2-10: My Slow Day at Home, and Boring Linguistic Stuff

I woke up (un)pleasantly late today, and owing to the several inches of snow outside decided to forgo my run. I settled for a light bodyweight routine and am hoping that a day of non-activity will help me wake up a bit more--I feel that since disembarking at Nikola Tesla, BEG that my body and mind have been a bit sluggish (doubtlessly that's shown through in my writing =P ).

The view from my room as the snow falls on Beograd.

So for today, I felt content to sit in the living room for a chunk of the day, reading with my host father Bane (BAHN-yeh, short for Banislav--contrary to popular belief, I am not rooming with the masked musclebound anarchist mastermind attempting to implement pseudo-Hobbesian designs for Gotham City). We're both very introspective people--while passing one another late last night in the kitchen looking to get a glass of water before bed, we accidentally talked former Yugoslavia for an hour and ended up jamming some acoustic Pink Floyd until one in the morning. I think I'm going to love it here.

I'm sitting in my room now, working on translating introductory words through three different languages while listening to the full Metallica/San Francisco Orchestra, an album that I believe emboldens the capabilities of classical music to younger generations and dispels myths about hard rock and heavy metal to older ones, and that should be mandatory in school, right up there with a holistic interpretation on the Second Treatise on Government and ad nauseum instruction on the correct use of turn signals. Here's a few observations:

1. I am one lucky son of a bitch. Which isn't particularly news, but is always a good thing to remember when you have the privilege to do the things and go to the places that I have.
2. Either the Serbians or the Russians dun goof'd when they adapted Cyrillic. Considering Vuk Karadzic's divinely-inspired insistence on the phonetic "one letter per sound" policy when standardizing the Serbian language, I'm looking at you, Russia.
3. At the same time, I'm very excited about my cognate collection. Plenty of words are different here (most irritatingly that "why" in this language is "what" in Russian), but among the many cognates, verbs feature most frequently. Here's to (words about) action speaking louder than (action-less) words!
4. For a third perspective, however, I am slightly concerned about my Serbian and Russian mixing into some unintelligible Slavicstein as I struggle to use my far from complete knowledge of the latter language to bridge into the former. I would ideally keep them separate; I would be okay if my Russian took a hit in order to learn the language here and now, as I can always work to correct it next year; if I failed at both, I would be sad. Possibly even Novi Sad (ignore that awful Balkan geography joke. This is why I need an editor, and possibly a new amygdala.)
5. This city is, as far as I can tell, wonderfully safe. My host family heedlessly walked through neighborhoods the likes of which I wouldn't touch in Baltimore or Philly well past midnight.
6. I found out yesterday that Kosovo means "field of blackbirds". Considering some artistic decisions I've been making recently, I think it's a good sign. I don't know why, but I feel fascinated by Kosovo.

May or may not make a post tomorrow. Minimal time on the computer is kind of liberating.

Srpski word of the day: Mredza (мрежа)-net (as in "fishing", "basketball", or "Inter-"