Božić na Sarajevo

I have to admit that I had a little apprehension when it came to spending the holidays away from family this year, since I knew it would be very different. Fortunately, I had a pretty awesome Christmas, and it's all because of the the wonderful people I've met here.

Being outside of the US during the holidays is in some ways a huge relief. Sarajevo's population is predominantly Muslim (at least 70%), so Christmas is definitely not a big thing here. In the US, Christmas is commercialized to the extreme. Retail stores start selling Christmas decorations in early November, and Christmas music plays on the radio around the same time. I always avoided shopping the day after Thanksgiving, since all hell broke loose as people try to take advantage of the Black Friday sales. Driving is also much scarier between Thanksgiving and the day after New Year's in the US because people are stressed out about meeting deadlines and figuring out what to buy their families for Christmas.

In Sarajevo, things are much different. It almost felt like Christmas didn't exist until around the 18th or so. That's when I finally started seeing lights on some of the houses in our neighborhood and a few Christmas sections in the supermarket. The Fox channels on tv even started showing a few Christmas-themed commercials. And then there was the Coca-Cola Sarajevo Holiday Market. It was kind of like a mini-version of a Christkindlmarkt in Germany. The perimeter was lined with quaint wooden houses in which merchants sold everthing from souvenirs to whiskey and crepes. There was a kiddie train off to the side, and a large white tent housed a biergarten-inspired restaurant. A rather large Christmas tree stood in the middle of the market grounds. Since the traces of Christmas were scarce, I felt the need to create my own spirited atmosphere by spending almost three entire days baking cookies and listening to the same four hours of Christmas music over and over again. I apparently can't have Christmas without mountains of cookies.

Lights in the Neighborhood

On Christmas Eve, my bassoon colleague Edo invited a couple of us over so that we could spend the holiday with family. It was a very nice Bosnian-style evening. We sat around the living room and talked while drinking beer and rakia and eating homemade bread and assorted sausage. Soon the principal flutist and his son came over to join us. Edo's wife had put Christmas decorations up, and we enjoyed the smell of amazingness in the oven. I don't remember the name of the dish, but it was cooked in a clay bowl that was hundreds of years old and passed down through the generations. The ingredients in the bowl included at least three kinds of meat, potatoes, carrots, green beans, and cabbage. The point was to bake it until the top was completely black. In addition to this hearty dish, we ate homemade bread, beats with garlic, salad with pumpkin oil dressing, and a chicken soup for dinner. It was a delicious.

After dinner Edo, his wife, and our flutist pulled out instruments and started jamming, Bosnian style. Edo owns at least two drums, an accordion, a couple of bassoons, a saxophone, a guitar, two upright pianos, and two sazes (not really sure how to make that one plural). So, he took the accordion, his wife and the kids played the drums, and our flutist played guitar. Tim joined in on some bottles and even learned a couple of drum riffs by the end of the night. Edo and our flutist took turns singing. I would have joined in too, but I was at a loss of what to do or where to start. I have no idea what they were playing or singing most of the time until out of nowhere they played a song by Stevie Wonder. Ha! It was quite the scene.

Edo plays accordion

We stayed over until about 11:30 that night talking about everything from astrology and witchcraft to the source of our flutist's son's Clemson hoodie. At the end, Edo graciously provided us with the closing song of the night: an ethno version of Bolero on the piano. Tim and I then caught a ride home with Edo's best friend, who stopped by after dinner. And thus Tim experienced his first white Christmas as a fresh layer of snow fell from the sky.

The next day was also quite eventful and enjoyable. As soon as I woke up, I started baking cookies so that I could bring my family's best tradition to the Christmas get-together that night. I was able to take a break from the cookies to have Christmas supper with Tim. My family usually does lasagna, but I opted for an easier version: pasta with a loaded red sauce. He had brought up his computer, so we watched the movie Elf while we ate. After he went back to his apartment, I continued with my baking frenzy and finished everything just in time for the party. The tray of cookies I brought included gingersnap, sugar, chocolate chip, and personalized gingerbread men. They were well-received.

As soon as I walked into Matt's apartment, I felt the Christmas cheer. There were icicle lights in the doorway to their living room, a small Christmas tree in the corner, jazzy Christmas music playing over the speakers, and several friends chatting happily to one another. Everybody wished each other a Merry Christmas with a handshake or a hug and the European-style kiss on the cheeks. After everyone arrived at the party, Matt and Ivana handed out the presents from Santa. We all opened them at the same time, and there was immediately a roar of laughter and commotion that lasted for at least 20 minutes. Everyone had gotten a silly hat. We put them on, traded with other people, and combined several hats into one giant cacophony. Best Christmas party idea ever. The rest of the night passed in a flurry of conversation, music, and good times.

The Otes family with silly hats

Throughout this past month, I have had several conversations with locals about their views on holidays. It was especially interesting to hear a Bosnian perspective on Christmas. Apparently, a lot of Bosnians put up what I would consider to be Christmas decorations to celebrate the coming of the new year, not necessarily Christmas itself. That would explain all of the lights in our neighborhood, which I doubt contains any Christians outside of those in our Otes family. Also, I've heard just as many fire crackers this past week as I did when Bosnia was still in the running for the Euro Cup playoffs. Admir explained to me that this again is because of the coming new year. Finally, I have learned that Bosnians both celebrate every holiday and celebrate no holidays. There is a fine line between the two in this culture. Bosnians know how to sit back and enjoy their life as it is in the moment, whether it's on a Tuesday night or Christmas Eve. No matter what, this time of year is the same for everybody; it is a time to celebrate hope and family. After all that they have been through, Bosnians may be some of the most grateful people in the world.

Learning Bosnian

One of the interesting and entertaining aspects of living here is learning Bosnian. If you know Bosnian, Croatian, or Serbian, you will be able to communicate almost anybody in former Yugoslavia. When Yugoslavia was dissolved into smaller countries, each new country adapted the original Serbo-Croatian language into something they could call their own. Bosnian seems to be the most complicated of the these languages though. As I have discovered over these past 3 months, Bosnian has 7 cases, and I've only really learned one so far: nominative. I don't know a whole lot yet, but this I think is what makes their language the most complicated one I've seen so far. It's like German on crack.

Of course, the first thing we learned upon our arrival besides zdravo (hello) and pivo (beer) was how to count. Rehearsals for the orchestra are run in Bosnian, and numbers are an essential part of understanding where a conductor wants the orchestra to start. Unfortunately, numbers confused me a lot for the first month I was here. Many of them have similarly sounding syllables, and people abbreviate them differently. It reminds me the problem of hearing the difference between 13 and 30 in English. Also, because of the different cases, the endings to the numbers change to agree with the noun they modify. This really tripped me up in the markets. Bosnians would say 'dvie marka' instead of the 'dva marka' I was expecting. I would then give them three marks because I thought they said 'tri marka.'

Since we've gotten here, we've had several information-packed lessons with one of the women who works for the orchestra. She has the certification to teach Bosnian, and man is she a good teacher. Everything we have learned has proven to be quite useful. Our first lesson involved learning how to pronounce the Bosnian alphabet. Everything in Bosnian is pronounced how it looks, so once we get those sounds down, it'll be a breeze. Even having been here for 3 months, I am still struggling with it though. They have quite a few soft consonants that all sound very similar: č (tch) and ć (ch), c (tse) and s (se), dž (dje) and đ (je) and ž (dge). Then there is the elusive lj sound. Ivana says that it is made by saying ye and adding an l sound to the front of it without quite touching your tongue to the inside of your mouth. Unfortunately, this sound is a part of a word I use almost every day when I buy bread (hljeb) from the bakery. Another difficulty with pronouncing Bosnian is the fact that they tend to cram a bunch of consonants together like in the word 'prvi' (first). It seems like the letter r is kind of used as a vowel, since they roll their r's. I've never been able to do that, so it might be a while before I can master it. Besides the alphabet, we have learned common rehearsals phrases, how to telling time, how to read dates, basic present-tense verb conjugation, and how to form questions. I am always looking forward to our next lesson.

I never would have thought that I would ever move to a country before learning the language. It's made for some interesting communication issues here. Since my vocabulary is very basic, I generally get two reactions to speaking Bosnian. First, there are the people who I fool with my ability to say hello and ask how they are doing. They just kind of ramble in Bosnian at me, and I usually just smile and nod. Eventually if it's someone I know, I'll ask for them to translate. Otherwise, I am forced to admit that I don't really speak Bosnian. The other reaction is laughter. Let's face it, I sound funny when I speak Bosnian, and sometimes I can't hear the difference between how I'm saying it and how it should sound. All of the embarassment of failing at Bosnian will be worth it though when I can finally go into a store and have a real conversation with the person behind the counter. Sometimes I feel a little dependent on English speakers here, and it would be nice to go somewhere new in the city and not have to worry about people there being able to understand me.