The Serbian mentality (1): Water and tea

    “Our country's water is good. You can drink it from the tap!”

    Any traveller who has ever lived in or been to a country where tap water is drunk, or at least heard that tap water is drunk in some countries, may take the above as a humorous statement when your host praises her country's water in this way.

    But no, it can be a serious statement.

    “Serbian water is good.” The landlady told me as she kindly offered me a glass of tap water. At this point I was not quite sure what “good water” she was referring to. Was she trying to tell me about some Serbian water from a particular mountain which was rich in a certain kind of mineral good for human health? Or was she going to make a joke?

    The next sentence she went on to say, without a second of pause for me to imagine all the possibilities to answer my own query, was “You can drink it from the tap.” Ah, she was not joking! At least her husband did not laugh, which meant me as a foreign visitor should not laugh either. She was sincerely telling me about something she was proud of about her country!

    Thanks Serbian writer Momo Kapor for his “A guide to the Serbian mentality” and the owner of the bookstore in Montenegro who recommended it to me. Without this “guidebook” as my great travel companion I would certainly feel clueless about how to understand what Serbian people say and do on my trip.

    The landlady told me she liked Kapor's writing, too. As a native she certainly did not have to read the author's work in a translated version like I did. I also believed that she had not read this particular book by Kapor that I was reading, for it was genuinely for foreigners to understand the Serbian mentality. (Having said that, this book can not only be read as anthropological or cultural literature but also a non-traditional travel guidebook of Belgrade.)

    Out of curiosity, I asked her about tea. “Do you drink tea here? Momo wrote that Serbians only drank tea when they were sick.” Of course I did not really believe in this statement by Kapor. But I was just so desperate for a real tea – not the kind of bottled “ice tea” sold at kiosks and supermarkets which did not have the letter d nor ice in it. Now I could have believed it if someone told me tea was banned in this country. My attempt to find tea on failed even at a Chinese noodles shop in the so-called Chinatown in Belgrade!

    “We do drink tea, not when we are sick. He was just joking,” the landlady replied. Giving an explanation on the Serbian concept of tea to me as a foreigner, she elaborated,“But we are not like the English people. We don't drink tea at five.”

    That was exactly the comparison which Kapor made! For sure I did not mistake any Serbian as English. That made me wonder why both he and the landlady coincidentally draw the same comparison to distinguish their national identity.

    To cite a paragraph from Kapor, he wrote:

    “If they perchance happen to be in our city, Anglo-Saxons are most surprised that their invariable ritual – tea at five is not served with milk, as it is elsewhere around the world!”

    Here I should protest, because the Anglo-Saxons are not the only race on this planet who have milk with tea. At least I do it too! Despite failing to find tea in Serbia, I shared the observation that milk was considered a mismatch with tea in the region as I proceeded to Bosnia and Croatia later on my journey. In some touristic areas in these two countries I did manage to order tea with milk, but ALWAYS served also with lemon and honey as if tea with milk were so incompatible with each other that they might need honey and lemon as glue.

    I could not make sense out of it. I understood that different cultures had different ways of having food and drinks and they might find my way a strange foreign habit. But since those cafes offered this tea with milk option, presumably for tourists like me, why would they think I might put lemon and/or honey into my tea given that I had ordered it with milk?

    Yet, this way of serving tea pleased me much more than what I had in London Chinatown a few years ago. I was driven totally mad when served a Chinese tea poured with milk! 

A tea in Zadar, Croatia, very generously served with milk, lemon, sugar and honey.