So I'm having coffee at this place on Republic Square when I see this lepojka walk past; exquisite in a city of beautiful devojka. There's a high ratio of silicon /botox enhancements here, but this girl was jeans and a t-shirt, not made-up at all, just strolling along while feasting on a slice of veggie pizza. Now in my personal life (that is, unrelated to school or employment) I have walked up to a female stranger exactly twice in my entire life. It's just not something I'm accustomed to doing. But I am a stranger in a strange land and have had quite a run here so, having learned to pay for coffee when it is brought to my table, I finish it quickly and navigate my course through the somewhat crowded square in the wake of this young lady. I'm not at all sure what it is I will do when I catch up to her—I'd been searching for this hard-to-locate bookstore, but I'd just found it before having coffee, yet I think I can pretend I hadn't and ask her for directions to it. She paused by a fountain bench to finish her pizza slice and I caught up with her. As I approach I hear her humming a tune that I know, but cannot name. I stumbled through my introduction in Serbian (which is a bit better now than a mere stumble) and she smiled at my lack of dialect and replied in a curious accent of English. I tell her I'm looking for Plato (locally, it's a short a-sound; PLAT-oh). She points in the direction and I acknowledge the landmark, and she tells me precisely where I can find it. I ask her where she's from, because her accent doesn't sound Serbian. She says she grew up in Sarajevo and (some town I don't recall) in Turkey; her family's Serbian-Turkish. How curious, I comment and tell her, of course, that I'm en route to Sarajevo in the coming week. We chat a moment about Sarajevo and I tell her the Serbian joke Mr Bećković told me; she laughs. Ah, that's all I needed, a laugh is a step towards a greater conversation.
So that's when the pigeons took flight around us. That's when one of them shat on my head.
Ewwww, I say and wipe it quickly from my hair and—just as quickly—produce the little bottle of hand sanitizer from my daypack and make a quick clean up as I joke about how I can't very well flirt with a pretty girl with birdshit in my hair. She found that quite funny and commented that most people would have gotten terribly angry and/or embarrassed, neither of which are at all alluring. Humor is attractive, she said. Then I do a soft-shoe shuffle dance to clean my hands and hair and drop the little bottle of sanitizer back in my daypack and ask her if she thinks talent is attractive.
Her answer itself isn't as important as the fact that her family has a house in the mountains south of Sarajevo and, after finishing her visit with grandparents in Beograd this week, she's going back to Sarajevo until August. And that I have her number there.
In addition to merely being infatuated with this lovely lady, I'm incredibly curious to hear the tale of her Serbian-Turkish heritage.
So I suppose I'm grateful to that pigeon. And my general lack of embarrassment when things go horribly wrong. And that even though I get quite angry at a great number of things, my anger here in Serbia has been limited to the boneheads on the news (I've watched BCC World News a few times this past week and seen the boneheads of Israel and the bonesheads of BP and that majorly disgusting piece of excrement disguised as a Dutchman who is in custody in Peru), since my personal anger is in that same checked luggage locker in Heathrow along with my judgment and ideology awaiting my return trip from here.
Pigeon gods work in mysterious ways.
Oh... and Plato is a cool little bookstore
As I came in this evening from taking sunset photos of Sv. Sava's, I found myself humming the tune I heard from her. It took a few minutes but I tracked it down in the great music archive of my head:
~*~
So that's when the pigeons took flight around us. That's when one of them shat on my head.
Ewwww, I say and wipe it quickly from my hair and—just as quickly—produce the little bottle of hand sanitizer from my daypack and make a quick clean up as I joke about how I can't very well flirt with a pretty girl with birdshit in my hair. She found that quite funny and commented that most people would have gotten terribly angry and/or embarrassed, neither of which are at all alluring. Humor is attractive, she said. Then I do a soft-shoe shuffle dance to clean my hands and hair and drop the little bottle of sanitizer back in my daypack and ask her if she thinks talent is attractive.
Her answer itself isn't as important as the fact that her family has a house in the mountains south of Sarajevo and, after finishing her visit with grandparents in Beograd this week, she's going back to Sarajevo until August. And that I have her number there.
In addition to merely being infatuated with this lovely lady, I'm incredibly curious to hear the tale of her Serbian-Turkish heritage.
So I suppose I'm grateful to that pigeon. And my general lack of embarrassment when things go horribly wrong. And that even though I get quite angry at a great number of things, my anger here in Serbia has been limited to the boneheads on the news (I've watched BCC World News a few times this past week and seen the boneheads of Israel and the bonesheads of BP and that majorly disgusting piece of excrement disguised as a Dutchman who is in custody in Peru), since my personal anger is in that same checked luggage locker in Heathrow along with my judgment and ideology awaiting my return trip from here.
Pigeon gods work in mysterious ways.
Oh... and Plato is a cool little bookstore
As I came in this evening from taking sunset photos of Sv. Sava's, I found myself humming the tune I heard from her. It took a few minutes but I tracked it down in the great music archive of my head:
And Jane... came... by with a lock of your hairSo I guess this is where I say, "Sincerely, L. Cohen," and bid you goodnight from Beograd.
She said that you gave it to her
That night that you planned to go clear --
~*~
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