Cricket in Belgrade

Few people know that I am a highly respected international athlete. Perhaps not so respected for my athletic ability, but I am respected for working out how to get the rest of the cricket team from one nation to another, keep them from getting lost, acclimatizing them to local customs and history, etc.

Easter weekend a few of us – Steve, Adrian, Shobhit, and myself – from the Dunabogdány Cricket Club headed down to Belgrade to play in a Twenty20 (an abbreviated version of the game that I like, because it's shorter) tournament being held by our cricket-mad Serbian neighbors.

Serbia being on an Orthodox calendar, Easter is usually celebrated on a different weekend than it is in Hungary. This weekend, however, the holiday happened to coincide in both countries and so Monday would be a day off. This “Easter Monday” concept rather surprised me when I first moved to Europe, but then I crunched the numbers and realized that, yes indeed, if you sit in a tomb for three days after being crucified on a Friday, then it is indeed on a Monday that you rise from the dead, not Sunday. The US government must have hastened the Resurrection in the name of national productivity.

This was my second visit to Belgrade, having gone there for a few days with Moni last year. It’s really one of my favorite cities with a great party vibe. Of course, it was a bit sedate this holiday weekend, by Belgrade standards, but at least the air was better from the reduced traffic.

So, after a long train ride down – it’s less than 400 km, but the train runs as a local on both sides of the border, so it takes a while to get there – and paying the extortionate taxi charge from the Belgrade train station – just like in Jordan, these guys know they have you over a barrel – we found our hostel on one of the center’s historical streets.

I had never been in one of these backpacker’s hostels where you stay in a dorm room with other strangers, and felt a bit too old for it at first. We thought we might have the room to ourselves, but the remaining three beds were occupied – with friendly, er, young people from various countries. Anyway, the whole experience was tolerable enough but I think I prefer meeting people when they are awake. Probably a lot of fun if you are in your 20s and backpacking around, and very cheap. This was my first trip in a number of years that came in under budget.

The other guys not having been to Belgrade before and my being team Yugoslavia expert, I took them to look at the downtown and Kalemegdan Fortress, and they paid such careful attention to my history lesson that I bought them a beer afterwards. This is the dramatic centerpiece of the city, perched up on a hill at the confluence of the Sava and Danube, and made a favorable impression on my companions. Actually, we had originally thought that we would be playing in the sports fields underneath its ramparts, as this is what the Serbian cricket website said. But later it emerged that they had stopped playing there, because it was a crowded park and there was too much danger of plunking a kid or a dog with a cricket ball. Instead we would be playing on a soccer field in a large park on the outskirts of the city.

I found an old restaurant from my last visit that could accommodate Steve and my craving for cevapcici and pleszkavica, Adrian’s sudden craving for a wiener schnitzel which probably hit him the moment we crossed out of the former Habsburg Empire, and Shobhit’s constant craving for rabbit food. Then our Serb hosts showed up. These guys would proceed to take wonderful care of us over the weekend, showering us with legendary Serbian hospitality. We spent the latter part of the evening in one of their local pub before retiring to our bunks at a not-too-unreasonable hour.

The next morning, after a bit more wandering around Belgrade, it was off to our match. Steve had already left to umpire the first match. The tournament consisted of four teams. Two Serbian sides, a team that flew in all the way from Scotland, and although we had been joined by two other players from Hungary, we were still only half a team and would play together with another half-team from Slovenia. Steve thought we should call it the "Sluggery", which I thought was clever, even if no one else did.

The Scots had lost to one of the Serbian teams in the morning, and we then proceeded to take on the other Serbian team and get beaten quite badly. They plowed through the heart of our order fairly quickly, which meant that I got a bat, but as usual, I had to face the other team’s fastest bowler against whom I am invariably helpless and got out after a couple balls. The next day we would be playing the Scots for the wooden spoon and the two Serbs teams would duke it out afterwards for the championship.

But we regrouped at the evening social held at an Irish pub in the part of town where I had stayed on my last visit and got to know our Slovenian teammates a bit better. Also one of the Serb history students answered some questions I had been dying to know for years about the assassination of King Alexander Obrenovitch and Queen Draga. (Their bodies were thrown out of the window on the park side, not the street side, but it wasn’t the Old Palace that is there now. It was an Older Palace that had been demolished to make way for the Old Palace.)

Now that we were a properly lubricated organization, we thought we had a good chance with the Scots. Whereas both Serbian teams seemed to be made up of students, both locals and ex-pats, in the flower of youth, the average age and general physical fitness of the Scottish team was probably closer to our own. I didn’t do much in this match, batting too low in the order to get a bat and not having anyone hit anything my way in the field, so spent most of the time daydreaming. Shobhit was really the star of the show, if not a slightly overzealous one, with excellent batting, bowling, a beautiful one-handed catch up in the air right off the bat. Below we have Scots and Sluggery posing together after the match in the spirit of the brotherhood of cricket.

For lunch our new Serb friends served up an entire roast pig, fresh from the butcher and carved up in several boxes of delicious crispy succulent goodness.

 A noble end: the beast can rest proudly. Some of the Serbs had been avoiding meat for several days before Easter, and now busily began making up for it. The Serbs are great meat lovers, even more than the Hungarians or other carnivorous neighbors in the region. Also, they take their Easter eggs seriously. We were offered these nicely painted eggs several times over the course of the day, once after buying a couple rolls at a bakery. One egg would pretty much decimate the profit margin on that, I think.

After lunch we settled down to watch the all-Serbia championship, cheering for the team that didn’t beat us the previous day. They got beat though, in an unusually low-scoring match. A family of English tourists or ex-pats out for an excursion wandered by during the match, asking whether they had stumbled on a mirage.

At the end, the Slovenians had to head home and many of the Serbs had family obligations to run home to for Easter, but the rest of us sat down for refreshments at a nearby café.

I was seated in a cluster of friendly Scots from Edinburgh, at the camera end of the table. At first I found it a bit difficult to understand them but with the help of the magic potion you see on the table, I could speak Scottish too. Since conversation seemed to revolve around sports, I got up the nerve to ask a question I had asked English sports fan before, but never a Scot: If countries like Belgium and Spain, which consider themselves to be composed of separate “nations” can field a single team for international soccer, wouldn’t the entire UK maximize its chances at success by abandoning the home nations approach and instead get all of its best players all on one team?

“Ooh Noo,” they answered, shaking their heads slowly, “That wouldn’t do at all. If we did that, then our best player would be fetching the water, the one from the Northern or Ireland would be giving the massages. It would be the end of Scottish football.”

So, basically, colonial resentment has hardened too much for attitudes to change anytime soon. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t want the English national football side playing for me either.

Goodbyes all around, it was back to the railroad station for the overnight train back home, where Adrian learned that Hungarian border guards do not accept crumpled tourist maps of Belgrade as identification valid for international travel and Steve showed all of us how to sleep with a half-full beer bottle in your hand without letting it fall. We, for our part, look forward to hosting everyone in Budapest soon.

Israel/Jordan March 2011

So now that it's almost May, it's about time already to write about our trip to the Middle East in March. This was my second visit to Israel, and first to Jordan. Moni had studied there (in Israel, not Jordan) for several years in the late 90s, so it’s kind of a second home for her. Malév was running a sale on winter holidays in January, so it seemed like a good way to get some sun a few weeks before it would finally decide to peek out of the winter gloom in Budapest. We planned a ten day trip in order to have a full week in Israel and a few extra days to poke around in Southern Jordan, mainly to see Petra. 
 

An interesting time to visit the Middle East, if there ever is a time when it isn't interesting. Things seemed relatively calm in both of our host countries though.

Also, we planned it to coincide with Moni’s uncle Sanyi’s (known as Dov in Israel) 80th birthday. Well, technically he is a first cousin twice removed, but a highly avuncular first cousin who visits us frequently in Budapest, posing here with soggy, shivering cactii on top of Mount Tabor, site of the transfiguration of Our Lord, where the weather, like in the rest of Israel, was cold and rainy for the first few days of our visit, while Budapest basked in winter sun, although the weather improved after the front moved through and it is hard to begrudge the Middle East a few centimeters of rain since they won’t get much more until November.

Plus this meant we could sit inside and listen to Sanyi’s stories after our rain-soaked excursion around Mount Tabor and Nazareth. He had emigrated from Hungary after WWII and was immediately drafted by the Palmach to open the supply lines to Jerusalem in the 1948 independence war and has served in all the major conflicts since then. He takes a philosophical view about the weight of Israeli history and its relations with its neighbors, and on just about everything else too.

He was also deeply committed to the Kibbutz communitarian ideal, having  lived on the Yod Hanna kibbutz in Central Israel (the part where the country is about 11 miles wide, tucked up against the West Bank town of Tulqarm) since then, where we stayed with him for the bulk of our stay in the region. 

Sanyi had helped built it from the ground up with other immigrants from mainly Hungary and Poland, and took on a directorial role later on which he maintains today. They were hard core in the old days, assigning jobs in the various agriculatural and administrative undertaking, raising the kids communally so that the mothers could work. You didn’t even own your own clothes. When the clothes you were wearing got dirty, you brought them to the wash and signed out a clean set in the same size.

As the country’s economy developed they gradually adopted a more individualistic approach, such as paying people in cash rather than a set stock of goods for each month.  Moni has fond memories of communal meals and activities in the community center (shown), but now it’s not a Kibbutz at all anymore and the communal kitchen and other communal facilities have shut down. 

While the kibbutzim clearly played an enormous role in the developing the country and helping it absorb new immigrants, clearly its time is passing. They still raise delicious buttery avocadoes on the land but the work is mainly done by guest workers from SE Asia or political/economic refugees from Sudan who have appeared in Israel in large numbers over recent years. A number of the old-timers are still around, but it has also begun to lose its residual character as a kibbutz as the land is parcelled off and built up with suburban housing and becomes more like an American subdivision, where neighbors don’t know each other or interact much. Clearly a change that, for long-time inhabitants, is somewhat disconcerting to watch.

On Day 3, with the weather clearing somewhat, we took a visit around the Old City of Jerusalem, a place which I, like many other visitors, find a bit eerie simply because such a large percentage of the human race gets so worked up about events that supposedly occurred here or in the immediate area long ago, or even not so long ago. If the sound of the earth is a B-flat many octaves below what humans can hear, then this is where the pipe organ plays from the depths. Sanyi conducts a mellow, ecumenical tour of the city that operates on the assumption that whatever any given faith says happened in Jerusalem did in fact happened and any conflicts of opinion can be worked out later.

Here we have one of the market streets in the Christian quarter. Jerusalem was always a market town, in fact it had no other importance than that aside from being a religious center. I wonder what kind of kitsch they were selling in biblical times. Interesting book I have been reading is Martin Goodman’s Rome and Jerusalem, which compares and contrasts the lives and views of Jews, who were numerically a significant portion of the Empire, and Romans in the period around the first Jewish revolt in 69 AD. Slow going but worth a read, since Western Civilization, such as it is, is built on this relationship in many ways.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is built on the site of Calvary, where the Stations of the cross tour wraps up. This is the slab where The Redeemer was laid out before being entombed a few feet away, so you can kiss it as a sign of your devotion. Doesn’t get any holier than this. I wasn’t clear on whether or not there are any penalties for not kissing it.

Moni in the spice shop. That’s not real saffron, unfortunately. It’s safflower which is much cheaper and much less potent. Which is OK but in a lot of places, including at the central market in Hungary not long ago and maybe still, they try to pass it off to tourists as the real thing.

Temple Mount with Dome of the Rock, wailing wall. Mount of Olives in the background, with lots of tombs. Mount of Olives is a popular place to spend the hereafter because when the final trumpets call, it will be from the Temple, and these guys will be the first to hear it and wake up. Which means they have to fix the coffee for the rest of us.

Moslem visitors to the Dome of the Rock enter from the other side of the Temple Mount, which is in East Jerusalem. It's a strange part of the world. 

After police hold up pedestrian traffic on one of the streets for a few minutes, some unusually cheerful young American Hassidim take the opportunity to conduct one of their ritual dances.

Rainbow over the West Bank. That white strip over the bend in the road is the security wall that the Israelis put up a few years back.

The next day the weather has really picked up and we take a bus into Tel Aviv, starting with the old port of Jaffa, which is the only really old section of town. 

Otherwise, Tel Aviv, thoroughly modern and future-looking is as different from Jerusalem as two cities 50 lying miles apart in the same country could be. OK, maybe DC and Baltimore. In fact Tel Aviv does have a slightly American feel, although more of the West Coast variety. Growing up in the US, where there are lots of big cities to choose from, and now living in a country where one cosmopolitan city effectively dominates the smallish country around it, with all the problems and tensions that creates, I wonder what it is like to live in a small country with exactly two major cities of more-or-less equal prominence. I think I would much prefer life in Tel Aviv over Jerusalem though.

Walking up the beach, we found a nice place for a beer. The partly-obscured young gent loafing in the chair, whose hookah is unfortunately not visible here, later decided to buy a round for the entire house, which as usual, had immediately filled up immediately after we sat down. The management came out and made sure his hookah was kosher, but the philanthropist’s will was iron. Our beers were free. And these weren’t cheap beers either, he had to pay not only for the 12 ounces of beer, but for the view of those millions of hectolitres of East Mediterannean seawater too. A shame that this doesn’t happen more often in other cities.

 The next day we are down on another bus heading toward the Red Sea. There’s no point in renting a car now because you can’t take Israeli rental cars over the border, and that’s where we’re going. But first we have to ride through a few hours of desert. Over on the right, in the middle of the Negev at Dimona, we spy a heavily-militarized industrial-sized popcorn popper.

 

And instead of taking the bus all the way into Eilat, we got off at the border crossing a few kilometers north of town. This took some doing, because we asked the driver during one of the breaks to let us off at the border crossing, but he had no idea where it was. Hard to notice a big sign for a border crossing written in three languages on a busy road like this that you drive down every day. We should have told him we wanted to get off at the Birdwatching place.


Anyway, the reason I look so cheerful is because there is very little I enjoy more than crossing international borders on foot. I didn’t photograph the border station itself because I avoid photographing people with assault weapons, but all those mountains to my right are in Jordan.


The border guards on both sides were all on their best behavior — they are famous for not being so — although, the Jordanians have, regrettably — having learning from the Israelis’ bad example — recently instituted an 8-dinar-per-head exit tariff which wasn’t mentioned on the travel sites, and which we would have to budget for on the way out. Moni wondered if maybe they make you wash dishes if you don't have money to pay the exit fee.

But we were ready for the taxi mafia waiting on the other side to take us into Aqaba: the international brotherhood of crooks ready to cheat clueless, fatigued tourists whenever they stumble out of the international train terminals, border crossings, and airports of the Earth.

"How much to take us to our hotel?"

"10 Dinars!"

"It say on the sign there that it’s a fixed price of 6 dinars."

"6 dinars to the taxi station. 10 dinars to the hotel!"

"Where is the taxi station, then?"

"In the downtown area"

"OK, we’ll go there then"

"I think it is very far for you… 2 or 3 kilometers to walk. It is better to go to the hotel."

Arthur, brandishing Aqaba tourist map, "Where is it on the map?"

Cabbie 1 (in Arabic) to Cabbie 2: "Oh crap, he has a map!"

"See, I think the hotel is in the downtown area, which doesn’t look very big."

"I don’t know where the hotel is."

"Well maybe we need a driver who knows where the hotel is."

Cabbie 2 (Playing good cabbie to Cabbie 1's bad cabbie): "He knows where it is, just not where it is on the map!"

Anyway, he eventually remembered where it is and we got him down to 7 dinars to take us to the hotel and presently were enjoying a refreshing rooftop swim at the hotel. 

This upper neck of the Gulf of Aqaba is not only lovely, it’s also geopolitically interesting because it’s where Egypt, Jordan, Israel, and Saudi Arabia all come together. I don’t think there is another place on earth where you can see four countries all at once from more or less sea level, but if anyone knows, drop me a line. This is the kind of thing that keeps me awake at night. Anyway, we’ll have a better view of this from our hotel in Eilat later.

The hotel was fine, but Aqaba itself didn’t have too much to offer in the way of sites to see, although of course it’s always interesting walking around an Arab town. The Jordanians are trying to build the place up as a free trade zone where you can buy cheap imports from China without VAT and a sun-and-surf package holiday spot to compete with Eilat and the Sinai. Diving is apparently quite good all over the area.

The Jordanians have dispensed with the unsightly billboards and crass commercials that plague western societies, and instead offer their wares and services to you personally as you pass by them, or in the case of taxis, with a friendly beep, as they pass by you, about every twenty seconds. It was good-natured and less aggressive than say, Tangier, and by and large a friendly smile and “no thank you” would suffice to end the transaction. But it still got to be a bit much, especially at the Petra site itself. But since these people don’t have too many other ways to try to make cash, one has to cut them some slack.

So I thought if I got a Jordanian haircut I could pass as a local and we wouldn’t have to decline all these polite offers for our commerce. Since King Abdullah has leant his imprimatur to the business, I assume this is where he gets his hair cut when he is in town. In fact, he seems to patronize many of the businesses in Aqaba. This master of the hairdresser's art was something to behold – his flying fingers staccato scissors technique has long been lost to Western barbers, and he even individually sterilized the razor before my eyes—something I never see in Europe where at most they just dunk it in some mysterious goop first.  

My plan didn’t work. They still knew I was a tourist. But at least I had a nice haircut.

And dinner was the best hummus and variations thereof that I had ever tasted—even better than Israel, where they have no business being chintzy with the tahini. Are sesame seeds expensive or something?

So after enjoying all the delights Aqaba had to offer and a good sleep, we took the shared taxi, together with the locals, on the two hour drive to Wadi Musa. Most tourists go on tour buses or hire a regular taxi, but why bother? The shared taxi is cheaper, more fun and more colorful. One friendly guy pointed out the sites to us on the way up, as we passed Wadi Rum, where they filmed Lawrence of Arabia, and various Bedouin villages.

Finding our B&B, we immediately headed down to the Petra park entrance, since there isn’t a lot else to see in Wadi Rum, which has mainly grown up around the tourism industry generated by the inhabitants’ ancient predecessors. We bought our two two-day ticket — which at 55 Dinars (about 75 USD) is only slightly more expensive than the one day ticket for people staying for at least one night Jordan, but much cheaper than the 90 Dinars that day-trippers from “neighboring countries”, i.e., Israel, have to pay under the new system. Visiting Petra isn't cheap, unless you have a passport from an Arab country, in which case it is only one dinar.

Instead of taxis offering to convey you wherever you would like to go, now we have camels, donkeys, and horses offering their services. Mahmoud here, who upon finding out we were from Hungary (and not Spain. Apparently he has a problem with Spaniards) immediately broke into a few not-so-bad Magyar phrases which resulted in the desired effect of Moni getting on his horse for the ride down to the Siq, the long shaft that is the entrance to Petra. 

I myself decided to spare the other beast. Hungarians seem to be well-liked in Islamic countries that I have visited, and in such places I don’t make a point of mentioning that I’m only a quasi-Magyar from Washington, DC. In Turkey the affinity makes sense, because the Turk generally regards the Hungarian as a kind of blanched distant cousin, but in Arab countries there would be no reason for this. Here I think maybe it’s more because Hungarians never bother the Arabs and lots of Jordanian guys study in Budapest and meet nice Hungarian girls to settle down with, which was the case with Mahmoud’s cousin.

Anyway, Mahmoud said his family lived in the caves in Petra, as Bedouin did for centuries before it got converted into a park and they got resettled, and he says it’s in his blood to ride around on horses here. Not a bad life.

Anyway, after saying so long to Mahmoud, we headed into the Siq, a mile long dry canyon leading to the city, where you see cool stuff like this:

Publish Post

 With the treasury peeking out at the end:

I won't write about Petra, because you can read about it on Wikipedia and then you will know as much as I do. But here are a more pictures. The place is definitely worth a look. Don't go in summer. March was perfect.

After getting our fill of Nabatean ruins for a day and a half, it’s back to the border and Eilat. Now we’re in Eilat, which as a beach resort is a few pegs up on Aqaba, with a slight Las Vegas tinge to it. I think Eilat probably appeals more to the Israeli working stiff or to the Israeli recent immigrant from Russia than it does to the Israeli concert pianist or Israeli systems analyst, but it’s a fun place to rest for a day.

Here you can see the four-country view from our hotel balcony. On the left that’s Jordan and Aqaba. In the haze to the upper right of that derelict-looking freighter that I think was there on my last trip here in 2004 you can sort of make out a bit of Saudi Arabia. And somewhere up in those hills on the right is Egypt. You can see the Egyptian coast better from the beach, but we didn’t bring the camera down there because it’s not good to get it wet. The water just warm enough to splash around for an extended period and just cold enough to wake up with a cold, so it’s with a packet of handkerchiefs in hand that I collect the car keys for the lovely bashed up econo-Hyundai that will be our desert camel for the next few days.

I hadn’t driven a car in several years – there’s not much reason to keep a car in Budapest and I hate driving in Europe anyway, where neither the roads nor the inhabitants are suited to be paired the internal combustion engine, but I kind enjoy driving in Israel, where driving conditions and fellow motorists are more like in North America. Especially crossing the Negev, where there's nobody else to tick you off.

This is the Ramon Crater, a great big crater in the middle of the desert.

And Israel being a small country, by early afternoon we are back at the kibbutz in a completely different climate zone for Sanyi’s birthday. A good time is had by all.

FAQs

Q: At an 80^th birthday party on a kibbutz, do they say “Mazeltov” a lot?

A: They say it a lot. So much that I started to think I could understand Hebrew.

Q: What music do they listen to at an 80^th birthday party on a kibbutz?

A: Barbra Streisand


The next day we ride the Korean camel up to the Sea of Galilee to meet our friend Anna, who moved to Israeli a few years back and is now living in the Golan with her husband, Robi, and their daughter. Robi is also Hungarian, from the Hungarian-speaking Jewish community in Romania that has pretty much all packed up and left, mainly for Israel.

First we take a quick look around Galilee, home to a bustling tourist industry of buses loading and unloading the faithful from around the world in search of cosmic reverberations of Christianity when it was still at the venture capital stage.

Then Robi and Anna lead us on a tour of the Golan, which is looking very fine and in full bloom this time of year. First stop was Gamla, which was a major site in the Jewish Revolt in 69 AD, but is now a natural park, where they rehabilitate giant vultures.

We then had a look up by the Syrian border, which is a partially-militarized area. Golan is an attractive mix of vineyards and geopolitics. Robi, in the car up ahead signals we should pass the Humvee or whatever the hell that thing is. Is it really a good idea to pass an IDF Humvee? Isn’t that like blowing past a police cruiser? But we escaped. That Humvee was just too big and clunky too catch up with our sprightly little Hyundai.

That’s Syria on the other side. Everything looks peaceful. The white encampment houses the UN ceasefire monitoring force, a unit of, currently, Poles who make sure no one moves too many tanks too close to the border and suchlike.

Taken from the same spot but in the other direction is what Robi says, switching into English, “we call a weather station. It tells us whether the Syrians are coming or not.” Golan wine is pretty solid, too.

We finished off the day up by the Lebanese border with some kind of exotic rosehip, honey, and orange-based sweets in a Druze village and a view of Mount Hermon, which at over 2,000 meters allows a local ski industry at 33 degrees of latitude. A country the size of New Jersey and they are skiing on one end and swimming at the beach on the other. This was our last day, so we said goodbye to Anna and Family, drove back to the kibbutz for a nap, and then caught our early morning flight home. Next visit we think we’ll combine it with a visit to Egypt. And who knows, maybe the time after that, some of the other neighbors will be more accommodating to visitors crossing from Israel, and vice versa.