A Moment of International Celebrity
Trip Start
Jan 06, 2006
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73
120
Trip End
Sep 02, 2008
Banja Luka,
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Wednesday, November 8, 2006
On a visual level, Banja Luka looks pretty good. It had an earthquake in 1969 that devastated everything but well built Austro-Hungarian buildings. The former Yugoslav state funded reconstruction and the wars of the nineties never reached Banja Luka in the way that they did in Mostar and Sarajevo. Unlike the last two cities, Banja Luka's inhabitants are Serbian by a vast majority, so it wasn't contested.
These days the denizens keep their city tidy and they drive shiny European cars. There is a really nice pedestrian street in the centre of town with slick sidewalk cafes. I don't know what the average bank account balance here is, but it does look like developed Europe.
There was the odd anomaly: there is no McDonalds', but we found a imitator that used the famous "M" and had a very similar menu, sans foam buns. There weren't any hostels either, but the food wasn't too expensive. Bro found a nice "Gas" brand shirt at the market for 20 KM. A few minutes later he walked into their outlet store, with it on, where their real shirts sell for 300 KM.
Here, like everywhere else I've been in Eastern Europe, a person's clothes are very important. As a general rule, my impression has been that even in the poorest places: Albania, Kosovo, Serbia, and Romania, a lot of people dress to look wealthy despite the general poverty. I'll put it this way: there are enough people of the streets of the larger cities of Europe's East who would not look out of place in Berlin or Vienna. The difference is that the people of Europe's East don't have the same mass of Euros to pump into expensive clothes. But they do it anyway.
My best uneducated guess is that in these emerging capitalist cultures, the aura of wealth is compulsory or at least a great part of one's respect or self-esteem. It's hard for me to imagine that there could be another reason for people to spend such a large portion of their money on clothes. Alternately I have been often fooled by very good imitations of designer clothes. With this in mind, there can be little wonder why counterfeit clothing is so copious in this wee corner of the Western World.
*I found the most unusual letter of welcome on the same site, written by the Prime Minister of the RS. I don't think politicians get more frank than this... unfortunately since I first found it, I have the impression that the PM's message has been changed to sound somewhat more like slick political rhetoric. If I'm right and someone finds a cache'd copy, I'd be grateful for it.
* * *
We actually went up to Banja Luka to visit my buddy Dejan. He and I met in Berlin back in April. We weren't in the same language class (he was one tier ahead of me) but we went out together lots and had a crush on the same girl (everyone had a crush on her). We went out to the same places because she was going to those places and we kept crossing paths. We made friends despite that. While she was entertaining other suitors, we struck up our friendship. You can never let an badly reciprocated crush get in the way of friendship.
Dejan's a journalist with the independent newspaper Nezavisnih Novina. Just before I met up with him, he was photographing "the minister" at the opening of a special needs long term care facility. In order that we could hang out that afternoon, he contrived the idea of writing an article about a tourist in Banja Luka, ie., me. That way, he wouldn't have to miss work! He was very busy and it was an ingenious idea. Otherwise, I would have had to tag along while he went off to interview farmers about a new type of wheat that they were going to be trying out next season.
The article was a cool idea. It's the first article on yours truly published in a while, and it's pretty well deserved. After all, I [insert the hot air you've heard me blow here; there's too much for me to even begin], really. But one can mention my travels, as he did. By the end of this year alone, I will have been in 30 countries and territories, bringing my "life total" up to just short of fifty. I really wish that I could link to the article here, but it's encrypted in the newspaper archives and you need a electronic subscription to see it. Even if you could see it, you'd still need to read Serbian to understand it.
Before we left there was talk of visiting one of the groups that clears landmines while they were on the job. No, they are not street cleaners in Paris. They actually remove dangerous explosives from the ground. It would have been a most unusual thing to visit. Alas, we could not contact them in the short time we were in Banja Luka, and we wandered off to Zagreb.
