DULTfest Regensburg: The Other German Beer Festival

Oktoberfest, Munich

Yes, we've all heard of it and everyone wants to go.  That's the problem.  Everyone - and I mean everyone - goes.  Unless you go alone and arrive early in the morning, expect to walk around for 2 or 3 hours until a bench opens up.  I only found a spot at night by virtue of wearing my "Baracktoberfest" Schlafly Beer t-shirt.  Some Americans recognized Obama's smiling presidential face on my shirt and invited me to squeeze in on the bench.

DULTfest, Regensburg

Have you heard of it?  If you don't want to fight crowds and wait hours for a delicious German beer, there are hundreds of other smaller Beerfests around the country.  By sheer chance my hitchhiking trip through Regensburg in August coincided with DULTfest.  I randomly chose Regensburg, but it is a scenic UNESCO World Heritage Site which is well worth passing through for more than just the beer festival.  This is truly Bavaria.

Here's something you never see at Oktoberfest - an empty beer tent.  I found Brook Lane Hostel and spent the morning recovering from my nightmare hitchhiking trip from Austria.  After a brief rest I set off for DULTfest around 2pm.  The pictures are courtesy of Romy, a nice Bavarian girl I met at the hostel whose photography skills are far better than mine.  Thanks to her talent, I look almost professional even with a comically large beer and a massive wiener in my hand (*snicker*).

I was sober at the time this picture was taken.  I only spent a brief time at the festival sampling some local beers and Bavarian food before returning to the hostel to sleep some more.  When I awoke Romy was gone, but a few new guests had arrived.  A wandering Czech who was working in Germany and a young Irish business student became my drinking buddies for the evening.

The night progressed as one would expect at a beer festival.  We visited the 6 different tents and settled on the largest based on the fact it was hosting a curious sport where participates had to climb up the tent's tallest central pole in order to win...you guessed it, beer.  We placed bets on the pole climbers, and after drinking several liters and bullshiting travel stories, we returned to the hostel considerably drunker than before.  Regensburg was a brief, but perfect way to end my Eurotrip 2011.

Absolute Hitchhiking Failure In Austria

I'm in central Austria at 2 in the morning and I drank my last Red Bull and no one wants to give me a ride and my bank account won't work until I get to Germany which means I have no money so fuck me.

As they say in Slovakia...Jebautopezdopice (Fuck a dog's vagina.)  I'm sleeping in the gas station tonight.   There's a small restaurant area inside so I stretch out on one of the padded booths and pass out.  It seems the employees don't care.  For the past 5 hours they've been amused with watching me absolutely fail to hitchhike from Austria to Germany.

After the Ruzinov Concert I spent a few happy days joking and playing in Bratislava with my Slovak and Polish friends from Krakow.  I completed my travel circle by passing through Vienna once again to visit and say goodbye to my Bulgarian artist friend, Kosta Tonev.  Once I left Vienna I was on my own again.  I had a few more days to catch my flight from Frankfort back to Costa Rica, so I arbitrarily picked a town half-way between Vienna and Frankfort to hitchhike to.  That town was Regensburg.  Regensburg was the best random choice I could have made, but the trip there proved to be my worst hitchhiking experience ever.
  

View Larger Map

It started fine.  In accordance with hitchwiki.org again, I had taken a bus to a gas station at the farthest possible Western point of metropolitan Vienna.  Within an hour a nice middle-aged lady took me to rest stop  on the highway south of Linz.  From there it got more difficult, and almost 2 1/2 hours passed before a young hippie, professional juggling couple picked me up.  They said they wanted to take me because I had a guitar, so I "must be an artist" like them.  Hippies.

"We are sorry, artist.  We must go south, but can take you to Wels where there is a highway to Passau border to Germany.  It is late."

They seemed very apologetic about having to leave me alone at sunset by the highway.  There wasn't much to look at: the gas station, a rundown hotel and a large parking lot full of trucks with license plates from all corners of Europe.  A typical highway rest stop.

I had a small sign with "Passau" written on it.  I brandished it like a sword at the automobiles as they stopped at the pumps to fill up.   It was far easier than standing on the side of a highway and I felt positive despite it being almost 8 o'clock at night.  Several people were already offering me rides.  Unfortunately no one was going all the way to Germany.  An hour passed in front of the station and the streetlights light up.  It was officially nighttime.

Time to ask truckers.  This idea quickly went south as practically all of them had turned off their lights and gone to sleep.  The cars that remained in the parking lot were full of sleeping families and various boxes.   Most of them bore license plates from Slavic countries, The Balkans and Turkey.  Austria sits at a crossroads between what many people refer to as prosperous Western Europe and poor Eastern Europe.  The parking lot was in the middle of Austria, but felt like one of the many eastern borders I had crossed on my journey.

It was a parking lot of tired transients with no fixed homes: truckers, immigrants and a lonely American hitchhiker.  It was cold and late, so I went inside to spend my last saved Euros on a cup of coffee at the all-night cafe.  The bartender and gas station staff were all Bosnian and Croatian.  The two sexy girls who sat down next to me were Romanians who were "just working" in Austria.  Where were all the Austrians?  Wels stood at the foot of a mass wave of immigrants working in France, Germany, Switzerland and Belgium while secretly waiting for their free days to return to their families and culture in Romania, Serbia, Ukraine and Turkey.  My quick little European joyride felt quite insignificant in comparison.


I slept fitfully for 3 hours in the booth.  In the early morning light I got a ride from a man who spoke neither German nor English.  I tried my Serbian-Slovak-Slavic mongrel language.  His eyes understood and he showed me his Croatian passport.  He was going all the way to Frankfort to work so, yes, he could drop me off in Regensburg.

I will miss "Eastern" Europe.

  

Hostel Business In Budapest

"Ideally we get him so drunk that he will miss his 8am flight.  Leaving him no choice but to work with us.  C'mon...do you know what that guy could do for our hostel website traffic?!?!"

The owner of Aboriginal Hostel was explaining why we were trying to finish off 6 bottles of various Eastern Europe liquors in the amount of time normally reserved for the 100 Meter Olympic dash.  The target of his scheme was Josh, the American owner and founder of Hostelmanagement.com, one of the best website for promotion and networking in the hostel industry.  Josh had excused himself to the bathroom for minute - most likely due to the copious amounts of alcohol we had been drinking all night.

Aboriginal common room

Being a Costa Rica hostel manager had perks.  By simply flashing my business card and website, the Aussie manager had given me 20% off my room and access to the staff's store of liquors.  He introduced me to the owner and Josh, who by coincidence was staying at the place on the last night of a month-long Eurotrip before he caught an 8am flight to California the next day.  He had picked the hostel due to its good ratings.

Josh was a programmer and website designer who had eventually focused his work on his personal project, Hostelmanagement.com.  He was a quiet and unassuming man who didn't talk much unless it was about web design.  He looked at my hostel's website and quickly pointed out several things I could change in order to increase our traffic and guest visits.  I could clearly see how valuable he could be to any hostel business.

I wasn't the only one.  Aboriginal's Hungarian owner had been trying to convince him to become part of the Aboriginal team.  He was a flashy, loud, jewelry-wearing man who was more concerned with the monetary aspects of hostel ownership than the hospitality part.  He not only promised Josh great pay, benefits and compensation for his missed airplane flight, but said that he had "special friends" who could get Josh the golden prize: a free one year European Union work visa.  No questions asked.  Delivered to his hands within a few weeks.  I know from having failed to get a EU work visa that this is no small task...

Palinkaaaa

The Hungarian owner's showy manners and bribes seemed to make the shy Josh uneasy.  He was polite, but kept insisting that he had to make his flight back to the USA the next morning.  This was difficult considering the strong spirits we were drinking.  What the owner offered us was formidable: Hungarian and Romanian Palinka, Croatian Rakija, Polish vodka and beer for those who lacked the balls to pound these shots.

I of course jumped into the liquor with no reservations.  It was all free.  I've never found liquors from this part of the world particularly enjoyable, but the palinkas and rakija were high-quality brands that went down smooth. Too smooth...

Besides I had to do "business" with these hostel employees.  We talked of partnerships and the possibly of me working as a manager at Aboriginal in the future if Costa Rica didn't work out.  Josh asked my recommendations for Central America while the flashy Hungarian hostel owner insisted we drink one more shot...Josh, the pay is good...one more shot...We'll get you an EU visa...another shot...palinka good...blahblahshotblah...pa-shot-linka...

pa...lin...kaaaa...

aaa...   aaa...   shot...?

Fuck...

Why did I pay for a bed?  Around 9am I woke up on the couch in the common room.  The Aussie manager looked amused and told me to get some breakfast...It's FREE!  I asked what had happened to Mr. Hostelmanagement.com.  "Oh, he made his flight, but in bad shape. I need to get home myself and recover." My shape wasn't as bad as I expected and a few cups of strong coffee helped.

I ate the free breakfast (it's delicious), checked Hitchwiki.org then caught the metro to the nearest hitchhiking spot to Bratislava, Slovakia.

Hairy Hungarian Hitchhiker: Belgrade to Budapest

That is an impressive beard!

In hitchhiker language "H" is for Hungary

That is the first thought that came to my mind when I got picked up by the truck-driving Hairy Hungarian Hitcher.  His massive beard, short stature and round figure gave him the appearance of a dwarf who had crawled out of a mountain from Middle-Earth.  I had no way of expressing my thoughts since I discovered with a simple "Hello" that my driver knew not one word of English.  Magically in my travels I had acquired 6 words of Hungarian, which were enough to make the Hairy Hungarian Hitcher (now referred to as the HHH) smile with delight and chat to me as if I were his long-lost friend.

"Szia. Eg, Kete, Haram"

"Ezhgie okjoklkomun keszelk?"

"Uh...Koszonom!"

"Kegeskszouem keszerss!!! Gskgetlkl zeguk eguszoj ...." 

  

Truck drivers.  The true saviors for many a desperate hitchhiker.  Lonely, creepy, smelly and uncouth...they receive a bad reputation even though most of them have a heart of gold.  All most truck drivers need is some entertainment since being on the road for a million hours can get mind-numbingly boring.  Hitchhikers have received the same bad reputation as truckers thanks to a few bad apples; and we get bored standing by the road.  Naturally, we bond quite quickly.

Lost in Serbia

Somehow my conversations with the HHH were more interesting than Dusan, my first hitcher who had taken me from the northern side of Belgrade to the desolate, hot highway where I got the next ride.  Dusan and I had rambled on in my broken Serbo-Slovak-Polish language and he was happy to leave me with two wonderful gifts.  The first was a wilted cellophane-wrapped sandwich that I greedily accepted (when traveling never turn down free food.)  The second was a fine map of Serbia.  It was not a standard highway map but it was detailed and included all the major roads and cities I needed to know for traveling.

Too bad I'm leaving Serbia today.

I was showing this map to the HHH, who laughed and then suddenly looked concerned.  He pointed at the northern-most point on the map and said something with a rather regretful tone in his voice.  He repeated it with the same sadness and I looked at his hairy, dwarf face.  I gathered that was the point where I had to leave.  Only when I when we reached the border did I understand that the border police was his principle concern.  No hitchhikers.  Were it not for that I would have had a ride on highway E75 all the way to Budapest.  I shouted, "Egészségédre!" and got out.

My next two rides were spent in silence save for the Hungarian greetings.  These people weren't as excited as the truck-driving HHH to venture a conversation with a foreigner when they couldn't speak English.  My final ride dropped me off in central District IX within the vicinity of a metro stop and a shopping mall.  The mall had a bookshop where I quickly checked my email.  My last-minute planning skills were in effect, and I was hoping for a last-minute Couchsurfer to give me a place to stay.

There was no last-minute Couchsurfer.  I received responses, but they were offers for other nights or locations too far outside of downtown for me to handle getting lost at 9 at night.  This left me to search for hostels.  I already knew of some from previous stays so I headed to my favorite of them all: Budapest Bubble.  It's perhaps one of the smallest hostels in Budapest, but by far the coziest and friendliest one.  And one of the co-owners, Olga, has received praise and admiration from far away for her smile and indie-girl good looks.  I took the nearest metro there.

Budapest Bubble was full.  No surprise for a place that only has 20 beds.  However they did send me to their sister hostel, Aboriginal Hostel, which was a mere 500 meters down the road.  I thought I would get some sleep.  Instead, as a card-carrying hostel manager from Costa Rica, I met some very important hostel people who revealed to me the rather sordid and often dirty business of hostel management.  This is gonna be a long night.

Eternity In The Belgrade Streets

Wake up.  Go to work.  Realize that your low-paying job will take you nowhere.  Realize it pays enough money for alcohol.  Buy alcohol.  Drink it.  Pass out.  Repeat.

It's another day in Belgrade, Serbia.  As a tourist my typical day went something like what you see in the video above.  The only difference was that at some point I could leave.   Every time I go to Serbia I fall more in love with the place and think how nice it'd be like to live there...  Hold on, dreamer.  As one Serbian asked, "American, if you make the same wages as I, will you love the place??" ...

Still the party goes on.  Despite nights at the Belgrade Beer Festival watching great music (including those from the video, S.A.R.S.), the best times came from hours of wasting time on the winding streets of Belgrade.  Nothing important ever happens and at the end of the day you ask yourself, "Where did the time go?"

The next thing you ask yourself, "Who gives a damn?"

We sit at a cafe drinking.  We're relaxing after spending the day wandering the ruins of Kalamegdan fortress.  Some of us have beer or strong coffee while others are content with water.  I don't recall the names or nationalities of all of those sitting with us.  Some are Serbian and others are from as far away as Australia.  We arrived with a group of four, but that changed rapidly.  New people keep arriving at our table.  As soon as they arrive others leave.  But some of them return.  Others don't.  We order another round of coffee and beer.

Belgrade Cafe Gatherings

Our little cafe table is a revolving door of new faces and conversations.  Every conversation starts as an epic plan with someone to travel to some new location in Serbia; Sabac is nice by the river; no, the fortress in Novi Sad; no, no let's go back and party in Nis...  As soon as the plans are set in stone, they crumble and fall apart like the old buildings of the White City.  Someone leaves and another comes to replace them.  New plans begin ever more elaborate than the first; a train to Sarajevo, Bosnia; no let's hitchhike to the Hungarian border; Timosoara, Romania's not so far away; we can go all the way to Latvia if we leave now...

We order another round of coffee and beer.  And another.

I have seen this a million times when traveling.   Plans, plans and more plans that are thrown about like so many darts at a board.  Very few actually make it to the target, but the game was fun regardless of the time spent.  We spend all afternoon on plans for traveling to the ends of Europe and back.  At the end of day we stay at a Couchsurfer's house in Belgrade for the night, completely exhausted from all the dreaming we've done.

  

Bye-Bye Bosnian Baby...I'm Back To Belgrade Again

Sexual.

Sensual.

Selma.

I need a cold shower.  Quite frankly this is sexier than all that American booty dancing.

Selma Bajrami, my fantasy Turbo-Folk girlfriend

The Balkans were formerly part of the Turkish-Ottoman Empire and still has a lot of Turkish and Middle-Eastern influence.  I had a Serbian friend tell me that Bosnian and Albanian girls are the best dancers in the former Yugoslavia because of their Arabic origins.  If that is true then Turbo-Folk singer, Selma Bajrami, is a fine example of that kind of dancing.  By chance I met her in a club in Sarajevo, Bosnia in 2010.  I'm still smacking myself for not asking for her phone number that night.


My current Bosnian baby wasn't mad anymore.  She lay on top of me, moving her hips against mine and touching me under my shirt.  I likewise ran my hands under her clothes and quietly whispered in her ear.  She caught my eye from time to time as we moved together to some psychedelic hippie funk she had put on Youtube.  I lay down in anticipation while she continued her Arabic grinding.  My hands moved lower.

"Hey you American fucker. Get a room...but not here."

I have some great Serbian friends.  My friend told me there was Russian Couchsurfing couple in Nis who had a car and were heading for Belgrade within an hour.  I vaguely remembered meeting a Russian couple during the last 2 days of insanity in Nis.  Nis is always a blur.  My friend explained the deal succinctly, "Ride with them and pay only gas, or wait and pay more for a bus...Fucker."

I had friends I could stay with in Belgrade, and now I had a quick way to get there.

After my friend gave me a travel update, he left me alone again with my Bosnian baby.  We continued moving and grinding together for as long as time allowed.  I wanted her and - as with many others I had meet - I knew it wouldn't happen.  At the moment I needed to see her naked and bare and dancing in front of me.  We were kissing and touching out of urgency and raw emotion.  The chaos of the moment inappropriately made my mind conjure up images of NATO planes flying over Sarajevo.  This girl needs a rescue mission.

Those dreams evaporated in the incredible heat of the Southern Serbian summer.  Before I could reflect  further, I was in the back seat of the Russian couples' little car, staring out the window and cursing myself for desiring a wild life of women, drink and dance over a simple life with just one woman who I truly desired.  I am still thinking about this.

To avoid highway tolls, the Russians drove on the service roads that followed the main highway to Belgrade.  We were in no hurry and stopped in several small towns for sightseeing.  We took pictures in front of historical monuments and they recalled their previous visits to Serbia.  They were a happy couple...one of many Russian ex-pats who lived on the Southern Adriatic beaches of Montenegro so that they could escape the bitter cold of the country they were from.  Serbia was just a brief vacation for them to arrange their paperwork to continue their ex-pat life.


View Larger Map
The Russian and I spoke in English of our countries long love-hate relationship with each other while his girlfriend periodically snapped at him in Russian.  She couldn't speak English but was able to understand everything.  As we approached Belgrade, they checked the map frequently to make sure we were taking the right way to my friend's apartment in the city center.  They wanted to continue sightseeing so we choose a hilly backroad that followed the Sava River.  Although I could see the urban mess in the distance, the winding road we were driving on felt very provincial.  One side of the road dropped off into the glistening river below while the other side meandered away into several green farm plots.  The houses were small, quaint, terracotta constructions that looked of the era before Communism took hold.

The tranquil beauty disappeared as we entered the city limits.  Small rustic houses gave way to the typical clunky, multicolored Communist blocs I have seen in so many parts of Slavic Europe.  The hilly topography of the land contributes to Belgrade's disorder as it makes the city appear to be falling into itself.  Apartments awkwardly pile up and start to tumble head-over-heels into each other.  Trash collects in corners of the streets while the smell of cigarettes and coffee seeps from the cracks in the buildings. The single road we were driving on ceased to meander in one direction and splintered into a million little spiderwebs that got swallowed up in the urban decay.  

It's all so wonderfully, beautifully, ridiculously chaotic.  The 'White City' is falling apart all around me.  I want to fall apart with it.

Spomenik Neznanom Junaku

In The Shade of The Bubanj Memorial Fists, Nis, Serbia

(Part Two of a more detailed account of my time in Nis, Serbia)

Welcome to the dark side of the moon.

The three stone fists of the Bubanj Memorial Park stretch defiantly skyward.  They jut unnaturally out of the featureless, flat grassy field like alien-made monoliths on the surface of a far away planet.  Or as one of my friends so eloquently put it, "Dude, it looks like the cover of a Pink Floyd album."

It was still scorching hot.  I sat in the shade of the largest fist in deep, melancholy thought.  My thought process was a depressing continuation of that from Crvni Krist Concentration Camp where I had just came from.  Although Bubanj Memorial Park is located several kilometers from Nis and requires a 30 minute walk uphill, it is intimately connected to the camp.  The prisoners of Crveni Krst were executed at Bubanj Hill.

The three fists are different sizes to show that men, women and children were all killed and buried here.  Since bodies were buried with bulldozers and many were burned to cover up evidence, the number of dead can only be vaguely placed at somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000.  At one point between February 16th and 17th, 1942 over 1,400 prisoners were executed on the hill.

Bubanj Memorial was as lonely that day as Crveni Krst.  I sat under the largest fist for nearly an hour and not a soul came to interrupt my peace.  Once again there were no signs to explain the history nor tourist-friendly lights to illuminate the stones.  The only signs of human interaction with the monuments were squiggles of blue graffiti.  The wide, grassy field was overgrown and unkempt.  Amazingly the loneliness here felt more crushing than in the camp.  Dying in a concentration camp is horrifying enough, but being brought to die on an extremely isolated, unidentified hill in the middle of a forest seems far more frightening.

This sculpture has no explanation

The sun was setting and the moment was over.  I am not some heroic backpacker who independently desires to learn of the history and suffering of the Serbian people by visiting such an unfamiliar place.  The reality is that a Serbian friend told me about it and I thought, "That sounds like a good idea."  She was kind enough to let me explore the field and monoliths on my own as she slept by the path that lead to the desolate area.  If not for her, perhaps I never would have translated the Cyrillic message on a stone I saw at the memorial before we descended the long hill back to Nis:

  “From the blood of communists and patriots fists were born: fists of revolt and warning, fists of the revolution, fists of liberty. We were shot, but never killed, never subdued. We crushed the darkness and paved the way for the Sun.”    
                                                                                                                      --Ivan Vuckovic                                                                                    

My Own Private Concentration Camp in Nis, Serbia

(Part One of a more detailed account of my time in Nis, Serbia.)

I've been to Auschwitz in Poland.

It hit me in the gut.  I felt sad at the mass atrocities that had happened.  I felt relieved that my great-grandparents from Poland had left in the 1890s so they had avoided the horrors of the war.  I felt angry and felt like punching some asshole tourist when I saw him filming and taking pictures of the interior of the prisons and cells in direct violations of the rules. I generally hate rules, but...don't you have any respect? Asshole.

I had many strong feelings.  But they were stronger at Crveni Krst Concentration Camp in Nis, Serbia.  

Why?  At Auschwitz I stood in a line for a ticket, followed a tour guide around in a line, watched other tour groups walking through various parts of the camp and finished the tour at a souvenir shop.  All the exhibits were clean and shiny and well-kept.  The whole thing felt like a creepy, well-maintained ride at The Walt Disneyland of Death.

Crveni Krst looks like it hasn't been touched since it closed in 1944.  The one employee simply collected the $1 entry fee, let me in and went back to sleep.  He offered no tour, no advice and no explanation.  Not a single other tourist came during the hour I spent there.  All the signs were in Serbian Cyrillic so I could only make vague assumptions of what happened.  I was alone with my own private concentration camp.

I did not feel a cold chill as I walked into the camp; rather I felt extremely hot, sweaty and uncomfortable.  My American brain has problems with metric conversions, but that scalding Serbian summer cemented in my mind what 40 Celsius feels like: really fucking hot (or 104 Fahrenheit.)  Any prisoner who had been there during the summer between 1941 and 1944 would be sweating bullets for more reasons than one.  Ironically, stepping inside the prison building was relieving. 

The lack of any English in the building confounded my attempts to learn the history.  I squinted at the exhibit signs and desperately hoped to understand them, but I did not magically gain the ability to read Cyrillic.  One wall had pictures of various prisoners, so I started counting them until I lost track.  Human skulls were in a display case and I could only assume they were from dead prisoners. The entire experience left me feeling more lost and alone, until finally I found a room full of artwork that put the camp in perspective.

Kids draw the damnest things

The artwork was graphic, disturbing and was clearly drawn by children.  In the United States these drawings would get a child sent to the school psychologist for counseling and a call to the parents.  Here they appeared to be a project approved by the school itself.  I was able to discern that there had been various acts of torture against Jews, Gypsies and Communist prisoners.  Several pictures depicted a large unarmed revolt.  Many prisoners were escaping over the walls, but many others were shot dead while tangled in the barbwire.


I wish more history was told this way.  If I could have read the adults' Cyrillic signs, I'm sure they would have tried to impress me with elaborate stories involving phrases like "astounding heroism," "incredible atrocities," and "never again in our lives."  These fancy words are always accompanied by various facts, figures, graphs and numbers.  Do we need numbers to prove that war is bad?  The childrens' drawings get to the point.  

                         Some people live.  

                                                    Some people die.

The first floor was a museum.  The second floor was just a large attic with prison cells; nothing more.  The cell doors were open, so I went inside one and sat down.  I didn't think.  I didn't want to think, because I would start coming up with all those florid, elaborate, "adult" phrases that I hate.  I stared at the door.  Then I stared at a wall.  Then I picked another wall and stared at it.  I stared at different walls until I found myself staring out the shutter window that was in the roof.

I started thinking.  What if I couldn't leave?

(Of course I'm an adult, so I had many thoughts, and later I fact-checked everything with my Serbian friends and the Internet.  But I'm not some douchebag who works for Lonely Planet, so I won't write it here.)

Sweet Home Nis Serbia

I hitched a ride from the Serbian-Bulgarian border.  I planned to be in Nis, Serbia before the sunset, but it's already nightfall and I'm in a small town called Pirot, still 75 kilometers from Nis.

I'm dining on a traditional 'gurmanska pljeskavica' (Serbian cheeseburger) and a not-so-traditional Coca-Cola.  The old man who picked me up, Dusan, just paid for my meal with one of the fattest rolls of Serbian Dinars I have ever seen.  I estimate its worth at at least 100 American dollars.  He's waving the money around to let the world to know he has just paid for the Amerikan's dinner.  I remember I'm not in Latin America where such an act might get you robbed.

"Ciefing" in Mostar, Bosnia

Southern Serbia (and the Balkans in general) operates on a different wavelength from the rest of the world.  Only in Nis do I see people spend a 12 hour day drinking the same cup of coffee while talking about all the things they have to do, need to do, should do, could do...without ever actually doing them.  In neighboring Bosnia this has a name, 'cief,' which loosely translates as 'doing nothing and loving it.'  This sounds more like the laid-back 'mañana' attitude of Latin American countries such as my current home of Costa Rica.  However the Balkans has managed to create an equally laid-back, but more sophisticated culture, around something which is not supposed to relax you - a cup of coffee.

I blame the evil tourism industry.  Since I live in Costa Rica, I use it as the obvious example.  Costa Rica has marketed and sold the expression 'Pura Vida' as THE way of encompassing the people's friendly, relaxed attitude towards life.  This place is sold as a peaceful, military-free country with gorgeous beaches and perfect sunny weather where nothing goes wrong.  They don't mention the criminals who prey on tourists, the tourists who prey on prostitutes, the trash and piss-smells in the streets and the fact that it rains 11 months out of the year.  

While it is true that Costa Ricans are happy and friendly, that's only true if you talk about happy, touristy things.  If you take the conversation beyond the weather, they turn out to be as conservative, deeply religious and closed-minded as your average American Southern Baptist Republican.  Despite me tolerating criticism daily about 'gringos' and capitalist USA, if I criticize Costa Rica I'm usually told to, "go back to your own country if you don't like it. (see Youtube comments.) Sound familiar?  Yeehaw!

The Balkan countries of Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia and Serbia, (and Kosovo depending on who you talk too) have stunning mountains and beaches, nice weather and friendly people who will often invite you into their homes like family.  Unfortunately tourists still see this region as a war-torn, poverty-stricken place full of violent, genocidal war criminals.   

Horrible, war-torn former Yugoslavia

When my nice Serbian friends travel through Europe, they hear supposedly intelligent people call them 'war-criminals' and 'racists' because of the actions of a few powerful people with evil ideas.  Oh well...such is history.  Germans still have to apologize when they get 'too patriotic' at international football games because some politically sensitive, whiny pricks start throwing out the word 'Nazi.'  I don't care.  I was cheering for Deutschland at the Eurocup 2012. 

But I digress...

I watched the elderly Dusan wandering around the gas station parking lot and wonder how he could be a war criminal.  He was beyond laid-back, and the fact that he couldn't speak English didn't stop him from sharing his whole life with me.  We had already stopped by his house to move furniture, finished a Serbian dinner on his tab and had coffee at a local cafe that was owned by his son who had lived in Chicago for some years.  His son was 'Americanized' and had explained to his father that although I appreciated the hospitality, it was 8 o'clock at night and I had somewhere else to go.  

Dusan was now soliciting rides for me from truck drivers in the gas station.  His son said I was in a hurry; but Dusan couldn't be hurried.  He strolled from truck to truck seemingly without purpose, and yet somehow managed to find a ride for me within 10 minutes.  He passed me his number and told me to call him when I arrived in Nis...and that I always had a home with his family if I was ever in Pirot.  The same crushing, sad feeling I had had with Maria in the Ukraine - knowing I would never see someone again - came over me.

An hour later I was at the riverside amphitheater in Nis, singing Gogol Bordello, drinking heavily and partying with my friends as if we had never missed the past year together.

  



  

   
  

How To Entertain The Bulgaria-Serbia Border Police

Where the hell am I?

The bus left me on a lonely dirt road that supposedly went to the Serbian border.  The road drifted away and disappeared around a distant corner.  All I could see were haystacks, cows and miles of rolling hills.

Hills.  I wasn't ready for hills.  After 3 hours of sleep, a wild night with a Brazilian backpacker girl, a city tour of Sofia and several hours lost in the Bulgarian countryside I was ready to collapse.  The Red Bulls had worn off much faster than expected and my guitar had suddenly grown a lot heavier when I stepped off the bus.

I shook myself out of my exhausted haze and started walking down the snaking road towards the corner.  The corner soon gave way to a large descending plain of rolling hills on my right and a farm that meandered off into the horizon on my left.  In the distance I saw a farmer with a scythe hacking at hay as several cows lulled around him.  Chirping birds and evening crickets gave the surroundings a tranquil, pastoral feel that I was completely unable to enjoy since I had no idea where I would sleep that night.  I had the vague feeling of a trespasser as the dirt road slowly brought me in the farmer's direction.

Maybe he would offer a wayward traveler a place to stay?  Sunset was evident now and long shadows played over hills which refused to show a large sign or line that said in big letters, "SERBIA."  This was not the kind of road I expected to find any hitchhiking cars on...maybe tractors or donkeys.

Among the tranquil bird and cricket chirps I detected sounds of civilization: cars!!  The large hill descended to a highway - the same highway I had lost when I got on the bus.  The Serbian border would be there somewhere. 

The farmer became a distant concern of mine as I scanned the highway for signs of a border crossing.  I saw it; cars were forming lines in front of highway border checkpoints and two large gas stations.  I breathed a sigh of relief and walked through the trees that lined the road.  Although my route was not the obvious border choice, clearly others had taken it since there was a worn path that lead down the hill to the gas station.

And several border police. Damn. 

Well...even though I magically appeared out of the middle of nowhere like an illegal immigrant, I wasn't doing anything wrong, was I?  The hill was clear and I felt completely exposed as I walked towards the gas station.  Once I walked through the trees, the police saw me instantly and pointed as I descended the hill.

They stared me down as I advanced on them with my guitar case and black backpack.  There was nothing I could do so I continued walking casually as if it was perfectly normal to be wandering around alone on a international border at nightfall.  They stopped me.  They had guns.

They didn't speak English, but "passport?" is an international word.  I stood there tensely as they flipped through my blue passport.  "Amerikan??" I nodded, and fortunately they liked Americans.  Smiles broke across their faces as they pointed at my guitar.

Did I mention "guitar" is another international word?  I celebrated my first Bulgarian-Serbian border crossing by performing "Hotel California" for a quartet of armed border police.