Belgrado, Bratislava, Budapest, Liubliana, Praga, Sarajevo, Skopie, Sofia,, Varsovia, Zagreb

Tak chcialabym, chcialabym, chcialabym! Podrozowac po tych krajach i tych miestach, jezdzic samochodem, poczuc wiatr we wlosach, sluchac muzyki i byc totalnie wolna od wszystkich ograniczen. Jest moim wielkim marzeniem widziec te miejsca, sluchac te jezyki, oddychac powietrze i po prostu byc tam.

 

I believe that every individual goes through some sort of experience during their childhood that will affect their future lives in one way or another. For me, the one big event that filled my life in the early 90s was the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the war in Yugoslavia. Instead of playing with dolls and my little ponies like most other girls, I would watch the news and suck in all the information I could on Eastern Europe. Why? That was simply what they were showing, in the weekends I would watch Italian football. And it wasn't just the news broadcasts, during the winter olympics in Albertville in 1992 a new fascinating "country" appeared. IVY, Itsenäisten Valtakuntien Yhdistö, known in English as the Commonwealth of Independent States. Those athletes didn't have proper flags in front of their names, just the Olympic ones. My mother got me Zlata's Diary, the diary of a young girl in Sarajevo during the war. Unlike Anne Frank, she had a happy ending I think, she left for France. The encyclopedia had a lot of useful information on Yugoslavia, too. I still remember the beginning of the first film ever to be made in newly independent Slovenia; there was an old lady playing solitaire. If you don't win something terrible will happen.

 

And I was hooked. I still am.

 

Languages that sound like music, with a lot of letters that the Finnish alphabet is completely lacking.  The melancholy, the beauty, the wilderness. And the freedom, as crazy as it might sound, I associate everything beyond Germany with freedom.

 

And then there is Hungary: with a language that instead of music sounds like Finnish, but with the wastness of the puszta.

 

At moments I get "homesick": I miss many places, but the homesickness I feel for Eastern Europe is more like a sudden urge, a need to be there, to experience all the melancholy, beauty, wilderness.