Sale is a strange one. After reading this article, you will have little doubt about it.
But, given the way I make my coffee, I find myself faced with a legitimate and possibly troubling question: am I slowly turning into a Serb?
Sale dares to think he just might understand a few things about Serbia. He’s risky that way.
Sale sees beauty in the rough, and Serbia has become his goldmine.
What I have found, others have lost. My travels to Serbia have rewarded me with so many gifts.
Sale proposes that you get acquainted with Serbian medieval history on your next trip to Belgrade
Two of Zet’s loves unite: his favourite music in his favourite country.
Sale discovers inspiring strength under the scars of a Yugoslav heart.
Sale is a German/French-Canadian who found his way through marriage to an inexhaustible source of wonder and fascination called Serbia.
When I first began visiting Serbia, my father inlaw was my main companion, and while my wife met with her friends in Belgrade, he helped me discover the Moravian monasteries of Šumadija. Awakened to the complex and intriguing history of the region on my previous visit (see SAN 8), this trip was the first where I chose the destinations.
I know an old man in Belgrade who has a zet from Austria who visits Serbia frequently, maybe as often as I have, but while he’s there he rarely leaves the city. I’ve been told that when he’s in town he lives inside his phone and his laptop, and appears to have no interest in the places and people, other than family, around him.
I am, adamantly, an atheist. So is my wife, given her socialist-Yugoslav education, but she's not militant about it the way I am. Completely convinced that there is no omnipotent creator, the stories of Jesus' miraculous birth strike me as too preposterous to merit serious consideration. Celebrating the arrival of the 'Son of God' on December 25th is lost to my Roman Catholic childhood, replaced by ski trips with Torontonian Serbs at Quebec ski resorts.
Crazy hot, weekday, summer afternoon in Belgrade, with stifling humidity and not much in the way of a breeze. I've just climbed aboard bus 56 along Ulica Kneza Miloša. It's packed with sweaty, sticky, and smelly humanity, and the air conditioning appears to be broken. Everyone wears the same worn expression, as if their brains have melted from thinking about the heat. And every single window of the bus is closed.