Making Connections

Friday evening I went to a concert of a French group of folk singers as part of what apparently was French Cultural Week here. They were six men with excellent voices who mostly sang without accompaniment. But on some songs they also used open backed drums and a tambourine. The cultural center where the concert took place is not far from my place. It’s actually on the route I walk into town everyday, though I’ve never noticed it before. The group’s French was hard to understand since they were from some southern region of France (Provence maybe) with their own distinctive dialect. But they also made many introductions to their songs in English. And most of the audience seemed to understand (laughing at the jokes, etc.).

This is a phenomenon that I have observed overseas before, how people from all over the world often use English as the “lingua franca.” I’ve seen Belgians, Germans and Dutch using English in France; Italians, Swedes, Japanese, and Danish sharing a household with English as the only way to communicate with each other; and many other situations all over the world where the only way to communicate is English. I think it’s a phenomenon that has never happened before in history or prehistory, this global way of communicating. I’m not saying that everyone speaks English, or that they should. And I’m not saying that everyone’s English is equally good or fluent or effective. But I have noticed that no matter where you go, almost anywhere on the planet today, you can probably find someone who can speak a little English. So if you speak English, you can probably get along almost anywhere. It’s really amazing when you think about it.

I also took a little outing with a colleague yesterday. We went to Trsat. She showed me the health food store there (Lotos) and pointed out things that she likes to buy there (like some soy pudding, good honey, and interesting bread). We sat and had coffee in an outdoor café for a few hours and just chatted about life in Croatia and the States (where she has visited several times). I asked her about life in communist Yugoslavia. She said it wasn’t really bad most of the time, nothing like the U.S.S.R., since they could travel and never had shortages and so on. Plus she said life was better in some ways, everything was available and provided (like health care and apartments), and you could afford to go out to dinner and cultural events and so on quite easily (which I gather is less the case now).

I also heard from my Dad’s cousin’s daughter (Cathy) who is an expert in genealogy. She found this blog and wrote me as a result, telling me some details about our family history. Our grandmothers were sisters, so their parents (the Kosmuch/Milosevich family) were the ones who came from Croatia. Anyway, the name of the village they came from is Mrzla Vodica, which is very near Lokve, which amazingly turns out to be just 25 kilometers from where I am now, Rijeka. So I should have no trouble going there and looking in the parish (St. Catherine’s) records for family information. It probably means any Kuzmic families around there may be relatives.