Americans Abroad

One funny time was when I was in Zagreb, and a pair of sisters invited me up for tea in their apartment. The elder one had her boyfriend there, and he wanted to discuss Credence and Johnny Winter, where I wanted to talk about tambouritsa music. He spoke no English, so his girlfriend translated for him. He was amazed that I cared in the slightest about Croatian folk music, and expressed his amazement (in Croatian) that I had an interest in "naša muzika," and I answered in English, "and all you care about is OUR music." Both sisters broke out laughing, saying we maybe couldn't speak to each other, but we understood each other.

There is a mafia for every Balkan ethnic group these days. Croatians, Serbs, Albanians, Romanians, Bulgarians, you name it. They all have groups of well-trained ex-military guys who like money, and are eager to use their skills. In western Europe, people tend to be unarmed, and get indicted if they defend themselves, so we are "easy pickins" here.

Although Hrvatski uses the Latin alphabet, the Cyrillic one isn't hard to learn, and it is completely phonetic, so once you learn how a letter is pronounced, it is almost always pronounced that way,

I've had a few adventures over here for sure. My favorite one was marrying one of the friendly natives