With dedication and inscription for a little extra honey. I thank you in advance my generous readers for staying the course with me over these uncharted Bloggery waters!!

Book is biography of my Serbian Royal Family, the Karadjordjevici! A Super cool tale of David and Goliath and the evolvement from those times to current times. 

Book is in Serbian, hard copy for the moment. Only! Available at all Laguna/Delfi Bookstores and also (with personalized dedication and at exorbitant additional charge) directly from me. PayPal and all major credit cards accepted through http://www.wooldomination.com/?p=5021

Thank you!

Telegraf.rs October 2015

http://www.politika.rs/rubrike/Kulturni-dodatak/U-subotu-10-oktobra-u-Kulturnom-dodatku-citajte.lt.html

Sign up for pre-orders of my new book… Please send me your email address. I am at wooldomination@gmail.com 

Or visit a Laguna/Delfi bookstore in your neighborhood! Books will be in the stores November 29, 2015

Thank you!

    See you at the Belgrade Book Fair, November 1st, Sunday 1-3pm!

Last Sunday a reader commented:
A reminder Christina, that the only word adopted into the English language from Serbo-Croatian is “vampir”. As to the “vrdolak”, or werewolf, well that’s another story.

To which I reply, thank you. These days I am fascinated with all things Serb, including the language.

I stab away at learning but resort to a homemade ‘pidgin’. On TV I watch American crime shows with Serbian subtitles and now I know ‘blood’, ‘murder’, ‘kill’, ‘arrested’, ‘victim’ and ‘Oh man!’

For a higher game level challenge I might try and decipher Cyrillic where you have a triangle next to a rake next to something that looks like a squashed spider, and all of it is pronounced like you’re coughing up phlegm.

Then there is Serbia’s contribution to ‘Pop Culture’ regarding vampires and werewolves.

Allegedly, a certain vampire Princess sipped on the milk of lactating wolves so as to beget herself a son. This son lived a long fecund life, his descendants are amongst us. The lactose-tolerant Princess was the inspiration for Stoker’s Drakula. (While she was not Serbian, she came from a land nearby).

Which makes me wonder, speaking of lousy jobs, who milked the she-wolf?

Is it merely coincidence that the shape of the country of Serbia (despite border lines which change with head-spinning rapidity) looks like a baby dragon tip-toeing toward the Croatian coastline, short arms extended, maybe even with a smirk on his face. Is he drunk?

Recently a friend was forced to write a legal document (with pen and paper) and he had to write this in Cyrillic. I watched as he composed the swirling elements, some topped with flourishes of birds flying over, and he repeatedly paused and confessed, ‘I can’t remember how to write in Cyrillic.’

So what hope for me? I’m still having trouble with English.

~:~

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Ah, werewolf weather. I’ve been waiting to meet you.
I’m afraid of nothing. I’m protected by the Gypsy’s spell.
The thing about weather is it’s about clothes. Clothes may as well be as starched and fussed with as can be, but essentially they suit a need. Survival.
After a decade in the fiber trade I am the wool dominator. I have sacks of anti-Polar conditions threads, a lifetime supply of swaddling.
I watch you encroach.
Starting from after one single perfect week, autumn, and then the first chill night.
Autumn, the procession of highs and lows, playing with our emotions and hopes, and tee shirts and sweaters.
Until one cold day and an even colder night.
I’ve long heard of Serbian winters and feral beast. Serbs are Cat People and werewolves.
There’s no denying it: Serbs are different.
They ask me not to mention bad things, enhance the positive.
They love their homeland, please don’t contribute to the negative propaganda.
Write good stuff.
I tell them I love everything. 
They tell me I’m overly enamored.
Schizophrenic?
Meanwhile, this time last year I noticed the cold. I remember shivering at the Tesla museum. A year ago I was caught in the land of forests in my flip flops as the season changed. I was not prepared. 
This trip, going on months, devoted to the slow examination of the nation, flanks are covered. The looking up close and personal at the strands of DNA and Neanderthal strains, and possible vampire connections all tatted together.  
Last year I misread the weather. After four years in the tropics I can be forgiven for finding it cold.
It was you, werewolf weather.

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The gypsy girl insisted on reading my palm. Mostly I did not want to touch her. With a blister on her lip and her dirty fingertips. But she was imploring, and somewhat serious and urgent about it. I acquiesced and presented the palm of my left hand.
She looked shocked, she looked at me and looked back at my hand and blinked at me with an extremely nervous look.  ‘You are supposed to have died already twice’, she said, ‘You are surrounded by many enemies.’ She withdrew back in her chair she looked frightened of me.
Then she burst out laughing, and said, ‘There is no greater compliment!’
‘I want no money’, she said, ‘Take this talisman and in exactly one week follow these instructions’, she recited a chant for me to repeat thrice.
When it was time to perform the magic ritual I walked toward a fountain set up with benches. I would sit on one of the benches and stare at the sun for a bit. Warm up. But upon approach a man, who had been sitting on one of the benches, stood up and turned to face the fountain. Like  he was going to applaud the fountain. Instead he grappled with the front of his pantaloons, and then as if I really was seeing what I thought I was seeing, yup, he was pissing. A slight easy arc, rigorous pace and flow. I adjusted my plan. No warm up. Straight to the middle of the crossroads and the island, shaped like a tear drop, a cement obstacle, my prow.
With the sunshine in my eyes, blinding me, I followed the gypsy girl’s advice, and ever since I am waiting around for things to improve. 
Front row seats at the strangeness that is my life.

I dreamed I was in India, dancing on a beach in a codling heat, when I woke up, it was midnight and I was in Serbia. The days here are sunny but the nights are starting to chill. But I was fidgety so with no particular purpose I left home and meandered the streets of Belgrade. I saw a man with a parrot on his shoulder and I followed him into a courtyard strung with fairy lights. Tucked in a corner was a restaurant. 

Indoors it was packed with twenty-somethings, standing and drinking and smoking and energetically chattering, and at the back of the room a four piece band. Shy drummer, electric guitar, lady singer and a harmonica player with Bayou soul. They played covers, like Mustang Sally, which you’d be hard pressed not to hear on any given night in Key West. 

Between sets the musicians and I chatted. I asked them if it bothered them not only no one danced, no one even listened to them. If anything the patrons appeared to be trying to drown out the music.

“We’re used to it!” the harmonica player said, “This crowd are here to hook up.” Apparently the dance scene in Belgrade are Techno lovers popping Ketamine. So 90s! But I’m told everything gets to Serbia 20 years late.

I tapped my feet to the end of their gig, a concert for one, but I wanted to dance. Blame it on the water, but I don’t have the courage to dance alone. The dude with the parrot was in the crowd intently conversing with a girl wearing black-rimmed glasses. I took it as a silent nod from my last true love, the Green Parrot.

I walked home and fell back asleep, slipping into dreams of dancing in the sand on a hot night. Over morning coffee I couldn’t be sure what was what, had I gone anywhere? Am I going anywhere? East or West, what’s next?

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Recently I complained to my friend Nenad of a pain in my back. I told him because I didn’t expect him to do anything more than say let’s go for lunch or let’s go to the movies but instead he orchestrated a hundred meetings with doctors, none of whom spoke a word of English and most of whom tried hard to dismiss my complaint with offers of aspirin. Without Nenad I would, literally, have gotten nowhere. Turned out I have a couple fractured vertebrae and I’m now strapped into a torso brace.
Nenad is the uncle of a beautiful maiden. This lass, a model, was hired to work the catwalk in an upcoming fashion show. Since Nenad had plans to be out of town on the day of the show he asked me to be his ambassador.
We sent word to the designer and asked for tickets. For a date I invited my friend Lokica Stefanović (a famous dancer here in Serbia) to accompany me, not only I adore her but also she is friends with the designer. I had tickets, I had a stylish date and now all I needed was to pull myself together. How exactly do you rock a torso brace?
One option was to don a Dracula-style cape. I went the other way. First stop was a hairdresser for indiscreet stripes of blue and green. Next was a make up artist to paint my face like a whore for Halloween, then quiet black pants and white shirt and all topped off with the brace.
It was just assumed my brace was a corset and the latest in hip fashion from the West and Lokica and I were the darlings of the photographers. We happily posed for the flashing bulbs.
Don’t be surprised to see my mild S&M look on next year’s Serbian runways.

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‘Are you Indian?’

‘No!’ the Roma Princess answered.

‘Do you consider yourself Roma or Serbian?’

‘I don’t know!’

‘But didn’t Roma originate from India?’

‘It’s a myth!’ the Princess stated, staring at the ground.

An American anthropologist assured me the Roma traveled from India 1000 years ago, but they deny this. For fear of deportation? Fear of discrimination? He was not sure.

The Princess is fluent in Serbian and Romani yet claimed neither she nor any of her six children write in any language.

Inside her home the walls were painted in candycane stripes of green and white and pink. The furnishings were worn, yet plentiful. On a side table was the Mack-daddy of flat screen televisions, blaring CNN and hooked up to the Internet.

Do you use Facebook? I asked. All six kids affirmed they have their own accounts. So what kind of no writing is that?

Just as they build their towns like fortresses, one cannot presume solid answers from direct questions. These are a very private people.

The Germans have a system whereby Roma, from any country, can apply for financial aid.

Well-intentioned Westerners study these Roma tribes, offering education and modernization. Seems to me the Roma want for nothing except to be left alone.

We may judge their lifestyles, and we may pity and romanticize them, but they live the way they want to.

They are poor, by our lilly-white Western standards, but they thrive on a different currency. They love each other and they love their families.

Maybe I’m going all granola and soft here in my dotage, but I did ask permission to return for second visit.

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The Roma of Serbia, who are Indian by heritage, are never pleased to see outsiders wandering into their settlements. Their greatest fear is deportation to India. But I wonder where in India they would be sent? Do they even know?

While they’re not Serbian, they’re hardly Indian. These ‘outsiders’ can be found in every country in Europe. Each European country has a different attitude towards these nomadic intruders.

Of course ‘nationalism’ (read: racism) shows up everywhere, no ones hands are spotless. And not to say things are easy for the Roma in Serbia, but at the same time Serbs use them for punchlines of jokes equally they acknowledge the poignance of them.

Emir Kusturica, Serbia’s preeminent filmmaker, depicted the Roma in shades of realism and melancholy romance in his 1988 film Time of the Gypsies. The Roma leave their settlements to conduct their business. You’ll see a man and his son driving extraordinary contraptions, wooden flatbed carts motored by cobbled-together engines, or hauled by ponies. To see these ‘vehicles’ check out the documentary Pretty Dyana (2003) by Boris Mitić.

While they enter the city, it’s not reciprocal. The Roma will not ban you from visiting their settlements but they will make you feel uncomfortable, unless you are invited.

Every settlement has its own King. My friend Igor Stojanović wrangled an invitation for him and I by the King of the Roma of one particular settlement. We’ll go bearing gifts and return with tales to tell.

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