triumph

I have now mastered the cyrillic alphabet. I would show off my prowess, but I don't know how to type those characters. I transliterated my housemates names & made place cards for dinner last night. No one seemed to appreciate it particularly, but that's okay. It felt like success.

Many of the cyrillic letters are new to me. When I write them, it all ends up looking crooked and not like the letters in my Teach Yourself Serbian book. I write like a first grader.

In other Serbia-related news, I gave up reading Bosnian Chronicle. It's written by Ivo Andric, the only Serb to ever win a Nobel Prize for literature. It was painfully boring. I read a hundred and fifty pages in which: a Napoleonic French diplomat is dispatched to Ottoman Travnik. He hires a local assistant. He fires said assistant. He gets a new assistant, a Frenchman. Tension develops between the Frenchmen. Main character's family arrives & they move into a new house. An Ottoman messenger dies; the local vizier holds onto power.

Quite ironic that this icon of Serbianness writes about French people. My fingers are crossed that he is not a national hero, that I will not have to sit through long sessions others praising his genius.