Spavao sam kao zaklan.

And the most nonsensical analogy I can think of.

One of the many Quebecoise friends that I made during my travels, Élise, is an insomniac. This is why she reads my blog, coincidentally -- because there is nothing better for her to do when she is awake all night. We don't talk that often, but whenever I think about her, I'm hoping that she's sleeping better. Every time I get around to emailing her, I make sure and ask how that's going.

I don't speak French, which is Élise's first language, so I always write to her in English, her second.

"still sleeping like a baby?" I asked in the bon fête wish I sent her the other day.

"I have to thank you as well for updating your blog," she replied, knowing that I knew what she meant by that: it gives her something to do at 4 a.m. when she's still wide awake. "See, I'm still sleeping like a baby. Pathetic isn't it?"

That got me thinking about the phrase "sleeping like a baby."

Doesn't look very asleep to me.

Every parent with young children always celebrates the moment when "Janie is finally sleeping through the night," as if it's some huge event; as if normally, babies don't sleep peacefully at all. This is common knowledge. Everyone knows that babies cry in the middle of the night. Everyone knows that babies, more than anyone except perhaps former NFL linemen with sleep apnia, do not sleep like babies. And yet we continue to say it: "Man, I slept like a baby last night."

It makes no sense. Kind of like saying "It's the same difference," or asking where the bathroom is.

French speaking Élise makes more sense than we native English speakers when she compares a baby's sleeping habits to that of an insomniac.

Now, in Bosnia-Hercegovina, where I met Élise, they don't compare a good night's rest to something so nonsensical. Life is a little less rosy in the Balkans. We obsess over a recent downturn in the market like it's the greatest burden ever borne by any society in the history of mankind; they're still obsessing over 500 years of Turkish occupation, two world wars lost, genocides and NATO bombings. They view things a little differently in the Balkans. Things like, well, life. It's not nearly as cuddly as our American world view.

"Spavao sam kao zaklan," is how the Serbo-Croat speakers describe a peaceful night's sleep. Translation: I slept like I was slaughtered.

Which is how I slept many a night at the Three Black Catz in Belgrade after drinking rakija and pivo for six hours.

The South Slavs (English for Yugoslavs) are as close to a no bullshit culture as you're going to find. I once met an old Serbian man who, within maybe five seconds of having shaken my hand, let me know through an interpreter that he thought I had hands like a woman. "They are soft, he says, like woman," my friend Živko said.

I wonder if Živko describes things these days as being "as soft as Bili's hands," instead of a baby's bottom.