What's In A Name?

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Friday, July 13, 2007

It is an odd thing. You hear these strange names of foreign lands where wars are being fought. You see news clips and imagine a world unlike your own, people unlike those you know, if you bother to think much about it at all. One day you hear the war has ended and occasionally there is a news story about how the countries involved are doing, how they are recovering, what governments are being put in place. You don’t pay much mind. It is a different world.

Then you find yourself traveling near these countries, these odd names you remember hearing once upon a newscast. You look at your guide book, a curiosity brought about by proximity, but you see only a vague outline of these lands. Eastern Europe books would include all of the Balkan Peninsula, except perhaps Greece, wouldn’t you think? But no, Serbia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Albania appear to be a no man’s land – unmapped regions, blank patches of white showing in contrast to the detailed maps of the countries surrounding them. Certainly you wouldn’t venture into an unmapped region? Or would you?

The familiar calls the vacationer. The unfamiliar calls the traveler. So you start asking around. What are these places? Belgrade? Sarajevo? These names only familiar from newscasts a decade ago. “Oh no, a woman shouldn’t travel there alone,” you hear. “It is still dangerous,” they say. “There is no infrastructure; travel by public transport is nearly impossible.” But you talk to travelers, those on the road, and you get a different story. “Oh definitely go. Belgrade is great, a lot of fun. Sarajevo is beautiful.” And so you go.

And then you find yourself walking down Kralia Milana, one of the major streets that leads from Slavija Square toward the center of town. Cars hurry past, with the buses and the trolley trams. Couples walk hand in hand. Women are walking their dogs. Men jog by wearing sweat pants. Puppies for adoption play on the grass with potential new owners. There is a Dolce and Gabbana marquis on the side of the building, a pizzeria every other block, McDonalds. The language is different, even the letters are different, but the life is the same. People. People getting on with the business of living. Are these the same people who did the atrocities Serbians were accused of during the war? If so, it doesn’t show in their eyes. Or do you put war atrocities behind you like you put away yesterday’s dirty dishes, like last week’s lost love, like the shock of the World Trade Center attack. Man is amazing in his capacity to heal and move forward. That is one of our greatest strengths, though sometimes, from the outside, it can look callous.

It strikes me more and more as I travel. We are all the same – searching for love, reaching for happiness, striving, trying to survive, find peace in our souls, be true to our gods, raise our children, care for our parents, hope for tomorrow. Where do the wars come from? Why do they come? I don’t understand. Don’t understand how mankind can find so much reason for separation when we share so much in common.

Belgrade is a magnificent city. The ravages of war still show in places – skeletons of bombed government buildings stand aside busy thoroughways. Dilapidated buildings reflecting a bare memory of their glory straddle brightly renovated jewels of architecture. The side streets and sidewalks are still in a state of disrepair, evidence of a budget not yet thriving. Fifty euro is worth 4,000 dinar and change is worthless in an economy still struggling for stability. Yet layered above these whispers of a war not so long ago is a vibrant, bustling energy; a strange energy I have not felt before in my travels. Is it the reborn hope of a city rising from the proverbial ashes, again? As it has time and time before?

High above the city, standing watch over the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers below, stands the Belgrade Fortress. In these now peaceful, lovely rolling ridges of green, one can see the remains of fortifications that were razed to the ground and rebuilt over and over – by Romans, Byzantines, Hungarians, Serbs, Turks, Austrians. It is a difficult concept for an American. The wars fought on our lands are romanticized concepts of presumably principle-driven battles of long ago, rather than a redundant reality of our entire cultural existence fighting to maintain its own ground.

I sit in the waiter-serviced internet café, unworried by the cost at about a dollar an hour for internet, sipping an almost undrinkable Turkish coffee while Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” plays on the speakers above. What exactly did the people who warned me not to come think I had to fear? No the city is not shiny and new. I splurged on the hotel with internet access, needing a little solitude and time to catch up on my writing. It is a five star hotel for only $50 a night with all the accoutrements - a casino, internet, salon, restaurants, convention center - and yet the walls are crumbling in the hallways, the carpets stained, and the tiles around the toilet in my room have fallen out, leaving a gaping hole revealing the crumbled plaster of the wall. There is nary a single cheap art print and the only light sources are weak spots of light hung in the wall. I’ve seen Motel 6’s in a better state of repair, reminding me again, as I am constantly, how spoiled we are in America with our bright, shiny, clean newness everywhere - in our buildings… and in our history. Still the people are friendly, the room comfortable, and the internet café is open twenty-four hours a day.

Prices are unbelievably cheap and here they do not seem to see tourists as walking wallets to try to take advantage of. It was disappointing to me how often this happened in Bulgaria and Romania. Perhaps tourism is still too new here. You see backpackers about the city, but it does not have the tourist bustle of most historically laden metropolitan cities. It is a living city. The museums and parks and monuments are blissfully uncrowded, lending them some sort of real-ness that the great steps of Sacré-Coeur or the lawns about the Coliseum cannot recall. There is an energy much like New York, lusty, vibrant, excited but without the frenetic pace that hardens the Big Apple. Even along the Knez Mihailova, the pedestrian walkway adorned with its beautiful neo-renaissance and art nouveau architecture and bustling sidewalk cafes, there is a calmness, a peacefulness in the midst of the pulse.

I have still seen little of the city, buried in the work that will pay for Russia in September and writing. Still I have fallen in love with the place that belongs to that name I heard once upon a newscast. I dare say over the next few years this city will follow in the footsteps of Prague and Budapest, calling people from all over to wonder at this other world along the Danube, different, yet so much like our own.