Election posters – Belgrade

I spent election night in one of the more relaxed bars in the city – Ana 4 Pistolja, located right behind the Skupstina.  Good music, kind staff who didn’t guffaw at my srpski, interesting bunch of drinkers.  Most seemed to be supporting Boris Tadic.  

Actually, most didn’t care or were cynical about the whole exercise, but of those who were taking an interest in the results coming through on the TV, the majority were for Tadic’s pro-Europe party.

Khmer gestures

The lip point

Purse the lips, tilt the head back and the chin goes forward.  Lead with lazy lips and indicate the bus the foreigner should be getting on, or the place he should buy a phone card.

The hand twist

Don’t have something, don’t know something, just uncertain.  The hand rotates back and forth on the wrist — pretend you are turning a door knob.

The oooooooo

Two dollars? Ooooooooo no no no.  Head back, let them see up your nostrils as you oooo and half-close the eyes in pain.  Are you trying to kill me with that price? Two dollars? It hurts.  Okay two-fifty.  

The smile

Any opportunity.  Things going well.  You just had a terrible accident.  Nice to see you.  Never seen you before in my life.  What are you doing way out here? This is a strange place to meet, isn’t it? I am doing something very dangerous with electricity at the moment. Smile.

Sulzberger

CL Sulzberger’s book A Long Row of Candles is mostly a pretty dull diary of people he met and places he went while a top New York Times correspondent.  It shouldn’t be; he lived in interesting times and places.  

The first part, though, is good. He lets himself go a little, becomes a little less stiff.  And you come across passages like this about the Balkans in the 1930s:  

It is, or was, a gay peninsula filled with sprightly people who ate peppered foods, drank strong liquors, wore flamboyant clothes, loved and murdered easily and had a splendid talent for starting wars.  Less imaginative westerners looked down on them with secret envy, sniffing at their royalty, scoffing at their pretensions, and fearing their savage terrorists.  Karl Marx called them ‘ethnic trash’.

I, as a footloose youngster in my twenties, adored them.  

All the stereotypes are here.  Nonetheless, I know exactly what he means.     

The White City

“Consider yourself lucky if you happen to be in Belgrade in May”  -  Momo Kapor

So I followed Momo’s advice and considered myself lucky.

Momo Kapor, author, artist, wit.  Belgrade’s answer to Bob Ellis.  Momo reckons Belgrade the most beautiful city in the world in May.  Quite a boast.  Geelong, for one, would give it a run for its money in May.  To say nothing of the true regional beauties: Sarajevo, Ljubljana, Zagreb…

Belgrade is as ugly as they come.  It was so in 1938, when CL Sulzberger wrote: “Covered in flea bites [from his cheap hotel] I started to wander around Belgrade, an ugly city with which I fell in love”.  And so it remains, ugly and loveable seventy years and several wars later.  

Looking further into this outrageous claim of Momo’s, it seems that he bases it on the strength of the city’s human adornments: the world’s most beautiful women. 

To test it out, I spent half of a May day idling in the crowded cafés on Knez Mihailova, the main pedestrian mall through the older part of town. It is impossible not to stare at the Belgrade girls: tall, black haired and green eyed, eagerly out in their summer clothes after the wrapped up winter, flashing glances every which way.  I very quickly started to see Momo’s point.

Ahh Belgrade.  The White City.  

Capital of the incredible shrinking Serbia.  

Perceived in the world as a byword for trouble.  On the map of Europe the label next to Belgrade still says ‘here be monsters, war criminals turned hippies, embassy burning hoodlums’.

Belgrade’s bad image deters visitors, which is a shame.  Tell a Belgrader you are an Australian with no agenda but to discover their city, and first they’ll be incredulous (‘Why?’, is the first question), then pleased, proud and manically helpful.  And then they’ll tell you about their cousin Dusan who lives in Melbourne.  And then you’ll tell them about your respect for tennis player Ana Ivanovic, and everyone will go off for shots at a bar.

Travelling Melburnians might notice something familiar about Belgrade.  Not just the trams. There is a faint touch of the old St Kilda about the place.  Belgrade squats above its own ugly-charming waterfront, the confluence of the Sava and the Danube rivers.  Belgrade is raffish and roguish, artistic, under-employed, ill-advised, scruffy, defeated, bleak and romantic.  Belgrade is pretty much punk rock.

Sulzberger felt some of this when he lived there.  He writes of the place as “a delightful peasant town.  It smelled of fog, sweat and meat”.  In the simple restaurants (kafanas) he watched thirsty students with no money pass around eau de cologne and he sat with them as they planned insurrections, showing him photos of their military training in the nearby woods.  And in the evenings:

There was always and agreeable clatter of horse and oxen hoofs on cobbled streets, the whining horns of river steamers, the wails of accordion and tambouritza music starting up in the kafanas…

Belgrade is a place where the tourist should simply sit in parks and cafes and watch the spin of life.  One reason is that Belgrade has almost zero ‘must-see’s’.  There are some lovely and important churches, a grand Parliament Building in the Austro-Hungarian style, and some much-loved parks, but nothing significantly older than in an Australian city and little you can see only in Belgrade.  

Belgrade is actually one of Europe’s oldest cities — it doesn’t look it.  It has been knocked flat more than forty times over the years. 

Fitzroy Maclean writes about arriving into newly liberated Belgrade just behind the Russians and Tito and marvelling at the destruction.

Before that, in WW I, the brilliant war correspondent John Reed watched from behind the walls at Kalemegdan as the city was defended from the Austrians.  Later he walks around to see the damage:

Everywhere were visible the effects of artillery fire.

Great holes fifteen feet in diameter gaped in the middle of the street. A shell had smashed the roof of the Military College and exploded within, shattering all the windows; the west wall of the War Office had sloughed down under a concentrated fire of heavy guns; the Italian legation was pitted and scarred by shrapnel, and the flag hung ragged from its broken pole. Doorless private houses, with roofs cascading to the sidewalks, showed window-frames swinging idly askew without a pane of glass. Along that crooked boulevard which is Belgrade’s main and the only paved street, the damage was worse. Shells had dropped through the roof of the Royal Palace and gutted the interior…

Hardly anything had escaped that hail of fire – houses, sheds, stables, hotels, restaurants, shops, and public buildings – and there were many fresh ruins from the latest bombardment, only ten days before. A five-storey office-building with the two top floors blown off by a 30.5-centimetre shell exhibited a half section of a room – an iron bed hanging perilously in the air, and flowered wall-paper decorated with framed pictures, untouched by the freak of the explosion. The University of Belgrade was only a mass of yawning ruins. 

(The ‘freak of the explosion’ is great).

And then later the mad hand of the Communist architects went to work on their own remodelling. And then NATO did some bombing…

There are still plenty of reminders of the Communist days.  My hotel of choice, The Excalibur, is an optimistic moment from the early 1960s teleported forward to the current day.  You close the lift doors by hand.  The rooms haven’t ever been improved (but are still clean and great value).  In the dining room, with its once-futuristic light fixtures and its stained glass windows displaying the coats of arms of Belgrade’s premier hotels, aged waiters in bow ties serve an eternal 1960s breakfast.  I felt sad all this opulence had dated so very fast…

Like the old St Kilda, the political is on the surface.  It was just prior to the parliamentary elections and the graffiti on the streets was mostly angry stuff directed at the Democrat President Boris Tadic (Tadic je Juda  – ‘Tadic is Judas’), the NATO bombing of 1999 or Kosovo independence (‘Kosova je Serbija’ – Kosovo is Serbia), but there was humour as well – I liked ‘Ibiza je Serbija’, claiming that the notorious Spanish party island Ibiza belongs to the Serbs. 

So, what to do if there is nothing to see?  There are small good things available for not many dinars and little effort.  The war museum and the old fortress at Kalemegdan Park are worth your strolling time.  You can taxi down to Ada Ciganlija, an island in the Sava River with beaches and cafes and strange homemade bars on the water and every kind of sport or recreation available.  Or go to the huge open air fruit and veg market Kalenic Pijaca to find local cheese.  You should certainly enter a kafana and attempt to have dinner.  Kafanas are traditional bistros and mostly full of smoking men getting loudly hammered on rakija.  The food is always simple, fresh and homemade, and generally meat-based (particularly lamb), but Serbian salads are delicious and not to be missed.

It Was King…

Further to below, the best image from the Obama speech was one of Martin Luther King’s:

It is a direct reference to one of King’s most riveting lines, spoken in Montgomery, Alabama after the long and dangerous march from Selma in March, 1965. King said he knew people were asking how long it would take to achieve justice. “How long?” he asked, over and over, making listeners desperate for an answer — and then he supplied the answer.

“How long? Not long. Because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

And then, apparently, King went on to use several variations on the ‘arc’ line in different quotes.

No Ice Vo Vo, Mr Obama?

What was the heat? It was scorching.  

And the cold? Bitter.

How did people manage the cold? They braved it.

What about the future? Its a road. A long one.

How are people listening to radios? They are huddled.

Where are they huddling?  Beyond our shores. 

……..Okay, but enough of the Flann O’Brien cliche spotting…  

A powerful speech.  Simple language.  Clear line of argument (the win is not enough). Catchphrases and slogans (Yes we can).  A personal anecdote (Ann Nixon Cooper).  A few touches of lyricism (this autumn night).

All beautifully delivered, of course. Triumphant without arrogance. Sober and inspiring. 

No images that astonish with originality, though.  Except this one, perhaps.  My favourite image:    

It’s the answer that led those who have been told for so long by so many to be cynical, and fearful, and doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.

Hands on the arc of history is interesting – new, tactile. 

And favourite paragraph:

To those who would tear this world down – we will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security – we support you. And to all those who have wondered if America’s beacon still burns as bright – tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from our the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.

I think want he meant was, a la Kevin Rudd:

‘We have a job of work to do”.

Bodies on Yemen beaches

Sixty bodies washed up this week on the stony beaches in southern Yemen.   

How bad is life in Somalia that people will try to get to Yemen?

You are 8 months pregnant.  You pull together $100 for this, possibly the most pathetic and desperate of human voyages.  The boat is badly overcrowded – 115 people on board and stuffed into the holds where many will suffocate during the 36 hour crossing.  The boats are unseaworthy and regularly capsize or sink.  

Your life is in the hands of armed people smugglers.  There is not enough food or water on the boat.  Survive all this, make it within sight of land and then face a final cruelty:

The survivors told UNHCR that the boat left on Friday with 115 passengers who were mainly Somalis and Ethiopians. The passengers had each paid $100 but when the Yemeni coast was in sight, the smugglers demanded more money. Those who did not or could not pay, mostly Ethiopians, were severely beaten and thrown overboard.  

While approaching the shore at 8:00 PM, the smugglers noticed some lights on the land. Being afraid to be spotted by the coast guard, they forced us into the sea, even if the water was too deep. Several people did not know how to swim and they drowned.

All this gets you to a refugee camp in Yemen.  Rations and handouts and then you might join the ranks of the unemployed urban poor in one of the poorest countries in the world.  Some will try to reach the gulf states.  

The Yemeni government apparently grants refugee status to those who land, though there are also reports of armed battles between the people-smugglers and the Yemeni coast guard.  Yemen also has plenty of its own displaced people. 

One of those largely unreported tragedies in the world.  

http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/pr/release.cfm?id=3167

Arctic

Ice and water push the light up beneath cliffs and into other places where you would expect to find shadows, and back into the sky where it fills the air.

Lopez looking at ice and light in the Arctic.

In the heart of the heart of the country

Near dusk on the road back from Pailin bats were suddenly in the pale air.  Looping like a thinking ribbon, they schooled and spread, black dappling the sky, and in all their movements they never broke but kept turning as one thought.  I pictured the form of a dragon, this was how a dragon would whip its snake-form.  Out hunting in the dusk.  

A girl in the back of the taxi cried out and the driver slowed down.  She put her camera-phone through the window and took a snapshot.