Last night I rolled into Sofia, Bulgaria, where I now await the bus to Goce Delcev, for my friend Rumen's niece's wedding. (for those who don't know, Rumen aka Sali is a great Rom musician & also one of the most generous & loving people in the world). The wedding's on Sunday, and afterwards I'll cross the spittin-distance Greek border & work my way to Athens to fly out on the 24th.
Meanwhile, since my last email, I've visited Skopje, Macedonia, & then in Serbia: Vranje, the Guca Brass Band Festival, & my friend Zeljko's family home in Zavlaka, near Valjevo. Some highlights:
Skopje seems kinda sleepy, but something about the place–perhaps the mostly dormant Slavic-Albanian-Rom tension, perhaps just the longstanding crossroads quality, perhaps something else entirely–lends a sense of something always bubbling just beneath the surface. The Carsija (Turkish style covered market) is mostly dominated by Albanians selling music (largely plastic pop stars, the covers garish & surely designed with the intent to induce seizures in anyone thus prone), cheap clothes, and expensive headscarves & formalwear. I bought a shortwave radio, always wanted one, for five euros. Each band has a subtext, unfortunately: a continuous, underlying extra radio station no matter where you tune the dial.
Just across the Vardar river on the western bank awaits a kilometer stretch dedicated to the very Balkan evening custom of made-up young Macedonian (I.e. Slavic-identified) women parading past seated, amply-perfumed young Macedonian men sipping Nescafe & smoking so so much. (Macedonia is second only to Greece, apparently, in per capita cigarette consumption. Don't tell the Serbs that, though, as they'll surely fight for the title.) Below, the banks of the river are teeming with Rom kids, continuously ogled by the Macedonians on the bridge above.
After a couple of uneventful days there (couldn't connect with a friend in Bitola because he was too busy performing at private parties), I headed north to Vranje, where I studied last year with Vranjski Biseri, more on them later). Again failed to connect with friends there (seems folks in Serbia tend to change their mobile numbers whenever a better deal comes along), so I set off for Cacak, the closest major town to Guca. Somehow, as seems to be my destiny, I found the slowest bus in the country, and the trip took nine hours; woulda been about four by car.
In Cacak I was immediately befriended by a somewhat haggard older man who promised to show me how to catch the bus to Guca. This wasn't all that difficult, as it was the bus 200 other people, the only folks at the bus station at 11pm anyway, also hoped to take. Actually I think we DID all take that bus. Never since Cairo have I been on transit that crowded.
Arrived in Guca. Now just imagine: reportedly 600,000 people converge yearly on this town nominally of 50,000, and create a decidedly unholy lovechild of county fair, smokehouse (meat & tobacco both), fraternity party, nationalist fiesta, and brass band competition. Brass bands rove the streets, playing for paying diners (or more commonly paying drinkers); a sea of trinket seekers combs booths for cds, trumpet keychains, & of course t-shirts ranging from the innocuous (Guca 2007) to the mildly obnoxious (f*ck the country that doesn't have a Guca) to the faces of nationalist butchers of the last 10 years & old royalist heroes evoking a Greater Serbia.
There was, of course, great music, mostly in the restaurants, and also in the Saturday evening concert (though there the experience was much less immediate, given the sound system & 100 meter distance from the bands). I also had the pleasure of sharing sleeping quarters in the back of a big old diesel truck (much more on that truck later) with some friends from San Francisco: Joe Mama & Kate from the humanitarian circus which goes every year to Kosovo to teach valuable life skills to refugee kids; Zeljko of Kafana Balkan (myspace.com/kafanabalkan) & his dad; & Shane of Extra Action, who is very sweet sober & unfortunately doesn't stay sober much.
For those wondering, Vranjski Biseri, who I studied with last year, won Best Band (kinda 2nd place); Nenad Mladenovic (heir to the Bakija Bakic legacy) won First Trumpet; and a racist from the west won the newly inaugurated Golden Trumpet, which is decided by the crowd vote, as submitted by text message from mobile phones.
Joe Mama invited me to Kosovo with them to help with their circus, & Zeljko invited me for a couple of days to the Serbian countryside, so I abandoned my plan of returning to Greece for the Panageia (the festival of Mother Mary's deathless ascension), and went instead with Zeljko & his father in the big truck. (spoiler alert: This was to be the last uneventful trip I'd make in that truck.)
Beautiful land up there in Zavlaka: rolling hills, undeveloped in any post-19th century way, giant haystacks, sheep & goats & plums & my god the tomatoes & clay tiled rooves & narrow gravel roads seldom travelled without at least couple of stops to go share a coffee or slivovica with a neighbor.
The 2nd day Dad decided we (dad, Zeljko, sister Jasmina, & I) should go visit the old fortress & monastery at Sokol Grad. After a lovely visit filled with lots of photo ops, and seemingly completed with some homemade slivovica & bread & kajmak (salty creamy cow cheese) courtesy of the nice man who lives all the way up there, we piled back into the truck (why had dad driven up on those crazy roads? He said it would be faster when we were ready to leave.) to take the dirt road short cut home. At dusk, as the rain started, third day in a row. Short version: six hours of four guys (luckily Zeljko had met a distant cousin & his friend, Zeljko, at the kajmak stand, who'd agreed to lead is down the treacherous road in their old Yugo) heaving the truck & car both out of mud pits, punctuated with life-flashing dashes, sitting in the truck bed for added weight & traction, hoping our momentum would enable us to fly over all the other mud pits in the way. I'm convinced the reason I survived was because I decided to. And because we kept laughing.
Also made a trip to Valjevo, to send my new used trumpet home along with some other unnecessary weight. The truck's tire blew. (It's a miracle only one did, after inspecting them.) The Valjevo post office taught me one thing: the bureaucratic legacy lives on in the public services here. After trips to three windows & back again, paying small fees at each, we're told that if the package is refused at customs, they can't send it back to Zeljko's house in Zavlaka. Why the postal service can't deliver a returned package, I still have no idea. So we took the package back (visiting the other windows for refunds), since I'd be more than a little sad to have my new old trumpet end up in the dead letter office.
Anyway, we had a nice lunch while Zeljko eyed the ladies (I swear I didn't notice any beautiful women; it was all Zeljko).
For the sake of brevity (why do I suddenly consider brevity, you may ask), my failed connections on this trip total 7: Ismail in Macedonia, Dalibor & Sanje in Vranje, Demiran & Bojana in Guca, Dusan Ristic in Valjevo, & the entire Kosovo circus. Does this happen to everyone here, or what?
Truck failures are 4: stuck in the mud by Sokol Grad, blown tire to Valjevo, empty gas on the way to catch the bus to Nis, and (in my absence) broken axle on their way home from the bus depot. Times I was in the truck: 4. Again, am I somehow to blame?
I think that's all I can manage to say for now. Next update will likely be after the wedding!
