October 12 – Sofia, Bulgaria.

October 12 – Sofia, Bulgaria.

The day I left Ohrid for Bulgaria (the 9^th of October) I ate breakfast with some Peace Corps volunteers working in Albania. I cannot say I am too jealous of their country assignment. While the people are very friendly, the language has not appreciable connections to any other language. The population of the entire country is about 3 million, another 4 million Albanians live in the near and far abroad. They were fun, smart and friendly. Fear not, for America is well represented in Albania.

Social customs remind me a bit of Siberia. After speaking to a local girl/women within 10 years on either side of one’s age the rumor mill starts and within an hour come the inevitable… “Are you going to marry your _____ (maybe even your host sister)?”

“No.”

“Why not? She is not pretty? You don’t like Albanian women?”

Another day off the map. We parted ways as I boarded the bus bound for Sofia and they for Albania. The now perfunctory turbo-folk blared through the night. Its thumping bass and shrill reed overtones easily pierced any mellow music I have in my Ipod.

I met interesting people on the bus. A young couple of about 30 kept an eye out for my well being and informed me of when I was being corrected by the driver (the lack of eye contact killed any comprehension meager Russian might afford). An Albanian student in Bulgaria’s American University made for good conversation during our frequent smoke breaks. Finally there was the Skopje pediatrician/pulmonologist.

Upon hearing me speak English the doctor was keen to practice his. After a few early stumbles within 20 minutes he was unstoppable. What started as a mundane conversation about family became a discussion of borders, identity and race. This progression is quite natural when people ask about my name, where my family is from or about how they have family living in America. To make a long story short, he was quite racist. He proposed that all “civilized/white” (he used the terms interchangeably, political correctness may have been more prominent had we been speaking Macedonian but the subtleties are often lost once you use a second language) people should just get along and work together to keep from being over run and culturally subverted by blacks, Mexicans, Muslims and Chinese.

I mostly listened, putting in a word or two here and there about staying in SA several months “liking Mexican” but the hints of difference or opinion were brushed aside with a “well, yes perhaps I agree, BUT…” onward and downward. He regretted the privatization of Macedonia’s industries to foreigners and lamented that Macedonia was now “less developed” today than 15-20 years ago.

There was a time not long ago when I would have responded with a “yes, perhaps I agree, BUT…” all my own. I tend to find myself defending open markets, but then I know of nothing else in practice, having grown up in the states. For him the socialist security of the past meant low wages, cheap goods and a good life on the whole. It sounds like endemic stifling of potential to me.

Now while I maintain personal preferences of comfort on issues like race, socialism and dinner tonight, I no longer see any system of belief, governance or living as inherently better or worse. Perhaps such distinctions can be made on a case by case basis but not upon ideas as a whole. When I lived with my Stalinist host family in St. Petersburg, even that seemingly straight forward case of good versus bad became completely subjective. If you can’t agree on facts, it is hard to agree on analysis. Anyway, who would I, a privileged young American, be to lecture someone who lived through Stalin’s reign and the USSR’s disastrous collapse?

These sorts of experiences draw me way from a clear picture of truth and toward an evaluation of relevance. This equivocates any lesson to be gleaned from an experience while recognizing the subtlety of variation. The weakness of this perspective is its strength. I live for seeing (or perhaps imagining) beautiful paradoxes like that. To me, they are moments of epiphany.

Learning languages well also holds lessons that I value very deeply about the subjectivity of cultural perception. This is most clear in the translation of closely related concepts. “Sorry” in English is translated (or poorly transliterated, as the case may be) as “iz-ven-eet-tia” in Russian. Sorry suggests compassion, and shared sorrow for another’s suffering, though we use it so often that it has lost this gravity. It is the speaker who is active in English by expressing her reaction of regret. In Russian, the phrase is a verb conjugated in the second person formal and means something more like forgive me. It is similarly used only slightly less frivolously than its English counterpart. Russians are far less inclined to establish themselves as the principle actors in their sentences. English is full of possession and personal initiative. The differences are trivial translations at first glance, but taken as a whole they add up to a significantly distinct world outlook. English speakers see themselves as able to affect change boldly in the world. Russians see themselves as the recipients of others’ or God’s actions.

To stretch the applicability of the idea perhaps beyond capacity, I would utilize the framework for justifying Russian as well as American expansionary and interventionist policy. Russians perceive rivalry and subversion along their borders (others negatively causing injury to Russia). Thus they seek to control or weaken their neighbors.

America may be expansionary and interventionist for opposite the opposite reason today. Americans see problems, want to “fix” them and proudly believe that we can. Through hard work and American know-how any problem can be solved.

From my limited familiarity with the period of America’s Westward expansion, however, I would argue that U.S. actions were more defined by the fearful perspective even if the ideology of Manifest Destiny remained grounded in the self-assurance of American Protestantism. American intervention in Latin America also smells of paranoia more than naivety. I guess when trouble is perceived in your backyard the motivations for dealing with it change. Russia’s Eastward expansion occurred at roughly the same time as America’s and has never really stabilized due to a lack of strong neighbors and natural boundaries.

Sofia is a good city but the real attraction has been some of the other restless bodies I have met at the hostel. They are more impressive than travelers in Central Europe and former-Yugoslavia on average. Several people are traveling around the world. One of them has been doing so as often as possible for a very long time. He is now 70. There is practically no where he has not been. A Scotsman is on his way back from Afghanistan where he worked for NGOs for two years. After a rocket hit his compound several weeks ago, he decided it was time to go home. A 23 year old German woman is studying some works by a Bulgarian writer who wrote Social Realism, and like so many talented creatives, used the system’s template for subversion. She is fluent in English and Bulgarian and has two or three other Slavic languages under her belt. Another guy is writing a novel, “a red-neck catch-22.”

A writer/editor for Sofia’s weekly life-style magazine interviewed me today. Every week they profile a traveler to Sofia and I was one of the few people in the hostel when she came by today. It was a great conversation. I had to explain how I feet about 9-11 (something I have not never directly articulated or thought about before) and explain why I am reading the Koran. When asked for a story about traveling, I told her about the Mister Piernas competition, it was the only interesting story I could think of when prompted with “could you tell me a story about something that has happened while traveling.” To my dread and amusement, she assured me that the story will certainly be published.

People almost always tend to pursue their interests to the nth degree. Climbers want to climb the hardest route, swimmers to swim the fastest and runners to run the farthest. Travelers to travel further and homemakers to perfect the abode. Linguists search for odd, dying languages and anthropologists for unique cultures. Each person is both admirably determined to get the most out of their experience and trapped into alleys of narrow definition by this process. In considering motivations from this perspective, I wondered what compels me to go to Kyrgyzstan.

It is another tally mark on the vain score-card of the odd and remarkable places briefly where I have briefly lived. It is the chance to broaden and deepen my youth-guide identity. It is to solidify my Russian and grow another tongue in a futile effort to understand everyone. I have a specific curiosity now after reading part of the Koran. The Koran is more prescriptive in its approach to handling everyday affairs than I would have guessed. I want to know how it is that Kyrgyz people reconcile their identity as a secular Islamic society. According to my reading of the Koran so far this is akin to proclaiming oneself to be a married bachelor.

I suspect that perhaps the effort to establish order through rigidity may be self-defeating. In Islam’s case, so much is at stake that competing claims for the all-or-nothing legitimacy resulted in decentralized religious authority and dissent though the holy book clearly declaims this outcome.