This has been a very peculiar visit. The first few nights here, I woke more exhausted than I had been when I went to sleep. Strange dreams -- a large battle in a city filled with civilians sometime in the future. Some run-ins with strays and a peculiar muscle strain (in the spot where Jacob was wounded in the wrestling with the angel, ominously) meant that I skipped the run of for a week or two in the middle of it, and that's never a good thing. Eventually, I found a decent path for the run, and the joint healed enough that I didn't feel as if I were pushing it too far.
Instinctively, there was a strong regret that I had left the last city, which I like very much. And my first encounters with the locals and the area put me on my guard a bit. Eventually, I realized that (at least on this side of the river), things are more like the southern coastal country of the old republic. You find the neighborhood shady bowers and rest there, rather than heading into the bold designs of downtown, which are there to be experienced, but not really lived with. At least not yet. The monumentalist aesthetic is only a decade or two old, and although it's something to see (Bucephalus will not be rendered more honorably anywhere), it can be fatiguing.
None of the bookstores appear to have any English translations of the local authors -- the English spirit is facing distant lands, apparently. But there's a very bustling mall culture, and the housing is generally quite fine; as with most countries in the Balkans (there are exceptions), the standard of living is higher than the corresponding wealth percentile in the more prosperous nations. I keep looking up into these apartment windows, mostly buildings built in the last 50 years after the earthquake, and imagining shelves filled with Hegel. But I don't think they do that anymore. Back to the admin tasks, so I can do some reading of my own this evening. Lector, cura te ipsum.