhib when you’re talking about the language.

Thus in the PA comic, they basically called the mystic crystal spirit Madame Feminine Roma Something. It’d be like introducing an American character as “Mr. American.”

I’m sure they just picked some word off the internet and went with it. Even if you know anything about the adjective, the absurdity plays well into the comic in any case, thus my amusement. Even better would have been if they’d picked the word romni, which means specifically a Roma woman.

Madame Woman, noooooo!

A woman began beating her husband, and he somehow got away and hid under the bed.

–Come out from there - his wife screamed at him
–No, I won’t!
–You will, come out, I’m gonna break all your bones!
–Woman, as long as a man’s heart still beats in my breast, I’m not gonna budge from here!

Почнала жената да го тепа својот маж, а тој се оттргнал некако и се скрил под кревет.

–Излегувај оттаму - му свикала жената
–Не, нема да излезам!
–Море, излегувај, оти коските ќе ти ги скршам!
–Е жено, жено. Дури чука во мено машко срце, нема да мрднам одовде!

Oh dear Lord, Macedonia, can you please just do this one thing for me?

Pleasepleaseplease?

Don’t install a 100ft high statue of Alexander the Great that blares Toše Proeski songs in the central square.

C’mon guys. Do me a solid.

I use Skype to call my friends and family pretty often. Video chat between two Skype clients is free (which keeps my parents comfy with having their son in a country with otherwise poor infrastructure), but calling to a landline or a cellphone costs money. Before I came to Macedonia, I set up Skype to automatically refill my account from my debit card whenever my credits were drained low enough.

For unknown reasons, Skype cancelled my automatic payment plan in September. When I tried to set it up again, I found that the website no longer allowed me to pay with my American debit card. With any debit or credit card, actually. But I happened to be travelling to Prague very shortly afterward, and when I tried again in Prague I found that option had opened up again, so I set up automatic payment again and didn’t think much more of it.

A couple days ago, Skype cancelled the plan again. The faceless will of the coprorate world is not for the comprehension of mere mortals like me, so I still don’t know why. With no trips abroad on the agenda for the time being, I could only look in more detail into the payment options Skype was offering me.

Basically, they wanted either a direct bank transfer, which takes several days to process and costs me a rather steep fee through my bank, or they wanted me to use an external service called Moneybookers to pay.

Trying to register and verify my debit card through Moneybookers was a migraine in the making. They wanted to send a physical letter to the physical address of my physical parents to which they would have to physically reply in order to confirm that, yes, I do have a debit card for an American bank account and, yes, I do want to pay with it. They also wanted to send an SMS to an American cellphone number and receive a reply before they would let me start using my debit card with them, which is ludicrous security overcompensation. Think about it: if I’m a wily and untrustworthy Macedonian (you know they all are!) who’s managed to steal a poor, unwitting American’s debit card and I have an operation going to intercept his mail in Wisconsin, getting an American cellphone number is probably not going to be insurmountable burden for me, yes?

So I’m annoyed with all of these inconveniences that Skype is putting in my way. And I figure it must be purely because I’m connecting to the website from a Macedonian IP address, which is getting me all riled up on Macedonia’s behalf. What, Macedonian money isn’t good enough for you? Prim and proper Estonia will have nothing to do with European countries without the good fortune to be located right next to Finland? Being in the EU means you don’t have to deal with the rabble, huh? Already forgotten how hard it is to recover from having been colonized by a huge neighbor, huh?! YOU PROBABLY HAVE MY IP ADDRESS LABELED UNDER “FYROM” TOO, DON’T YOU?!?!

After I stopped venting my spleen, I thought about it a little bit. If the only reason Skype was preventing me from paying was that I was connecting to the website from a blacklisted country, then all I needed to do was change the country I was connecting from. The magnificent thing about the internet is that it is (to an extent) geographically unbounded. I don’t actually have to leave Macedonia to connect from outside Macedonia. All I have to do is route my connection through somewhere else before it reaches Skype. Somewhere more ‘acceptable.’

So with a little tinkering, I got a proxy connection set up through The Tor Project, which provides free clients for anonymizing your internet connection. My proxy routed me through Germany. I tried connecting to Skype again and found that it, indeed, thought I was connecting from Hamburg. This meant that the website was presented to me in German, but I read German, so that’s okay. I navigated to my account, requested to add money, and–lo and behold–I’m now allowed to use my debit card again. Type in the number, type in the verification code, select the expiration date, and danke schön, bitte kommen Sie wieder.

So now my Skype is working again and I am content. I find it blackly humorous, though, that I need to bamboozle Skype just so that they’ll let me give them my money.

For the last month and a half I’ve been practicing for a play. A director here in Macedonia every year writes a British pantomime (an old theater tradition that involves a lot of audience participation, cartoony humor, and crossdressing). All of the actors and technicians volunteered and the proceeds from the ticket sales went to an orphanage. It’s going to take multiple posts to describe all the craziness that accompanied this project (a riot of ten-year-olds, a staple stabbing someone’s foot, me the imaginary thief having to guard props against real thieves, for a taste). For the moment though, I’ll just post a clip of one my scenes:

Amusing incident as a bar was closing up last night.

I was talking to my friend Sneška in English and a girl I have seen previously at this bar and a few other places, but don’t remember being directly introduced to walked by us. She suddenly stopped, leaned in close to Sneška, and said in Macedonian, “The guy’s lying, he can speak Macedonian!”

Assumedly she thought I had pretended I spoke no Macedonian so I could talk to Sneška in English. I guess she heard me speaking Macedonian on some other occasion. The reason I speak to Sneška in English is actually because she speaks absolutely fluent, beautiful American English and my Macedonian is an embarrassment in comparison. She insists that I’m downplaying my ability in the language way too much, but when I still can’t understand anything more than theme of a Macedonian conversation between people my age, and Sneška has not once failed to pick up on even my obscure slang and idioms in English, I’d say there’s a long way for me to go.

I will get to Sneška’s level in English eventually. It’s just going to be a slow, awkward road. In the meantime though, the compliment from Bar Girl, though odd, is appreciated!

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.

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 was stepping out onto the balcony of my apartment so I could take a call from my boyfriend without bothering my roommate, but I had to interrupt him in the middle of the conversation to narrate something rather peculiar.

There’s a set of benches across the street from my apartment. They’re occupied all hours of day and night, as Macedonians tend to make a lot more use of parks, greens, and places to sit in them than Americans do. This is probably because the Macedonians seem to put a lot more value in meeting with friends to chat, usually in public places or cafés. Not that Americans don’t do this, it just seems to be more spontaneous and frequent among all ages of Macedonians. There’s a Turkish word for it: muabet. Shooting the breeze, but with a sense of mutual enjoyment and pleasure rather than the vague boredom and discomfort that seems to hover over most ‘idle chit-chat’ that wasn’t previously penciled into our planners beforehand among us Americans.

So anyway, the benches were occupied as usual, except one man was sitting alone, obviously too busy to be making muabet at that moment because he was setting a fire. I do not mean a little slip of burning paper—I mean a campfire fire. A fire that looked like it might get larger than a campfire and catch to the very bench he was sitting on if he kept stoking it with whatever it is he had. This was both unusual and glaringly obvious even from my balcony, since it was dark. Fires tend to be kind of visible in the dark.

So it was funny that I seemed to be the only person paying attention to this. His neighboring bench buddies certainly weren’t perturbed. They weren’t even looking. They just chatted away with occasional hand gestures and some laughing, totally comfortable with the fire being set a few feet away from them. The people in the café nearby didn’t seem particularly flustered either. Not even any staring. Not even any stiff attempts not to stare as everyone keeps quiet and stews awkwardly in the collective discomfort. Fire-setting man and his barely disguised hostility toward benches not being consumed in flames was obviously not pressing enough to warrant anyone’s attention except mine.

Finally, a policeman came along on a motorcycle and I figured all would be right with the world again. Mr. Policeman and Mr. Pyro would have a chat that would probably end with the latter in handcuffs, ranting about the unrecognized threat of sinister benches needing his cleansing fire. The policeman stopped his motorcycle at the corner, took his helmet off, proceeded to turn his back to the man setting the fire and leaned against the motorcycle while crossing his arms and watching the traffic impassively. And now I was beginning to wonder whether I’d been scarfing some dodgy ajvar or something.

Fortunately for the poor bench being put to the stake, the man seems to have run out of lighter fluid or something, because the fire started to die down and then went out as quickly as it had started. Fiery bench death apparently not being his main aim, he got up and walked away, carrying whatever explanation there was for this incident with him and leaving my poor sense of normality in cinders instead.