We've moved!

Meaghan and I have moved out of her mom's house and into the city of Boston. My commute to work is now 15 minutes shorter, and we're starting to take our cool furniture and stuff out of storage. Friends are welcome to email me for our new address.

This is pretty much the last stage of our readjustment from our year in Serbia. Most young couples here have their own place, so moving back to the city is like rejoining society, in a way.

woo-HOO!

I got a job!

As of yesterday, I'm the new full-time ESL teacher at a public high school near Boston. I'm teaching two classes of ESL 1, one class of ESL 3, and two study skills classes, each of which meet daily. The students are all immigrants to the US, from a variety of different countries. (No Yugoslavs though - немам шансе да вежбам мој српски :( )

So far, my impressions are generally positive. (In fact, I'd like to go on record as saying so now, so that I can look back on this in case I change my mind later.) The students seem sweet, my colleagues have been very supportive, and I'm looking forward to really getting started.

American high schools are a strange institution. There's a lot of bureaucracy and paperwork; I'm responsible for filling out a variety of grades, record books, report cards, attendance forms, and such. I've never really had a teaching job where I had to grade my students, so this will change everything in a way.

Despite all that, though, the most difficult thing for me is waking up in the morning. You may know that I am a "night person" by temperament; well, high school teachers are required to arrive at school before 7:30 in the morning. (This must have something to do with the "old days," when Americans were all farmers.) As a result, I have to wake up well before six. I have a feeling that in the days to come, coffee will be my new best friend.

Overheard at Boston Language Institute

Spanish Teacher: Nice to meet you.
Daniel: Mucho gusto.
ST: Ah, ¡hablas español!
D: Sí, malo znam ...
ST: ¿¿¿???

Nedostajete mi

As time passes since my months in Serbia, I miss different things. Well, some of the same things, and some different things. For instance:

• Juice is still a big one. I was in the supermarket yesterday and the only reasonably priced juices are like 25% actual juice. The rest is water, corn syrup, dyes, and fillers. To get good juice, you pay something in the $3.50-4.00 range. I had to walk right by the tempting bottles of blueberry and pomegranate and settle for cranberry, as usual.
• I wrote to one Serbian friend about this: recently, I was walking by a restaurant on a beautiful day, and there were no tables outside. Something about this just seemed wrong to me. The next week, Meaghan and I were out to dinner and she was getting nostalgic for Serbia, although it hadn't come up in any way. When she thought about it, she realized that this was because we were sitting outside.
• When Meaghan and I go out with our friends here, there's always a process of planning that happens first. There's a lag time, somewhere between a day and a week, to make sure they're free, we're free, when we're meeting, what we're doing, and so on. In Serbia, when I wanted to go out (at 10 PM, whatever) I would call someone up and we'd go out.

While I'm on the subject, I should mention this: on my current temp assignment, I work for a guy who makes coffee in the office a couple of times a day. Whenever he makes coffee, there's a pause of ten minutes or so before any work gets done. I wouldn't say this is Serbian style - he would need to take at least a half hour, and he doesn't smoke - but at least it's a step in the right direction.

Readjusting

A wedding report is in the works, just as soon as I get my photos in order.

Montana was great and I spent a nice week with my family afterward, but since then I've been pretty bored. To make matters worse (for me), Meaghan started work this week, leaving me with very little to do while I'm waiting for some resolution on the six or seven jobs I've applied for. Since she spent nine months in Serbia with no particular job, Meaghan sympathizes with me, but doesn't exactly feel sorry, if you know what I mean.

To fill my time, I've taken to walking around the city. Yesterday I spent about two hours walking around Boston (in blistering heat), rode the train back to Quincy, and then walked around Quincy for an hour, before returning home to watch television for a while.

Swimming through the humid summer fug made me thirsty, and being thirsty in the city really made me miss Serbia. You see, in Boston there is nowhere you can just sit down and order a drink. Belgrade has a great cafe culture and even a provincial town like Kragujevac has dozens of sidewalk cafes where you can stop for coffee, juice, lemonade, water, or whatever you want. Boston, on the other hand, has cheap restaurants and expensive restaurants. It's possible, but unusual, to sit down in a restaurant and order a drink, unless you're planning on eating. Remember the way I used to fantasize about ethnic restaurants? Well, on yesterday's walk, dying of thirst, I walked past a Mexican restaurant, Thai restaurant, sushi bar, Middle Eastern grill, and two or three American grills, all of which I found totally uninteresting.

Eventually I found a convenience store, something like a miniature supermarket that sells newspapers, snacks, cigarettes, and prefabricated sandwiches. In my wildest dreams, I was hoping for a real lemonade, containing only water, sugar, and lemon juice. Any drink made primarily out of fruit juice would have been acceptable. Sadly, this convenience store was poorly stocked and offered mostly Coca-Cola and such.

I continued down the street to the next convenience store, which had a wider selection. When I looked closer, though, it turned out to be a wide selection of crap. First came the soda drinks, which ranged from the familiar Coke, Pepsi, and 7-Up to the exotic chemical concoctions of caffeine-enhanced Sierra Mist and - I am not making this up - strawberries and cream flavored Diet Pepsi. Next came the masterpieces of chemical engineering known as energy drinks: Red Bull and its various clones. Then, "upscale" drinks like iced white tea, which include massive portions of corn syrup along with the snob appeal, making them so sweet as to be almost undrinkable. There was a selection of bottled water, which I avoided because I wanted something with electrolytes and flavor, and also because earlier in the week I bought something I thought was lemon water until it turned out to be essentially diet Sprite.

At the end of this marketing parade came a selection of drinks claiming to be juice. I chose one called "Dole 100% Juice Ruby Red Grapefruit," took it to the register, purchased it, and consumed all 15.4 ounces (45.5 cl) in two gulps. It tasted fruity enough, but when I looked at the label, I saw that despite its name, it contained a selection of artificial sugars and stabilizers, and more grape juice than grapefruit.

I'm frustrated with what I see as an American tendency to complicate everything for marketing purposes. The drinks aisle includes more chemistry than juice, and more gimmicks than anything, so companies like Coke and Pepsi can deny that they're producing the same thing. The snack aisle is even worse: one flavor of Doritos corn chips after another, each with aggressively garish packaging featuring at least one exclamation point. The overwhelming chemical-spice taste of the chips completes the sensory overload.

Probably being out of work leaves me with too much time to think about these things. Just the same, I'm reminded of a friend from Novi Sad who spent a year here in the U.S., and how frustrated she was with the scarcity of opportunities when she got home. She wasn't only talking about consumer choices - believe me, I'm grateful that I had six or seven relatively interesting job opportunities to apply for - but consumer choices were definitely part of it. In response, I'd point out that more choice isn't necessarily a good thing, and that the most satisfying thing is the availability of the one choice you really want.

I'll take a glass of cherry juice, please.

Who cares about sports:

There's an interesting thread on Crooked Timber about soccer and nationalism. Of course, it's often observed that the World Cup is a more civilized alternative to total war, but I do get tired of some writers drawing unwarranted parallels between countries and their soccer teams.

One commenter on Crooked Timber notes:

On a stop-over at Aukland airport I was amused to find the tourist shops selling t-shirts that read, “I support New Zealand and anyone who is playing Australia.”

I wonder if there's a geopolitical explanation for this.

Traveling

The Native Speaker comes to you today from the Broadway Inn motel in Missoula, Montana. I wish I could tell you a typical July 4th celebration story, but I spent all of yesterday on the road.

Here's where I was yesterday morning at 5:15 -

outside 30th Street Station in Philadelphia. That building on the left was completed since last time I was in Philly, and it makes an interesting architectural contrast with the old station building - something like Copley Square in Boston.

Montana has beautiful natural scenery. Yesterday I drove here from Spokane, WA, through the mountains and past Lake Coeur D'Alene in Idaho. The view is very much like Brokeback Mountain - I'm sorry I didn't take any pictures for you while I was driving. (Watch this space in the next few days.) The local radio stations, on the other hand, are not so great. Your choices are Christian devotional, country, or hardcore metal. (One friend who is from here told me about a radio station that plays hardcore metal and Rush Limbaugh.)

While I missed the Independence Day barbecues, parties, and even the stand-up comic in the hotel bar, I did get to see some fireworks. All the small towns in the area have their own fireworks display, and you can see them all going off at once, up and down the valley. I just pulled my car over on the side of the highway to watch. You can see five or six flashes of colored light very small and close to the horizon, and the mountains looming in the background. I guess everything is bigger out here.

On a walk around Boston

Here are a couple of things that caught my attention:

This is Beacon Street in Brookline. Notice that there are separate areas reserved for walking, parking, and driving. With no cars parking on the sidewalk, Serbian-style, there is plenty of room to stroll. To provide this amount of space to pedestrians in a city like Kragujevac or Belgrade, the city authorities need to install metal posts along the curb.

Notice also the meter next to each parking space. You put coins into a slot, and a little clock tells how much time you've paid for. In Kragujevac, on the other hand, an attendant in a day-glo vest collects parking fees and tickets violators. In a post-socialist country like Serbia, the first solution to a problem is to create a government job; in the US, we prefer to invent a machine. Of course, someone has to read the meters, but the process as a whole is less labor-intensive.

I spotted this cement mixer on the campus of Simmons College. I had never before seen a piece of construction equipment painted with the lyrics to a patriotic song. If you're not familiar with the song, here's the whole text.

Confusion in any language

Since the incident I wrote about earlier in which I wanted to speak Serbian to a restaurant seating hostess, the Serbian language has continued to try to assert itself in my everyday speech.

With no internet at home, I've been frequenting a local cafe with free wireless access for my laptop (free plug: Java Jo's in East Milton Square). Last time I was here, when I got up to use the bathroom and the barista looked my way, I was a split-second from asking, "Mogu u WC?" Another time, someone bumped into me and apologized, and I replied, "Nothing." (I'm not even sure if that's good Serbian; is ništa an appropriate response to izvini?) And all this is nothing next to the effect Serbian has had on my other foreign languages, such as my frustrating tendency, when speaking Italian, to say da instead of sì.

Worst of all, though, my English seems to have acquired the feature of Serbian English (srpsko-engleski?) that I found most frustrating on my arrival in Serbia: the use of the phrase "I know." When Serbs say "I know" (znam) it can mean something like "I understand, I follow what you're saying, I'm familiar with that." To an American (at least to me), the meaning is more like "You didn't need to describe that in such detail, I was already familiar with it, you're wasting my time." To make matters worse, Serbs tend to repeat this sort of brief utterance twice, so "Yes, that's acceptable" becomes može, može; "I will do that" is hoću, hoću; and "Yes, I understand" is znam, znam. In Serbian English, this gets retranslated as "I know, I know," which to an American is the expression of someone who's just barely restraining their impatience with your intolerable denseness.

Once I worked out the hidden meaning of "I know, I know," I felt an immediate sense of reassurance: the Serbs don't all think I'm a moron after all! My second response was amusement at this sociolinguistic glitch, and "znam, znam" became something of a humorous catchphrase between Meaghan and me. But then, like the kid who makes one funny face too many, my language began to stick that way. It got to the point where Meaghan had to give me a stern talking-to. You know you've crossed over to the dark side when what used to frustrate you in others becomes a bad habit of your own.

Now I'm monitoring myself carefully, trying to go cold turkey on "I know" until I can use the phrase as a native speaker would(!). If you're talking to me and get the impression I'm frustrated with you, now you know why.

If I really am frustrated with you, I'll try to be extra clear about it.

Serbian habits (možeš da veruješ??)

Here are some things I've caught myself doing recently, showing the clear influence of my time in Serbia:

• As many of you know, ethnic foods are one of the things we missed the most during our stay in Serbia. Naturally, when my mother-in-law, Evelyn, picked us up at the airport (in her Pontiac Bonneville, which has a passenger area big enough to fit a Fića inside), she drove us straight to a Mexican restaurant. The seating hostess came out to greet us, and I started formulating Serbian sentences in my head. I had a moment of shock when she said, "Hi."
• I got a photocopy made at a local copy shop. Copies are something like ten cents each, so my total bill was about thirty cents. I took my receipt with me to throw it away later, because in Serbia, you have to take your receipt for everything so the tax authorities can audit official receipts. I guess all those months of official signs reminding me to УЗМИТЕ РАЧУН!!! got into my subconscious.
• The selection of items available in stores surprises me. I was in a video rental club, which like most stores here has immensely high ceilings and shelves crammed with merchandise. (Students from my second-year classes will remember the Best Buy photos.) Browsing the new releases, 2-for-$30 DVDs, and 3-for-$15 pre-viewed VHS tapes, I wondered how many of these films were available on DivX.
• Making breakfast for Meaghan and Evelyn this morning, I realized that the eggs here have thinner shells and the bacon has more fat. Also, as I expected, the juice is clearly inferior. We've been drinking Cranberry-Grape, which has a rather generic fruity-sugary taste, and missing our cherry nectar. At least we have our domaća šljivovica (homemade plum brandy) for moments of nostalgia.