People

Frogs are hidden in this picture! Meanwhile, the Q-tip thief was scheming behind me.

Random flowers near the Hotel.

American Fried Chicken. Lol.

Deaf Girl

There was a deaf girl on the flight to Istanbul. She fell asleep while they were giving out dinner. When she woke up, she typed into her phone asking me about dinner, and I typed into mine a message saying they already had served it. If you or I were in this position we could just ask the flight attendents pretty simply if they had any food left. She could have too, if she really wanted, but the added difficulty and/or awkwardness of the interaction probably discourages people like her from trying.

Now that I'm in countries that aren't English-speaking, I find myself doing the same sort of thing. I noticed that the busses sometimes say "free wifi" on them, but I don't feel like going through the awkward hassle needed to figure out what the network details are. So I go without internet... Anyway, when I went to the bathroom I told the flight attendants she was hungry and they came around to take her order. They still had food.

Patrick

When I got to the Istanbul bus station I bumped into this French dude. Patrick. He'd started in Japan and gone through Southwest Asia and India and a bunch of places before I met him. Apparently he quit his job to do it. We talked about a bunch of things, some of them American politics because somehow everyone has opinions on American politics. Probably because we keep interjecting ourselves into everything. Sometimes with bombs.

But he said jobs are different in France. Apparently, even private companies cannot just willy-nilly fire people in mass layoffs like in America. They have to demonstrate that they have some need to do so. Another structural reason that European life seems like it's more stable than American life.

Margarita

This woman is great. I couldn't get a direct bus to Sarajevo from Istanbul, so I just went to Sofia because it was the furthest I could get. I showed up at 5AM or something ridiculous. No one was even working the bus offices so I couldn't even figure out my next steps. When they did open, it was hard to speak English with anyone. I wasn't seeing any signs for Sarajevo, so I didn't really know what I was going to do.

I finally found some woman (not Margarita) who had a ticket that involved 24 hours of driving that went all the way out to Albania and then back-tracked to Sarajevo. It was disgusting. But also the only thing I knew of that would get me to Sarajevo before the tour started. So it was my default plan.

Then some other woman told me to go talk to Margarita, who had the best English so far. And in a moment she gave me an itinerary through Belgrade which let me spend the night in Sofia, go to Belgrade in the morning, spend the day there, and catch a night bus to Sarajevo. Oddly enough, the first bus was with that woman's company that was going through Albania. Apparently she didn't know about this route. Thank god for Margarita and her 30 years of experience. She single-handedly made a huge difference in my trip.

Q-Tip Thief

When I finally got to Sarajevo, I went to try and find some Q-tips. I bought some for less than a dollar at a random grocery store. After that, I found some frogs croaking like crazy near the river next to the Hotel. So I had to jump down past a little railing to try and take a picture, but I left the box of q-tips on the sidewalk, thinking nobody would steal bloody q-tips.

I turned around while trying to take the pictures, not sure why, but I saw this guy walking away with the q-tips! Who does this?!

Anyway I walked towards him while saying aloud "that's mine" or something and the guy gave it back, trying to smile and laugh it off like he didn't just try to pull off the most absurd shit. All kinds of people out there. This was likely one of the refugees/immigrants/gypsies that were hanging around Ilidza.

Crystal Lady

How insane is too insane?

I met this woman with a jewelry shop in the old town. She said she used to work in some kind of TV capacity. Marketing or broadcasting or something, I don't know. Anyway, I liked some of her products, so I walked in and she started talking about how she's into crystal energies and therapy and all that strange stuff.

Yet here she was, a functioning adult, at least on the important basic levels. She's got a business, she's sourcing products from Italy/Turkey/etc., making sales, paying rent, raising a kid. I'm sure people with these sorts of proclivities also have proclivities towards other things that end up causing some parts of their lives to be difficult. But everyone has those kinds of proclivities, strange beliefs in crystals or not.

Also recently met someone who believes in astrology stuff, but she also has a reasonably demanding job, a family, etc.

I heard about a gainfully employed professor at UIUC that runs around on the streets shouting absurd things at passersby as a social experiment.

Even Newton was dabbling in weird mystical things I think, like Alchemy and God. Was it Heaviside or Gibbs that was so paranoid he wouldn't eat food anyone but his wife gave him, so he literally starved to death when his wife died?

So I don't know. It seems you can believe a number of whacky things and still make it through life in one piece. So back to the original question: how insane is too insane?