Bosnia crushes Estonia 5-0 in first Russia 2018 qualifier

Bosnia handily defeated Estonia, asserting their dominance from the opening kickoff. HSV Hamburg defender, Emir Spahic put Bosnia in the lead the 7th minute with a header, Edin Dzeko put away a penalty kick in the 23rd minute, and the team added another three goals after halftime, while the anemic Estonia only forced two saves the entire game.

I had originally planned on attending this game until I realized that it was being played in Zenica, a 45-minute drive northeast of Sarajevo. Therefore, I opted to watch the game from the comfort of my Airbnb flat. When I asked a local why the game wasn’t being played in the capital, he informed me that none of the stadiums in Sarajevo meet UEFA’s international standards, therefore all the national team games are played in Zenica.

The current national squad consists of players who, all but one, play their soccer in other parts of Europe, with half the team playing league ball in either Germany and Italy. Probably the most recognizable players are Roma striker Edin Dzeko, Juventus midfielder Miralem Pjanic, and Chelsea’s backup keeper, Asmir Begovic.

Bosnia, which if one bothers to rely on the idiosyncratic algorithms of the fickle FIFA ratings system, is currently ranked 28th in the world. (As a point of reference, the USMNT is currently tied for 26th with a considerably weaker than normal Dutch side.) They are in Group F for the first round of European qualifying for the 2018 World Cup in Russia, along with Belgium(2nd), Greece (surprisingly low-52nd), Cyprus (86th), Estonia (117th) and first-time entry, Gibraltar.

First place in the group earns an automatic trip to Russia, whereas the 2nd place finisher in the group phase plays a home-and-home against another 2nd place team to qualify. So this is a terrific start for Bosnia, giving them a healthy goal differential, which will be beneficial if they are tied on points at the end of the qualifying round.

First Impressions of Sarajevo

The Sebijl, an 18th century wooden fountain in Sarajevo's Old Town is a famous landmark and popular tourist attraction. Interestingly, my photo is devoid of the usual flocks of pigeons surrounding the area.

Walking the streets of Sarajevo I can clearly see why many observers call it a cultural crossroads. (They even have an East-West demarcation labeled in the street!)  It definitely has the feel of a merging of cultures, Ottoman-era structures stand next to modern glass buildings, interspersed with abandoned, board-up buildings; mosques and churches intermingled. 

Women sporting bare mid-drifts and miniskirts walk side by side with more modestly dressed women in a variety of coverings ranging from colorful hijabs to black niqabs, the latter only revealing the wearer's eyes through a narrow rectangular slit. (Here's an interesting NY Times piece on variations of what most Westerners call a hijab.) 

Besides Bosnian, I've heard German, Arabic, and Spanish as well, though English seems to be the "go to" language when waiters or shopkeepers identify someone as a foreigner.

Other random observations: 

• I know I'm vertically challenged at only 5"6", but Bosnian men seem like giants, and after a little trivia trolling on the internet, Bosnians indeed are among the tallest nationalities, with men averaging over a lofty 6 feet in height! 
• Cars tend to be much older and not kept as meticulously as compared to Germany or Italy, and there also seems to be fewer motorcycles and scooters.
• Sports-based gambling shops are located ever couple blocks. 
• Staring at cellphone screens is as ubiquitous and obnoxious an obsession here as it is at home. (Though I don't see much laptop/tablet/iPad use in cafes here.) 
• Television broadcasts here show many American movies, and television series with Bosnian subtitles. They also are plagued with cheesy talent shows and late night psychic hotlines.

Scooters are not nearly as prevalent as they are in Italy.

  

Beware of False Cognates!

False cognates, or "false friends", are those cunning little traps that allow natives to guffaw at ignorant foreigners struggling to communicate in another tongue. Essentially, false cognates are words in one language that resemble words from another language, but differ in meaning, sometimes significantly. These faux dopplegangers, if you will, can lead to potential miscommunication, and in retrospect, provide hilarious entertainment.

Some 35 years ago, as a foreign exchange student in Paraguay without any prior knowledge of Spanish, I was trying to explain my embarrassment over something, and of course, if you just tack a vowel onto the end of a an English word, it must be the Spanish equivalent...I mean, come on, embarazada surely sounds like it would have the same meaning! Little did I know that I was claiming to revolutionize medicine by declaring to be the first pregnant human male. Nothing like exponentially increasing one's embarrassment.

So the other day I was browsing through the Bosnian-English dictionary that I just received in the mail, and lo and behold, my eyes were quick to spot the Bosnian word "svastika".  I immediately had visions of throngs of men wearing military uniforms and jackboots, sporting goofy abbreviated mustaches with their right arms raised, singing the Horst Wessel song (a catchy little uber-fascist number popular with the SS).

But no! Svastika is not exactly what comes to the mind of an English speaker when referring to a sister-in-law. Unless of course...oops, we'd better not go there.

So today's lesson is: always look up new words that you encounter, even if they look very similar to English words, just to make sure of their meaning, and to avoid confusing and awkward moments in foreign lands.

Basic Bosnian/Bosniak language resources

Not knowing the language when hitting the ground will be difficult, but here is a free multimedia web resource for learning basic phrases in Bosniak:
http://www.101languages.net/bosnian/

The fact that the language has been politicized as a result of the Yugoslav civil war makes it difficult for a non-native speaker to understand what all the fuss is about. Without knowing anything about the language yet, I wonder what differences there are between Bosniak, Croatian and Serbian. Obviously, Serbian uses Cyrillic writing, but are the other differences between the languages anything more than what we might call an accent, or a preponderance of different word choices (similar to spanner: wrench, elevator: lift) or idioms and slang?

Here's a brief explication summarizing some of the variations between the three:

http://www.omniglot.com/language/articles/serbocroatian.htm

That being said, here's an "old school" Serbo-Croatian resource, the US Foreign Service Language Course, complete with two PDF manuals and downloadable audio:

https://www.livelingua.com/project/fsi/Serbo-Croatian/

Another manual on the live lingua project website comes from the Defense Language Institute, a place I once called home (a lifetime time ago, when I was in the US Army studying Russian in Monterey, California.) This one's apparently just Serbian, so unless you're planning to spend a great deal of time in Republika Srbska, and need practice with Cyrillic, I'd stick with the first two links.

https://www.livelingua.com/project/dli/Serbian/

Reading List for the Balkans

I've decided to add a permanent page for a bibliography for this project. I'm sure it will grow monstrous in size quite quickly...and there are so many books out there that I haven't had time for.

One of the difficult tasks is deciding which books I really to purchase redundantly in electronic form, since I already own most of books listed, but haven't found a gullible sponsor to ante up enough money to ship a loaded pack mule across the Atlantic.

Deciding on a starting point--Sarajevo

I had to put my upcoming sabbatical out of my mind for the month of July as I was punching above my weight in an National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar, studying Existentialism at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. It was an enriching, yet quite humbling, experience. Lots of really smart, articulate people; lots of deep and voluminous readings...As much as I enjoyed it, I came to the realization that I'll never be more than a dilettante in most things; especially philosophy!

Over the last few days I've been refreshing my memory on the various historic sites and other things I want to see and do. Since the focal point of my sabbatical is to try to gain an understanding of the diverse viewpoints of the various participants' involved in the Yugoslav wars, I will focus on Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), where the conflict was prolonged and involved shifting alliances.

I've been of two minds, whether to hit the ground running, using my initial burst of enthusiasm to explore the many outlying areas of BiH that experienced significant upheaval and suffering during the conflict, or to start in Sarajevo, soak up as much as I can there, while networking for potential contacts with firsthand knowledge and friends they may have in the periphery.

 After hours of trying to plan several itineraries using different geographic parameters, I finally came to a decision to trust my intuition and make Sarajevo a starting point, at the risk of  permanently narrowing my scope to the many stories of Sarajevo (which I'm sure, in the end, would be just as revealing).

Several other advantages come to mind by taking this approach:

• Learning rudimentary Bosniak phrases and customs before traipsing around in the countryside will make life easier, as the percentage of the population that may speak English usually drops precipitously.
• Trying to live frugally,finding a central location to rent an Airbnb place by the week or month cuts your rate by 20 to 50%.
• No matter how much knowledge you gain from books and the internet, locals are the experts. Hopefully a few are willing to take me under the wing and enlighten me over a few rounds of rakija.

In the beginning

So a few weeks back, there I was, nursing an IPA from my local microbrewery.  And as I braced myself for grading a thick stack of uninspired essays, I unexpectedly received a call from a union official inquiring whether I would still be interested in taking a sabbatical.

After the slightest hesitation, probably just to squelch a hop-inspired belch, I tried to play it all cool and composed, responding, "Oh? Do you mean the proposal that I submitted back in 2012? Ummm, yeah, I think so..."

Annually (usually the time frame is December through February), in accordance with the teacher contract, the Rochester City School District solicits sabbatical proposals from any teacher who has served in the district for a minimum of five years. A committee consisting of teachers and administration convenes to review all submitted proposals, and then makes recommendations to the school board. Everything is kept hush-hush, and applicants don't find out their fate until it's made official at the April or May board meeting. 

So basically you're sitting on pins and needles for several months to find out whether your proposal was approved, and I remember how agonizing the wait was several years earlier, when I submitted a full year technology-oriented proposal. It  was quite a disappointment to read the board minutes the morning after, and to discover my proposal had not been mentioned. 

And for what ever reason, though I imagine it involves lawyers, there is no procedure to provide feedback from the committee on inadequate proposals, nor is there any form of notification that states you've been rejected. So you wait, and wait, and wait, and wait (for Godot!)

Since 2000, the district has granted anywhere from three to six sabbaticals per year, some year-long, but more frequently one semester in length. I have worked in the same building as three previously approved teachers. So yeah, sabbaticals in the district are for real,and it's not just a myth. 

And yeah, it's competitive.  But hey, I've written two successful applications for highly competitive national NEH fellowships, I should be able to compete within the district! 

But a strange phenomenon occurred with my second proposal. Behind the school board's closed doors, it was unilaterally decided that no sabbaticals would be granted...and I had no clue whether the proposal had even made it out of the screening committee. So April's board meeting rolls around, and no mention of any sabbatical approvals. 

Okay, I say to myself, I'll have to wait another month for the formal announcement at the May board meeting. But again, no mention of any sabbaticals...so at this point I'm scratching my head and thinking, "WTF?" So I eventually called the union.

They stated that the union was filing a class action grievance against the district, and that was the last I heard about it...

Okay, okay. I confess. I badgered Human Resources (such a dignified euphemism) with an email the following year when they announced the window for submitting proposals was open again. And when that went unanswered, I followed up with a phone call. The district's response was pretty much a "no comment" and I obviously didn't have "need to know" status.

So to be truthful, I had quite given up on any chance of a sabbatical, especially as I am now just a hop skip and a jump away from cashing in early on a pittance pension and a future life devoted to cab driving or some other venture equally divorced from today's pathetically dysfunctional system of secondary education.

Last Friday I received an official district email stating that my sabbatical proposal to travel to the former Yugoslavia was approved for the 2016 fall semester.

Thanks to the class action grievance filed by the Rochester Teachers Association, the district lifted its moratorium on teacher sabbaticals, and previously approved proposals were allowed to proceed.

Now, reality is setting in. I'm excited, I'm scared, and I’ve got a load of prep work to do.