as many of you will recall, almost as soon as i found out that i was going to Beograd, i was lauding the fact that i already knew of two definite places in which to obtain free wireless in the city. i believe i was also claiming to know their location. i think i was lying. while using the first (which is a site somewhere downtown that i have yet to locate specifically—but usually sit at the tables of a mcdonald's or in the stoop of a doorway, behind which construction is happening and so no one seems to go in or out of the door), i have spent the past 9 (nine) days searching for what had always sounded like the better one: the skupština opština (municipality conference building) in Novi Beograd. it turns out that, despite what seemed like a great wealth of information regarding said building, it has taken me all of aforementioned 9 (nine) days to confirm that it does, in fact, exist. once i'd found on which street it was supposedly located, i have walked the length of Bulevar Mihajla Pupina several hundred times over; i must admit, it was reaching somewhat riotous levels as i varied the search process to involve getting off buses of various numbers at stops along the road. you'll note that i have not mentioned the street number of the skupština, which i also had in my toolkit of marvels, because, you see, these are rendered completely meaningless here. (another addition to yesterday's post; i'm sure there's some system along the lines of the order-in-which-they-are-built which accounts for edifices having numbers at all, but i haven't figured that out yet. in Beograd proper, things are at least linearly predictable.) moreover, while the street number gave me absolutely no clue as to where along the road my destination lay, Mihajl Pupin is a big street. like a small highway. its main constituents, other than apartment bloks, are the shiny-sided monstrosities that house Jugopetrol and Lukoil (and the boys in their back rooms), the Palata Federacije, the Energoprojekt, and many many banks. so not only have i been wandering up and down the street, but also into these complexes, wondering as i go if the address of the other buildings i am discovering would still be considered BMP, even though i am, by now, far off the street and have been for many hours. this morning (obviously this was reaching a new height of obsessivity, given that i was doing said activity on the way to work), i disembarked the bus i was happily taking, walked across a field of grass and, upon beholding the skupština itself, i knelt and kissed the ground before it. or, rather, i whipped out my computer, found a very real and pulsing signal without any sort of password, stowed everything away and jumped back on the next bus. the irony of this is, as follows: skupština is about 4 blocks away from my house.

speaking of public transpo—the system is a bit ambiguous and full of ways to elude it. one is supposed to purchase these little tickets, which then are inserted into a punch-card machine on the tramvaj/bus, which mark the ticket with the magic series of numbers (haven't figured out if this is specific to the *bus* itself, or the numbered line or something completely other; i've ruled out a randomly generated three-digit code, simply on the basis of the archaicity of the apparati). obviously, because a passenger does not have to clear with the driver or anyone else (indeed, the drivers seem to care not at all about whether people punch their cards), there is a strong motivation for free riding. i would just like to point out that i am resisting this, unlike the entire summer in ČR, when i did not buy a single tramvaj ticket and still had the one bought on my behalf (by the visiting, tourist parents) when i left Brno in the middle of the night to return so circuitously to the US. what prevents the situation here from descending into a wild cacophony of (more sneetches) people riding all over the place without paying a dinar seems to be the presence of incognito Checkers of Tickets, who board the vehicles, run the gamut in no uncertain terms, very gruff and often loudly humiliating people, even those with tickets, and then get off. these men (always men), with their grimy power, stand in stark contrast to the actual policije, who ride the tramvaji to get where they are going (which makes sense, given the state of the roads in Beograd), just like the rest of us.

in the context of the above, i've developed some fear of authority here (maybe it *is* possible...). there's something about being held up for questioning in a language not my own that is not my first choice for an activity. it's not just the lack of clear understanding, which makes me admit that there's a lot of residual affect about communist/post-communist structures of bureaucracy and seeing specifically Serbian enforcers. apart from this (mostly) irrational assessment (via history, via literature, which i must remember are added onto individual experience, although it doesn't seem that way (for me) most of the time)), it's not necessarily fear that they could do anything to me, particularly because i don't *think* i'm committing some awful crime, but fear of being embarrassed by the whole situation, unable to use language effectively.

thunderstorm, with hail, as i was leaving language class. i had to go and get my dictionary at the Institut za strane jezike (Institute for Foreign Languages), where i have been going every day to collect things in this piecemeal-imposed-by-petty-beaureacracy fashion that i know and love. on monday i went for CDs, having been told they'd be in then; they weren't, but i managed to get them yesterday, when i was told that the dictionary i needed would be in today after 4pm. on the way there, the tramvaj got stuck on the track and everyone started to get off; i was confused until i looked just in front, where two cars were sitting on the tracks, apparently in some sort of disarray that looked less like an accident and more like they were stalled and this was unacceptable behaviour on the street proper, so they'd been pushed to the middle where they'd *just* be paralysing the three tramvaj lines that happen to run on that track. as i walked to the Institute, i contemplated the great ingenuity of those who, during wartimes, immediately take out the railroad tracks to cities and production sites.

on the way home, purely in the interest of science, i stopped by at the skupština again—this time to see whether They kept the wireless on after hours. the signal was strong outside the building, so although i'll have to do a few more random visits at odd hours, i have a few reasons to believe that i should be able to use this connection whenever i want. thinking about all the good times ahead, camping out on the steps in front of my municipality building, i was also forced to infuse this vision with a bit of uncomfortable reality in the form of the red welts that were appearing all over my body as a result of the 6 minutes i had just spent in the vicinity. apparently (probably due to the rain. i'm hoping due to the rain), all of the mosquitos, about whose lack i was just about to post in the form of an ode, actually live at the skupština. i escaped with my life, but barely. i always knew i would have to make sacrifices in order to use my computer, but i had not realised that these would take the form of complete body wrappage. speaking of which—i imagine that this scenario will be even more ridiculous in the dead of winter. i am already cursing the fact that i did not bring my mittens with the convertible partial-finger gloves; that i won't be playing violin here was no excuse for such a gross lack of foresight.

as we work ourselves out of the washing machine crisis, today was my day to centrifuge dirty clothes. so as soon as i returned home, you can be assured that that's precisely what i was going. several hours later, i found the dial had moved about 2 mm in the clockwise direction. thinking that this machine was unbelievably even slower than similars in the ČR or UK, i sat down with Ana and Danijela (we were going to have The Apartment Talk; i was cowering and thankful, all at once. living with girls...yeh, mhmmm.) and found that i had neglected to turn on the water connected to the machine; it had run through almost an entire cycle when Danijela found it and set it back on its course, hydrated this time.

first phone call from home! (how strange to be at home, or make myself at home, wherever i am—but then as soon as there's a comparison involved, through the wires, through the aether, it is at once undeniable that "home" is only where i am known. and loved. that narrows its possible locations down only slightly.) there aren't a lack of people with whom to converse here, by any stretch of the imagination. as i was mentioning earlier, it's just the substance level that is diminished—because of language, but also because my connection to people here is, right now, artificial and new. also there's the fact that i don't want to speak in English, which is (at this point) the only language that allows me to convey and receive information adequately (substantively). opting for nothing, in the absence of real conversation, seems purely stubborn: principled...and bereft. in any case, my voice sounds (to me) so strange when i speak in English for more than a few sentences, when i am able to keep the apology out of it.

i would just like to say it: my g is The Best.