It took Cheesy 30 hours to get from Croatia to Montreal.
Cheesy had had a flight booked from Split to Montreal at 11:30 p.m. on a Saturday. On the day of her departure, friends from France were visiting her in Split. One was a street musician and wanted to play a show that evening, so they drove her to the airport at 6 p.m. Cheesy checked her bag in and decided to wander around to kill the next 5 hours. She left the airport and walked along the highway for a bit. An African man in a Smart car pulled over and asked if she needed a lift. He didn't seem to understand the concept of just wandering around. He gave her his phone number and drove off. She was hungry but all she found was an abandoned fast food bar on an abandoned beach.
Bored and hungry (a combination Cheesy knew all too well), she wandered back to the airport. Her flight was the last one of the day, and it was delayed. She arrived at Zagreb at 1 a.m. and slept on a bench until her flight to Frankfurt at 8 a.m. That flight was also delayed, because they had loaded someone's bag into the plane who didn't ever board the plane. Once she arrived in Frankfurt, Cheesy ran at top speed to her gate. She got to the gate at 9:58 a.m. The 10:00 plane to Montreal had just left. So they re-booked her on a flight to Ottawa at 1:30 p.m. From there she took a flight to Montreal at 6 p.m., or midnight Split time.
So you can imagine that by the time Cheesy got to Montreal, she felt very, very far from the life she had set up in Europe. She began to notice things she had never thought twice about in Montreal. Here are her observations.
1. Advertisements were force-fed to passengers on Air Canada. There was a screen on the back of every seat. Within 10 minutes of flight, each passenger had images of restaurants, Mitsubishis, and MasterCards whirling just inches from his face.
2. Food and company names were way kitchier in North America. Cheesy's snack on the plane was called "Maized and Confused Corn Chips." In Canada, shops that sell cheap Chinese trinkets were called things like Dollarama or Buck-or-Two. In the Balkans they were called… China shops.
3. Company signs were way simpler in Split. They said something like, "Ivanovic Brothers. Garage doors." Or even just, "Furniture." In North America whole careers were devoted to studying which colours and shapes attract consumers more. Fortunes were made and lost depending on who came up with which logo first. Flashy was seen as favourable.
4. The point: Croatians were much more to the point than North Americans. The best example was the communication Cheesy had witnessed between the airplane pilot and flight attendants over the loudspeakers. On the Air Canada flight, one announcement went like this (no joke): "Hi folks, your pilot speaking. The reports of turbulence from the other planes flying in this area are beyond my comfort zone, so I'm going to have to ask the flight attendants to please pause what they are doing and have a seat until further notice." On Air Croatia: "Flight attendants, sit down."
And it seemed that in the Balkans, if someone felt his point was not getting across properly, he just started yelling. Cheesy had been on one bus in Montenegro where a passenger, some young French tourist girl, had lost her bus ticket (they really do just look like receipts, Cheesy had nearly lost one herself). The co-pilot found the girl without her ticket, and lost it completely. So here was this gigantic Balkan man howling at this skinny French girl in a language she couldn't even understand, She just looked up at him and burst into tears. On the bright side, she did get the point.
5. Despite their apparent curtness, Croatians frowned much less than North Americans. They walked around with perfect posture, slim and confident. If they made eye contact with someone, they smiled or said hello. North Americans checked each other out secretly. They looked down in shame if someone noticed them staring. Then they would peek again when they think the other person was distracted. North Americans frowned when they saw a line-up ahead. They frowned when things fell behind schedule. They frowned when something cost more than expected. They frowned when they were tired. The brilliance of the Balkans was that everyone somehow knew how not to worry. The line-up is long, but life is short, so smile and make the best of it.
6. For some reason people had lovely abs in Split.
7. Montreal had better graffiti than any other city Cheesy had seen anywhere. In general Montreal was way more artistic that most places Cheesy had seen. People wore broken fishnet stockings, dyed their hair green, wore fake retro eyeglasses, and still managed to pull off a fashion statement. People spoke freely about art and sex and drugs. Locals went to the museums and galleries, not just tourists.
8. But even if Montreal values were very open, the people were not. Cheesy had had many random conversations with many random people in the streets of Europe. But when she went to a café in Montreal and started to chat up the barista, all she got was a weird look and an expensive bill. (Okay well maybe soy milk wasn't the hottest topic to start new friendships with… but Montrealers were foodies, weren't they?)
9. Cheesy did appreciate the fact that Montreal and Split share similar coffee cultures. When people had nothing better to do, they went and got wired up on espressos all afternoon. Except in Montreal they tended to eat sandwiches or cakes with the coffee, and often people would bring their laptops along to do work.
10. Work! North Americans were obsessed with it.
11. Rules were generally stricter in North America. What clothes to wear to school, which way to drive on the street, how much money to tip the waiter, how long to take to finish university…
12. Down to food business. Quebec sorely lacked burek. The Balkans sorely lacked poutine. (Cheesy sensed a genius restaurant idea coming on…)
13. The attitude towards food in North America was totally schizophrenic. No wonder people were either too fat or too thin. You opened a magazine and the message was this: "Lose those extra pounds! Here's exactly how to do it. We have all the weight-loss secrets. You don't have to think at all. You will be perfect. You are not perfect now but you can be perfect just by obeying these five simple rules. Everyone will love you and then you'll be happy." And then on the next page: "Indulge yourself! You deserve it! You're unhappy and you work so hard! Double fudge chocolate cake only $13.99!" - They always wrote "only," even if the price was obviously exhorbitant – "and only 500 calories per piece! You will learn to love yourself and then you'll be happy."
And so the deep questions of North American life were these: Am I happy if others love me or if I love myself? And is that kind of happiness achieved by eating or by not eating? And if the price is right and the calories counted, is happiness guaranteed?
There was an enormous attachment to calorie-counting and rule-following that Cheesy still couldn't see the logic behind (note the irony). Did North Americans not want to think for themselves? Did they want their health and happiness to reduce to nothing more than a set of numbers? Maybe it was very comforting to believe that something as mysterious and fleeting as happiness could be achieved algorithmically.
(Wrong! Cheesy's brain screamed. It's instinct, happiness is achieved by instinct! North Americans have lost their instincts, and so they have to follow a set of rules in order to mimic the results that instinct achieves naturally! My god, Nietzsche must have been one of the most brilliant assholes ever to have lived. And for those who couldn't care less about Nietzsche, just watch American Beauty again.)
14. Chopsticks.
15. There are more things like reusable shopping bags, recycling, and hybrid cars in North America.
16. The following grim observation, as well as a few of the above ones, was courtesy of a friend of Cheesy's: In North America, they chopped down trees and then named the streets after them. (Although to be perfectly fair, they had just razed down a park of old trees in central Zagreb in order to build a shopping mall.)
17. Final thoughts back to Cheesy's age-old question about whether and how people can change. Sometimes one believes one has had a deeper or shallower change than one has. People might say, "Oh I know I've changed a lot," and they're still the same goddamn person (if they would just admit it, then they could begin a real change). Not everyone notices change, either in themselves or in others. Cheesy also realized that sometimes a change could reverse itself, as she fell back into her old Montreal habits. But Cheesy suspected that if one puts oneself in the right environment, one can re-reverse a change. And when she stepped out of the airport in Split, and saw the highway she'd wandered along 12 days earlier, and smelled the sea, and saw the dry Dalmatian hills in the fog, she actually began to cry with happiness. Her instincts had suddenly re-aligned and everything just came together with a perfect clarity. Her instincts had told her to come here, and she did, and she was happy, and there was no greater happiness than finding out that you were right to have trusted your instincts. There was no greater relief for Cheesy than finding that the great wave she had been riding was right in mid-air where she had left it.
