the other day i traveled to bosnia. how little time it took to get there may surprise you. i arrived in only fifteen minutes. i know, it seems impossible, but really, i was there.

i wandered outside of my neighborhood last sunday looking for a new coffee shop to discover. at last i found my own little slice of eastern europe. hello, caffe milano. from the outside it’s a typical storefront with showcase windows, cool couples seated facing the scenes of traffic and belligerent drunks. on the inside it’s all bosnia, all the time.

of course, i didn’t know this until i opened the door. i expected a typical funky, peace-nookish, granola-y coffee house atmosphere. but as soon as i opened the door, i knew i was a long way off from woodstock.

first of all, everyone looked and sounded completely bosnian. execpt me. and i guess the eastern europeans take their coffee experience a little more formally. there was a lot of poly-blend and lycra happening in there. and the discotheque/singles bar vibe was complete with the dance house music and international music videos playing on the plasma screen tv. and there i was, the only one in fatigue colored shorts and chacos speaking in my brashy amerikan.

all this hits me as i’m slo-motioning walking through the door. i’m soooooo not a local. oh well. too late to turn back now. i’m here, i might as well hang. so i sit up at the bar and order a tea. i asked for an iced chai and she didn’t know what it was. now i really knew i was in the wrong place.

how about a hot tea? okay! yea! there’s hot tea in bosnia! and not just any hot tea, rasberry hot tea. i’m pretty sure there was crack in it, because after about thirty minutes i was wired enough to go running a 5k or something like it. i kept shaking and dancing my feet to the techno bounce. i got a lot of essay grading done, surprisingly enough.

when i was done, i tried to pay. my money was no good there. i was befriended by the locals who took me under their wings, taught me a native dance, and then paid for my drink after christianing me with my new croatian name, grblinka.

no, not really. i tried to pay with a check card and they didn’t have a debit machine. ahhhhh, yes. i forget that eastern europe is not always as technologically advanced as the west. i managed to scraped together a dollar in u.s. currency and that seemed to appease my waitress.

then it was time to go. i had a family to get back to in faw nation. so i gathered up my crappy junior essays and bid my bosnian friends dovidjenja.

ella and i got stood up for a last minute dinner date and tony was off playing poker, so we went to dinner, just the two of us.

it’s always interesting to see how wait staff handle seating a kid. he brought us to our table, put down two menus, two sets of cutlery, and started to leave us to our booth.

um. ella in a booth? with a fork and a knife? and a menu?

where do i begin with all the things wrong with this picture? i guess it wasn’t obvious she needed a high chair. and a spork. and a tarp for the floor. he quickly figured it out. with a little help.

we enjoyed our dinner of greasy spoon fare. and there was a chocolate milk shake for dessert, so of course we had a great time. but probably the highlight of the dinner were the people sitting behind us.

in no particular order, a gay man that looked like captain kangaroo dressed vaguely like a pirate (without the hat and eye patch or boots), an older single woman (read: fag hag) and one rather handsome woman with a “future porn star” t-shirt. i was too distracted at first by the icky t-shirt to notice the woman. she had really big hands. and an adam’s apple.

ahhhh. the variety of south city diner. who needs television with people watching like this?