I hitched down the Zagreb-Belgrade motorway in 1990, just before the whole place went up. I remember Slavonia, which is the long arm of Croatia which points towards Serbia, being a flat uninspiring landscape, with mountains paralleling the road way over to the south. A couple of the drivers told me that in a year or two the whole country would be up in flame, and I thought 'Yeah right'. Milosevic had done his Field of Blackbirds speech down in Kosovo and the whole of Yugoslavia was jumpy. There were no signs saying 'Welcome to Serbia' or 'Welcome to Croatia'. They were too incendiary, so you'd pass from region to region and not even know where the borders were. The locals all knew, though.
The landscape of the country changed dramatically as you went south. In Slovenia you'd imagine you were in Austria or Switzerland. Slavonia was Lincolnshire with assault rifles. Serbia's landscape got rougher and hillier as you travelled from Belgrade towards Nis. Macedonia was wild - an American said it looked like Southern California. And Kosovo was poor. On the way back I spent an evening in a train carriage with some Kosovar lads starting their conscription up in Ljubljana, getting drunk and attempting conversation in broken Russian and German.
I remember a hideous concrete shopping centre in Pristina. There was almost nothing in the shops at all, and they were playing Kylie Minogue's 'I should be so lucky' at ear-splitting volumes over the tannoy.
And there was massive hyperinflation. The notes were all dirty and prices went up daily, almost.
I believe the Serbian for hello is 'Dobor dan'. At least, that's what my Bosnian brother-in-law says. 'Polako' is slow. 'Pola pola' is half-half, meaning you're going to share. That's about my limit in Bosnian...
