But how *did* I get here?

Wait, didn't I already answer that question? Well, yes and no...

Back when I was starting out in my career in my librarian, I wasn't really interested in travel. I moved to Darwin because I thought it would be good for my career, but I never cared to travel the short distance to PNG or Timor Leste or even Indonesia, Malaysia or Singapore. I didn't see the point. Besides, I didn't have a passport.

But I do have a passport now. Last night, I was handing over my passport, as I crossed the border into (the Former Yugoslav Republic of) Macedonia, and noticed the date on my first ever stamp.

11th of June, 2009, Port Vila.

And I remembered. This is where it all started. At the New Librarian's Symposium in 2008, I met a lovely young librarian named Romany who was working at the RMIT library, who was soon to head to Vanuatu for a year as an Australian Youth Ambassador for Development (AYAD). We stayed in touch, and I decided that it would be worth visiting. I mean, Vanuatu isn't that far from Australia (Actually, it's 6.5 hours via Brisbane). So, I went, and it was my first time travelling abroad by myself. It was also a wonderful cultural experience, from taking in the local culture, to sleeping in a village, snorkelling, hanging with other AYADs and VIDAs, and coming to the realisation that if I want to travel, all I have to do it take the step through the door.

And although it took quite a few years, I ended up initially heading to PNG for 2 months, which turned into 3.5 months, followed by another 3 months in Hoi An, which turned into another 9 months into Hanoi. And here I am now in the Balkans where, strictly speaking, I'm not working in development anymore, but my skills and experience in the international development field have been perfect preparation for the kind of work I do now.

So, thank you Romany, for helping set these wheels in motion. My life would have been very different otherwise.

For those interested in Romany's adventures in Vanuatu, for a candid account of here experiences, you should start here. :)

Enable backpacker mode!

So, I'm travelling this weekend. Nothing has gone to plan.

Firstly, I was dropped off at the bus station at 5:15pm - plenty of time to get a ticket for the 6pm bus to Skopje. Except that when I went to buy a ticket, the guy said, "Oh, just go to the bus and get a seat. Over at bay 8." So, I was like, okay, went over there and waited. Eventually, somebody came along and said that the bus was now completely booked out, and that anybody who didn't have a ticket had to go and buy a ticket for the 7pm bus.

Well, at least there was a 7pm bus so I guess that's a good thing!

On the plus side, I met three young women (two canadians and one swiss) who were interns with the UNDP in Kosovo, so I had some bus buddies to chat with who were vaguely on the same wavelength, so I guess that's a win.

Then, I arrived at Skopje and went to the hostel that a friend had recommended. Now, I have to confess that at my age, my days of sharing dorms are pretty much completely over. On my arrival at the hostel, I asked for a single room, and was told that there were none available - just dorms. I was not in the mood for sharing, and was halfway out the door when that voice in my head said, "Oh, go on, just do it. Be sociable with complete strangers. Have a few beers. You're not a real backpacker, but you can at least pretend for an evening."

I'm so glad I did. Sitting around a table with a bunch of random Irish, Kiwi, English, Turkish, American and Macedonian backpackers drinking beers was a surprisingly pleasant evening. The on-duty guy at the hostel was more like a host for a dinner party than receptionist, and it made all the difference. So, if you're ever travelling through Macedonia, I would recommend Shanti Hostel. Best of all, it's only 10 minutes walk from the bus/train station.

I'm not sure I'd do it every night during my travels, but it's good to know that I'm not too old for this shit yet! :)

Kosovan Kuisine...

So, after living in Vietnam, the land of rice, noodles, leafy greens, fish sauce and assorted mystery meats, my general diet has changed rapidly, now that I'm living in the Kosovo, the land of bread, cheese, pickled peppers and... more assorted mystery meats!

Like in Vietnam, the cost of food is very cheap - a filling snack costs less than €1, and a basic meal shouldn't cost much more than €3-4. If you feel like splashing out for a nice steak dinner, you'd be looking at around €10.

So, what kind of food can I expect in Kosovo?

Meat

Whilst it's certainly possible to get by in Kosovo as a vegetarian, meat is very much a part of the culture. Walking around Pristina, you see many qebaptores that serve grilled qebapa - meat patties - with bread and salad. You can also opt for the more US-friendly hamburger, or there's often marinated steak or chicken if you prefer your meat less processed (but slightly more expensive).

On the other hand, if you're out with a group of people, you might order a mezze plate of cold meats - usually consisting of an array of sliced smoked, dried and cured meats, with some local white cheese for variety. A great salty snack to go with drinks on a sunny afternoon.

Having been occupied by the Ottoman Empire for a number of centuries, the Turkish influence is also certainly present, with its share of Turkish restaurants around town, where you can get meat and cheese-filled pides, or sliced doner meat in a sandwich or on a plate with salad.

Salads

Speaking of which, salads are great here! I'm not talking about some leafy tossed salad. Most salads will consist primarily of fresh cucumber and tomato as a base, with a variety of other ingredients depending on your taste. Greek salads with feta and olives are a popular choice (although, if you're south of the border, make sure you ask for a Macedonian salad!) There are also meaty options with chicken or beef. However, my favourite is the shop salad, which is the salad as above, but with sliced peppers, onion, and grated white sirene cheese on top. It's the best! Who says you can't make friends with salad?

Shope salad

Baked wonders

Bread is plentiful here. At most bakeries you can get all kinds of bread, which is pretty much the same as bread anywhere else in the world. But the magic happens when you order a byrek. There are generally three kinds - the meaty kind that has mince and onions in it, the cheesy kind with the salty white cheese goodness, and the spinach kind that has cheese and spinach. It's cheap - usually less than €1 and tasty. Locals often cut it up and dip it in yoghurt. Another similar traditional dish is flija, which can be best described as a pile of savoury crepes which have been glazed with layers of salty dairy goodness, and left to set, so that you cut it up like a pie. I'm not describing it very well, so here's a picture:

Flija, you fools!

Pizza is also very common here. it's cheap and tasty, and they take thin crusts to the extreme, compared with pizza that I've had back home. Then again, I've yet to have real pizza in italy, so I shall reserve all judgement until then!

All of the above meals are often served with a pickled sides - usually olives and yellow peppers. Be warned though - the peppers may be yellow, but they pack quite a punch in the spice department.

Dessert

So, you've eaten dinner and, what? You're still hungry? Fortunately, at the moment it's berry season. Around every corner there's somebody with a cart full of punnets of fresh strawberries - which you can purchase for €1. Similarly, turkish cake shops will sell you some delicious baklava. However, if you're feeling decadent, a local speciality is treleqe. Now, this is very much a sometimes food, and here's why: First, they bake a cake. Then they make a mixture of milk and sweetened cream and, once the cake is cooled, the sweet milky-cream is poured over the top of the cake until it is soaked right through. Finally, spread a caramel on top.

Trileqe

Enjoy! Then go to the gym the next day for penance.

How to spend a weekend in Sofia (without needing to take leave).

I recently had the opportunity to attend the Sofia Swing Dance Festival, in the nearby country of Bulgaria. As I had only started work, I didn't have any recreational leave, and it would have been a bit cheeky to ask for it anyway. Besides, there are no direct flights from Pristina to Sofia, so to fly there for a weekend without taking any leave would have taken 4.5 hours each way via Vienna, arriving at 12:40pm on Saturday, and leaving at 6:45pm on Sunday for the not-so-cheap price of 800 EUR.

However, there is another way, if you're feeling intrepid...

Friday
6:00pm - Board the bus at Pristina Bus Station, bound for Skopje.
8:30pm'ish - Arrive at Skopje Bus Station, depending on how long things take on the border crossing into the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM). Change some Euros for Macedonian Denar, and get some dinner.
10:00pm - Board the bus for Sofia.

Saturday
1:00am - Be awoken as the bus crosses the border into Bulgaria.
3:00am - Arrive at Sofia Central Bus Station. Find an ATM to take out some Bulgarian Leva. Find a taxi, go to your hostel, fall asleep....

8:30am - Wake up, and head to swing dance workshops all day. Followed by social dancing late into the night!

Source: Sofia Swing Dance Festival FB Page.

Sunday
3:00am - Stumble back to the hostel, sweaty and swungover.

8:30am - Wake up and head off for another full day of dance workshops. Skip the afternoon workshops for a Communist History Walking Tour of Sofia. Have dinner, and head out to social dancing in the evening until...

11:30pm - Get a taxi to the Central Bus Station.

Monday
12:00am - Depart for Skopje. Vaguely wake up to hand over my passport at the border.
3:00am (Gaining an hour crossing the border) - arrive at Skopje Bus Station. Attempt to nap for a couple of hours on extremely uncomfortable furniture.
6:00am - Depart on the bus for Pristina.
8:00am - Wake up in Pristina Bus Station, not even recalling when you went through the border, but there's a new stamp in your passport, so it must have happened. Head home for a shower and a change of clothes.

9:00am - Arrive at work, ready for a productive day!!

Fifty shades of whiteness...

Okay, disclaimer: this is going to be a bit lot of a ramble. I'm going to say things that some people will not agree with, and that's okay. Ideas of racial and cultural identity are complicated, and I don't pretend to have the answers. But I'm hoping that one day I'll be vaguely on the right track. Here goes...

I am biracial. You can call me Eurasian, if that label appeals to you more. My mother is Chinese, born in Malaysia, where her family has lived for a number of generations. My father was born in Australia, where his family has lived for a number of generations, a descendant of Irish immigrants. His ethnic identity is... um, let's come back to that later.

Anyway, I was born and raised in Australia. Race was something that I was aware of, growing up in school. I remember singing, "I am, you are, we are Australian" in primary school - after all, we were one, but we were many, and from all the lands on Earth we came. We shared a dream, and sang with one voice.

Except that we didn't. In the school yard, there was the usual multicultural mix of Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian, Greek, Italian, Turkish, Egyptian, Lebanese... and then you had the "Aussies". The "white" kids.

So, as a kid, I described myself as half-Chinese. The other half, being "Aussie" from my dad's side was assumed.

The 90s saw the rise of such visionaries as Pauline Hanson and the One Nation party. I don't know if it was out of shame of my Chinese heritage, or just that I didn't want people putting me in a box, but I realised that I needed to claim my Australian identity, otherwise other people would take it away from my. So, for a long time, I insisted that I was Australian - born and raised here - and whatever genetics my parents added to the mix had no bearing on who I was as a person. That's how I felt for a long time.

That is, until I lived in Japan and, later, Vietnamese. Despite my Asian genetics, I was a gaijin - a white person - and that other W-word - "Western". My frustration grew when Japanese and Vietnamese people asked questions about the culture of "white people" and "Westerners" - like we were just one race of people who all looked the same, in much the same way that Pauline Hanson might have viewed Asians in general. And then they would ask about "Australian culture". To this day, I still have difficulty in describing exactly what Australian culture is. We're still a very young country, and have hardly been around to really establish some kind of National identity - and no, it wasn't born on the shores of Gallipoli.

I wasn't sure how to feel about having this "whiteness" thrust upon me. Especially when I think about the recent rallies across Australia where those against multiculturalism want to "Reclaim Australia". The thing is, when I think of the cultural diversity that our immigrant population has to offer, what does "white Australia" have to offer, other than cooking snags on the BBQ, downing tinnies of VB, and drunkenly shouting at people whilst wearing the Australian flag as a cape? What could be more Aussie than that?

Which brings me to libraries. Yep, I'm great at segues.

I recently read a really interesting article entitled, "Soliciting Performance, Hiding Bias: Whiteness and Librarianship". I absolutely agree that the mainstream ideas of libraries have been based on American and European models of learning and knowledge-sharing, which often reflects values of the privileged educated middle-class. And that the bulk of librarians, having been raised under such conditions continue to reinforce many of these attitudes, particularly when hiring staff. In doing so, they "paralyse" themselves, as they do not represent the diversity and cannot truly empathise with the needs of the communities that they serve.

The author epitomises this as "whiteness", defined as "white, heterosexual, capitalist and middle class"... the "ideology based on beliefs, value behaviors, habits and attitudes, which result in the unequal distribution of power and privilege". These lead to "gestures, enactments, and unconsciously repetitive acts which reinforce hegemony."

And yes, I can agree that libraries have been traditionally a tool for the privileged, and you can judge how privileged and middle-class a community is just by walking into their public library. I've worked in libraries in Darwin where plenty of indigenous people see it as "whitefellas" business - probably because they're mostly staffed by non-indigenous people, and full of books in English. I've seen and heard of libraries set up in the Pacific, organised using Dewey Decimal Classification, and bounded by strict rules, because those were the rules set by those who established the libraries, unfortunately incompatible with local knowledge systems and ways of thinking.

Call it privilege, or colonialism, or plain old-fashioned-ness. But "whiteness"? Something doesn't sit right with me about that. It's more complicated than that.

That's not to say that white privilege doesn't exist - it totally does. And maybe that's enough to validate this case for "whiteness" in libraries. But to me, it doesn't hold that much meaning. Maybe I'm blinded by the "white" privilege that I at least partially possess, and I need to be a "real" person-of-colour to truly appreciate the extent to which "whiteness" has paralysed libraries.

But one final thing that I find interesting from this article is the idea of libraries being neutral, which thus situates white as default, and in doing so supports white cultural values. In the same way, I feel like the moment that Australian identity shifts to truly embrace multiculturalism, then it's that neutrality of whiteness that is eradicated. And that scares people. I get that. I've been constantly denied part of my cultural identity all my life. It's confusing.

So, when people ask me about my ethnic identity these days, I say that I was born in Australia, descendant from Chinese and Irish immigrants. You can do with that information what you will.

M is for Monday

M is for Monday. The start of a new week. M is also for momentum, of which I am currently lacking, and I need to get the ball rolling. To kick-start my brain this morning, M is also for Meme.

This meme was started by Kate, and following Fiona's tradition of the Monday Meme, I thought I'd join in:

I’m reading – Just finished "Guardian of the Dead" by Karen Healey. Loved it. Now I've just picked up "As stars fall" by Christie Nieman, who is a former work colleague. And the cover is exquisite - immediately evocative and haunting. Ever since I lived in Darwin, something has always creeped me out about curlews...

I’m watching – The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. I'm loving it, actually. It's exceedingly charming, funny and silly, yet subtly smart and cleverly written, as only something written by Tina Fey could be.

I’m cooking – Not as often as I should. Vietnam broke me out of the pattern, because eating local street food was infinitely easier and cheaper (and more delicious) than cooking myself. Now that I'm living alone, I'm yet again less inclined to cook, and eating out is still cheap. To be honest, I usually only cook if I have guests and have somebody else to cook for.

I’m drinking – Sabaja Smoked Porter. This is one of the offerings of Pristina's local (and only) craft brewery. They also make a tasty IPA, but this is my favourite:

I’m thinking – about the future. What to blog next. Where I want to travel to. Where I have friends relatively nearby who I can meet up with. Where my career is going, and how to get there. And always thinking about ideas for writing. Sometimes I even write them down.

I’m taking – one step at a time. deep breathes. notes. drugs to help me sleep at night.

I’m missing – dancing. friends. having a comfortable familiar space.

I’m enjoying – the adventure of being out of my comfort zone, both professionally and geographically. There's always something new to do around the corner.

I’m planning – travel. Macedonia (and teaching swing dancing!) next weekend. Prague (with more swing dancing) the long weekend afterward. Otherwise, making lists of places to visit over the summer.

I’m listening – to recordings of Tibetan singing bowls. They also help me sleep at night.

Pristina nightlife

For its comparatively small size, Pristina is a lively city, and this is evident just from looking around town from the moment work finishes through until the early hours of the morning.

Now that winter has well and truly passed, many of the bars have courtyards filled with people, and all along Nene Tereza boulevard, the restaurants are set up for al fresco dining. It's a sociable, but civil, affair, with a macchiato being as common as a beer or glass of wine - coffee being as much the social lubricant as alcohol in the local culture.

Once the sun has finally set, it's approaching 9pm, and the temperature begins to drop a little. For the more traditional continuation into the night, there are a number of rakija bars (I will explain rakija in another post), where you'll see a blend of local young people, and older Albanian men. However, at the same time, there are a number of hip modern places - two of my favourites being Dit' e Nat' (Albanian for "Day and Night") and Soma Book Station.

Both of these are unique in that they are cafe/bars that are also bookstores (or are they bookstores that are also cafe / bars?). They often hold performances by bands - both local and visiting - and attract the closest thing to what you might call the local hipster community. I'll often see posters advertising local creative startups and cultural festivals, and I'll often see young people set up with their laptops and notebooks, sipping their coffees or local craft beers whilst working on some creative endeavour. And so, I quite like both of these places - not just because they most remind me of my home town of Melbourne - but also because they provide unique creative spaces in the community. Also, it's dangerous to have books for sale in a place where I might have a few drinks, and lose my inhibitions...

Soma Book Station

On the other hand, if what you're after is a smoky bar with DJs playing latin music, then the Cuban Bar is the place to be on a Friday or Saturday night - especially if you've got some salsa moves. Personally, I know enough basic moves to dance salsa if absolutely necessary, but it's no substitute for a good swing-out.

Finally, once the midnight hour is upon us, it's time to make a choice. With the onset of my middle-age, I must confess that I'm usually in bed by midnight, or 1am at the latest. However, on one occasion, I'd had more than my daily quota of espressos, and was ready to push through into the darkest hours of the night. In this case, we ended up at an extremely smokey underground bar called Zanzi. There was quite a good cover band, ripping out some power anthems to an appreciative crowd, and then some DJs of varying quality. Entry was free for the women (and 3 Euro for the men) and looking around, I could see why. By 2am, it was 98% men bopping along on the dance floor (plus the 3-4 women that I'd arrived with). I've been told that this is just part of the local culture - and whilst I made the observation that it seemed far more progressive for women here, who seemed quite liberated in their dress sense, here was an indication that there are still conservative social attitudes where women don't stay out late. Either that, or we were at a particularly crappy dive spot that women just didn't want to go to!

Eventually, the DJ started playing some pretty obnoxious techno (still not as bad as Vietnamese house though!) and we used that as an excuse to leave. I arrived home at about 3:30am, and, smelling like an ashtray, put all of my clothes straight into the laundry, and made a mental note to wash my hair in the morning.

The next morning, I woke to find that I'd spent more money than I planned, but on the plus side, I had a new impulse-buy novel to add to my bookshelf.