| Cheese and Socks |
| Videogames - Geek Adventure | |||
| Written by Pixelsmith | |||
Wednesday April 30 2008We were up by 3pm. Brodos had drawn the short straw and was staying in Peyota's room, so he had had to wait until the party went home before he could go to sleep. But even with a proper rest, my brain hurt, my eyes were fuzzy and my mouth felt as if a selection of woodland creatures had spent the night inside it, and then died. Peyota was watching handball in the living room. It's not a sport I'm familiar with, a weird cross between basketball and lacrosse that involves throwing a ball into a medium-sized net with your hand. To someone raised on the English scholastic system's focus on football and rugby, this seemed a lot like cheating. At least they put a man in front of the net to make it a bit more difficult. Peyota cooked me up some eggs, adding a strange cheesish thing called kimac. I was hesitant. But then again, I will happily eat cottage cheese and, to the unfamiliar, that probably resembles something that just tumbled out the wrong end of a goat. So I tucked in, and it was very tasty. This was strange. I remember we had been worried about coming to Serbia, partly because it had a recent history of conflict, and partly because tensions in Kosovo were much publicised in the English media at the time we were planning the trip. It seems ridiculous to worry about that kind of thing, but in England we live a pretty cossetted existence. People my age and younger were born into a country in which war was a very distant thing in the memories of other people, and the military campaigns our Government has been a part of have taken place overseas, viewed by us only on TV. Terrorism - well that's just something our media likes to worry about. It's all about worry really. A few people might know somebody who got "caught up" in a London attack, by which they mean they were using the Tube when they took place. And except for that minuscule proportion who know somebody who died, it's just something to worry about. So few of us have a direct experience of conflict, and long may that continue, that even the prospect of heading to a country that has been at peace for a decade makes us think twice. I don't know what we expected. The border guards answered it for us, armed but carrying a welcome basket of lemon sweets. When you're actually there, you realise the gun's pretty much irrelevant to you. But a thousand miles away, ill-informed, you'd never notice the sweets. That's me, anyway. Most are probably a lot more clued up than I was. I sat, eating eggs and kimac, as Peyota filled me in on the history and reasons behind the war at the end of the 90s. Wikipedia will tell you a lot better than I can, but not as well as Peyota, whose university studies filled in the global background, how it is in the interests of a capitalist economy with an army and weapons manufacturing industry - like the UK - to get involved with conflict elsewhere, so their miltary machine has something to do in the downtime between their own wars. He broke off, looked at my feet and asked if I wanted to borrow some slippers for the house. "You have just... er..." He stumbled a second, forgetting a word. "Socks?" I suggested. "Yes, socks!" he replied, a little embarrassed. "My English is not so great." I wasn't so sure. There he was dissecting the politics of war while I was still struggling with the Serbian word for "hello". "Thanks Pez," I said. "The socks are fine." Next week: Learning Serbian.Read from the start:
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jonathan makes this comment
Tue 01 Sep 2009 11:30:43 CDT
Brodos makes this comment
Sat 26 Sep 2009 00:11:08 CDT