Greetings from Sarajevo

I'm sick and really not wanting to be sick. In Sarajevo. The person sitting next to me on the bus was a survivor of the war and told me in Serbian (of which I understood 50%, thankfully not more, it was gruesome) about what she went through. Pointed out where Srebrenica is, where other towns were destroyed (now being rebuilt). I saw some evidence of the destruction still around... bullet holes in house masonry for example. Other than the artillery marks left in the landscape the shape of plain old poverty and war is pretty much the same.

The bus trip took 9 hours instead of the usual 4 1/2 because we rearended a little car and took out its rear windshield just that side of the Serb/ B&H border. It was a long boring event, really.

The bombing mess left by NATO is still untouched/ unreconstructed in Belgrade. It is unnerving to see buildings looking almost as fucked-up as the WTC but fucked up by our bombs and our allies' bombs. One bomb landed near the house I stayed in last night. However, when it fell my friend wasn't awoken. But the Chinese embassy bombing further away woke him. Apparently the Chinese didn't move anything out of the old building into their new building, rumor has it because of the bad feng shui. Accidental bombing-- that's some bad feng shui! They REALLY shouldn't have gotten that extra carp tank.

I leave on a madcap funpacked road trip in a stick shift sedan with four other people down the Montenegrin coast and over to Macedonia via Kosova in two days. Send your SlackerStalker all the safe travel energy you have, stalksters!

Oh, and Slovenija is still a place I will stalk. I ran up to it and gave it a kiss on the cheek this time-- going night swimming at the Portoroz Adriatic seawater spa and sleeping in gorgeous little architectural jewel Piran for one night. The Slovenes are the well-adjusted Slavs. Just imagine it. They are happy people and they are Slavs. If Slav nations were dogs, Slovenes would all be Border Collies. The taxi driver (apparently straight, on his way home to his wife and kids) who took me from the airport in Ljubljana volunteered right after I said I love Slovenija and want to move there that "Slovenija isn't nationalistic or homophobic like other nations." That out-tha-blue comment alone was worth the $35 he charged me for the ride.

OK, off to try and steam this cold out of my head where it got firmly and painfully jammed by the steep mountain ascent I endured today.

The Anal Sandpaper That is a Dissolving Company

So I have been remiss in posting because I've been cramming for the GRE (710 verbal, 630 math, not bad), trying to get ready to be laid off (job fairs, applying for positions, etc.), preparing for this gonzo work-related two-week tour of the Balkans that I'm leaving for in a few hours (Prague, Portoroz/ Piran, Zagreb, Belgrade, Sarajevo, Skopje, Athens), and watching my co-workers one by one get laid off unceremoniously.

I had a strong intuition slap me over the head that my horrible boss will lay off the rest of our office for Christmas, despite her pledge to keep us on until March, because she doesn't want to pay our (mandatory, by personnel policy) time-off between Christmas and New Year's, pay that doesn't come out of earned vacation or personal time. A former boss realized we tended not to take vacations as a staff, so she forced a short vacation every year at the winter holidays. This boss will lay us off rather than pay for three people to rest for four days. She just laid off a friend and co-worker earlier than she had said because she wanted to avoid him earning an extra vacation day in his last few weeks.

So, amidst this painful situation, I have to now go abroad to tout my organization's virtues. Which are mostly the people on staff who are mostly all gone now.

While I'm on the road to these seven different nations I will be checking my blog a little.

Here are some things I might need while I'm racing through the Balkan peninsula:

The Universal Currency Converter
Today the dollar is worth:

26.7 (CZK) koruny in the Czech Republic
198.75 (SIT) tolars in Slovenija
6.444 (HRK) kuna in Croatia
57.607 (YUM)new dinars in Serbia and Montenegro
1.64 (BAM) in convertible marka Bosnia and Hercegovina
51.20 (MKD) denar in Macedonia
and, speaking of anal sandpaper...
0.839 (EUR) Euros in Greece

The Weather Underground/ Wunderground EU Map

The Meeting Planner at Timeanddate.com
(Pacific Time is 9 hours behind Central European Time, although CET TV stations are only now playing Xena reruns that we saw two years ago on Oxygen)

The CNN regional country summary for Bosnia-Hercegovina (with drop-down menu to other local countries)
You remember that war they had there? You should read this summary and see if YOU can figure out how they make any decisions. Conservatives, some whose campaigns were funded by US Republicans, are making gains all over the former republics of Yugoslavija. Pfeah.

See you in December!

Transgender Youths Dress Up Like Prostitutes and Pretend to Be Undercover Vice Cops... Makes Me Almost Love the US Again

"You couldn't put this in a book -- nobody would
believe it."

--New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg Nov. 7 after
five transgender students from the Harvey Milk gay
high school were arrested for impersonating undercover
vice cops dressed as female prostitutes and demanding
money, credit cards, ATM cards and PIN codes to let
their victims go free.

(From Rex Wockner's "Quote / Unquote" column)