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Hello everybody,
After an even longer post-free time there’s some news finally. A lot of things happened (I can’t even recall everything myself), but I’ll do my best to write as short as possible and as long as necessary.
My Croatian is improving! Yes, really! Although I still feel like I’m not able to express my thoughts at all, I can understand relatively often what people say if I know the context, I was even able to laugh about Croatian jokes already (which is an unbelievably good feeling after a “long” time without understanding the language), and I think I’m off to a promising development though my conversations at the counter still go like this most of the time: “Dobar dan, jedan Staropramen molim.” (Hello, one Staropramen, please [beer from Czech Republic, very popular here].) – Something on Croatian, inquiring look daring me to speak. – Choose one of the following: “Da!”/”Ne!”/Smile./”Sorry, I don’t really speak Croatian” or sometimes: “Oprostite, ne govorim Hrvatski.”
Yesterday’s Moment of the Day: Went shopping in Kaufland and was able to answer all the questions at the counter, didn’t require a single English word and managed to stay “incognito” (at least nobody made it clear to me that I obviously have a limited language knowledge). There’s hope!
Short addition to the thing about Floorball in the last post: I have to correct myself; it’s not much of a hockey-like sport but rather has similarities with ice hockey, just without ice and without skates. Hockey seems to be somehow more similar to football (concerning the rules) whilst floorball is not similar to that at all. You never stop learning.
On the first weekend of November I visited my hometown Ravensburg for a few days; the last big event of the Landsknechte 2014 took place on the day I arrived, and it was awesome being able to be a part of it. It was a rather weird feeling leaving home on Sunday and somehow arriving at another home again a few hours later, but I’ll have to get used to that for this year.
The main part of this post is definitely the time between the 14th and the 22nd November.
There are three obligatory seminars for every “kulturweit” volunteer: the preparation seminar before the voluntary service, the end seminar after we come back to Germany, and the, well, let’s call it “middle seminar” (there’s no accurate translation for the German expression as far as I know) which took place from the 17th until the 21st November for me. Different places are chosen for those seminars and all volunteers are invited to the one that is the closest to their town; mine was Sremski Karlovci in Serbia, a pretty small village where everything is dead at midnight (also on Saturdays), but it has some nice buildings. Before I went there though, I met almost all of the other seminar participants in a beautiful hostel in Belgrade to discover the city (at least most of us) and to party at night. I had been told beforehand multiple times that Belgrade is not a particularly beautiful city; I have to agree partly. The city has been destroyed shockingly often (I think I remember the number 34) and the reign over it changed very often, due to which there is no uniformly beautiful “face” that the city could show. However, Belgrade has its own special charming atmosphere, some kind of an own feeling, that is really appealing to me; I probably would not want to live there, but I’ll walk those streets again for sure and feel the life pulsing in the graffiti-covered veins of stone.
Due to some difficulties with the bus we collectively arrived late for the seminar on Monday.
The time from Monday to Friday was full of input, information, ideas, experiences, extreme relaxing, eating, city tours, critical self-refection, cigarettes, and of course fun day and night. (I may kindly ask you to put your focus on the triple alliteration construction that I more or less managed to maintain despite translating from German.) The seminar was exactly what I needed right then, it helped me a lot and left loads of beautiful memories.
Two words dominated the vocabulary during those days: Ajde and Joj. “Ajde” is something like “Come on” or “Let’s go”, can be used in basically any situation you want, is frequently used for saying goodbye in combination with “Bok” (Bok = hello and goodbye, rather colloquial and used by friends and young people; comparable with the Italian “Ciao” or the German “Servus”) as “Ajde Bok” – you see: an universal word. “Joj” is some kind of an exclamation and just as versatile as Ajde, maybe even more. “I won the jackpot!” – Joooj! “I lost my wallet.” – Joj… “We have to prepare breakfast at 8 o’clock tomorrow.” – Joooooj!
Endless possibilities! Joj! And it’s incredibly fun walking around with some fellow volunteers and wildly jojing at random people.
The majority of the group left for Novi Sad after the seminar which isn’t far away from Sremski Karlovci (or SK as we liked to call it), where one of the volunteers is working, to spend the weekend there. Two of us – Ruth, working in Sarajevo, and me – lived through a tough night in Belgrade again (according to the reports of the others who sneaked into our hostel on their way back and talked to the people there, we left a lasting impression), before our busses took us to Sarajevo/Zagreb. The following rest of the weekend was mostly spent with sleeping.
I’m part of the teachers’ volleyball club now (after having been repeatedly asked by different colleagues and recommended to do that by my predecessor), we meet once a week to play one and a half hours. My unbeatable playing skills are still on vacation, but they said they’ll join me around June or something if I keep on trying so hard.
It’s freezing cold here at the moment, the first weather reports about snow are coming in, I’m wondering when it’ll come. However, that raises my expectations for the new skiing and boarding season that’s going to start for me as soon as I’m home for Christmas.
The solution of the riddle from the last post: A river.
See you
Florin.
Riddle:
If I eat, I live.
If I drink, I die.
What am I?