"Dober Dan" Means "Good Day"

So far I've made "friends" with the Kosovar bakery family at "Pekara Montenegro" and the Turkish barbers and hairdressers at the MB Hair and Beauty Center, including Enis (sp?), who, today, helped me look more like Tintin than I ever thought possible.

         

  

He wishes he looked as good as me

The interesting thing, though, is that although Šahe (and her precocious 13-year-old sister Drilona) and Enis were both full of smiles, laughing, trying to communicate, and interested, so far the Montenegrins I've met at the local coffee shops, markets, and restaurants have been grim, uninterested, and monotone. It's weird. Both of my airbnb hosts have been friendly and helpful, I guess, but I never really see them. It's clearly a Balkan thing — and more a male thing than a female thing — but it certainly can be a little off-putting, and a little intimidating. I'll be interested to see how and when I get past it.

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So I mentioned to a friend yesterday that this is an interesting country (aren't they all?), with ongoing and abandoned construction sites right next to multi-story modern apartment complexes, enormous fully Westernized shopping malls, and gleaming-window office buildings. Sidewalks can be uneven and broken, and rebar and empty fields are all around ... but so are very attractively designed and furnished restaurants that wouldn't look out of place in San Francisco or New York.

Looking through my photos today, I realized I had one that illustrates this phenomenon somewhat.

You get the point

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When I first moved to Budapest in 2007 I was struck by how many statutes and "this famous person lived here" markers were dedicated to people I had never heard of. We Americans are just not as familiar with the personages of Central and Eastern Europe as we are of Austrians (Mozart lived here, Freud lived here), French (Degas lived here, Dumas lived here, Napoleon lived here), and English (too many to list). But the great majority of historical Hungarians famous to people in that country today are essentially unknown to us (István Széchenyi! Sándor Petöfi!).

It turns out ... that's essentially true here as well, so all of the individualized memorialized in statutes and other historical markers are completely unknown to me. Which makes googling kind of fun.

Interestingly, not Montenegrin

"France Prešeren (pronounced [fɾanˈtsɛ pɾɛˈʃeːɾn]) (3 December 1800 – 8 February 1849) was a 19th-century Romantic Slovene poet whose poems have been translated into many languages. He has been considered the greatest Slovene classical poet and has inspired later Slovene literature. He wrote the first Slovene ballad and the first Slovene epic. After his death, he became the leading name of the Slovene literary canon."

The Montenegrin "Sissi," apparently

"Jelena Savojska, penultimate Italian queen, daughter of the Montenegrin king Nikola I and Milena Petrović.  She was educated at the Smolny Institute in Saint Petersburg . At a ball in Moscow on the occasion of the coronation of the Russian Tsar Nicholas II, she met her future husband, Victor Emmanuel III of Savoy, the Prince of Naples. They were married in October, 1896.  In 1908, as the Queen of Italy, she was involved in humanitarian work after the catastrophic earthquake in Messina, Sicily, where a monument was erected in her honor. Jelena was reportedly the only queen at that time who could speak Croatian."

Um, I assumed I'd be able to read the name from the photo, but ... nope.

ditto

And again

I'll take better notes in the future, I promise. 😎

But heck, I got two of 'em!