Surprises

Skopje is more crowded! With people and statues!

Goce Delčev! is on a horse!

New buildings! Mostly banks but who cares they’re shiny!

Macedonian is such a beautiful language! I love getting back into it!

Ajvar is still delicious!

VIP has completely taken over the country!

VMRO shut down the entire city center for a party party OMG what!

I am caffeinated!

More soon!

Spring is here.

In related news, yesterday I saw six ants scuttling around the apartment. Today, there are eleventy billion of them. On my toothpaste tube.

AWESOME.

While there are many things to worry about living in Skopje, crime is not one of them.

In terms of muggings, murders, assaults, burgleries, and car theft, Balkan cities are actually safer than Western European cities, to say nothing of an American city like Chicago or Los Angeles. American friends of mine here, male and female, are quite accustomed to walking home very late at night (sometimes only to save as little as two dollars on taxi fare). No one hassles you. As of yet, I’ve never heard of a mugging.

Which is not to say that no one worries about late night walks at all. Ethnic Macedonians are often horrified by the idea of going to ethnic Albanian neighborhoods late at night, a reluctance that they’ll frame in terms of fear of crime. I haven’t yet heard ethnic Albanians express the same fear about the Macedonian-majority areas of the city, so I don’t know whether this goes in the opposite direction too. I haven’t had problems anywhere in the city, no matter the ethnic makeup. Women still restrict their range of movement moreso than men, both for culturally specific reasons (women do not go into Albanian/Turkish tea houses, for example), and for sadly universal reasons (women have told me that they fear that if they are cornered in an isolated area, they will be sexually harrassed or raped). That is no different than in the US, though. And for me personally, as a man, these are not things I think about much, except to consider the social progress we still have to make before men and women can truly said to have equal rights and opportunities.

Here’s one small, but salient worry that I do face: wild dogs. There are an enormous number of stray dogs in Skopje. Most of them are harmless, pathetic even. They will cower when you approach. Many Macedonians look at stray dogs as bigger versions of street rats and treat them with the same disdain and disgust. This angers many of my American friends here, but speaking honestly, I can understand how the attitude has come about.

One night in November, around 1am, I was walking home from a bar. I planned to take the same shortcut through a building’s elevated parking lot that I always took, the easiest way to ascend the hill up to my old apartment. But as I climbed the on-ramp, I noticed a group of five or so dogs trotting up the other side of the lot. I stopped when I saw them. For a moment, they paused too.

Then, in perfect unison, they all took off toward me at top speed, barking furiously. It was extraordinary how quickly and collectively the hostility was switched on. I turned and ran.

I’ve never seen a pack of dogs do this in the daylight, when there are other people around. But the isolation of the city at night, and their power as a group, must have emboldened them. Running at full speed, I managed to reach a main road with a little trickle of traffic. I crossed it, hoping the cars would slow the dogs down, and they did indeed stop on the other side of the road, barking and snarling. I walked far around them and didn’t encounter any more incidents that night, but I was angry that I had been made to run by a bunch of mutts and shaken by the thought of what might have happened had I been further into the empty parking lot when I saw them. They could have caught up with me before I reached the main road.

After this incident, and a few others with individual dogs, I’ve taken to being more cautious about the routes I take home late at night. I use about the same caution as I did in Chicago, actually, though the danger inspiring it is different. I’ve also stopped looking at stray dogs with pity. More like annoyance and anger. That is certainly no justification for abusive behavior towards them, which I would never do. It also doesn’t mean I don’t think they deserve better treatment. They are animals trapped between an ancient inheritance of social instincts oriented toward human attention and an even more ancient inheritance of hunting and territorial instincts. Humans, as a species, created dogs through selective breeding, and we have a responsibility toward them. Spaying and neutering programs have only just been started in Macedonia, mostly through the efforts of a single volunteer veterinarian and a Peace Corps member here who threw himself into the project.

But it will be some time before Macedonia is wealthy enough to spare money for humane stray animal management. And I understand why it’s rare to hear Macedonians express any goodwill toward the dogs. Under the wrong circumstances, they are dangerous.

Macedonia enforces copyright laws only in theory.

While companies that pay regular tax can’t go about using trademarked imagery or producing copied versions of major films, there’s a bustling streetside trade in DVDs. I can watch a new movie soon after it comes out in the States just by heading to the old city and perusing the cardtables set up everywhere along the road until I find a vendor selling that particular one. All the DVDs are packaged in double or quadruple sets, usually tacking an old or unpopular movie to a blockbuster. Prices are cheap–two dollars to four dollars a package. Quality’s shoddy, but occasionally you run into a very clean rip from a domestic-market DVD. Subtitles sometimes show up in Spanish or Mandarin or Serbian, but almost never Macedonian.

I think international copyright law is broken and abused by large corporations to stifle innovation and protect themselves from competition. The benefits for a few industries outweigh the damage done to the public in general. When film and music executives whine that profit from entertainment work will evaporate if the government doesn’t deploy its monopoly on the use of violence to protect them from technological change, I hear them lying to cover for a fat and greedy status quo. I am not beating my chest and rending my shirt in agony from seeing their movies sold here without any profit going back to them. As far as I’m concerned, good for the street vendors. I am not an American government official and I do not need to parrot the official line lest I get showered with an arrowstorm of angry criticism from corporate-backed Congressional representatives.

But here is one thing about the laissez faire market for movies that troubles me. Yesterday, while I was with an Albanian friend of mine searching the market for a particular game, I noticed that alongside the American movies and Balkan music video compilations, a vendor was selling several DVDs that advertised their contents as dog fights on home video. They were named things like “Russian Dog Fights!” or “Turkish Dog Fights!” or “Warehouse Dog Fights, Vol. 3!”

That is sick. I am not a vegitarian or a vegan and I do not think animals should be accorded the same rights as human beings, but a minimum of humane treatment has to be maintained. The only reason why you would buy DVDs like those would be to enjoy the spectacle of creatures violently injuring and killing one another. There’s no instructive value. There’s not even a gambling value. It’s brutalising for the sake of brutilisation.

I feel similarly about torture porn movies like the Saw series or the Hostel series, by the way, but at least those are fantasies. Everyone there is an actor. No one is hurt. While I worry about what effect the enjoyment of brutalisation has on a person’s sense of empathy, I also think that censorship is a disproportionate and ineffective response. The vast majority of people will not do something horrible under the encouragement of torture porn movies. For that handful of people who are emboldened by them, they need to be held personally responsible for their actions, not treated as ‘victims.’ Human willpower is stronger than a flickering sound and light box. If you are so deranged in character that all it takes is a movie to push you (helplessly!) into murdering people, you have a responsibility to check yourself into a psychiatric ward, or you deserve a permanent prison sentence.

I guess the clientele who buy dog fight movies here probably won’t do anything horrible that they wouldn’t have if such movies were unavailable either. But unlike actors, the dogs have no choice. And unless there’s vast sums of special effects money going into the grainy black market home video market that I’m unaware of, the blood is real too.

The ability to buy those DVDs easily and cheaply, on the way home from buying groceries, goes hand-in-hand with the institutional tolerance for copyright violation. While I’m not bothered, I’d even say I’m glad to see the latter, it gives me something to think about that the former comes with it.

I visited a Macedonian friend of mine in the hospital today, the same hospital I was in one night for an infection. He fell and broke his tailbone while I was in the US and I found out when I got back. The poor guy is completely laid-out. He can’t move. No paralysis, thank gods, but they don’t know yet whether they’re going to have to operate or not, and until then he has to stay in the trauma ward of the state hospital.

I wasn’t keen to go back there, on account of my less than pleasant experience last time (no fault of the doctors or nurses–the place is just creepy), but I wanted to relieve P’s boredom and help out any way I could, so I just had to man up. I thought it would take me a while to find him. The place is a labyrinth. Hallways shrink and expand unpredictably, there are turns at random, signs are haphazard and ad hoc. Luckily though I know how to ask for what I’m looking for now and he was on the first floor, so I reached his room without any headaches. The staff just let me walk in without signing or checking at a front desk.

He was sharing a room with four other patients, the lot of them with broken limbs. He was glad to see me and we talked for about a half hour, though I had some trouble understanding his Macedonian because he was speaking gruff on account of the pain. The other patients would occasionally interrupt to ask me to do something for them–to close a window or to get fill a cup with water or to get the nurse. P looked cared for, though not in the best of states. It’s the holes in the linens that get to me. Obviously having a few holes in the bedsheets is not going to compromise your health, but I take it as a token of an unhygenic state. The hygiene that’s vital to a patient’s health in a hospital, though, can’t be seen. For all I know, the state hospital here in Macedonia is cleaner than some American hospitals in regards to the bacterial and viral hygiene that matters. After all, nobody here is dying of salmonella poisoning due to gross failure of the regulatory authorities.

In any case, while I’ve got a rather unpleasant cold right now (too much time on airplanes this past week), I can be grateful I haven’t got it as bad as P. When I left, it was especially nice to walk in the spring sunshine. For now, I can do that anytime I want.

On a completely different note and to end with some better news, I finished my graduate school interviews last week. I was accepted to UCSB, Stanford (provisionally), and Berkeley for their linguistics programs. After visiting all three programs and I decided to go to Berkeley, but there was some added excitement at the last moment when I found out that Berkeley’s department had nominated me for a university-wide funding competition. Winners receive a five-year scholarship and work/study package from the Graduate Division and I had won. So not only will I get to work with students and professors who share my passion and peculiar interests in linguistics, but I’ll also be able to do so without worrying about how I’m going to pay tuition and living expenses. Without the help of my thesis advisor Prof. Victor Friedman and other professors both here in Macedonia and at the University of Chicago, I never would have been able to get this far, so I’m extremely grateful to them.

Though my disapproval of climates that don’t receive at least a few feet of snow a year is well-known, I’m still looking forward to exploring the Bay Area.

Not till I finish what I came here to do first though!

Last night I learned that there is an epidemic of mumps going around the teenagers of Skopje. Mumps is one of a set of illnesses I think of as banished to the past, ancient infectious irrelevances like polio, rubella, and smallpox. But that conception is totally dependent on ongoing vaccination programs. Unfortunately, Macedonia’s current situation with mumps is an example of what happens when vaccination is disrupted.

Vaccination against mumps was uncommon for people who are now over the age of 40, but for people younger than that, it was provided Yugoslavia-wide. An advantage of the socialist system for Macedonia was the standard of health care, which has declined in efficiency, efficacy, and availability since the fall of Communism. While the gains from the end to a centralized, state-planned economy and the suppression of civil rights that accompany it are well known, it is simply ignorant to say that everything improved once the system was dismantled. Vaccination, for example, was disrupted. Children who are now teenagers to twenty-somethings no longer were born under an institutional framework that could provide widespread vaccination.

As a result, mumps is now a live illness in Skopje. Even worse, it’s spreading among teenagers. Mumps is one of those illnesses, like the most virulent strains of influenza, that are actually more severe among people at the peak of their health. It is much worse to catch mumps as a teenager than as a child. While this is not a fatal health crisis by any means, it is highly unpleasant and serves as an example of the importance of vaccination. There are some people in the United States who advocate against vaccination or refuse to let their children be vaccinated, but ask a Skopjanec who can’t swallow and remains bed ridden with inflammation what his feelings are about an end to vaccination programs. I don’t think you have to guess how he’ll respond.

J finished Peace Corps, returned home for the corporate job he’d been planning all along, discovered that corporate jobs revolted him, and came back to teach English and marry his Macedonian girlfriend.

E finished Fulbright, made a bureaucratically mandidated round-trip from Skopje to the US to the Ukraine to take on her new job there, had it come out as a wash and decided to come back to Skopje.

B wrapped up his job with the university by nailing a major project and set off for his plum position in the US with a résumé weighty enough to bludgeon someone with. Where is he now? Skopje. Teaching English.

C finished the training course, said goodbye to this tiny country he’d randomly ended up in, and then said hello again after a couple of months. Macedonian girlfriend again involved.

S is now admitting to me that he’s planning to extend his Fulbright officially over the summer, and then extend again unofficially and get a job somewhere in Macedonia. “I mean really, I go back, and then what? I’ll submit a job application and they’ll be like, ‘Gee, you know, we’re firing thousands people just like every single one of our competitors and every other firm in every other industry, but you just seem so clean and nice, we’re gonna make an exception’?”

I expect M to be announcing a return any month now, the way things are going.

See, it’s very clever. Macedonia looks like just a small, beleagured, somewhat run-down country, but it is actually a magnificently engineered American Capture Device. Macedonians’ insistence that they have no idea why you would have come to their country voluntarily is merely a clever feint to lure you in.

Good thing I was forewarned.

People in Skopje ask me directions. I don’t know why.

Plenty of people know I’m foreign just by looking at me. Actually, recently some people have told me I could pass for a Macedonian. And people only ask where I’m from originally after the first few sentences I say now, rather than before I even get the words out of mouth. But it only takes half a dozen words to hear my accent and half a dozen more to hear a grammatical mistake, so I’m still easily identified as a foreigner.

Still, people ask me for directions here far more often than they ever did in Chicago. My professor guesses that it’s because I look young and friendly and open, as he described it. Macedonians don’t smile as much as Americans and adopt a harsher look on the street than you usually see on Main Street (though certainly no harsher than New York or downtown Chicago), so maybe it’s my Americanness. Or maybe it’s just me. In any case, people seek me out from a crowd to ask where to go.

The difference these days has been that I can actually answer their questions a lot of the time.

Today I felt almost like a true-blue Skopjanec for being able to tell an elderly man where the former bus station is. Whenever you say ‘bus station’ here, people ask “old one or new one?” The old bus station is long gone, torn down and being replaced by new buildings, but minibuses and taxis still set out from the same location. There are no signs to point it out, so you have to have lived here to know how to find it. Fortunately, it’s located next to conveniently famous landmarks, the Stone Bridge and the Ploštad, so it’s easy to direct people to.

So I did. And felt that slight smugness of knowing that, for the moment, this is not some place I’m visiting. This is where I live.

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!

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.

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.