Life Before Plastic Flipflops in Tibet & Nepal

Here in Pokhara as with most of the poorer Asian countries, plastic flipflops are ubiquitous. You see the German tourists stumping around in their sensible hiking boots, the ultra-feminine Indian women in delicate, painted leather sandles (often with little kitten heels), a few Americans in sneakers, and practically everyone else is wearing plastic flipflops.

Leather is not used here very much - partly because cows are sacred and also people were until recently too poor to eat much meat, so it's not like there were a lot of spare hides laying around. So I asked our new friend Babu what did people wear before there were plastic flipflops?

He looked at me astonished at my dumb American naivete. "Their bare feet of course!"

I looked at him astonished at his dumb male naivete. "Not everyone. Of course there were shoes!"

Well of course we were both right. Most people were in bare feet, but I was delighted to meet a (female) shopkeeper from Tibet who told me all about the lovely wooden sandals people used to wear. See my snapshot above.

"How do they stay on?" asked my husband. The shopkeeper and I exchanged a look, really men can be so unintelligent sometimes. "You hold on with your big toe." I picked one up - it was extraordinarly light - almost like a sandal made of balsa wood, although tougher than that. It would be delightful to wear. Tibet's version of Holland's wooden clogs.

"Thank Heavens for the Language Barrier"

There's a line in the wonderful and intelligent film, Spanglish, where the lead character, a Hispanic immigrant working as a housekeeper for a wealthy California household says, "Thank Heavens for the language barrier."

The first time we heard it, our entire household roared with laughter. Then it crept into regular usage. Someone, my husband or I, would get annoyed with each other and say something that perhaps would have gone unsaid (or been said more nicely) with cooler heads. Luckily, when you're annoyed, you tend to lapse into slang in your language of birth. His is Serbo-Croatian slang and mine is American slang.

So, neither of us would quite understand what the other person was saying. You can tell from the tone and face of course. Arms being flung into the air, things like that. But, we've discovered if you don't understand the precise wording, it's not so upsetting. There's a curiously relieving distance between the other person's biting tone and your heart.

Which may be why somewhere in the conversation, someone (usually one of the kids) mutters, "Thank heavens for the language barrier."

So, when my husband decided to wear his horrible, new, clunky leather sandals all day yesterday, my remark of "Crunchy Granola!" didn't put a dent in his excited pride. And when, after sniffing the air outside, he decided to wear socks with those sandals, my comment of "You look like a dork" didn't douse the bounce in his step. "What's a dork?" he said.

Well, there may be a word for Dork in Srpski, but it's not in our dictionary. I know, because in the heat of the moment to make my feelings heard, I looked it up.

But you know, I'd like to thank the dictionary makers for not putting slang in. They kept the language barrier intact. And waking this morning, I thought over yesterday and how happy he was striding out into the day with his Brand New Sandals and I don't have the heart to put a little arrow of poison into that joy. I guess we all can be dorky at times, and it doesn't matter as long as we are happy together.

Fall Shoe & Boot News From Serbia & Croatia

No one except other shoe-lovers will appreciate this post, so if you are not a shoe-fanatic, then skip it.

This post is based solely on personal observations, so it may be entirely wrong. But I've got a keen eye for footwear whereever I travel, so I bet it's at least partly correct.

Firstly, unlike what upscale stores and shoe advertising here are showing, most young women (by which I infer they are hip to what's real in fashion vs what's hyped) are wearing no heels at all. Above you'll see an absolutely typical flat-heel slouchy boot being sold and widely worn for fall in Sombor Serbia and I presume elsewhere. The only thing that's not typical about this boot is color -- the totally-in color for all shoes and boots I've seen in both Croatia and Serbia is a deep rich chestnut brown suede. I'd be so bold as to say chestnut brown is the new black.

There's just one exception on the commonly worn flat boot front, and that's in Croatia's capital city Zagreb. Here's a snapshot I took of the park and buildings outside the main train station. If you squint at the giant billboard ad on that main building, you'll see a pair of female legs in cowboy boots. "Do they have a Texas fetish here in Zagreb?!" I asked my husband in astonishment. No, not at all. Turns out Zagreb is well known as a fashionable cowboy boot capital for Europe and the natives have made the boot their own, especially upscale, urban versions of it for women. And yes, after we saw this sign I did look around carefully for women actually wearing cowboy boots on the street, and spotted a live one. (Felt a bit like spotting a man in a kilt walking down the street in Edinburgh.)

However, most young women in Zagreb weren't in boots. As you can see from the pic below of three typical young women, most were in comfortable flat sporty shoes. The girl in the middle is wearing the ultimate in young women's foot fashion in Croatia right now -- an old fashioned-style high top sneaker. Converse high tops in colors other than black are really the most popular, but she appears to be wearing a nike version of the same style. I've never seen so many Converse hightops in one place in my life as I saw on young women and girl's feet throughout Croatia.

However, if you're a bit older and have wads (and wads and wads) of cash to burn, the streets of downtown Zagreb are lined with little, glossy shoe boutiques. Here's a typical one in a neighborhood akin to Boston's Newbury Street.

I saw far more of these little jewel-box-style shoe stores than I did jewelry stores. I guess shoes are a Croatian girl's best friend.

Or maybe it's a slavic or Balkan thing, because the streets of downtown Sombor also have far more shoe stores than practically anything else. Part of that is due to the fact that the Boreli shoe factory is located on the outskirts of town. So Boreli has at least four shopfronts downtown that I counted and possibly more. Unfortunately the shoe styles are ... stodgy. I asked a 20-something Serb girlfriend if she would buy shoes from Boreli, she said, "Well no, but my mother might."

Compare this snapshot of a typical Boreli shopfront to the Zagreb jewel-box above. It kind of sums up the differences in the two countries right currently. One is glitzy, fresh, but overpriced. The other is beat up, old fashioned, but rock solid at heart.


















Lastly, if you are a middle aged or older person in either country, you're more likely to buy your shoes at the greenmarket than in a shop. Here's a snapshot of a Croatian granny trying on rubber boots at an outdoor stall in downtown Ogulin.

By the way, aside from rubber boots and hundreds of Puma and Nike knock-off sneakers (mainly in blue for men) Ogulin's stalls also featured a lot of office-style shoes. All were nearly flat, perhaps a half inch heel at most, mainly a wide version of princess style. And every single one had a rounded toe. I guess the merger of ballet slipper and formal pump is now universal.

Sombor's Unwritten Shoe Law (Or, Why I've Got the Flu)

I've been sick with the flu for several days now, and apparently it's all my own fault because I flagrantly and frequently broke the unwritten but extremely important BARE FEET LAW in Sombor, Serbia.

Everyone here (and I mean everyone) wears shoes outdoors *all the time* even in their own backyards. These can be the flimsiest of sandles, but nevertheless the sole of your foot is covered. However, the split second your foot enters a house, it must be unshod. You're supposed to whip those shoes off and walk around barefoot (or in socks or house slippers) inside your home as well as other people's homes.

"What if you're all dressed up for a formal affair?" I asked a Serb girlfriend who recently moved back to live with her family in Sombor after a dozen years in New Jersey. "Sure you wouldn't take off your dressy shoes and walk around in bare feet in someone's house with a fancy outfit on?" "Oh, there's a procedure for that," she replied. She lept up from my kitchen table and ran out the front door, so she could enter again. This time, just as she stepped over the door into the house she raised one foot and placed her hand on it, as if to slip off her strappy sandle. Then she paused and looked coyly over her shoulder cocking an eyebrow at me. "This is how you show your hostess you're willing to take off your shoes." "And then she says 'It's ok to leave them on, right?" I asked. "Sometime yes, sometimes no."

Apparently this Shoe Law is not a Serbia-wide affair. People in Belgrade routinely wear shoes in the house. It's also not a Serb-ethnic thing, Serbs living in Croatia and other countries do not fret about shoe-wearing rules much. It's a Sombor thing. My husband thinks it arose 200+ years ago when the streets were often extremely muddy in this farm-market town.

No matter that the streets have been paved since the 1850s, I saw for myself at the outdoor fish Paprikas party last week, how this shoe law still holds sway. As we adults relaxed around an outdoor dining table, the young children frequently ran in and out of the propped-open back door of the house. No matter how much we'd drunk, or how engrossed we were in conversation, or how late it was, all the Sombor-born adults were on a continual state of what I can only call 'Shoe Alert. ' Each time a child approached that back door, someone in the group would break off conversation, and call out 'Take your shoes off" or "Put your shoes on!" whichever the situation called for. Then they would fix the child with a beady eye until the action in question was taken care of.

I can only imagine what my hostess thought of my dreadful American manners that same night when I forgot to take off my shoes when entering the house to go to the bathroom. She was gracious however, and made not a sign of her dismay.

Our next door neighbor couldn't help herself in a similar situation though. When she witnessed me walking about in our little grassy courtyard IN MY BARE FEET, she gasped loudly and cried out to my husband. I asked him why she was so concerned. "She thinks you'll get the flu if you walk outside in bare feet," he explained. "In 95 degree heat in August?" I asked. He replied, "Well, she's wrong of course, but she's older. It's old fashioned thinking."

However here I am now with a full blown case of the flu, so our neighbor's concerns are completely vindicated. As she knew they would be.

Current Serbian Shoe Fashions: lower, elegant, streamlined

The first thing I do when arriving in any foreign country is check out women's shoes. Men don't seem to understand this at all -- but I'm endlessly fascinated by it. Based on the Belgrade Bus Station (admittedly not a high fashion center) and nearly a week now in cafes in Sombor downtown (perhaps provincial, but better than nothing at all) I can tell you, unlike the US, high spikey heels are out. I didn't see anyone aside from a 14-year old in what were obviously hand-me-downs wearing thin heels taller than say 2 inches.

However, plenty of wedges are in, albeit at an average 2-3 inches, still a bit lower than I've seen in similar date-night street scenes back home where some women wobble more than walk. Also, I've seen plenty of kitten heels, especially as sandles. You won't see typical American plastic flip-flops, that's to casual for the women here whose sandles are equally comfortable and flat heeled, but slightly more elegant.

On the sneaker front, everything is very, very streamlined and also low-heeled. It's more like a sneaker genetically crossed with a ballet flat. A pair of US sneakers would look comically bulbous in their midst.

Lastly, although one store known for "sports shoes" has a couple of crok-look-alikes in the window, I've not seen anyone wearing Croks (real or faux.) And I doubt very much, aside from perhaps very small children's shoes, that Croks will ever make much headway in this land where they expect good looks just as much as comfort. Which is fine - the astounding $145 million that North Americans apparently spent on Croks in the last fiscal quarter (March-June) was one of the reasons I've decided to travel to foreign lands. OK, well, my husband handing me a ticket and saying 'We're going now" was the main one....