Just before I left, a 40-year-old Korean showed up. Jung-min had owned a seven-room hostel nearby, but thanks to coronachan, it croaked, forcing him to move into a dorm room at the One Way.
A tireless traveler, Jung-min once took a year and a half to bicycle from Singapore to London, where, exhausted, he stayed for a year. Nearly each evening, he vegetated at The Gunners, downing pints. Now, he was waiting for Vietnam to reopen so he could fly to Hanoi. "I don't care if I have to be in quarantine for two weeks." It's his favorite country.
With no crossable land border, South Korea is a de facto island, and its super-efficient trains and buses make the country feel even smaller. With its lush fields, hills and low mountains, the landscape is beautiful enough, but lacks contrasts. There are no dramatic peaks, as in, say, Japan. South Korean cities are similarly new. With bright, colorful signs everywhere, they contain few buildings from even half a century ago. Sprung, guys like Jung-min go berserk from the exhilarating variety of the larger world.
Busan was comfortable, but it wasn't home, even somewhat, so nearly each day, I checked to see which countries had reopened, so I could get baffled by everything, all over again, from another angle.
At Travel Off Path, there was a helpful article, "Countries without any Restrictions or Travel Requirements," but by July 15th, it could only list Mexico, Maldives, Northern Macedonia, Serbia, Albania, Turkey and Tanzania. Since three of those were in the Balkans, and Turkey was just a quick hop away, it made most sense to head to that cluster, so I pulled the trigger.
On my last evening, I got on an unfamiliar bus to go wherever. Soon enough, we left the bright commercial strips to climb into a poorer neighborhood, with its shabbier houses, darker streets and empty sidewalks. One by one, everyone got off until it was just me and the driver lumbering, like exhausted refugees, into a rather grim bus depot. In the dark, I trekked back down to the sweetest city I won't likely see again. Thank you, Busan!
2
In 1937, Rebecca West got here by train, "Then I slept a little and woke up in a little town where there was not a minaret, where there was no more trace of Islam than there would be in a Sussex village. We were, in fact, in Serbia. We went and stood on the platform and breathed the air, which was now Serbian air. It is as different from Bosnian air as in Scotland the Lowland air differs from Highland air; it is drier and, as they say of pastry, shorter. Anybody who does not know that it is one pleasure to fill the lungs up at Yaitse or Loch Etive and another to fill them down at Belgrade or the Lammermuir Hills must be one of those creatures with defective sensoria, who cannot tell the difference between one kind of water and another."
So Serbian air, water, dirt and smell, etc., are all different from those of Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, Albania, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Kosovo, Srpska and Krajina, etc.
Arriving from South Korea, with a layover in Abu Dhabi, the differences I encountered were much, much more striking, of course, starting from the airport, which was modest. Of the poorest ten European countries, seven are in Balkans, but who can blame any of them? There has been so much turmoil here.
Belgrade has been razed 44 times. In the 20th century, it was bombed thrice. In World War II, hundreds of thousands of Serbs were mass murdered by Croats, an undisputed fact still little known.
From the taxi into town, I was reintroduced to the concrete housing blocks that are typical of the former Eastern Bloc. Belgrade's few high-rises are left over the 1970's, perhaps the worst decade for architecture ever. Its gorgeous buildings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries have been crumbling for decades.
I passed a monstrously huge banner of Serbian soldiers, with the lead one a stern female saluting, with accusation in her eyes. This draped the former Yugoslav Defense Ministry. Bombed by NATO in 1999, its mauled remains are left as is.
At a nearby park days later, I'd chance upon a bronze statue of a small girl holding a rag doll. Framed by a black marble slab resembling butterfly wings, she stood on a grave-like marker that's partly inscribed, "DEDICATED TO THE CHILDREN KILLED BY NATO AGGRESSION 1999."
Most of the world, though, don't see Serbians as victims so much as perpetrators of genocide, as recently evidenced by the Siege of Sarajevo and, even more so, Srebrenica.
On July 13th, 2012, Eric Margolis wrote:
A tireless traveler, Jung-min once took a year and a half to bicycle from Singapore to London, where, exhausted, he stayed for a year. Nearly each evening, he vegetated at The Gunners, downing pints. Now, he was waiting for Vietnam to reopen so he could fly to Hanoi. "I don't care if I have to be in quarantine for two weeks." It's his favorite country.
With no crossable land border, South Korea is a de facto island, and its super-efficient trains and buses make the country feel even smaller. With its lush fields, hills and low mountains, the landscape is beautiful enough, but lacks contrasts. There are no dramatic peaks, as in, say, Japan. South Korean cities are similarly new. With bright, colorful signs everywhere, they contain few buildings from even half a century ago. Sprung, guys like Jung-min go berserk from the exhilarating variety of the larger world.
Busan was comfortable, but it wasn't home, even somewhat, so nearly each day, I checked to see which countries had reopened, so I could get baffled by everything, all over again, from another angle.
On my last evening, I got on an unfamiliar bus to go wherever. Soon enough, we left the bright commercial strips to climb into a poorer neighborhood, with its shabbier houses, darker streets and empty sidewalks. One by one, everyone got off until it was just me and the driver lumbering, like exhausted refugees, into a rather grim bus depot. In the dark, I trekked back down to the sweetest city I won't likely see again. Thank you, Busan!
2
In 1937, Rebecca West got here by train, "Then I slept a little and woke up in a little town where there was not a minaret, where there was no more trace of Islam than there would be in a Sussex village. We were, in fact, in Serbia. We went and stood on the platform and breathed the air, which was now Serbian air. It is as different from Bosnian air as in Scotland the Lowland air differs from Highland air; it is drier and, as they say of pastry, shorter. Anybody who does not know that it is one pleasure to fill the lungs up at Yaitse or Loch Etive and another to fill them down at Belgrade or the Lammermuir Hills must be one of those creatures with defective sensoria, who cannot tell the difference between one kind of water and another."
So Serbian air, water, dirt and smell, etc., are all different from those of Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, Albania, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Kosovo, Srpska and Krajina, etc.
Arriving from South Korea, with a layover in Abu Dhabi, the differences I encountered were much, much more striking, of course, starting from the airport, which was modest. Of the poorest ten European countries, seven are in Balkans, but who can blame any of them? There has been so much turmoil here.
Belgrade has been razed 44 times. In the 20th century, it was bombed thrice. In World War II, hundreds of thousands of Serbs were mass murdered by Croats, an undisputed fact still little known.
From the taxi into town, I was reintroduced to the concrete housing blocks that are typical of the former Eastern Bloc. Belgrade's few high-rises are left over the 1970's, perhaps the worst decade for architecture ever. Its gorgeous buildings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries have been crumbling for decades.
I passed a monstrously huge banner of Serbian soldiers, with the lead one a stern female saluting, with accusation in her eyes. This draped the former Yugoslav Defense Ministry. Bombed by NATO in 1999, its mauled remains are left as is.
At a nearby park days later, I'd chance upon a bronze statue of a small girl holding a rag doll. Framed by a black marble slab resembling butterfly wings, she stood on a grave-like marker that's partly inscribed, "DEDICATED TO THE CHILDREN KILLED BY NATO AGGRESSION 1999."
Most of the world, though, don't see Serbians as victims so much as perpetrators of genocide, as recently evidenced by the Siege of Sarajevo and, even more so, Srebrenica.
On July 13th, 2012, Eric Margolis wrote:
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