Notable South East journalist Raquel Mustillo faked an American accent while travelling in Serbia earlier this month.
Her ploy was undertaken as Australia is highly unpopular in that European country owing to the visa furore surrounding Serbian citizen and world number one tennis player Novak Djokovic and his bid to secure a place in the Australian Open currently being played in Melbourne.
“Feeling very diplomatically alone in Serbia, I alternated between American, English and Russian accents to avoid drawing any unnecessary attention to myself,” Ms Mustillo told The SE Voice.
“I am terrible at accents so it was a real hoot trying to maintain them.
“I was in Serbia’s second-largest city Novi Sad so, beyond the initial outrage when the Australian Open news broke, it was fairly chill.
“However, that could have been due to my accents or the fact we were about to go into the Serbian Christmas.
“The Serbian capital city of Belgrade was pretty fiery and they had at least three days of protest rallies.
“Novak’s parents attended one of them and addressed the crowd.
“The mood was very different in Serbia compared to what I have picked up in the Australian media and people are largely very upset with the government and Australia as a whole.
“A lot of swear words have been bandied around.”
Ms Mustillo said she was going to go back to Belgrade after Novi Sad, but decided to go to Bosnia.
“I think I will let things chill for a bit and head back in a month or so,” she said.
“I have only met one Australian in the eight weeks I have been away which is very unusual as usually we are in the Balkans, particularly Serbia, all the time in normal circumstances.”
Ms Mustillo is widely-travelled and was in Albania before visiting Serbia.
“I am now in Bosnia and Herzegovina which has a very sad and turbulent history,” she said.
“Sarajevo has some of the best museums I have been to in my life.
“Going to a former extermination camp today which will be interesting.”
The one-time Millicent North Primary School and Millicent High School student has family ties to Albania and Italy and is bi-lingual.
A solo traveller, Ms Mustillo seldom frequents the high-profile tourist haunts in her overseas travels.
For example, she visited North Korea in 2015 and was one of the first Westerners to ever plant rice in that Communist country.
