return to the conflict zone

It has been nearly a year, but I’m back in the Balkans.

The last post I made to this blog spurred the greatest number of comments from readers I didn’t know personally of anything I wrote all year. I was angry at the treatment of my thesis adviser and it came through in my writing. Even though I’d already arrived back in the United States, I was still invested in one of the dozens of national conflicts that still rage across this region.

I was so invested, in fact, that it felt as though I was bringing the Balkans with me back to the US. The very first day I got back, my parents came to meet me in Chicago and within minutes of us sitting down at a restaurant, I realized our server was Albanian, started a conversation with him in Albanian, had another Albanian coworker of his come over, and promptly got into a heated argument with them about language issues in the Balkans. My parents had to intervene and beg the men to drop the issue so they could talk with their son for the first time in a year.

I remember my Dad asked me, “Is this what it was like in Macedonia all year? Is this normal?”

And my response was… well, no! But… well… yes. Sort of. Passions run high. People of all types, educated and not, love to hash these issues over. Hard-headed certainty with no room for shades of grey shows up at every level of conversation. I am not of this constellation of cultures and I cannot participate at the level of a native, but I had adapted closer to the Balkan norm over the year. That this marked such a change in me for my parents was startling. It got me to thinking I might need to distance myself a little.

So I have not posted in a year. I spent the year moving to a new city, starting graduate school, picking up a new sport, making friends, making enemies, and discovering new sides to my virtues and faults. It has been a good year, a mostly Balkan-free year except for purely academic work. I kept loose contact with my friends and colleagues, but not as well as I should have. I got the distance I thought I needed. I got too far away.

So now I’m back, throwing myself back into the mindset, the languages, the sense of frenzied, purposeful disorder of this place that simultaneously frightens and charms me.

I had a cunning plan that involved me landing in Sofia, taking a bus the same day to Skopje to crash with a friend of a friend, trucking myself to Albania one day later to see a fellow Fulbright-alumna and rekindle the smoldering remains of my Albanian knowledge, and finally bus it back to Ohrid just in time for the summer seminar on Macedonian linguistics. The plan immediately, of course, went awry, when my trusty, beat-up hiking backpack didn’t arrive with me.

So now I am spending the night in Sofia, woken up by politely intoxicated Serbian metalheads coming back from a Metallica concert and kept awake by the human body’s poor evolutionary adaptation to transoceanic jet travel. The hostel worker, who kindly has kept me company the past hour or so, is finally turning in. The day was full of muddled negotiations in Bulgarian-accented Macedonian and supplementary sign language. I’m not at full game strength yet, but I managed to make up a new, crazy plan to fit the changing circumstances out of what was available here.

A conflict zone is hard on the psyche. But I think I came away from last year a better, more complex person. I’m hoping another go at the Balkans this summer will push me even further.