Ribar

Active member
My friend told me that there is some debate as to whether Serbian and Croatian are different languages or different dialects of the same one.
They are different languages. Even Dalmatian language (even though it is not an original Dalmatian language anymore but more of a remnant of the original language blended with the dialect) in Croatia is different from Croatian.
Rucnik (Croatian) peskir (Serbian) sugaman (Dalmatian) are all words for a towel. Unless we may believe that Danish, Swedish and Norwegian are all the same Scandi language,too.
What people did not know and still don't, even though internet is full of info about it, is the fact that Croatia spent time in union with Hungary for at least 9 centuries, and also with Austria-Hungary, while Dalmatia, Istria and Kvarner(Quarnero) were parts of Serenissima, and the Italian influence, over the centuries. Also:
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
One thing that was weird when I went to Serbia and I said it on FB or Insta or something.... and then I started getting all these messages from friends and, really, people I'd say were more like acquaintances, and they all said "I'm in Slovenia why don't you drop round" or "I'm only a few hundred miles away in Albania, you should pop over" like I should have a holiday in the middle of my holiday and go for another flight and through customs and all that just to see someone I've met three times cos we're in nearby countries.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Also this guy was a friend of igor's came round and he talked like Steven Hawking and it turned out he used to be a rapper and also alcoholic and he was smashed apart by a car crossing the road super fucked up and now he had like a fake hip and he couldn't talk properly and it ruined his rap career.

Anyway he now did this thing he had copied from a channel in UK or something, where they invited a producer to a record shop and they had to put a paper bag over their head and pick three or four random records from the shop and then take them home and make a beat, in fact a whole tune, by sampling these records.

I watched one episode and it was this black bloke from England - Igor said he's the only black man in Serbia - and he got these records, the first one when he took off his mask turned out to be a load of nazi speeches. Whatever, fair enough he made a tune.

Then this guy left, Igor said "thank God for the accident, he was a terrible rapper". Next day we went out and got fucked up (maybe i was dj-ing in fact), we met this guy had like a secret bar hidden down this mews place and he invited a load of us back there, opened it at 4am for us all to go get more drunk.

... as we left we were walking through this mews and I see a black guy coming in and I said "see there is another black man in Serbia" and Igor said "uh-uh, that's that guy in the video" and I spoke to him and it was.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Also Igor is older than me and all his friends are people who ran Belgrade's first techno club or brought the Prodigy to the Balkans in 92 (apparently one of the conditions of their appearing was that they went on telly and gave an anti-drugs speech) and at one point he worked for Zilnik who was one of the major figures in the Black Wave of cinema - so when Igor said "My friend produces Kulen" I said "I never heard of that band" which he thought was the funniest thing ever. It turned out he was talking about this

1000008396.jpg

Which actually is quite literally the best sausage I've ever had, beating the hell out of any Italian salami or chorizo or... anything. At least the one his friend made did. But this guy only made a small amount, it was a real personal business thing - each one was a kinda huge dildo the size of my arrn but he made a limited number each year and it was impossible to get hold of them - when we went to this party in the mews the guy had a few samples with him and the owner was begging to get a connection and serve it there and he just said "sorry I can't sell it to someone on your level" - I nursed hopes of taking one home but... ultimately I drew a blank.
 

martin

----
Latvia: went to Riga in the mid-2000s and ended up drifting into a crowd in a square - thought it was an open-air gig (there were bearded blokes in viking outfits chanting on a makeshift stage), but turned out to be a fascist rally. An armed policewoman with scene girl mascara totally lost control of her horse, which was exciting, but I left soon after someone asked me for a fag and then got tetchy when he realised I wasn't a native. Saw a few skinheads in paramilitary gear who made our homegrown "Oi! Oi!" ones look like teddy bears. They have a Museum of Occupation where it's explained that Latvians hated the Russian occupiers so much, they greeted the Nazis with open arms - maybe that's why I saw TUPAC and a swastika scrawled on a bridge. The sky was a really beautiful sort of blue you never get in the UK.

Lithuania: wasn't here long, they have a cool Soviet fighter jet graveyard.

Estonia: went as the guest of some government maritime trade initiative. At the time (2017?), they were trying to attract overseas IT bods to bump up their tech sector. You could get a 3-bed flat just outside Tallinn for 100,000 Euros and loads of tax discounts if you were immigrating with an IT start-up. Tallinn's nice, old taverns, but I liked the island Saaremaa too. On the last night, one of the govt reps got pissed and started asking me loads of questions about English football hooliganism, he was fascinated. I got a bit drunk too and accidentally called Estonia 'Latvia', twice, which really pissed off another of the reps - it was explained to me after (in a strip club, which one of the reps insisted we went to at 1am) that many Estonians view the Latvians as educationally subnormal.

Does St Petersburg count? That was the best.
 
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