the balkans live on!

Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina

At long last, the account of the Most Excellent Balkans Road Trip has gained more airtime courtesy of the most excellent folks over at Blue Dot. Check out the article, and while you're at it, sign up for their email list to have each weekly article delivered right to your inbox. No websurfing needed!

Exploring the Balkans the Accidental Way

"...Following a road-trip pit-stop along the route through Montenegro, as we reclaimed the highway, my eyes drooped into an unable-to-be-fought post-lunch siesta. But I was soon awakened by the click, click, click of my friend Olivier’s camera. I dredged my eyes open to find out what had attracted his lens.

As they focused, my eyes found before them a natural marvel that the word magnifique was created to describe: a long, sunlit bay ringed by picturesque villages that were squeezed between the calm water and the steep, rocky, scrub-brush-covered mountains that plunged down to meet it.

What was this beautiful place?..."

Read the rest of the article here!

lenten poem twenty-two

Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2014.

Carême 22: Repose-toi

La nuit est fraîche

Mais la lune brille

Derrière les nuages.

Une lumière douce,

Gentille, et

Pleine d'espoir.

Tout ira bien, ma puce.

In English:

Carême 22: Rest

The night is cool

But the moon shines

From behind the clouds.

A light soft,

Kind, and

Full of hope.

Everything will be okay, my dear one.

lenten poem twelve

Ljubljana, Slovenia. 2014.

Carême 12: Stir Up Thy Power

Lord, as I long to

be known, help me remember

to deeply know others

                                                      ----being the first to hold out a hand.

(Third Sunday of Lent (Prayer) - InterVarsity's Emerging Scholars Blog)

lenten poem three

Sarajevo, Bosnia, 2014.

Carême 3: I Go

"Rend hearts not garments,"

says slow-to-anger Lord God.

Now

"get up and go."

------Ok, j'y vais

(même si ce n'est pas logique)

*Translation of French: Ok, I'll go. (Even if it doesn't really make sense.)

(Joel 2:12-13; Acts 9:10-17)

lenten poem two

Albania, 2014.

Carême 2: Hard Choices

Two paths before me,

"Avoid suffering," friends urge.

No---

I choose the Cross.

my balkans story in the washington post!

I've been published in the Washington Post! Exciting, right? 

Somewhere in Montenegro. July 2014.

Um, well, kinda. 

One of the big reasons to seek getting articles placed in these big outlets is that the stories will reach more people. Except that in the wonderful real world of publishing and editing, sometimes the story gets lost. 

Per the editors' requests, I wrote a long account of mine and Olivier's 12-day road trip in the Balkans. Difficult to condense down to however many words I was given, but I tried.

In the end, after the usual edits, they decided to run the story more as a photo essay than an article. Okay, no problem. Photos make for a cool spread, and it's great that my friend Olivier has ended up being an equal partner in what's been published.

But the way the story is cut, well, it leaves readers hanging. It's like the story's just getting started and then it ends. Friends who've read it have asked where the rest of the story is.

Anyway, that's how freelancing works. Once I sell them the story, it belongs to both of us, not just to me anymore.

So with those caveats, here's the link: "Driving through the Balkans, a rocky road"

Enjoy! And stay tuned. There's more to the story, and hopefully one day I'll find a place to tell it.

lunch in montenegro

To make up for my dearth of promised reporting on last summer’s oh-so-lovely Balkans road trip, voilà, a little account of A Lunch in Montenegro.

During the two-day return trek north from Albania back to France, Olivier and I ended up stopping for lunch on Return Trip Day One at a resort on the Montenegrin islet Sveti Stefan.

Being the go-with-the-flow travelers we are, we didn’t make any advance plans for pit-stops. Once we began to be hungry, we started consulting road signs and maps for a place to munch.

We found a pretty looking place—well, let’s just be honest: it was gorgeous—for lunch that day, so we pulled into the parking lot and began looking for the restaurant.

The beach, the buildings, the setting all seemed really well-to-do, but we’d been eating cheap for most of the trip, so it was nice to decide to have a little lunch splurge. It wasn’t until after that fact when I recounted the details to my friend Cydil, our host in Albania, that I learned just how exclusive this lunch stop was. She didn’t know it was possible to get onto the resort’s islet without an advance reservation and thought that overnight stays ran a minimum of 1500 euro/night. Fortunately, lunch was not quite as expensive as that.

When we asked at a covered booth at the edge of the beach and beside the bridge to the island, the hosts said we could call about reservations for the next day. We explained we wanted lunch that day. Tout de suite. Then they acknowledged there were tables available still that day and without further ado escorted us over a narrow isthmus through a 15^th century village turned resort to an umbrella-covered table overlooking the sunny Mediterranean waters.

We decided we could probably manage to handle the ambiance. It was our most expensive meal of the trip, but the pasta and salad and dessert were delicious. And the view was worth whatever extra we paid to eat there.

However, I don’t think an overnight stay at Sveti Stefan is ever in our future. Lunch will have to suffice.

balkans outtakes you don't want to miss

Ljubljana. July 2014.

It’s been three-fourths of a year since that road trip through the Balkans last summer that I promised to write about more here. I must apologize for the whole not-keeping-my-promises thing. I suppose you’re hugely disappointed and have had to seek counseling to overcome your rage. So sorry. ;-)

Anyway, I’m presently revisiting the trip for a travel story pitch that, in the way of publishing’s slow-turning wheels, has finally been picked up, which means I’m plumbing my memory, my journal, and my notes for all the details I can get my fingertips on from that trip.

Here are a few overview thoughts that won’t make it into the article. These are the outtakes, I suppose. But brilliant outtakes they are, so read with attention, please. ;-)

To recap: I went on a little 12-day road trip with my friend Olivier to visit some other friends. We started out in Aix-en-Provence, France, drove across Italy, and slept our first night in the Balkans in Ljubljana, Slovenia (though apparently some scholars don’t agree over whether Slovenia is officially Balkan…if I’d known this ahead of time, I would have polled the Slovenians I met ;-) ). From there we traveled south, eventually traversing Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, and northern Albania, before driving through all those countries again on the return trip.

Similarities

Of course, one road trip does not Balkans experts make us, but the choice to descend the peninsula by road gave us a chance to observe a little the ways these countries aren’t all the same as well as how they do fit together with some regional commonalities.

For starters, a somehow-comfortable melancholy seemed to pervade the landscape all along our route. Melancholy can be soft or harsh, and this version seemed to veer toward soft, honest.  

A lingual current also ran south with us. Though the languages are different, key words for tourists were similar—the restaurans, the stari mosts, and more.

To Each His Own

But each country also seemed to have its own personality—one it would have been nice to mine more deeply:

Slovenia seemed lively yet calm, two adjectives that admittedly don’t seem to go together, yet they meet in Ljubljana, Slovenia’s capital. This country has seen less war than Croatia and Bosnia, and one can sense this.

Croatia is absolutely beautiful yet feels already discovered. It didn’t feel so off-the-beaten path as the other places we visited. Like Slovenia, it’s already a member of the EU, though it’s not yet in the eurozone while Slovenia is. And tourism is already a big deal in Croatia, which has a good reputation for knowing how to showcase its part of the region’s treasure collection. Overdone tourism can make a place seem stripped of personality. But we also didn’t have any local guides in Croatia, so it’s possible we just missed the good parts.

Bosnia felt potentially dangerous, courtesy of its recent past, without actually being dangerous at all. Thus, it felt like a place not-yet-fully discovered. Tourism hasn’t been overdone here yet (YET!), while at the same time, there are growing resources for tourists.

Montenegro was just green and beautiful. We didn’t stop off in any large cities, so our route through Montenegro’s mountains gave the impression of a country of tucked-away hamlets that keep to themselves but are welcoming when you enter them.

And Albania felt like a place wrestling more than all the others with its past and its present. It’s in that awkward adolescent stage. Where Bosnia appears to have chosen a direction, Albania is still working to fully aim itself, but this is part of its charm for those travelers who enjoy discovery and a little dirt mixed in with glitz, antiquated farm implements and the occasional donkey mixed in with modern multi-story homes and lots of new-looking cars. Tirana, Albania’s capital, is a happening place, with plenty of nightlife, a place definitely in transition.

For the super-motivated and curious, here’s a link to a very helpful overview of the region’s complicated (for us outsiders anyway) recent history: “Understanding Yugoslavia.”

through my friend's lens

Until I can add my own Albania-visit post, here's a link to an overview of our visit from the blog of my friend in Albania. She's a great photographer!

Waggoner News & World Report: Weekend Re-cap

j'adore les balkans

Senj, Croatia

I've just returned from nearly two weeks in the Balkans, and somehow I feel older than when I left. My friend Olivier and I traveled by car, and I now think that's the only way to make such a trip. Any other form of transportation would have left us missing important things.

The trip came together in bits and pieces, and the end result was a really good overview of life in the Balkans and most of the former Yugoslav republics, a region I mostly know only from news reports of war 20 years ago. But at its start the impetus was simply to visit friends who have taken up residence in Sarajevo, Bosnia, and Tirana, Albania, and to have an interesting roadtrip. Reaching the friends happened to mean traversing four out of six former Yugoslav republics plus Albania.

As we made the return drive to France through the coastal mountains of each country--from northern Albania to Montenegro to Bosnia to Croatia to Slovenia--I felt an odd pang of longing and homesickness. Part of me wants to live in the Balkans because there's something honest about people and places who have lived out their suffering and their sins on the world's stage--especially in comparison to the glitz of southern France where I currently live on the eastern edge of the Côte d'Azur, the French Riviera.

Another part of me feels at home in nearly any mountains anywhere. Growing up in the warm embrace of the Appalachians put mountains in my blood, including their melancholy--so astutely remarked on by Olivier as we traversed northern Croatia on Monday. On the backside, the eastern side, of the mountains that could see the Mediterranean Sea from their front side, we found a landscape that made me want to write, one that brought to mind sad but beautiful and haunting Appalachian mountain ballads like those my friend Vanessa introduced me to years ago with her music.

Anyway, stay tuned for posts from each country on our Balkans tour, if only for the photos alone -- it's such a beautiful landscape. (A country by country post is the goal, anyway!) If you are the traveling type, you should put this region on your travel list. And if you're a history and current events nerd, make sure you haven't missed adding this region's story to all the facts you store in your encyclopedic head.