The wrong rung of the social ladder

We had a Serbian lunch yesterday, complete with home-made Gibanica and Ajvar. The mother of one of our work friends was visiting from Belgrade, and we spent a pleasant afternoon in a little Serbicised corner of Heidelberg. A good deal of the discussion, as ever, was about whether or not to move back to Serbia. Our friends are both Serbian, and often think of moving home. One of the things she was mentioning yesterday was ones social standing in the countries in which so many Balkan people now live: France, Germany, Austria, the US. One can be the king of the hill in Serbia, but when you move somewhere else, you end up on the bottom rung of the social ladder. And as a result one ends up mingling with people outside your normal social group in the new country. Our friend was telling us that they - with four college degrees between them - regularly attend parties with Serbians or Croatians that are truly working class: cleaners, laborers, etc. Something that is mostly unheard of in - well - anywhere.

Examples are everywhere. Consider the old friends of G.'s parents: they moved to Calgary for work. He had been a leading petroleum engineer in Serbia, but found himself being placed with entry level engineers. I think they like living in Canada for many reasons, but struggle to cope with the loss of status. Most people start to wonder, indeed, if it isn't better to go home and face whatever reality they have to face there - lower salaries, lack of work, etc. - if only to be better off in terms of connections and social standing.

It isn't, of course, a problem unique to Serbians in Europe. It is everywhere. Poles moving the UK, Russians moving to Israel, and many others all make the same comments. The university professor turned street cleaner is a well-worn cliche.

I think the problem that most Westerners have with understanding this, is that we normally don't move countries out of shear necessity. Normally those who go abroad are doing so by choice, and more often than not it is the opportunity of a lifetime that allows somebody to take direct advantage of skills gained at home and needed abroad. And if things go foul, we can usually return home, without too much lost in the process. For those moving out of a need to support families, the situation is alas different.

I guess my message is that the next time you hear a foreigner struggling to make him or herself understood in a language that he/she probably learned after the age of 30, that possibly you might nevertheless be in the presence of a genius or at least somebody that you would like to know better or perhaps possibly admit onto your social network. You never know, maybe - in exchange for just a modicum of respect - they have a house on the Croatian/Bulgarian/Romanian coast (free holidays!), or can get your foot in the door into something lucrative in a country you don't understand.

More little countries

The situation in Georgia reminds me again about the force of nationalism. I don't pretend to understand the situation at all, but I presume that again there are multiple groups of people who a) don't like each other, b) treat each other badly, and c) probably deserve each other. And as for the whole Serbia/Kosovo thing, I don't know what to think. Separation is a good thing as it might stop the bitterness, but a bad thing because it provides another example that groups can't co-exist. It is a good thing as we should acknowledge groups of people their right to self goverment, but a bad thing because the new divisions often go along with the creation of small, embittered and often badly treated minorities inside them. And on and on.

But frankly, my biggest problem with dividing big countries into smaller ones is that I begin to wonder why we need all these silly little countries and what good does it do in the long run? Drunk a few months ago I was arguing with a Nationalist Catalan friend of mine, and my final comments were along the lines of "why do you want to create another bullshit little country?" and "what, another Switzerland? Sheesh." Drunk or not, I think I may have had a point.

Smaller countries don't just create additional currencies and border crossings, but actually divulge power into smaller and smaller pieces. What chance of a powerful voice in Europe does (say) Slovenia have compared to (say) Poland? Sure, they can be members of the EU, they can join Nato, etc. but will any of the big players in the world really listen to them? When I think of the former Yugoslavia, exactly this force - namely the desire by neighbors not to have an over-ambitious all-slavic nation - was very often behind the politics. Italy and Austria, for instance, were always vetoing the early Yugoslavia pretty clearly for this reason. Originally it was because they thought it easier to make land claims on a set of smaller countries, but perhaps those now running Italy and Germany and France and England have, at the back of their political consciousness, a desire not to have another Poland storming into Europe, but a series of smaller, rinky-dink countries that are easier to manipulate.

I don't pretend that such a view addresses any of the complexities of the Georgia or Kosovo situations, but it is at least something that a semi-nationalist might like to remember. United we stand; divided we have less influence.

Yugo diary 2008 VI - Building a house without a boiler in the bathtub

In England, even now, people almost never have good water pressure. I remember being amazed when I bought my first flat in the UK to find that, though the flat was built in 1988, that, like most other places I'd lived in to that point, hot water was made by heating (electrically) cold water that was stored in a large, un-pressurised bucket stored in the ceiling. This means that, like every where else I'd lived, that hot water pressure consisted of a dribble driven simply by gravity from the ceiling, and that, consequently, one could never adjust temperature in the shower, having either scalding hot or freezing cold water, and nothing in between.

Things are generally better on continental Europe (including the former Yugoslavia), but as we slowly begin to renovate a house here, I've been noticing some of the oddities of house-building here. Namely the boiler-in-the-bathtub phenomenon. Having a boiler in the bathtub seems to be about as consistently ex-Yugo as the insistence on wearing slippers in the house (watch out for Brain fever) or the universal paranoia about drafts causing serious illness even in hot weather (ditto). In both Serbia and Croatia it often seems the norm to place the houses boiler above the bathtub. And more often than not this comes at the expense of any ledge to put soap on, or (more seriously) anywhere to fix the shower head to the wall, meaning that showers consist often of a rubber hose with a shower head that one has to hold, while always avoiding contact with the boiler next to you.

And its funny that people rationalise this with the same pseudo-logic that English people use about the water pressure. Where English people might say that European hot-water is too strongly pressurised (one friend told me that showers in Germany actually hurt), at least one Croatian builder told me that if the boiler was anywhere else, it might take 20 minutes for the hot water to move through the pipes. And just like in Enland, there is no counter argument along the lines of "but I've seen it work better in other places, honestly".

Still, if I had to choose, a boiler in the bathtub beats never having proper water pressure, but I'll fight tooth and nail to get that damned boiler put somewhere else.

Yugo diary 2008 V - Langauge Lunancy in Unlikely Places

Croatians are probably the most language sensitive in the former Yugoslavia, and I'm certainly not the first to comment on this. But I must admit this sensitivity is being expressed in some pretty odd places, the oddest of which is surely ingredients of snack foods. While on holiday, one always buys a lot of junk food - salty sticks, coke, etc. - and Croatian manufacturers clearly see this is as an opportunity to express linguistic distinctiveness.

On the back of many foods, the list of languages explaining ingredients is impressive: Slovak, Russian, Hungarian, Romanian, German, English, Italian. And helpfully the standard traveler/car symbols for the countries are used to denote them: SK, RU, HU, RO, DE, GB, IT. I noticed the other day a symbol I hadn't seen before MNG as well as separate lists of ingredients for BiH, HR and SRB (Bosnia/Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia). And then it clicked: Montenegrin, making four lists of ingredients where previously there would have been just one. A glance revealed that the differences were mostly a mixture of ijekavian and ekavian changes variously mixed up in ways presumed to be most peculiar to the language and some cute differences, such as Kisela voda being used only in Serbian & Bosnian for carbonated water.

I wonder if armies of ex-Jugoslav polyglots are employed to accentuate the differences in what is, after all, a single list of ingredients that would - minor variations aside - be understandable by all four groups of people. Perhaps it is worth thinking about what the equivalents would be like in the various English flavors. I mean, after all, it is obscene to consider English, American, Australian and Canadian to be the same language. So let's set the record straight with the ingredients to Coca-cola.

USA: Seltzer water, High fructose corn syrup, carmel color, phosphoric acid, natural flavors, caffine, aspartame (NutraSweet brand), potassium benzoate, citric acid

GB: Sparkling water, corn syrup elevated in fructose, colour of caramel, phosphoric acid extract, flavourings (including caffeine), Nutrasweet, benzoic acid potassium salt, citrate at low pH.

CAN: Club soda, sweet corn syrup, carmel colour, phosphoric acid, natural flavors, caffeine, Nutrasweet artificial sweetener (contains aspartame), potassium benzoate, citric acid.

AUS: Carbonated water, corn syrup, carmel coloring, phosphoric acid, flavors from natural sources, caffeine, Sweetener (Nutrasweet, contains aspartame), benozic & citric acids.

No problem. A few spelling differences (e.g. Caffeine/Caffine, Colour/Color, Carmel/Caramel), different colloquialisms (Sparkling/Seltzer water), and rearrangements and voila! Not that there is actually any difference between them, but perhaps somebody who didn't speak English might begin to believe they were truly different, though related.

Yugo diary Summer 2008 IV - Becoming normal Europeans... on the road

I was reading the other day about the late, great Zoran Đinđić. I was interested to read in Wikipedia that (and I like they way this is put) many people felt he was, at the time, the best hope for Serbians to become "normal" Europeans. Certainly Gs mother thinks this. "If he was still alive, we would be in the EU." But what are Normal Europeans? Tough one to be sure. What links the person in Athens with the one in Helsinki? This is a theme that I would like to develop later, but let's focus on one thing that I've been exposed to a lot during the past week, and that makes Serbia very abnormal in the context of Europe: Driving.

Now I must say I've driven in many European places with crazy drivers: Crete, Greece, Sicily, Marseilles and other more terrifying places like Istanbul & Tunis. And based on this I'd have to say that people in Serbia drive more like those in Turkey or Tunisia than those in Spain or Germany. I've had crazy driving experiences in France, Portugal, Italy - the usual stuff: tailgating, rude hand gestures, speeding, etc. And I always feel like Germans are rather brutal, or at least inconsiderate on the road, even when they are being safe. But in these places I've experienced nothing like those I experienced in just six days of driving in Serbia. Overtaking at speed on the left shoulder when somebody is waiting at a pedestrian crossing - mothers with children carefully leaning out past my car to avoid instant death. An eight year old child nervously and quite desperately trying to cross the road to his mother only to be sworn at by savages in white vans. Driving in the middle of a two lane national road under the assumption that people coming the other direction will just get out of the way on the hard shoulder. Actually pushing a car that is, in your opinion, taking too long to go around a large gaping hole in the road. Tailgating, gesticulating and honking impatiently at the driver in front of you in a construction zone on the Autoput when the other driver is doing 80km/h in a 40km/h zone, and knows (as well as you do) that there is a police speed control 1km ahead. Making it a habit to reverse on the Autoput when you've missed a junction (and well done, you've put your hazards on, that'll stop all those over-taking lunatics behind you). Normal? Hardly.

The other rather savage thing is the attitude towards seatbelts. In the seventies and eighties in Alberta (my sometimes redneck home province in Canada), when the laws about seatbelts gradually came into force, there was a lot of complaining and I had mostly forgotten about all of this until I drove with passengers (or as one) in Serbia. This week I've heard the same moronic statements I remember from Alberta 25-30 years ago. "Seatbelts trap you in a burning car, or one that is submerged under water" or "You don't have to wear a seatbelt here" or "Don't you trust my driving?" And odd behavior too: I see people taking the belts off (say) when they get off the Autoput, or when they get close to home, or taking them off on the Autoput once they are on the straight. I half-wonder if it might be embarrassing to be seen to be wearing one. Incredibly, at least one of the ex-pats we know (i.e. returned to Serbia after years of living in Normal Europe) also has this attitude, looking at me like I'm somehow less of a man for insisting that she wear one. For me seatbelts in the car are like slippers in a Serbian house - its dangerous not to be wearing them. Anyway, all rather primitive, rather 30 years ago, and not very, ahem, normal European.

I often think that something said in the US version of The Office applies here. When sycophantic employee Dwight Shrute is asked by noodle-head boss Michael Scott about the most inspirational thing that he was ever told by him, he answered immediately that it was: "Don't be an idiot", clarifying that now "whenever I'm about to do something, I ask myself 'would an idiot do this?' and if the answer is 'yes', I don't do it". Applies, seemingly, on the road here. Would an idiot put his blinkers on and reverse 500m to get back to a junction on a busy motorway to save ten minutes?

And more seriously, for any Road Gorilla who might getting upset about this as some kind of slight on his (or her) manliness, watch these:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVBfMMMUsGs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb5q_YYpxB0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1HV5h4K8D0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AT5e44lty88

And you will change your driving habits forever.

Yugo diary Summer 2008 III - The improvement of Novi Sad

Several people in Serbia have asked me how Novi Sad looks today. And I have to say, that for the record, it is looking a lot better on just about every level than how I first remember it in 2002. The first things I noticed in Novi Sad, the first time I visited, are those things that most residents don't notice, and moreover don't see any different from, say, Vienna or Frankfurt or Marseilles. The dirt, for starters. In 2002, the roads in Novi Sad sat like swamps of mud, peppered with rubbish. Today, the city is looking after these things a lot better, and where there had been muck, there is now grass, and even when there isn't grass, at least there is less rubbish.


Another big change is the number of kiosks. On Dunavska (the main street) in 2002, kiosks were everywhere, selling the usual odds and ends that kiosks sell, and this gave the impression more of a Turkish bazaar than a Western city. I don't know why, but now they are no more, and the high street looks more like a pedestrian zone in any European city. I have mixed feelings about this - kiosks were kind of local culture - but I must admit it is better without them. I wonder what happened to remove them. I think it was in the space of a few months, as suddenly, one summer, they weren't there anymore.

The same goes for the park in the center of the city. In 2002, this was a depressing or even scary place, rubbish, needles, dog-shit, that kind of thing. Bins sat overflowing with all manner of muck and people generally seemed to hurry through the place. Today, though I did see a rogue needle (at least it was a new one), the park is otherwise very nice.




Other things remain more typically Eastern than Western European. I'm still reminded more of central Athens on a hot day than Hyde Park. As a Polish colleague told me when he visited Novi Sad himself, the smell of the air is typical of a country where people have too little money to meet emissions standards for cars (which I think don't exist yet in Serbia, but would be happy to be corrected). I once walked home - eyes watering - from the city center during rush hour and was honestly shocked at the air quality. I guess it will get better as cars get better.

Many buildings also remain shabby. The office where G's company works is fairly nicely done up inside, but the interior of the building looks pretty terrible, and the outside of this building is visibly eroding. Again, the issue is money, and I'm encouraged that many buildings are getting facelifts. All in good time.


Graffiti is also everywhere. Even in relatively well-to-do neighborhoods it is really omnipresent. We were walking in the city the other day, heading to a relative's flat, and I started to get that feeling of walking in a rough council estate in, say, White City in London. G. was pointing out that the area was actually quite up-market, and that engineers and doctors and lawyers lived in these rough looking tower blocks. Again, all understandable when people have little money, but I do wonder about the graffiti.

And now that we have a dog, I notice the animals. Dogs and cats are everywhere in Serbia, running wild, pooping in children's playgrounds, etc. In Germany, perhaps rules and attitudes are perhaps extreme in a different direction: one never sees dogs running through the street. Any rogue animal is quickly taken off the street to avoid it pooping in places where children might be, but anyway, German dog-owners would never allow their precious Jagthund (or whatever) to run as freely as many dogs do in Serbia. Interestingly, however, both Croatia and Serbia have issued edicts that all dogs must be registered (in fact, the only post we received in our house on Krk was about registering our dog), so I'm told that, in principle, all of these street-wise, often mangy rogue dogs have a chip in them. All these little things, I'm told, are part of the large list of things that one must do to qualify for EU membership. Hopefully car emissions are another.

Yugo diary Summer 2008 II - Zekstra is still ok in my book

We've come to Novi Sad for the wedding of the daughter of old friends of G.s family. Unfortunately, I hadn't been able to dry clean anything before we left, so I dragged a not very clean suit in the car, leaving it squished between a suitcase and the dog food. It emerged from the 1400 km journey looking like a potato sack, so G thought it wise to see if we could get me a new suit. As I'm 203 cm (6'8") tall, I'm always skeptical about any suggestion that I can just go out and buy something as tailored-to-fit as a suit just off the rack in a shop, but we went into Zekstra, the Serbian clothing retailer, which I have mentioned before, on the off chance that it might just work this time.

The woman helping us looked me up and down and said that it wasn't a problem,and that they had several suits that would fit. I scoffed, and followed her. Yeah right, I thought. Heard this one before.

Much to my surprise, however, I tried one on and - hey presto! - it fit, with the only problem being the fact that the legs were too long. I bought two suits, and danced out of the shop feeling that I was once again among the land of the giants where I belong. There are some big boys in this country to be sure. And Zekstra - all is forgiven. You are still all right by me.