The former Yugoslavs

Had a day in Slovenia in the capital that I can still not pronounce. Onto an overnight train to Split in Croatia, smoking joints in the carriage with Portuguese, running hours late, customs getting on board, arriving at the sweltering Adriatic coast mid morning. Split is an old roman town that has some cool old ruins, I went to see a Serbian punk-rock band called the Partybrejkers, whose poster made it look like a skin head gig and only song in English was "fuck you fucking america".

I went along with this Croat girl, who will never ever visit Serbia, and thinks that Croatia does not have to hand over that war criminal that the EU are demanding. She says war is inhumane, there are no boundaries, once you go to war anything and everything is justified. Besides why do they apply these rules to Croatia, America does what it wants? Discussing linguistics a Norweigan starts by talking about the Serbo-Croatian language, she explodes,they are two seperate lagnuages. Onto Debrovnik and a really beaufitul ancient Roman city, I've uploaded some photos. Onto Sarajevo and the bullet hole republik, boarded up old beautiful buildings, Mosques and churches of different varities, a move towards asia with the introducion of chilli and an assortment of flavours. Moving too fast and into Serbia with some truly friendly and exceptionally delusional people. Serbian owners of hotel tell me with a laugh about when democracy came, Milosovic fell, there was a gay pride march, skin heads led by some Orthdox priest destroyed them. The Croats are rewriting history, they are Serbs who speak the same language. The whole world is carving up Serbia, for 73 days America bombed Serbia and we just slept, a Benetton ad shows a sinking boat, two guys are drowning, "the world saves a nigga but lets the serb drown". A friendly, although self obssessed Serb from Belgrade took us on a tour of the city over two days. The last bar we walked into had some music about killing immigrants, full of skin heads and swastikas up thorughout the toilets, I went in with an American Jew. The Serbian girl we were with started telling racist jokes, another Serbian girl asked for jokes about Aboriginals. I was starting to get a bad opinion about this country. I wanted to say, Hitler wanted you all sterilised because Slavs are second rate aryans, but when surrounded by fascists its best not to inflame them. In Belgrad I met a French father and daughter travelling together who led me to a gypsy festival, with no accomodation and no tent I figured I would not sleep, so I left my pack in a near by town at the bus station where there was a left luggage locker. Onto the bus to Cuca where the festival was been held, a Serbian tarzan, a self applied nick name, poured some peach based alchol into me and todl me stories about the greatest Serbian, some ancient who murdered Turks through trickery and raped Turkish women. Serbian is the greatest language in the world becuase it has 30 letters, your alphabet has only 26, I am better. Kosovo is the home of Serbia, the Turks stole it from us 500 years ago, we need to take it back, 500,000 Serbs have been murdered there in the last 10 years but the world bombs us!!! We defended Europe from the Muslims, we are on the front line and defeated the Turks. No more Serb nationalism, I think you probably have got the point, not many guys in this country have hair, I am glad I am white, I would have been lynched 76 times if I was any shade of brown. To the gypsy festival where the racists come to celebrate the music of one of Europes most despised. With only my jacket and small carry bag, Serb followed by Gypsy gave me all sorts of different drinks, my last memory was in a tent with some gypsy kid blasting his horn standing on a table. My next memory was late in the night, waking up freezing in a graveyard, lying on some ancient Serb tombstone, I needed to find my pack and sleeping bag. I stumbled to the bus station and caught the bus for an hour to the main town where I left my bag. The bus station was full of people asleep in the warmth, so I joined them. When I awoke in the morning I still did not have my backpack, or my little bag. I caught a bus back to the festival to retrieve my bag, found the French who had my bag, smoked a joint and returned again to the bus station. I fell asleep on the bus towards the Bulgarian border and missed my stop ending up in some town in the middle of no where that took my an hour to identify. I am now on target for Bulgaria and shoudl be in the capital Sofia tonight. Nationalism is a true disaster for humanity, I wonder what this place was like pre-Milosvic? My father got kicked out of Casino by the military somewhere here in the 70's after offending Yugoslav national sensibilities. Serbia replaces America and Brasil as by far the most nationalistic place I have ever been. Onto Bulgaria.

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