notes on the return
so I'm safely arrived in the states and my family's California Xmas togetherness extravaganza is nearing a close...
The adjustment back has been hard at times, but not as challenging as I was anticipating... I even got to listen in on a Serbian-language conversation two days ago.
On the way home from the airport, my mom and I stopped at a grocery store. My job was to pick out the ice cream. I wandered the ice cream aisle for a good 5 minutes, staring at the hundreds of flavors... I was too overwhelmed to decide. I came back a few days later and successfully picked out fudge brownie.
On Christmas Eve, I was listing to M all of the weirdnesses of the States, and he said to me, 'you know, this place used to be normal for you.' True.
I am missing blueberry juice something fierce...
I have also been watching a lot of TV mostly bowl games as of late, although words cannot describe my love for the Stewart/Colbert hour of hilarity. During this TV watching, I have discovered a product that seems to encapsulate all that is wrong with the States: restaurant-inspired cat food.
I could write essays about the wrongness of this product, but my grandma's left-handed mouse is scaring me-even though I am left-handed.
The adjustment back has been hard at times, but not as challenging as I was anticipating... I even got to listen in on a Serbian-language conversation two days ago.
On the way home from the airport, my mom and I stopped at a grocery store. My job was to pick out the ice cream. I wandered the ice cream aisle for a good 5 minutes, staring at the hundreds of flavors... I was too overwhelmed to decide. I came back a few days later and successfully picked out fudge brownie.
On Christmas Eve, I was listing to M all of the weirdnesses of the States, and he said to me, 'you know, this place used to be normal for you.' True.
I am missing blueberry juice something fierce...
I have also been watching a lot of TV mostly bowl games as of late, although words cannot describe my love for the Stewart/Colbert hour of hilarity. During this TV watching, I have discovered a product that seems to encapsulate all that is wrong with the States: restaurant-inspired cat food.
I could write essays about the wrongness of this product, but my grandma's left-handed mouse is scaring me-even though I am left-handed.
posted by rachel @ 7:14 PM
10 Comments:
At 2:37 AM,
Anonymous said…
hello. awsome blog you have here. congrats on the confidence and daring to move to belgrade for a year. i just stumbled across this site because, on a lark, i recently bought "teach yourself serbian", but it did not come packaged with the two CDs. the cd/book package was not available and i have not been able to find the audiofiles anywhere. after coming across your blog during my search, it occurred to me that you might have the mp3 files and i was hoping that you might be feeling generous enough to share them. if not no biggie, but if so i would be extremely thankful. i'll check back here for a response, as i don't care to put my email address anywhere without necessity. later.
At 3:09 PM,
Anonymous said…
God Lord,
"anonymous" you sound like she lives in the Amazon..."she's daring"
Perhaps you better not attempt to learn serbian at all. After the age of 7-8, it's hopless anyways...
Do you realize Serbia is in Europe?
I'd suggest Turkish, I've been told grammmar's a no brainer...and they also have a very interesting view on human rights...
At 4:07 AM,
Anonymous said…
dear asshole,
i don't know who the fuck you think you are, but what i do on my own time is my business and if i want to attempt to learn serbian, or any other fucking language under the son for that matter, that is strictly my prerogative. when i said "daring," i simply meant that moving to a foreign country thousands of miles away where the general population speaks a language other than english that is not taught in most american universities, aside from a select few, is an admirable thing. moving to belgrade is further off the beaten path than most expats go. i'm quite familiar with the country and where it's situated and i know it's not wild and dangerous. i spent a couple days in sarajevo (which is in the unified country of Bosnia & Herzegovina and i'm only mentioning that so you don't make some smart-assed comment about it not even being in serbia) and i know the area is not terrifying, desolate, or wildly exotic. it's actually rather vibrant and overflowing with a youthful energy that i don't feel when i walk around NYC. so, is moving to belgrade as daring as, say, moving to dar es salaam? absolutely not. is it more daring than moving to the LOS or brooklyn? without a doubt. also, i dont' care for your defeatist attitude. if i had your outlook, i probably would have told my friend who took up mandarin chinese in college to not even bother. if he followed such advice, he never would have acquired the job that paid for his last two years at the university of chicago, as well as the additional 25 grand for summer work and a guaranteed 2 years of work at an awsome job after graduation, which he just started. so yeah, we should all just quit learning other languages with the exception of turkish; then we can all move to berlin, beat our wives, and kill every armenian we see. fuck you.
At 3:13 PM,
Anonymous said…
What nice language you use...Cheers... Whatever language you choose to learn, make sure it has a lot of swear-words, so you can "express" yourself...
At 6:11 AM,
Anonymous said…
hey, what a great idea! focus on the style because you have no substantive response to the content. all those naughty words must render everything else that came along with them completely worthless. would you like me to bowlderize my response for you and restate it in the kind of stolid prose normally reserved for the pages of the economist? if what i wrote was anything less than a valid and clearly stated expression of opinion - you know, one of those pesky inalienable rights so frowned upon these days - then i'd love to know what expression really is. after all, according to you, i only "express" myself, which implies that my statements were less than genuine, inarticulate, and consequently invalid. sorry to offend your delicate sensibilities, but, after all, queen victoria has been dead for over one hundred years. so i use some exclamatory remarks here, a couple of flavoring particles there - big fucking deal! i'd rather be perceived as crass and vulgar than be the stuck-up, nit-picking, asinine naysayer who subscribes to such perceptions.
At 4:08 AM,
Anonymous said…
Rachel,
I feel sorry for you. Is this the kind of classy american that you want to attract to your blog? Well done...
You might have all the spices in the world and it may be hard to shop for size 18 pants in BG, but any European, anytime sounds better and more coherent than this...
At 10:02 AM,
Anonymous said…
I really don't get it. Where does all the aggression come from in these blogs? Carica, dont't get so overexcited about one word. For Americans it IS a big thing to go abroad, and anything other than a vacay in Paris probably seems daring to the average (read my words "a-v-e-r-a-g-e") American. And don't forget that there are still a lot of West Europeans, too, that don't have a clue about the Balkans and think moving to Belgrade equals going to a war zone. As a West European who did exactly that (moving to Belgrade), I know what I am talking about. Anonymous: Although I don't approve too much of the swearing, I think it's great you want to learn Serbian. So quit the bickering you two and be nice to each other :-).
At 2:23 AM,
Anonymous said…
To the previous poster:
Thank you for your encouragement, it is greatly appreciated. Just for clarification, though, i would like to point out that i know belgrade is not a war zone and my comments about moving there being "daring", which seem to have sparked this whole strange exchange, had much less to do with belgrade as a specific location and more to do with the difficulty of moving away from one's own family, culture, language, and overall comfort zone. Unless one is moving in order to take a cushy, high-paying job where housing, health care, and all those other bits of necessity are an afterthought, which doesn't appear to be the case for the owner of this blog, i would imagine that such a fundamental change is one to which it is difficult to commit and, further more, carry out.
Now, to Carica:
i did not come here to play the ignorant, pig-headed american and any accusations to the contrary are ill-founded. i honestly don't know what caused you to jump all over me, especially when my initial inquest was meant to better myself, not degrade any person, place, or thing. i also don't know why you haven't tried to engage in a coherent discussion. rather, you choose to mount your high horse and start spewing back-handed put downs. your arrogance and apparent phobia of Americans is quite unbecoming. Also, your pan-European neo-nationalism (that's really the best way i can describe it) is disturbing and, for the sake of international harmony, i hope it's not a wide-spread phenomenon. as evidence of your prejudice i point to this remark:
I feel sorry for you. Is this the kind of classy american that you want to attract to your blog? Well done...
You might have all the spices in the world and it may be hard to shop for size 18 pants in BG, but any European, anytime sounds better and more coherent than this...
now, i don't know who you are or where you are from, but in all honesty it's completely irrelevant to me. in my posts, i have responded specifically to things that you have said, and, i might add, i have done so in an extremely coherent manner. i did not speak about you in generalizations, stereotypes, or biases about your race, religion, nationality, etc.(unless you are turkish, in which case i was obviously being ironic and only responding to the stereotypes that you had already put out there. also, that would mean you are not european, at least according to the rest of europe, which would be very confusing in the context of your european obsession). So why must you bring up the tired old cliché about how america has every material imaginable in abundance, but europeans are smarter, classier, more coherent,etc.? Besides, that generalization is simply not true, as i have had more than one conversation with europeans so racist and intolerant that they make the klu klux klan look like the mickey mouse club, but that's an argument for another day. my point is, you're prejudiced against americans. if you are friends with the owner of this blog there is even a chance you refer to her as "one of the good ones", which is a tactic often employed by latent racists here in the states. i have to know, why so bitter? why so hostile? why not actually make an attempt to digest my arguments and my point of view instead of writing me off as ignorant, classless, and incoherent? i am many things, but incoherent and nonsensical i am not. you need to stop talking down to me because there is no way you are in any position to be so condescending, especially considering all the "class" you've been showing in your posts.
there. i've said my piece sans swearing, although everything i've written will probably be ignored and you will once again accuse me of being something that i am not. i just wish you would be a little more constructive.
At 8:51 AM,
Anonymous said…
As for studying Serbian... Have a look at:
http://www.isj.co.yu/izdavacka/izdavackaCoursebookpub.htm
These books are quite good compared with what else is out there. I am not sure if it's possible, but maybe you can order them online. Good luck!
At 12:14 PM,
rachel said…
I feel like it is time to chime in here.
I would be willing to send you the audio tracks... I have been waiting for access to high-speed internet, which has been very slow in coming... soon I hope.
and for the record, I wear size 10 pants.
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