Upon arriving to the seaside last week after not having set foot there in quite a while, I realized Crikvenica is the only place in the world that I consciously associate with particular smells. Olfaction-wise I've gotten so oblivious to my surroundings that I have trouble naming even one smell reminiscent of Ljubljana, New York or any other city, but Crikvenica is much different.
The basis for my ideal city is Venice, Venice of parallel universes, flowing queens and the smell of violin polish I always sense around Rialto. Actually, Venice is more than a base: the only element my ideal city would differ from Venice in is boulevardslike those of Rome. Venice doesn't have boulevards for it's too dense, its houses and streets crammed together so tightly that they encage high humidity and summer fevers, making them almost endemic. Rome respires in a similar way, but as it's spread across seven hills, the air has more space to unfold.
A long time ago, my favorite thing to do was take the subway to Times Square at any time of the day while undergoing a silent monologue on whether hot dogs from street vendors would sabotage my digestion or not. Although I suspected they'd turn out to be just as delicious as food from the [...]
Reading Momo Kapor's A Guide to the Serbian Mentality late at night reminds me of everything I'm not doing in Belgrade but could be. The most wonderfully uncomplicated things like syncing my heartbeat with the city's at Terazije and wandering aimlessly around Vračar are so far away right now that soaking up the book too often only makes me feel anxious. A collection of vignettes about Belgrade and its character, it's so sincere that reading it in English has almost the same effect as reading Kapor in his original Serbian.