The Hidden Europe: What Eastern Europeans Can Teach Us (WanderLearn) by Tapon Francis

Author:Tapon, Francis [Tapon, Francis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: humor, language, Eastern Europe, culture, balkans, central europe, baltic, travelogue, European, history
Publisher: WanderLearn
Published: 2012-12-31T05:00:00+00:00

What Serbia Can Teach Us

Have a two-hour coffee with your friends. It helps to have a 20 percent unemployment rate, but even if it were two percent, Serbians would make time to socialize for hours in cafés. Sometimes it seems that Serbians put friendship before family, they’ll have a coffee with anyone.

Take care of yourself. It’s not necessarily about how you dress, although Serbians pay a lot of attention to that. What’s more important is to maintain a healthy fitness level. Serbians are more athletic and trim than the average American.

Eat food in season. Serbians don’t buy tomatoes in the winter. Although it’s changing, they’re still old school and favor fresh fruits and vegetables.

Don’t judge a citizen the same way you judge his government. Throughout Serbia I didn’t hide behind my French and Chilean nationality. Instead, I boldly introduced myself as an American to see what kind of reaction I would get. I came from a country that had bombed Serbia just a few years before. Nevertheless, Serbians never flinched or gave me a suspicious look when they learned I was American. Their knee-jerk reaction was positive, friendly, and welcoming. It wasn’t fake kindness either—they welcomed me to their homes and rolled out the red carpet. Some of them had negative feelings about the US, but they never let those feelings get confused with an individual American. We should all separate our feelings for a nation with our feelings for individuals from that nation.

Laugh at your own misfortune. Despite their victimism, Serbians keep their sense of humor. It’s a unique, biting, dark sense of humor, but it’s a healthy sign that most Serbs know not to take life too seriously.

Earn $500 a month (the average Serb wage in 2011) and live like you have $1,000. And they do it without credit cards or debt. How they do this is still somewhat of a mystery.

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