Halfway down the Danube

Car owners, the second

So we are car owners again. After our coup with the VW transporter which we bought for 4,000 Euros, packed full of stuff, drove it down to Belgrade and sold it for 5,400 Euros afterwards, we now own a 1,800 Euro Mitsubishi station wagon. And no, we don't intend to pull another deal like the first one. This car we plan to drive until we move out of Europe one day. It has become very expensive to rent a car every time we're in Germany and it's almost impossible to stay in Ostheim without a car. Since we're also going to be in Romania for 18 months, we decided to go for it and look for an old, beat-up car which would serve our needs.

Once again, we were very lucky. Our "new" car is sort of a hand-me-down which has made it from the parents of Michael's best friend to his brother and now to us.

It's a very sensible car for a growing family: it has seven seats; five regular ones and two emergency seats in the back which fold out if needed. It has cupholders galore (which made Doug very happy), a good stereo (for baby music) with a detachable front - good for Balkan states -, a sun roof, enough space to accommodate two babies and their gear plus their parents and it is a nice shade of darkish red. Ah, I hear the grumble. It also has 120 PS and goes 160 km/h if need be, takes super gas (not so nice but not too much of a problem since gas is cheaper in Romania) and is used to driving a lot. Never had much problems with repairs and seems like one of those old reliable horses. We hope to own it for a while!

Moving on

It seems quite certain now that we'll be moving to another Balkan country soon. Doug has been offered a job in Bucharest, Romania which would keep us there for 18 months. He doesn't have a contract yet but this seems (knock on wood) a formality.

I'll miss Natsa. She is the best babysitter and Alan absolutely adores her. I'll miss our friends, Mira and Gaga above all others. I'll miss our house with the skylights that brought us through a Balkan winter without too much damage to our psyches. I'll miss lots of things.

But there is lots to look forward too. More on this as details unfold.

Addendum to Maya's kitchen

Bruce just informed us about recent changes to the kitchen -- I guess that means we have to go and see what else has changed. [Sigh] I never wish for an Enterprise-style transporter more often than at such moments. I'd so love to just pop in for an afternoon or evening, have a nice meal and good chat with Bruce and Maya, admire the girls who are turning into veritable beauties (they are 11 and breathtaking!) and tease Bribri about his secret reading vice. Alas, no such technical breakthrough anywhere near. So we will have to arrange for a nice long trip. One of these days, I'll talk Doug into it and we'll actually have the time too...

Jewel, Brian and Lila in Ubud, Bali

Wandering

The next couple of weeks will be spotty in respect to entries. We are traveling (Germany for Easter, then off to the States to visit family there) and therefore won't have much opportunity or time to post.

For those who've come here from Talesmag - we will continue posting on our life and experiences in Belgrade in about a month. If you plan to move to Belgrade and have any questions, feel free to leave a comment and we'll get into touch with you.

Claudia & Douglas

Maya's Kitchen

Yesterday morning we called our friends Bruce and Maya. When I talked to Maya, she told me that she had a Seder planned for 36 people. I don't know why but all of a sudden, I felt like I was right there, in Maya's kitchen.

Maya has the most beautiful kitchen in the world. Part of its appeal is that it is located in Saipan, on a hill which overlooks the ocean. On two (and a half) sides big windows allow a breathtaking view of the Pacific. Endless miles and miles of water and nothing but water but somehow one gets never tired looking at it. The light streams in through those windows during the day and make the entire room feel like an expansion of the outside.

Maya's kitchen is a huge room with a nicely sized pantry right next to it. Huge, yes, but even when you're in there by yourself, it feels just right. There's a cooking island and enough counter space to comfortably prepare a menu for 36 people or more. The sink sits under a large window with the before mentioned view of the ocean and some palm trees and the kitchen garden on top of it. Maya always has the nicest tropical flowers on the window sill there.

The dining table is big enough to easily accommodate 12 people. Over the table, there's always a big cluster of banana hanging from a rack, ready for you to pick the single fruit off when you feel like having fresh banana. There's a big, comfy couch and a door opening onto a balcony that's really more an elevated terrace, overlooking - of course - the Pacific. You want to sit there and watch the sun go down while sipping on a dry Martini, that sort of balcony.

There are places in this world that you will always miss. Maya's kitchen is one of those for me.

Green Market

We live just a couple of blocks from a green market, which is a big plaza full of little stands selling fruits and vegetables. Because central Belgrade is somewhat lacking in supermarkets, we go to the green market regularly, two or three times a week.

Pushing a stroller around the market can be strenuous. The ancient paving stones are cracked and tipped, and often damp and slippery too -- the market is cleaned by sprays from high pressure hoses, which washes the loose lettuce leaves and gunk away but makes navigation that much trickier. On the other hand, the sellers love babies. We regularly get extra odds and ends -- a free head of lettuce, a couple of bonus bananas -- because Alan has smiled at some horny-handed farmer.

And he smiles a lot, because he loves the green market.

All those people; all those things to see, great pyramids of tomatoes and buckets of olives; all those exciting sounds and smells. He's always excited to be going to the market (although once we push the stroller over the threshold, he goes into a sort of sensory overload trance state, wide-eyed and silent).

The green market is particularly nice just now because suddenly everyone is selling flowers. The flower sellers sit with enormous buckets full of daffodils and calla lilies, waving wildly at you if you so much as glance at them. And it's hard to resist: a great bunch of daffodils too big to hold in one hand, all sweet-smelling and fresh, can be bought for about $1.50.

I don't want to glamorize the green market. Some of the sellers are obviously painfully poor -- old women sitting with a few strings of garlic and some withered scallions. And all of them, even the kindly ones, will cheerfully sell you bruised apples and limp carrots if you're not paying attention; _caveat emptor_ is very much in force. And visiting the green market when there's six inches of snow on the ground, or cold rain falling hard from a windy grey sky, makes you think of supermarkets in a whole new light.

Still, on the whole, there are worse ways to pick up a dozen tomatoes.

Ass over teakettle

There's an English expression, "ass over teakettle". It means to take a wild fall, forwards or backwards. It's an odd idiom, but pretty common -- universal, really -- so you don't realize just how odd it really is, until your wife turns to you and says, "What was that you just said?"

It has come up a few times recently, because our son has been quite the bold explorer lately.

Ass over teakettle #1: the front steps. There are three of them just outside our front door. Alan loves to stand on the top step and look out over the little courtyard that fronts our house, like a monarch reviewing his kingdom.

Now, he knows how to go down the stairs: get down on the ground, turn around backwards, and crawl down one step at a time.

But that's not... imperial enough. No, the preferred method would be to stride down the steps, arms outspread, his Majesty descending to grace the peasants with his presence.

Unfortunately, walking down steps is trickier than it looks. Especially when each step is half as tall as you are.

Ass over teakettle. Thing is, I was standing right there. But I couldn't believe he'd actually try it. Ha! Ha! Yes, I know.

A big scrape on the top of his head, no lasting damage as far as we can tell.

A over T #2: Three days ago he discovered that he could climb up on the little table next to the sofa chair. (It's a little table that used to hold a lamp, a few books and Claudia's knitting. All those things migrated to higher altitudes a while ago.)

Two days ago, he discovered that if he leaned waaaay over, he could climb from the table onto the sofa chair. Happiness! But beyond the foothills, greater heights beckoned tantalizingly above. Why sit in the sofa chair when you could climb up onto the arms? And why stop on the arms when you could climb up onto the back? And, say, isn't that the TV remote up there? All the more reason...

That one was a double. Clutching the TV remote, he plummeted off the back of the sofa chair, took a clean bounce off the cushion head-first, and hit the floor after a rather lovely backflip. Two bruises, head and backside.

-- Actually, we're starting to lose track of the bumps and scrapes. A horrible thing for parents to admit, I know, but I just had this conversation with Claudia:

"Honey, what about that big lump on his forehead last week?"

"Which?"

"The really big blue one."

"Oh, that's the one that we never found out how he did it." (True. He wailed, we ran into the room, he had a huge bump on his forehead. The working theory is that the lid of the toy chest fell on him, but he could just as easily have run head first into the wall. To see what would happen, like.)

"I thought that was the one he got from running into the bottom of the kitchen table. "

"No, no, that was Friday. The big lump was like Wednesday."

"Oh, right. Thanks, babe."

Is this unusual? It's a bit hard to tell. Every kid collects bumps and dings. And parents have a habit of one-upmanship, especially once they're safely past the period in question. ("Oh, when Jason was fourteen months old we found him playing with some spent nuclear fuel rods.") So we don't really know if he's unusually active or just... active.

So, we pick him up, we hold him until the wailing dies down, we kiss the latest scrape scratch bruise or lump, and we make faces and head-butt him in the belly until he giggles and we give him something to play with.

And then we go in the bedroom and lie down for a moment until the trembling stops.

Ass over teakettle.

Budapest, belatedly

Two weeks ago we went to Budapest. We didn't mention it in our weblog because we didn't have a weblog then.

We had a pretty good time. We walked until our feet smoked -- it's a great city for walking, is Budapest -- then we sat down and had coffee and cake, and then we walked some more.

Alan liked it too. Most of the time he sat in his stroller, directing us like Captain Picard on the bridge of the Enterprise. ("Two points to starboard, Lieutenant, and Warp Factor Five towards that ice cream stand over there.") But Budapest has plenty of parks, so we we were able to turn him loose and let him run around a bit. Here's a picture:

Carnegie Library

We live about three blocks from the main campus of the University of Belgrade. "Main campus" means about four buildings, as the Uni is scattered all over the city. Still, one of those four is the University Library, a very dignified looking building that's painted a curiously pleasing shade of pink.

(At this point I'll just mention in passing that Belgrade has some of the loveliest buildings in Eastern Europe, cheek by jowl with some of the ugliest. More on this topic later.)

Three interesting things about the Library. One, you can't get very far inside -- it's still run on the socialist principle of Authorized Personnel Only. That's not just foreigners, by the way -- even students can't get in without a special permit. (Because, I guess, you wouldn't want students just wandering in and out of a library.)

Second, you can get as far as the card catalog. And the card catalog is, by gum, a real honest to goodness card catalog: a room full of those wooden cabinets with the tiny drawers, each one filled solid with hundreds of hand-typed cards. If you're under the age of 25 you may have no idea what I'm talking about, but this is how they used to keep track of the books in a library. A hard copy database, if you like.

Because of the wars and the economic blockade, Yugoslavia basically missed the entire IT revolution in library science. So they're still using a card catalog. And I mean using it; there were students in the catalog room, flipping through cards and pulling out drawers to sit on the table, just as we all used to do before 1980 or so. And it had that card catalog smell, hardwood and old card stock...

The library does have a CD-ROM with its collection information. But no computer terminals that I could see... so you'd have to either bring a laptop, or browse the catalog at home.

This is not to cock a snoot at the poor primitive Serbs. The catalog room was clean and busy. The system may not be modern, but it works. Under the circumstances, it looks like they've managed extremely well.

Third interesting thing: it's a Carnegie library, funded by the great robber baron's estate in 1926. I knew there were Carnegie libraries all over the world, but I didn't expect to find one here. And, like every library that Carnegie built, it has a bust of the great man himself as you walk in the front door.

Carnegie was a remarkably unpleasant man, but the good that he did seems to be living on.

Picture of the Day

Alan eating a raspberry jam toast. :-)

A strange kind of duality

One cannot call Belgrade a child-friendly city. I have yet to see a restaurant with a changing table or a policeman who will keep Belgrade drivers from parking on the sidewalks, not forcing mothers with strollers to sway into the streets and take it up with cars, trucks and buses.
No bus is equipped for strollers; not only are they always over-crowded but one would not fit through the doors. Aisles in supermarkets are so narrow that one better leaves the kid at home. I'm not even mentioning the bad air quality outside and the much worse air quality in restaurants, cafés or trains. Serbians are very Balkan when it comes to smoking.
However, in other respects Belgrade is the most child-friendly city I've ever been to.

Mothers are always whisked to the front of any queue, be it at the post office, the bank or in a restaurant. Everybody, from teenage boy to old woman, will hold doors open for you and offer to help you carry the stroller up or down the stairs while complimenting you on your sweet offspring.
No, it's true - even teenagers flirt with your baby when you're waiting at the traffic lights. No German or American teenage boy who has an ounce of self-respect would ever be caught doing that. Sellers on the market will give you free bananas and free advice on shoes and hats (both always obligatory on Serbian children, no matter age or climatic conditions).
I prefer this way of being child-friendly to the omnipresent Koala bear changing station in the States or Germany.

Perpetuum mobile

For some days now, Alan has been a very bad eater. He has his morning and evening bottles (1/3 formula, 2/3 milk) but other than that, he doesn't eat much. He nibbles on a cookie now and then, eats some crackers and yesterday I even managed to get a slice of jam toast into him. At mealtimes, it's a spoon or two of whatever I offer him, then he turns away in disgust. Believe me, the variety of foods I've offered him is amazing. I never thought I'd woo a male's stomach like this.
The funny thing is that he doesn't seem to suffer at all. He's his usual bouncy self and wears Doug and me to the ground with his boundless energy. Does he just absorb our energy or does he conjure it out of thin air? Babies are an endless source of wonder.

Thanks!

A big THANK YOU to my brother Hajo who set this web log up for me. I had no clue whatsoever and asked him for help. The result is this nice log!

I'm going to play around a bit with styles and settings but soon I'll have this up and running and will keep you all informed about our exciting life in Belgrade, halfway down the Danube.

Bild

Hier ein Eintrag mit Foto !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
YEAH !

First message

Hello Claudi,
erster Eintrag hier, ich weiss noch nicht so genau was das soll ....