Tucker Jones - Bridge Year Serbia
If you drove through my home town of Chapel Hill, North Carolina lately, you could have heard me on the radio. I've produced a show on a local community radio station for five years, where we play music and interview local bands and artists. I've also volunteered with the Morehead Planetarium's summer camps, where I encouraged elementary school students to explore science. My enthusiasm for international affairs began when I joined my high school's Model United Nations team in my freshman year. Since then, I've been hooked. I've managed to combine my interests in media and international relations by becoming an international correspondent for the Frankfurt Globe, for which I write monthly articles. I'm also interested in economics. I was on North Carolina's team for the National Economics Challenge, and through the University of North Carolina, I've performed research in behavioral economics, the study of the not-quite-rational. I love utopian and dystopian literature, and I taught a seminar on the subject at my high school, the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics. In addition to learning the Serbian language, I hope to improve my Esperanto over the course of the Bridge Year Program.
Posted Apr 02, 2012
When discussing family with Serbians, there’s more than just a language barrier. “We’re going to my sister’s slava,” my host dad Vladan said one evening.
I was confused. “I thought you were an only child.”
In Serbian, first cousins are also considered brothers and sisters. This isn’t for a lack of a better word—rođak, literally meaning “cousin,” ...
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Posted Nov 16, 2011
I had been warned to expect culture shock in the transition from the United States to Serbia. But when we moved into our hostel in the middle of Novi Sad’s pedestrian zone, I noticed the similarities between my old hometown of Chapel Hill, NC, and my new city more than the differences. We lived at the end of a side alleyway that opened up to a cafe and a statue of Jovan Jovanović Zmaj, a famous children's author and poet. More cafes line each side of the street, and every turn conceals one or two more...