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Vagabonding
Uncovering Cairo
In which our correspondent makes rabbit stew, views an Egyptian film comedy about America and sees the pyramids in a new light.
By Rolf Potts
[03/15/00]

Vagabonding
Backpackers' ball at the Sultan Hotel
With Flaubert's 1850 letters as a guide, our correspondent explores the enduring allure of opera, orgasm, belly-dancing and other Cairo clichés.
By Rolf Potts
[03/14/00]

Daily Planet
New York will shock pigeons
The dirty birds are to receive non-lethal electric treatment.
By J.A. Getzlaff
[03/14/00]

Daily Planet
Germany OKs drug-injection rooms
Heroin users can shoot up off the streets, unless the U.N. has its way.
By J.A. Getzlaff
[03/13/00]

Naxos nights
A lotus-eating stay on a Greek island ends with a life-changing midnight encounter.
By Laurie Gough
[03/11/00]

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A famous photo shows Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito, for 35 years the nation's mighty hunter, with his foot on the head of a freshly killed bear. Long after his death in 1980, one still finds it in bars and homes, framed above the TV.

For my friends Maple and Nicole, this is their text. On their own and together, the two aspiring academics have invested a great deal of time moving through it. They are excavating the remains of a monolith, and in many ways, it is the linchpin of their relationship. Since meeting two years ago in Zagreb, Croatia, they have co-written articles and lectured together on the subject of Balkan identity. While Nicole completes research for her Ph.D. dissertation, the two live in Ljubljana, Slovenia. On my way to Amsterdam to get an M.A. in cinema studies, I visit them. It is my intention to see what it is that they see in there.

Also Today Paranoid city Fear tears at Belgrade, as its citizens are gripped by the rumor of NATO bombing to come. By Laura Rozen

A week into my tour, we drive to Mostar, Bosnia, for lunch. We get into the coupe that Maple and Nicole have rented for the trip, and drive over the mountains of the Croatian coast into Mostar's valley. By now, I have adjusted to the windy one-lane highways and breakneck passing. Maple drives and I resign myself to the constructs of the guided tour. I am no longer the chief arbiter of my own well-being, but rather a passenger, a spectator situated to receive the data that enters my field. Nicole reads from "Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Laura Silber and Allan Little, and like a good little moviegoer, I lap it up.

We cross the border into Bosnia-Herzegovina. Traffic stops at a guardhouse. Two soldiers sit under an umbrella at a table. A third, during short breaks in their conversation, peruses the papers of passing motorists. He takes our passports from Maple's hand, doesn't look at them and then hands them back to Maple.

That it feels more like a checkpoint than a border, I learn, is not accidental. Rather, nationalists in Croatia feel that, as most of those who live there claim Croatian heritage, southern Bosnia should rightfully belong to them. At stake here is much more than land. For nationalist Croatians, the border, in all its ripeness for overdetermination, marks where the Balkans begin.

Abandoning these brothers and sisters to Bosnian rule is to let them become Balkan, which is to let the family become Balkan, which is something akin to having a son marry the maid. For now, however, nearby United Nations troops make any attempt at military advancement impossible, and so the temporary border stands. The U.N., however, halts no commerce. We drive on and see Croatian banks and post offices.

In both Serbian and Croatian, as well as the recently deceased language of Serbo-Croatian, the word "most" means bridge. The bridge of Mostar, built in 1566 on orders of the Turkish sultan, spanned the Neretva River. For hundreds of years, Mostar was the city of the bridge, a city that grew around it on both banks. Connecting Muslim, Orthodox and Catholic parts of the same city, the bridge symbolized the hopes for Bosnia: a nation of different ethnicities living out distinct traditions with mutual tolerance.

On Nov. 7, 1993, almost four years to the day after the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the bridge of Mostar was bombed. Now Mostar is a mess. There are two cities on two sides of a river -- one Croatian, the other Muslim. Despite the existence of other bridges, there is no contact between the two.

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