soup!

May 12, 2009 in Weird | No comments

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.

girls fill out prescriptions for the tricks
to keep their hearts from growing

Tags: soup!

about the blog

If you’re looking to study the Balkan Sprachbund, a set of unrelated languages that share fascinating similarities with one another due to prolonged multilingualism under the Ottoman Empire, then you need to head for the Republic of Macedonia, which retains a rich linguistic and cultural diversity that has almost died out in the rest of the Balkans. My research brought me here. But everything else is what’s making it memorable.

Macedonia is a jagged, frustrating, pristine, decrepit, pragmatic, fantastical, brain-bendingly beautiful place. It exists in the borderlands between several sovereignties and spheres of influence, but it is distinct and independent. It often feels clumsily cobbled together, but its history is ancient, complex, and sometimes startling in its continuity. Nothing goes smoothly, but the jolts and bumps remind me I’m along for a ride. Macedonia is polysemic. And polysemy is where I feel most at home.