In Transit

It was time for my friend to leave Poland. After buying some mint-apple juice from a nearby convenience store she mentioned that she had to use the facilities. My friend returned three minutes before her train left. I was exasperated, but didn’t want to ruin our goodbyes by ranting. It’d been amazing to tour the major sites of Poland with a friend of many years. Yet, I was ready for a brake. For the past week, I’d been Travel agent, Translator and Tour guide in-one. This is travel. But, not the way I’d grown up understanding it.    

About a month ago I embarked on the most recent family trip.  I was looking forward to the three week experience. After January in Wroclaw it would be heaven. The trip was planed mostly by my parents. The money would be their problem. The biggest thing I had to worry about was what to order for lunch!

I’ve traveled on my own before too. The experience is enlightening. You really get a feel for how people treat foreigners. Alone with your own thoughts, you develop an understanding of a peoples’ history -- Their way of thinking and living.

But, it’s anything but relaxing. You’re free to do as you please. Yet, there’s no one to share the experience with. The burden is all yours. I remember days in Albania when I thought I’d be kidnapped. Making a Belgrade train reservation is only possible with helpful locals. Avoiding drunks in Lwow is practically impossible.

Avoiding the drunks in Wroclaw was impossible with my Asian-American friend. It was as if we had a sign on our backs that said ‘give us crap’ at every street corner and tramwaj stop.  We had fun laughing at in-jokes and trying to ascend centuries old battlements. Still, when she lost her cell phone I was the one who had to deal with the national railways’ unhelpful blue-collar workers.

My mother voiced a similar complaint in Tunisia. There, she was the itinerary planner and translator for the entire family. “When will I be on vacation?” she vented one day. I felt relived of all concerns. My father just seemed proud that he was responsible for getting us on the plane to the country in the first place.  

When we arrived in Sicily, my mother began to relax. My father shouldered the driving. I handled the navigation. Mom provided the itinerary.

I felt life’s weight returning in Malta. After visiting Rhodes, I’d expected the country to be the knights’ crowning achievement. Even during Carnival, it turned out to be a Disneyland for old British people. For most of the trip, no expectations had been placed on me. Now, I realized that the trip would end. Reality is inescapable.

We got lost on our way back from Amalfi. My father, known for being needlessly cautious about travel plans, complained strenuously. It was a mere inconvenience for me and my mother.   

 Back in Poland, I’d misread the train schedules. The express my friend and I were planning to take wasn’t running. Only one other train departed to Wroclaw that day.  After a quick dinner, I informed her that we needed to head to the platform: now.  It was strange how much I sounded like my father as I sternly told her why she could not use the lieu at this critical juncture.     

Travel comes in many forms. With family, you defend against onslaught of reality. With friends, you hide from it as best you can. With solo travel, you immerse yourself with no life lines. Each holds a new type of knowledge; its own type of stress.

  As Ayn Rand opined in the Fountainhead: travel “is not for going places, but for getting away from them.” It’s an attempted escape from reality. A futile flight from that which is. No matter where one goes.    

Two Dictators of the Western Balkans

As I have mentioned earlier, while I was in Serbia I had the opportunity to learn something about how Tito not only kept the various ethnic groups of that country together, but also did so while following a breakaway policy from the USSR. More recently, on a visit to Albania, I saw firsthand how the policies of the western Balkans' "other" despot, Envir Hoxha, have been truly detrimental to the country.

In many ways the policies of both dectators bear striking similarities. Both of them broke with Stalinist Russia, and followed independent socialist policies. However, Tito seemed to realize that going it alone came along with the need to from alliances with many other countries throughout the world. For this reason, much of his duties revolved around state visits to world leaders. This also had the function of keeping the people in his own country focused on him, whether they really liked him or not, rather than making war on other Yugoslav ethnic groups. The aggressive diplomatic foreign policy of Yugoslavia, considered to be one of the most "liberal" communist regimes, allowed the country to keep in step with the rest of the world as it modernized over the course of the 20th century.

On the other hand, while Hoxha also quickly broke with Russia, he took Albania down a path of isolation. After a short-lived alliance with China, the country found it self alone, without infrastructure, municipal funds or a viable economy. The country was even forced to resort to bulding a number of concrete bunkers as its only means of defense. After the dictator's death the situation went further downhill. Even after the communist regime fell, the economy collapsed multiple times in the 90's as it struggled to change its outdated ways overnight.

On my trip to Albania, the consequences of this isolation were apparent. Even finding transportation to or from the country is difficult. Both coming and going I had to resort to asking people on the street how to cross the border.

The country itself is the least "European" country I have visited in Europe so far. It reminds me more of the poorer parts of Peru. Even transportation within the country is difficult, as the road system has seemingly not been changed to reflect the movement of the country's capital from Dures to Tirana more than 80 years ago. The railway system is practically non-existent, and the tracks do not match up with any of those in the neighboring countires.

It's not that the Albanians don't want to modernize. Most Albanians are great admirers of the West, and of America. When President Bush visited the country in 2007, the Albanians named a rather large street in the capital after him.

When I stopped in to a local barber shop, the proprietor was very polite. When he finished cutting my hair he shook my hand and sincerely thanked me in heavily accented English. I think he was honored to have a customer from the West in his shop.

When leaving the country I was left with no recourse but to pay an elderly Albanian to drive me across the border in his ailing 1980's mercedes. I asked him in Spanish why the border police did not bother to stamp my passport. "You're an American," he informed me in Italian. "You don't need a visa or anything in Albania."

Coexistence

My train was 3 hours late, so I was rather ready to get out of my second- hand Slovenian sleeper compartment as the train finally neared the Capital of Macedonia. I had read a lot about the country, and heard it constantly spoken of as the birthplace of Old Church Slavonic by Slavic linguistics majors who I knew. As the train crested the hill, and the skyline of Skopje came into view I was shocked to count 2 short church steeples and 8 towering minarets.
While I have been to both heavily Muslim and Christian countries around the globe, no city so effectly blurs the lines between the two like Skopje. While the two populations live distinctly in different neighborhoods overlap occurs throughout the city. Women in burkhas, and men in prayer caps walk in front of the site where Mother Teresa was born. Bars and advertisements for the local beer abound in the Christian section of the city, but are conspicuously absent in the Albanian-Turkish neighborhood on the hill across the river, where it is common to see restaurants with Arabic names. It was a surreal feeling to hear the ringing of the church bells join with the call to prayer.
In many other Balkan countries , Orthodox and Muslim groups have turned to violence.

Although I have heard that there is some tension beneath the surface in Macedonia the two groups, while largely segregated, seem to live in relative peace. I simply point out that the city of Skopje stands as an example that such piece is possible in the Balkans and elsewhere..