Travel to the Balkans is always a piercing of the veil. It takes much longer than it seems like it will take on paper, and then it takes longer than that. When you arrive, the world is different. I don’t speak Slovene. But I do speak Serbian. And that adds to the strangeness of floating inches above pretty much being sure the artificial dual-language exchanges I engage in (I speak in Serbian and they answer in Slovene) could just be resolved with a short crash back to planet English.
Today I started the day with cappuccino in a nearby plaza, followed by a trip to get some Turkish coffee grounds for the morning’s pre-excursion brew. The apartment came furnished with a džezva, like all Balkan rentals seem to do. The masses here, from the top of the Balkans to the tip, are sipping sophisticated shots of Italian anxiety juice all along the promenades, while being one thumbnail’s depth of dead skin away from reading the Rorschach shapes in black mud left in their cups after a thick Bosnian/Turkish/”our”/”domestic” brew in the privacy of their own homes.
I thought I would locate the main university library and attempt to reconnoiter with the subject librarians there, but it was not not be. A security guard, one not long on the job, sat behind the visitor’s desk in the place of the expert whose specialty was receiving seekers like myself. He apologized that he couldn’t help, but he was anxious to ask me one thing- how is it possible that the state of US politics was such as it is? Is it a joke? How is such a thing possible?
The natives are moderately restless.
Oligarchy, my friend, oligarchy and mafia! You just have to read the writing on that wall across the street. With that spontaneous cultural exchange thus concluded, I reembarked upon my open-air museum ramble.’
I walked around the old town through various squares at the base of the hill below the castle on both sides of the river, following which I sat for a sophisticated Italian style coffee followed by a .5 l of draught beer. It was the Austrian brew Stiegl, however. Not a local. Still quite tasty.
The service was so… relaxed that I asked another patron whether anyone was working. I was assured that someone was checking on the tables on the street… at least occasionally. Serendipitously, It turned out that they worked for Radio Študent, and they were able to give me some advice on what neighborhoods to visit for live music, cool bars, and record stores. They also suggested that I contact the radio station to see if anyone could guide me through their vinyl library. That was a solid lead. I’m already on my second day out of 14 here, and I whiffed at the library somehow, so I’ll take it.
I walked back to my apartment instead of taking the bus. This part of town where the social sciences and economics campuses are located is separated from the center by a pretty wide dead zone, so I’ll probably be taking the bus from here on out. On the way, though, I thought that Ljubljana manages to remind one of Belgrade, a very clean Belgrade, even if it leans more Zemun than Knez Mihailova, and more Italy than Ankara.