Serbian Sejour

So here it is: I am back in Switzerland after by far the shortest "vacation" in my homeland ever. As the young Serbian curse goes: "I wish that you live abroad, and come to Belgrade for less than 2 weeks", I have experienced the hasty 10 days of trying to see everyone, cattch up with everything, buy some (not so) cheap clothes, and get some sleep and rest in the process. Normally this is an ardeous task. At the time when the country is experiencing the worst set of floods in the entire century, it was downright impossible.

However, despite being on the edge of a cold for several days (which is equal to pneumonia for me), and having one of my back muscles lock down on me, I was able to "acomplish" a fair ammount of what I had planned. To start with, I had paid 4 visits to my dentist, getting 8 teeth fixed, meaning that I should really cut back on chocolate from now on if I wish to have any part of my original jaw still there by the time I am 40. Three out of the four sessions were done under anestesia, and the remaining one I had wished for it. To give Svetlana some credit, she really tried to make it as painless for me as possible, but I still stand by the claim that, if you enjoy torturing people, you should definitelly look for a career in dentistry. But now I will be, I hope, pain free for the following 3 months.

As for the people, which is the main reason I go to Belgrade for, most importantly I was able to see my family, and a good part of my High School class, and then a good part of them more than once. Usually I am better informed about what my friends are doing but it seems that all my study of communications tought me how to relay and extract a lot of information in little time, so I cought on quickly (Shannon would have been proud). I am just wondering if I will get it all mixed up or not. Some people I didn't get to talk to as much as I wanted to... others I didn't even get to see, especially the non-school friends. I almost mistyped the word 'friends' as 'fiends' - not a Freudian slip, just not pressing the appropriate key hard enough. It does raise a point about the english language, though. In any case, I wish I had planned my time more carefully, but even as such, my days were quite packed, and I tried to spend the evenings at home with my family.

So I come back to Suisse relativelly refreshed and ready to work hard during the following few months. This is partly due to some extra sleep, and partly because each stay in Belgrade reminds me that as much as I like where I come from and the people that I are close to me, it is really difficult to imagine myself functioning there on a daily basis, and I am glad to be living full time in a country where everything works, well, like a Swiss clock. It seems that I was born with some gene that demands my surroundings to function properly, and at least appear as if not everyone is trying to trick someone else (I am talking mostly business world and public life here). There exist honest men in Serbia, but my naive personality would not allow me to last very long there. One thing that was different this time than the previous was that I was feeling a bit more capable to fit in, and that maybe, just maybe there is hope for me to once return and be a productive (and successful) member of the Neo-Serbian society (the problem is that the neo-serbian society is very much like past-serbian society, only with a different variety of sharks).

Ok.. getting closer to Lausanne. One day I should write about it over a cup of Mocca in The Starbucks. A bientôt.