Having been told to meet our bus in this parking lot to begin the 12-hour trip to Halkidiki, we duly showed up at the appointed time and place. Instead of seeing our bus, however, we saw at least 20 such conveyances, surrounded with hundreds of bag-laden holidaymakers.
The process of transformation had already begun.
There are people who are born with an innate sense of orientation. These people always know which way is True North, how to get from here to there without circumnavigating the globe and discovering the West Indies, and do not refer to "right" as the "other left."
What is True North anyway? Is there a Fake North?
In Paracin for the weekend among in-laws and ancient ancestors, at one point we were at a loss for something to do that did not involve mounds of food, liters of rakija, and hours of nostalgia. Always the resourceful sort, I come up with a perfect plan for a Sunday night.
Let's go see a movie, I said.
Purple is amethyst and eggplant. It is indigo, lavender, lilac, mauve, mulberry, blueberry, orchid, plum, pomegranate, puce, royal, thistle, and violet.
The branding of Serbia has been going through a very long series of false starts and misfires for as long as I have known about it. I was involved in an early post-transition project in 2004 and 2005, but the branding initiative was ultimately shelved because no one could address the elephant in the conference room:
What is Serbia's brand?
In the old days, we used to happy when the phone would ring.
But that was then. Today Bob never calls. You read his Facebook updates. You might occasionally exchange "likes," possibly the odd instant message chat. And in the end, you know pretty much what Bob has been doing and what he likes and what is happening around him. The same for your sister and Aunt Wendy. The virtual nature of our communications today means that we have the impression of talking to people all the time. We open some social media site with our morning coffee or tea and instantly know what our thousands of friends are doing. Especially the friends we never met.
Only two days after a shocking report on the banking crash in Iceland, wherein many senior members of the Icelandic government were indicted, accused, and the Iceland central bank chairman, the former prime minister, and others sundry were formally charged with "mistakes or negligence" by the Truth Commission - is it really a coincidence that Eyjafjallajokull chose this moment to spit up fire and lava?
Today (and yesterday, and tomorrow since it is not quite finished) I opened a new bank account. In order to do so, I affixed my scrawling and somewhat easy-to-copy signature to at least fifty documents - none of which I read.