A Thanksgiving Letter to My Family

 Thanksgiving may be the holiday whose intent is most easily (and deliciously) drowned in gravy and sweet tea. However, it's important to remember the 'thanks' portion of the Holiday, not only as you sit down to your meal and say grace, but also throughout the day. It's so easy to take for granted the affluent, comfortable, secure lives we live at home, that it sometimes becomes difficult to remember what we have to give thanks for, particularly in challenging times.

So keep in mind while you cook your Turkey with an electric pressure cooker, in your house which is heated by gas, driving your car on smooth roads, passing police who don't care where your license plate came from, to stores with more varieties and brands of cheese than guests you are expecting for dinner—there are few places in the world that a feast such as this is possible. We are blessed enough, even in the hardest times, to live in the country that stands above all others. Every bet was and is against it; but yet it stands. 

So for Thanksgiving I will be sharing some stories of Thanksgivings past with my students; both Serbian and Albanian. At the same time I'll be dreaming of a little turkey with a lot of gravy, some potatoes (with a lot of gravy), some oyster casserole (I'd find a way for gravy to make an encore here, too). But most of all I'll be missing the company of the family I share the meal with. 

And one other thing is absolutely certain: the fact that I'm spending this Thanksgiving away from my family means that I'll savor next year's with a special relish. 

I hope you all eat until it hurts, and don't forget the pumpkin pie! 

I love all of you and I can't wait to see you all around Christmas.

-Charley

Back to the blog

Although I know with absolute certainty that nobody, not even Chinese spambots, persists in checking this site for updates, I am going to update it again anyway.

Starting with an attempt to upload a lot of photos for which I will give no context or explanation until some future date, I am going to give some basic update and over view of the last 6 weeks or so.

In my constant attempts to become a hipster, I brought a 38 year old 35mm film camera so I could pretend to be a tourist from 1973 instead of a tourist from 2011.  I remember using a film camera when I was a kid, although it was a much more highly automated machine than this old Nikon.  The experience of taking photos whose results will remain a mystery for quite some time is a huge adjustment from digital.  If I screw up a digital shot, I erase it and retake on the spot.  If I screw up a film shot, I've lost the opportunity completely.  The lag between exposure and development for some of my photos was almost exactly 2 months.  Needless to say, getting the film back was quite a rush.  The entire time it was at the lab I was covertly worrying about the quality of the staff at the store-- "What if they screw up all 5 rolls?"

Perhaps it's this emotional and chronological knot that makes me feel more strongly for my film work than my digital stuff - but I have found, of the 180-odd photos,  a much higher probability of what I'd consider a "very good" shot (at least for my skill level).  With the film results, I am proud enough of perhaps 25-30 of the 180 to share them.  Of course about 40 are abysmal or worse.  But with digital, I can (and in the past have been to known to) snap 600-1000 photos in a single day.  Out of that mind boggling number, I'll end up with 25-30 I am proud enough of to share.  On a great day, with the right subject, maybe I'll get 100.  But that still leaves my "hit" percentage at between 2.5-10% with digital, and at around 20-30% for film.

Of course there are a dozen reasons for that.  Digital cameras do everything for you, making it easy to run through a place with the shutter button held down, snapping a photo of everything that moves and a lot of things that don't.  With a fully manual camera and lens combo, combined with film's time lag, each shot is a commitment.  I have to stop, focus the lens, read the meter, decide what range of apertures I have available given the light, and then decide if I think the meter is giving me information for the kind of shot I want to take. 

The end result is this: the idiot-proof modern digital camera actually creates idiot-shots.  The completely cumbersome and anachronistic film camera forces me to pay enough attention to my photos to get good results.  It's really quite amazing.

This is a complaint I have read in a few places, mainly those writing about the transition from film to digital.  Anyone who started out with film cameras instinctively thinks that the best thing about digital is the ability to take as many photos as you want for FREE! It's an incredible breakthrough (especially when I just paid more than $10 per roll just to develop film, in Croatia).  And the symptoms of mid-life transition between film and digital are easy to see in someone like me.  Of course I was young when that happened, but I was certainly old enough to have wasted a lot of money on film and developing (rather, lots of mom and dad's money).  One of the first things I thought of, even when I was 8 years old, was "holy cow, it's free to see the pictures and it's instant!"  The first digital camera I saw in person used 3.5" floppy disks as memory.  I remember thinking about how cheap they were compared to film...

Anyway, the photos I'll be posting are all scans from film.  The black and white I'll post are conversions from color film scans.

I hope you enjoy the photos as much as I have enjoyed taking them.  Perhaps they'll do a better job of describing the places I am passing through than any words I can hammer into a keyboard.

Above: Zagreb Kaptol Cathedral exterior wall, Croatia.

Zagreb Cemetary on All Saint's Day, Croatia

Zagreb Kaptol Cathedral, Croatia

Random Austro-Hungarian style door in Belgrade, Serbia

Belgrade (Beograd) Central Train Station, Serbia

Archangel Gabriel church near the Partizan Football Stadium, Belgrade, Serbia

Belgrade Central Railway Station Platform, Serbia

Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, Sofia, Bulgaria

Wall beside a road in Štrpce.

Men playing chess in Kalmegdan Park, Belgrade, Serbia. 

Zagreb Cemetary, Croatia

Zagreb Cemetary, Croatia

Zagreb Cemetary main gate, Croatia

Zagreb Cemetary wall, exterior, Croatia

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Zagreb Kaptol Cathedral outer wall, Croatia

Zagreb Kaptol Cathedral outer wall, Croatia

Fountain, Kalmegdan Park, Belgrade, Serbia

Men playing chess in Kalmegdan Park, Belgrade, Serbia

Gavrilo Princip graffiti, near Belgrade Central Train Station, Serbia

Fire Salamander, near Štrpce, Kosovo.

Belgrade Central Railway Station platform, Serbia

Serbian Train (Zheleznitse Srbije) at Belgrade Central Railway Station, Serbia

Sofia Synagogue, Sofia, Bulgaria

Red Star Football Club graffiti, Belgrade, Serbia

Saint Sava Temple, Belgrade, Serbia

Austro-Hungarian style doorway, Belgrade, Serbia

Belgrade Central Railway Station, Serbia

Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, Sofia, Bulgaria

Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, Sofia, Bulgaria.

Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, Sofia, Bulgaria

View from my apartment window, Štrpce, Kosovo.

 Another view from my apartment window, Štrpce, Kosovo.

Orthodox church (left) next to Mosque (right), Ferizaj/ Uroševac, Kosovo

View from my coffee cup, Štrpce, Kosovo.

Mountains between Prizren, Kosovo and Štrpce, Kosovo.

Mosque and river in Prizren, Kosovo.

Another view from my apartment window, Štrpce, Kosovo.

Zagreb Kaptol Cathedral façade, Croatia

Zagreb Kaptol Cathedral façade and candle sellers, All Saints' Day, Croatia

Zagreb Kaptol Cathedral façade, Croatia

All Saint's Day Procession, Zagreb, Croatia

Danube and Sava river confluence, Belgrade, Serbia.

Archangel Gabriel church, Belgrade, Serbia

Inside Archangel Gabriel church, Belgrade, Serbia

Unfinished/ Abandoned Orthodox Cathedral, Prishtina/ Priština, Kosovo

Trail and wall near Štrpce, Kosovo

Abandoned structure in a pasture, Mount Sharr/ Šar, Štrpce, Kosovo