I first and foremost must admit to having chickened out from smuggling, which might after all have been a good idea, as all my baggage was x-rayed at customs. Well, such is life.

This is the land of extremes, and I mean it. On the one hand wealth in proportions extraordinary even against Western European standards is on incessantly conspicuous display here (massive buildings, parks, infrastructure, cars, cell phones, eating out, etc); on the other, rough sleepers and social outcasts are pleading with you for some help equally relentlessly in downtown Chicago, on the South Side, in the streets, on the train, bus, everywhere. In the three neighborhoods surrounding campus the occurrence of violent crime is around 2000 per 100,000 residents (that is, 2/100!). Our students are either damn intelligent but ugly nerds (probably the majority) or empty athletes and frat kids. Or just stupid, ignorant, fat Tonje-style Americans. That is the worst; you can at least bullshit with the big idiotic football-players about pussies and various MF topics, while being proud of how big and rooster you are.

By the way, I am in a single room, and moreover the aesthetics of our campus is rather world-class. The food is fine too (I mean in the dining halls, otherwise you don’t find anything other than junk), and I am being poured on resources, which are only maintained to increase the costs of your college education and rip all the rich brats’ parents off and are quite irrelevant, but nice for me to have for free. Hehe, free riding the system is excellent.

I met Ognjen (a Serbian classmate of mine from Bosnia) yesterday; he looks like a typical member of the first-aider team (tall, huge and disheveled). I think we will in the future be capable of great things together...

On a different note (and on one which is primarily aimed at Nikola), a person yet to be identified has just recently leaked out a tape on which our prime minister said to a crowd of party members at an informal assembly “[…] we fucked it [governing] up. Not a little, but greatly. No government in Europe has made such a fuckup over the past five to ten years.[…] and in the meanwhile we didn’t do anything. Nothing. […]”. In turn all the lunatic fringes (and there’s a good deal of them, no matter how much we reiterate that we are Central, not Eastern, Europeans) took the streets rioting in the middle of Budapest for a couple of days, evoking scenes resembling civil war. Fukdup. But extremely amusing to observe such a select elite of my homeland’s idiots from several thousands of miles distance…

Fuck, stereotypes of Americans are TRUE! They are peasants. They first cut the food up into pieces, put the knife aside, and eat with a fork in the right hand. And the level of the dinner’s formality does not matter. They wear white socks to black pants. They don’t even consider letting the girl enter a room first. They practically vomit the words they speak (it is really queer to realize just how smart some of the guys are who hardly speak proper English in everyday life). Etc, etc. I actually am having cultural shocks. Quite stunning.

Concluding, I am finding the place more and more enjoyable and exciting by the day; it’s only that it’s a lot more fun talking crap about stuff (i.e. Americans, the university, etc) than praising it.

Best yo yos,

Bazmeg