The “MUST DO” List When Visiting the Balkans

1) Buy car insurance from a guy that insists you have at least one beer before leaving his office.

2) Do a number two in a well established outhouse on a 100+ degree day.

3) Ration water like you live on Mars.

4) Harvest potatoes with a pitchfork until you can’t stand up straight.

5) Drink a three sip espresso at an outdoor café as Mussolini-era Fiats billow smoke out as they pass.

6) Eat watermelon you pick yourself and that is freshly chilled in a nearby underground stream feed river.

7) Pass high speed oncoming traffic on a single lane country road, without closing your eyes.

8) Breathe the crisp blowing air on a plateau situated high up somewhere in the Black Mountains.

9) Enjoy field corn that has exploded after being boiled for four hours.

10) Visit an outdoor market and buy authentic designer T-shirts from Albanians that has the word Alabama proudly displayed on it.

11) Curse traffic using three languages in as short of a sentence as grammatically possible.

12) Attend a beauty contest where all the contestants are wearing layered heavy wool traditional dress on hot sunny day.

13) Cut thorn weeds with a sickle, gather them up and set them ablaze at nightfall. Now sit back and recall the first time you read Lord of the Flies.

14) Have boiled cheese as your side dish to your main course of bread and cheese.

15) Discover that “white meat” is not the red part of a slab of pork belly.

For Sale

We went for a walk yesterday. We started later in the morning than we should have given the heat, but typical for when trying to plan something around here, even something as simple as a group walk.

We took the road upward this time, our destination the cemetery. Today we passed a man sitting on an incline along the side of the road. He was sitting in front of two medium sized containers with a large rock on each to hold the lids down. The man was old, skin darkened from a generation of working the fields. He was rather thin with deep groves cut into his face. His cloths were sturdy but worn and faded, almost a workers uniform.

Gjulia looked at him with interest. She does this with many things new to her, but this man held special interest. As we continued our walk, I got the sense she wanted to ask or say something. I looked down and she said, “That man is very poor isn’t he?” He certainly looked very poor to me, but I wondered what in particular made her deduce this. I asked her what made her think the man was so poor. Without hesitation she replied, “Because all he had for sale were rocks.”