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My breakfast soup this morning. Having gone to this restaurant for years, my friend Aleksandar knows this waitress well. Let's call her Angela. Her father was violent to his wife and children, so Angela married at 17 just to escape the house. She then moved to southern Serbia. Her husband was a waiter who, soon enough, also beat her. They had a daughter and a son. After 15 years with him, Angela returned to Macedonia. She then emigrated to Switzerland to pick fruit, before being hired by a fellow Berovian to take care of his mother. A successful immigrant, he owned a supermarket in Switzerland. After the old woman died, Angela came home and became a waitress.

Last year, Angela visited Berlin for four days and had Chinese food for the first time, she told Aleksandar with a bright smile. (She thought I was Chinese.) Aleksandar, on the other hand, has never eaten Chinese, Japanese, Indian or Thai, and the one time he tried bratwurst, he thought it was awful. "I like my own food," he has said to me several times.

Aleksandar has actually traveled quite a bit, without ever paying for a plane ticket. For work, he's been flown to Chile, Norway, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Italy and the US. For pleasure, he's gone to Turkey, Greece (many times), Romania, Albania and, of course, all over the former Yugoslavia.



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