throwback thursday - macedonia, summer 1995

oh, to be so young and thin again. it was the summer of 1995. a month at lake ohrid, ostensibly studying macedonian. but also having an awful lot of fun in absolutely glorious weather.

these were some of my fellow students from arizona state. that guy on the left was from alaska, but i'll admit i can't remember his name. the other one, whose name also escapes me (bob?), was the one who taught me the phrase, "it always comes back to me." the one is the cap and sunglasses is my friend dmitry, him, i remember very well and he's still a friend.

those high-waisted shorts are almost going to be in again. i don't know if i was pretending to be spiked on that spikey thingy or what. it was the balkans, after all, and those probably usually had a head on them in ottoman times.

another beautiful summer day on gorgeous lake ohrid. it was this wonderful summer that lured me back there on a fulbright in 1997. i have no recollection of who those girls on the left were. memory is funny like that.

at the foot of the statue of cyril & methodius. cyril was the guy who came up with the cyrillic alphabet. and they were scholars right there in the beautiful old churches of ohrid.

this guy was the owner of a place we found for my friend from belgrade to stay when she came to visit. it was a private home and he actually took us around on the lake in his boat and we drank quite a lot of rakija with him and ate some small silvery fish whole, heads and all. they were grilled and salty and really quite delicious. it all resulted in a toast to milosevic at one point, but we were young and we had to be nice to him because dajana was staying there. and then there was the rakija.

let's get lost: ljubljana

the wanderlust continues...

i long for strange and violent sculptures casting shadows in the midday sun on the side of a building.

i long to paddle again in a free canoe down the ljubljanica river, seeing the reflections of the city from another vantage point. 

and i long for a blue ice cream, eaten by a blue-eyed girl wearing a blue dress.

it was on this trip, when we stayed in an old school that had been transformed into a hostel, that sabin, age 6 at the time, declared when she saw the rather basic dorm-style room, "i'm not sleeping in here" and then promptly asked to go to the restaurant in the lobby for some sushi, as if we were staying at the manila peninsula.  definitely one of those, "oh dear, what have we done?" parenting moments.

*  *  *

these photos were taken in ljubljana, slovenia, summer 2007.

F9VP8CF6R64X

balkan ghosts

somehow, as summer comes on in earnest, i get a strange longing for the balkans. perhaps because my first trip there was a summer thing. or maybe because of finding husband there oh so many summers ago. but whatever it is, i get a kind of balkan yearning this time of year. so when i can't just pick up and head south, i turn to my bookshelves. this time, to rebecca west's epic black lamb and grey falcon, about the journey she took through yugoslavia in the inter-war period.

tho' there is much to take issue with as far as the orientalism of the book is concerned, largely dame west is open to the experiences she has. she's not that fond of the parts of yugoslavia that were part of the austro-hungarian empire and has more of a soft spot for those parts that were under ottoman domination and this i can relate to, since i feel exactly the same. i've read the book before, a couple of times, but i find that this time around, i'm reading it with new eyes - more european ones. i think i understand a lot more of the subtleties of the references to the growing influence of hitler in germany and what that meant in europe at that time.

but one of the things i'm most struck by on this reading is simply how well-read and intellectual she was. and it makes me once again long to have lived in that era. in 1913, she started a long love affair with h.g. wells and even had a child with with him. by the time of the balkan journey in 1938, she was a well-established novelist in her own right and had settled down and married banker henry maxwell andrews, who accompanied her on the journey. ahh, but she lived such an intellectual existence. i long to live that way (maybe minus the tumultuous affairs, tho' on the other hand, maybe not) - a life of high level discussions and thinking and writing about the events of the day. i tell you, 1913 was my ideal year.

but mostly, the book transports me. many of the political issues she describes are still relevant today and the discussions still thought-provoking. i love seeing the marginalia from my previous readings and adding more from this time around. and i long to live that way and travel that way--on trains winding slowly through the balkan countryside and most of all, to have time to think like that. to really think about things and how they're connected and what they mean and how they impact the world. how have we gotten so far from living intellectual lives?

i need the rhythm of a train journey and the erudition of a literary salon. i wonder if i can find that without being in the balkans. it seems somehow impossibly far away.

secret 2 - i'm a hitchhiker

this photo is not of montenegro

it's of lake ohrid, macedonia

but i used it because it was here on my laptop

it was summertime in the balkans. i was on the adriatic coast in montenegro with the starter husband and a good friend, D. we were staying at my friend's aunt's house in herceg novi and somehow, we'd gone to budva. i think we must have taken a bus to get there, as i only recall hitchhiking in one direction.

D insisted we had to go to budva because that summer claudia schiffer had done a photo shoot at the old castle/fortress there for some promotion or other. i don't know if she thought claudia might have fallen in love and would be hanging about, but it was beautiful (and sadly, i'm where my pictures are not, so i have no photos of it) and we had a lovely day. when the day was over, we needed to get back to herceg novi. buses were sporadic at best, so D suggested that we wave down a passing car.

thinking our chances were better as two women, we had the starter husband (hereafter SH) stand some distance away and soon waved down one of those aging mercedes that were so plentiful in the balkans in the late 90s. D established that the driver was at least going in the right direction and we waved SH over and we all got in. D, who is gorgeous and tall and thin and looks like a model herself, worked her magic on the driver and he took us all the way to our doorstep, tho' i don't think that was where he was going.

after that, i became downright fearless in my hitchhiking and even hitchhiked from the greek-macedonian border up to the town of bitola in macedonia. that was an old red car and the driver was so young that it crossed my mind that perhaps he didn't have a driver's license. i was happy on that occasion to be traveling with a friend, because i wouldn't have been comfortable in that car alone with the young man, with whom we didn't really share much language (my macedonian being a bit too rudimentary for more than the simplest things). but he was undoubtedly quite harmless.

i haven't hitchhiked in years, but i feel quite nostalgic about those brave and daring days. and when the weather is warm and the wind blows through the lush grass, i long for them a little bit. hitchhiking seems like such a summer thing.