The...the...uh...uh

There is no definite or indefinite article in Bosnian (or, I think, in any Slavic language)—no “the” or “a.” When I first learned this, it boggled my mind. How can you communicate without articles? In practice, though, I’m amazed at how seldom I miss them.

It does mean, however, that Bosnians have a hard time figuring out when to use articles. David bought this notebook for Isaac to use in his math class, and we were all amused at the use of the definite article.





But then I tried to figure out why it’s wrong. I have no idea, actually. Emma Lucy’s guess is the best I’ve heard so far: “space” is a mass noun (one that you can’t count) so you don’t use an article, while “universe” is a countable noun, so it does take the article. Any thoughts?

Makes me glad I learned English as a baby and didn’t have to figure out some rule for using articles on my own.

Basketball and Yugoslavia

These yellow metal boxes hold utility meters and are mounted on every house.


They are magnets for graffiti. I wondered where this bit of graffiti came from.


But it turns out (is this common knowledge for everyone except for me?) that the former Yugoslavia was a basketball powerhouse. We finally watched  "Once Brothers," the ESPN/NBA movie about two members of the Yugoslavian national team who became NBA stars together and then saw their friendship evaporate during the Yugoslavian civil war. A powerful film.

Sarajevo Sidewalks

Sarajevo messes with my ideas about what you need to have a walkable city.

I would have told you you should have a network of wide sidewalks, preferably separated from the road by a parking strip. And yet, Sarajevo is a city full of pedestrians and, except for the major pedestrian street in the center of town, it doesn't have any of that.

Here's the average sidewalk width.




This is a wide sidewalk.




When sidewalks are any wider than this, they always have cars parked, nose to end, on them, so you can't walk on them at all.

Cars drive too fast and people grumble about it, just like back in Florida, but the fact is that pedestrians and cars effectively share the road. Usually, we--and all the other pedestrians--walk in the road, but when a car comes, we move to the side of the road, and the car slows down until it passes us.

Maybe narrow roads actually make things safer for pedestrians, encouraging both pedestrians and motorists to look out for each other? Maybe you don't really need sidewalks to walk a city?

Oxymorons in Montenegro

I forgot to post one final photo from our trip to Montenegro: graffiti in Cyrillic script! And an interesting anti-graffiti strategy; everywhere I saw graffiti, it had been lined out, presumably by official anti-graffiti workers, but you could still read it just fine. Well, if you can read Cyrillic script, which I can't. I had David check it to make sure it wasn't vulgar. 

He says it reads: Our biggest problem is our strength.

More heads on buildings

The rain and sleet stopped and the sun came out, so I got some more photos of heads on buildings (other photos here and here). Some of the heads are on public buildings—schools, banks, theatres, government buildings—but a lot are on apartment buildings up near the roofline where you don’t even notice them unless you’re looking for them. Architectural exuberance!

One set of heads on a downtown building does seem to have symbolic significance. They are down low, just above the main door of this building (now a bank; I don’t know what it was originally), so you can't miss them.





I think (though we know just how much to trust me when I’m drawing conclusions about Bosnian culture) that they represent the three main ethnic groups in Bosnia: the Croats, representing the Western Europe influence, the Bosniaks, representing the Turkish influence, and the Serbs, representing the Eastern European influence. The three large centers of worship in the center of town represent this triumvirate of influence as well: the Roman Catholic cathedral, the mosque, and the Serbian Orthodox church.

Grb

A first: Isaac learned a Bosnian word before he knew the English term!

Thanksgiving Day also happened to be State Day for Bosnia this year. To prepare, Isaac’s class studied national emblems, like the Bosnian flag. He came home and asked us what a coat of arms is. “I know what the Bosnian grb looks like, but I don’t know what it’s for. Miss Selma looked it up for me in English, but she said it’s a coat of arms, and I don’t know what that is.”

(...and if you're wondering, you pronounce it just like it looks---say every consonant sound, one after another)

Wrong food, yet again

I bought an envelope of yeast so we could try these waffles. But when I tore it open, I discovered that I hadn't bought yeast.


Baking powder? Baking soda? The picture on the envelope should have tipped me off--cakes don't usually need yeast--but the envelope threw me. I just expected to find yeast in envelopes.

Later, when I went back to the store, I checked the picture on the envelope and checked the word in my dictionary before I bought. Yeast!



The waffles were delicious.

Martha Stewart, Age 5

One of the things that Eleanor loves most about the furnishings in our apartment is that she has a nightstand. In October, I walked into her room to put away some clothes and discovered that she had decorated her nightstand.



For November, she changed things up. The dried beans are to represent bounty--she asked me for fruit but wasn't pleased with the selection I offered.



She drew and framed a picture of a turkey.



The papers (actually Dad's old business cards, turned over) artfully strewn about the tabletop say: TH-AN-CS-GI-VN.



Happy Thancsgivn to all of you!

Not Florida, but still...

The beach! The real reason we wanted to go to Montenegro. Thousands of Europeans crowd this beach every summer, but we pretty much had it to ourselves in November.

Every time I go to the Adriatic coast, I'm stunned by the colors. The sea is a greenish-silver. And the rocks, all tossed smooth, are a range of



colors--white to pink to carmine to teal to orange to palest green. I wish I knew

more about geology so I could understand what made so many gorgeous rock colors all end up in one spot. This particular beach also had lots of pieces of floor and roof tiles, their broken corners all wave-smoothed, that had washed up with the rocks.

So we built!



And buried!



And even swam a little bit (in very cold water--November is not August!).



It did our Florida hearts good.

Traveling frugally with kids in Europe

One of the lessons we have learned about traveling frugally with kids here in Europe is to never stay in hotels. In the US, hotels and motels usually charge by the room. In Europe, the price is almost always per person. So with a family the size of ours, hotels are prohibitively expensive. We usually rent apartments by the day or the week or we stay in hostels, which still charge per person but charge a whole lot less than hotels.

David's conference was at this very fancy hotel. It's where James Bond says he is staying in "Casino Royale" (though the scenes in the hotel were

actually filmed in the Czech Republic, not Montenegro). The sponsoring organization offered to let us stay with David if we paid the extra charges, but they were--no surprise!--exorbitant. So, the kids and I stayed in a hostel just a few minute's walk away from the hotel. We visited David there but slept in the hostel.

Emma Lucy was able to do her online schoolwork in Dad's hotel room

(since our hostel had no internet service!), and thee rest of us enjoyed hanging out there, too.

The walk to and from the hostel also gave us a close-up view of some of Montenegro's beautiful plants and scenery.

Montenegro! Where it is.

The former Yugoslavia has splintered into seven independent nations: Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, Macedonia, and the two newest ones, Kosovo, and Montenegro. David had a business trip to Montenegro, so we tagged along.

Luckily the people bringing David to Montenegro sent a professional driver. We took the highway linking the two capitals, Sarajevo and Podgorica, but even though it's the main arterial, it dwindles as it winds through the mountains until it is a one-lane, dirt road. On the edge of a cliff. With a bus coming the opposite direction at the moment we approached. Since I wasn't driving, I just squeezed my eyes shut and held my breath.

So, no photos of the drive there. But we and our driver arrived intact.

There are great juice flavors here. I love pear nectar, but the label's English translation made it sound less than appetizing.



Good thing I'd already enjoyed my juice before I read it!

Yeah. Why not?

Isaac: Why do we call it "sunset" and not "earthset"?

On the way home from school

Every mosque has a fountain in front of it. Before the advent of indoor plumbing, this is where Sarajevans got their water (many of the fountains still burbling away are so old that they were around then!). During the war, when water was hard to come by, some Sarajevans went back to getting water this way.

These days the fountains don't provide household water, but they're perfect for getting a drink while walking home from school.

But what if you really ARE tired?

The basic greetings I know how to use:

Dobar dan. (Good day. My all-purpose, pass-you-in-the-street greeting.)

Zdravo. (Hi, though literally it means, Health.)

David learned a new greeting this week when he got in a taxi and a taxi driver said, "Imali umoran? (Are you tired?)"

David's Bosnian companion started laughing. "That's just one of those strange ways we in Bosnia greet each other."

So later, David tried it out on someone.

The polite answer, apparently, is, "Ne (no)."

American Professor in Bosnia

A national daily paper here, Dnevni Avaz, published a half-page article about David last Saturday.





They even had a photo of him being all professorial in front of a whiteboard.



Eleanor is thrilled because they included a sidebar titled, "He has six children" (though one of David's friends pointed out that it makes him sound just a little bit like a circus sideshow). Eleanor figures she is kind of famous, definitely more so than the other kids, because they talked about the other kids in the aggregate, but they concluded the sidebar by saying, "His youngest daughter is in kindergarten here."

My favorite part was how they spelled David's name.

Kurban Bajram

(Photo from http://www.diskusije.net/rodjendani-i-praznici-iza-nas/srecan-kurban-bajram-15972/)

Today there's no school or work in Bosnia. It's Kurban Bajram, the holiday that commemorates Abraham's willingness to offer his son as sacrifice (though here it's Ishmael who is remembered as being under the knife). Families buy sheep and then slaughter them. One-third of the meat is given to friends, one-third to the poor, and one-third provides the meat for the family feast.

On the way to church on Sunday, we were passed by a Volkswagen bus with two sheep in the back with the son, and sheep were being held in corrals around the bigger mosques.

We, however, have gone away for the holiday (no school, you know). More on that in a couple of days when we get back.

Put it all together, and what does that spell?

Next week is Kurban Bajram, a national holiday which commemorates the story of Abraham and and his son.

Isaac's school put on a great Bajram program. Every grade (up through the equivalent of 8th grade) participated. There was a combo with a clarinet and an accordion.


There were many, many choral poetry readings--all very polished and well-performed (obviously something Bosnian education values).


Not too many songs, but there was the token Christmas song (kind of like the token Hannukah song in our US schools' programs). They sang "O Christmas Tree." Maybe the ballerina was a reference to "The Nutcracker"?


There were a couple of dance numbers including an impressively-complicated folk dance done in national costume.


But sweetest of all was the youngest group, Isaac's class. They did a

recitation of an acrostic poem spelling out "Bosna i Herzegovina." Isaac was the "N" in Herzegovina. He's been working for weeks on his line:

Nigdje sunce ni grije kao ovdje. (Nowhere does the sun warm like it warms here.)

He was pretty grumpy when he was first assigned the line. "It's not even true! Florida's way warmer than here."

But he beamed when he finished delivering it during the program.