Twenty years of global travel has made me pretty choosy about souvenirs, but Milo is too green to resist the siren song of the colorful wares festooning the tourist trails. Not that his acquisition lust is confined to the kitsch cranked out for foreign visitors. It started in a Budapest subway station, when he caught sight of some Yu-Gi-Oh-ish trading cards in a kiosk window. "How would you have played with them?" I reasoned, as I frog-marched him, howling, toward the turnstile. "They're in Hungarian."
"Yeah, and money doesn't grow on trees, you know," Inky chimed in, helpfully repeating a shopworn mantra she must have picked up from me. I worry about her, remembering how reticent I once was about expressing anything resembling material desire. If one day she decides to haul off and really want something, loudly, unequivocally, the way her brother does, I don't think I'd mind.
Meanwhile, her brother's magpie tendencies were dragging us all down. Things came to a head in Sarajevo's Turkish bazaar, a charming warren of tea shops, coppersmiths and souvenir stalls. I'd call it a minefield, but that seems a tad insensitive, given what the citizens of this city went through in the early '90s. Any Sarajevan schoolkid who endured the siege understands the true meaning of deprivation. For the record, deprivation doesn't mean your mom refusing to buy you a giant pencil fifteen minutes after buying you an expensive handicraft octopus carved from a palm nut.
I like to think I'm not the only mother who cares whether her child is perceived as a brat. It's not so much a problem with the girl, but the boy is a trickier prospect, particularly in any setting where money is exchanged for goods. Both children had already been promised a souvenir from the Turkish bazaar, and as far as Milo
"Let's think this through." Steering me by my elbow, Greg herded the entire family to a bench several storefronts away. Milo was one monofilament away from losing it, but Greg implemented some horse-whisperer techniques and laid out a counter-proposal. The way he saw it, each child should be given a set amount, a sort of seed grant to spend as he or she saw fit. I immediately conceded the superiority of his plan, which was not only brilliant, but also educational. It would let me pretend we were reinforcing the homework they weren't doing. It sounded good to the kids, too, even Milo, who pocketed his ten-mark bill with something like relief.
After fifteen minutes trolling the bazaar, peacefully pawing at the merch, we decided that we'd be more effective, i.e. we'd get to the museum Greg and I wanted to visit sooner, if we split up, each parent escorting one child. I got Milo. "Is it okay if I know what I want now?" he asked.
"Sure, it's your money. Do you remember where you saw it?"
He described a newsstand we had passed earlier that that displayed a few toys and other non-touristy tchotckes behind glass. I remembered it because Milo had found it so painful that I wouldn't agree to any of the items at which he pointed. All former bets were off, though, now that he had his own money to blow. I navigated the ancient maze as Milo skipped by my side, alternately singing and fretting that I wouldn't be able to find it, or that someone else would have beaten him to the punch, snapping up the one thing on which his heart
The newsstand vendor didn't betray any particular opinion she may have had regarding the little American boy's choice, but neither did she offer to bag his purchase. Fortunately, I never travel without a nylon shopping bag, and the one I had on me was just big enough to contain this blister-packed monstrosity. I let Milo carry it himself, telling him that though I was happy for him, he should be discreet. "See, some really bad things happened to the people here. There was a war, and there were real explosions and real guns and a lot of people got killed. So, while you and I know it's just a toy, it might be the kind of toy that could make the people who live here feel bad. And I know you wouldn't want to make anybody feel bad."
Dumbing things down in that way makes me cringe, but Milo, bless his heart, seemed to get the message. When he handed his treasure off to Greg, who would be dropping stuff off at our guesthouse before our excursion to the Siege of Sarajevo Museum, he gave explicit instructions that the contents should be kept under wraps. He didn't want to hurt our hostess, who had introduced him to her pet Dalmation and invited him into the kitchen to help her make pancakes.
As to the museum, it was excellent, though perhaps not so much for children. There are plenty of photos