Whew! We managed to get all the pictures up before our plane takes off (in 5 hours).. so go check out the Bled pictures for swimming and rafting and hanging out in the rain. Then check out the end of the Ljubljana pictures for our overnight trip to Maribor.
In addition to general travel tips, and favorite places we've visited, I wanted to take some time to express some of the deeper impressions I've gotten from being here and learning about this region. I've visited other parts of europe like Italy, France, and the UK, but this trip has given both Heather and me a very different understanding of the world than all of those trips combined.
I should add that many of these thoughts come out of lengthy discussions Heather and I had on the road, trying to sort all this out. Much of it is in the first person only because I am writing it, but I don't think either of us would have thought as deeply about this if we hadn't been able to compare reactions and impressions throughout the trip.
Ok, first up, my general impressions:
I really enjoyed eastern Europe, but it was the region I was least prepared for. I didn't know enough about the area in advance, and just had some vague notions about what to expect. I love surprises, so I expected that would be good here. In some sense this was nice. We learned about Hungary in Hungary, and it was great to be immersed in such a different environment, where you can learn about some part of history and instantly see its affects around you.
But not knowing Yugoslav history made other parts of the trip confusing. We didn't know who the Serbs were, or why there was fighting or what countries suffered more or less. We also didn't plan to visit places that we heard were dangerous but are now fascinating and only now starting to change. A perfect example of this is Bosnia. Apparently Sarjevo was a great city to visit, steeped in culture and only beginning to be westernized.
I learned a tremendous amount on this trip about the complexities of the regions we visited during the last 100-200 years, and about the tremendous depth and interconnectedness of all of Europe for the last few thousand years. Reflecting back, I have new understandings of the United States as well. I had a professor (Dr. Bloom at SF State) recently say that the United States is the "greatest multi-cultural experiment in history" - and I understand that so much more deeply now. So many of the current countries in Eastern Europe have been sliced up, mixed together, spun off dozens of times in the last thousand years, and each country is constantly fighting for cultural sovergnity and independence. There is a history of racial prejudice on a level that we can't quite understand in the US. The Croats fought the Serbs because the Serbs tried to make Yugoslavia a Serbian nation and actually enacted a policy of ethnic cleansing to ensure this would happen. In some ways this is so completely different than the racial issues in the US because of their explicit prejudices and regional divisions. On the other hand, the parallels are right there - one racial group trying to maintain power over another, driven by pride and a goal of unity on some perverse level.
I have also come to realize just how young the United States really is, and how fragile empires can be. These regions have literally thousands of years of history that show how temporary huge institutions can be. The Austro-Hungarian empire was massive and powerful, constructed over hundreds of years. Who knew it would be dismantled by a handful of western countries in the early 20th century? The USSR, while economically weak, was massive and the political institution affected every single citizen down to their occupation and lifestyle. But it crumbled in 1989-1992, a mere 50 years after it was formed.
The way people talk about all different forms of government also has allowed me to understand Democracy and Capitalism not as natural evolution of government like my high school education might be telling me, but as one particular form of organizing a country, and one that happens to focus on the individual. It makes me realize how unique the right of "the pursuit of happiness" really is. Not everyone gets that right, and not everyone feels it is as important as other goals such as national pride, strength of community, and so forth. It does make me appreciate the freedoms I have as priveleges, not necessarily rights. And they are freedoms that not everyone expects, or even expects for their children, children's children, or what have you.
All of this really came into focus when our tour guide in Ljubljana talked about how 1991 was the first time Slovenia was independent in over 1200 years. He seemed frankly relieved that it had finally come to pass, and gave the impression of what a unique special thing that was. Think about that. 1200 years! That they would even think of it that way is fascinating to me. 60 generations go by, and still the concept of cultural unity survives. The United States, as an institution, has only been around 228 years. The "western" culture in the region known as North America has only been around for 500 or so years. But the Slovenes.. well however long they've considered themselves Slovenes, they haven't been independent for over twice that long. That means they haven't felt the true independence and freedom that we feel in the US for that long. They've had a whole lot more going on to worry about that. And they've done ok. Not to make my own stereotypes, but the Slovenes we met were really great folks.
There is so much more to say about this vastly complex region, and there are huge parts of the area that we never even saw (Poland, Romania, the Ukraine, Bosnia, Serbia, etc) - I just hope we make it to those areas before Western culture changes them any more!