Why Serbia?

When I first told my coworkers about our plans to move to Serbia, I got a lot of surprised, questioning looks. I also got a lot of "Where is that, exactly?" We eventually made a game of what's the craziest place that starts with an "S" for Meaghan to move to. Siberia, Syria, Samoa, Sri Lanka... you get the idea.

The truth is, I had a hard time selling the idea of Serbia to myself and to my family and friends. There are posts for this fellowship all around the world, and I had imagined myself in Africa. When the fellowship came through for Kragujevac (K), it was hard to reconcile my excitement for an adventure with the idea of Eastern Europe. All I could picture was frigid weather and concrete slabs of communist "architecture." We made the mistake of tracking down the one existing guide book to Serbia available in the States. It's made by Bradt guides, and they make guides for all the places no one really goes to, like Syria and Rwanda. This is what it has to say about K:

The city of Kragujevac, capital of the Sumadija region, has the fourth-largest urban population in Serbia with about 180,000 citizens. In contrast to the bucolic delights of the lush Sumadija countryside, Kragujevac is a modern industrial city with little to tempt the casual visitor, although its proximity to both Ljubosotinja and Kalenic monasteries makes it a suitable destination for an overnight stay.

This was not encouraging. Fortunately, I'm not a casual visitor.

Kragujevac doesn't have a lot of scrapbook-worthy architecture. What it does have is amazing people. Our contacts at the Embassy, the university, and local cultural center are all eager to take care of us and excited to have us here for the year. I've met more Serbians in the past two weeks than Parisians in a whole semester of study in Paris. People have taken us out for coffee, helped us register with the police (a task we surely could not have accomplished on our own), interpreted bus schedules for us, ordered taxis for us, and many other things that I'm not remembering at the moment. Just today, a rainy Saturday afternoon, our landlady unexpectedly brought us some homemade cauliflower soup, hot off the stove, and a sweet dessert of pudding, peaches, and biscuits. Delicious!

In fact, Dan sometimes gets frustrated that we aren't doing more things for ourselves. I'm inspired to someday host a foreign visitor in the USA so we can send the good karma back around. And this is just a first impression - I've only been here for two weeks. If I do make a Serbian scrapbook, I imagine pictures more meaningful than random shots of buildings - events we will host, experiences we will have, and people we will meet.