(the Ruskies are comin’, the Ruskies are comin’~)

It’s no secret I’ve been wanting to learn the Cyrillic character set for a while.

So I recently found the right occasion to do so right here in Belgrade on the twice-good Tuesday the 6th, and now I can read it. Just like that. The charset is no longer a mystery.

Thirty-three pesky little letters.

An hour to nail the entire alphabet, with about three more required for practice reading (1000 Russian words) with a diligent emphasis on improving my accent (I’ll make a video of me reading Russian so you can hear for yourselves).

Since I’m not bad in Czech for a non-local – especially compared to several dumbfuck American or British expats I know in Prague who still can’t string two proper Czech sentences together after living there for nearly a decade! – and since I’m formally trained in Czech grammar, I’ll succeed in Russian handily.

Incidentally, all Slavic languages find their roots in the tongue and alphabet bequeathed to them by the good Greek monks Cyril and Methodius. For that reason, mastering Russian grammar won’t be nearly as challenging (thank G.od!) as honing the Czech one was.

I’ve already gotten over my Slavic lumps (wink, wink), so to speak…

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(“civilized” Europeans fighting off the invading Ottoman Turks)

Belgrade, Serbia, Former Yugo, baby!
Captain’s Log: 13h
The fun never ends around here. Any night of the week is partytime.

Plenty of scholarly theories have attempted to demystify the reason why Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks behaved the way they did during the rash of Balkan wars in the Former Yugoslavia. Experts have been asking this question for the better part of a decade and a half, and such speculation will likely rage forever onward until they simply exhaust the discussion.

I remember a great conversation I’d had with a visiting expat bud from Budapest in the Prague metro. He told me something about the Balkans which somehow gave the entire conflict, genetically-speaking and certainly from an evolutionary perspective, such instant clarity in a way I’ll not soon forget. Within the span of a single sentence, I finally grasped why the war raged on as violently and as long as it had, in the absence of European and US/UK interventions.

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(President Obama and Veep Biden – can’t you just feel the love?)

Travel around Europe often enough and you get a keen sense of what locals’ different attitudes are towards personal space.

Do they like reaching out and touching you or do they attempt to distance themselves from you as far and as often as possible?

Some cultures are inwardly-looking and insular. For example, I’m thinking of Germany and Austria, and most of the border regions in the new-fangled “Czech Republic.”

Others are more welcoming and adoring, roll-the-red-carpet-out-in-front-of-you kinds of places.

Some societies in Europe prefer to keep a safe (and wide) “reaction threshold,” so its citizens have more time to react to your (G.od-forbid) bold attempts to be social, while others don’t mind closing that gap and do so willingly and often.

Of course, you can classify the entire European caboodle according to region and the manner in which they deal with personal space. So let’s slot their willingness to get closer or further away from you as being in the Narrow, Medium, or Wide camps, shall we?

Since I’m presently in Belgrade, let’s compare the society I don’t know to the one I do. Let’s compare Serbs to Czechs (and, ew…Slovaks), using the following grid as a guide to the perplexed on how to navigate the rocky shoals of these two (or three, counting the Slovaks) long-standing neo-Slavic cultures, mixed as they are with the blood of other cultures which they have somehow appropriated as their own.

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