Serbia

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10. 08. 2008 Belgrade (SERBIA) The night on the train went much better than expected, pampered by our factotum conductor Zoran. We share the couchette with a young Japanese couple from Osaka, a bit dazed, the classic types who when you talk to them always give you the impression they have no idea where they are... When the conductor, by mistake, confiscates their Eurail ticket, open-mouthed, staring at me dumbfounded, instead of arguing and getting his ticket back, he kept saying to me: 'Unbelieveble'. In the end we had to sort the problem out for him... We wake up at Šid-???, the border between Croatia and Serbia. The people start to change, and so does the landscape; we pass through little stations with barriers bent in two while kids wash the windscreens of the queued cars...

The old women with faces carved by wrinkles, who knows how much they've been through, sitting calmly, their white hair wrapped in scarves, doing crochet. [Rossho]: And tomorrow we're off to Bosnia... Today was a really full day... We saw Marjia again, who asked us to find her a job as a carer in Italy... Absurd... How unfair life can be... Back home, well-connected, know-it-all girls with no life experience become magistrates... and here we have to hear requests like this from such special people... Absurd... How Belgrade has changed since last time... Improved, Westernised, modernised, globalised... You walk along the beautiful main street and you're surrounded by shops like: Zara, Terranova, Nike...

But why can't a nation have its own identity, its own ego, and why is there always this continuous race to try to be all the same, as if to confirm the old saying: 'Every world is a village!' 11. 08. 2008 Sarajevo (BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA) I'm writing from a rickety Bosnian bus. Well yes, we're travelling towards Sarajevo, this city we've heard named on the TV news for so long, protagonist of an endless war.

We're heading right there, and for a soldier like me it's very moving, especially because Bosnia is still today a territory where our contingent operates! Along the road, as we skirted the airport, I saw a plane take off and I thought to myself: 'In an hour and a half this one will already be in Italy!' We, from the border, took more than fifteen! I love travelling like this, discovering every place starting from the bottom, certainly more tiring and hard on our bodies but more precious for our souls...

We move the way they move, we eat the same things they eat; even this is living the place that hosts you! This bus reminds me so much of the one taken from Mexico to Belize, except for the music, which here is a sad Gypsy-Slav lament, and the people don't have the perennial smile of those black faces but gaunt faces carved by suffering! The conductor, like many others, speaks to us in Serbian almost as if we understood it; I get the impression they really believe they're still an empire, the one Tito worked so hard for, but meanwhile, while Karadžić (a dictator accused of many crimes against humanity) is being arrested, here they're organising demonstrations and protests against this action. An exhausting bus journey, few kilometres covered in almost 8 hours...

Every now and then the bus stopped, picked people up, dropped others off, checked the tyres, stopped at the mechanic, then to eat... Bosnia struck me enormously. You expect to find ruins, buildings collapsed by the bombings and instead... The landscape from Belgrade to here: a mix of the Alps and Finland. Lots of green hills, trees, pastures with cows, sheep, little flowers... I was expecting a second Macedonia, or even worse, and instead I'm left open-mouthed once I'm here... [ continues at: ]