Name That Balkan Dictator!

It's Pop Quiz Friday here on Halfway Down the Danube, a new feature I am inaugurating in a hopel/e/s/s/ful attempt to get more comments on (and links to) this blog.

Today's question: from the following quote, can you identify the Balkan dictator this person is talking about? NB: one culturally specific word has been changed. No fair using Google.

Imponderables

You know, when Doug and Claudia asked me to guest on this blog, I was kind of bemused. I really had no idea what I should write about. I mean, it's Halfway down the Danube. It has a theme. Its readers expect erudite articles on Romanian monetary policy, not some guy in Brooklyn rambling about the punk rock episode of Quincy, or wondering when the Kool-Aid guy started wearing pants.

But finally, here's a question that's topical for this blog: female pop stars from the former Yugoslavia... why haven't they taken over the world? I mean, Ceca. Severina. Well, that's two, but do you really need more? Okay, I'll throw in the back-up dancers from Bosnia-Hercegovina's entry in the Eurovision Song Contest.

I swear, if Laibach was a girl band, we'd all be speaking German today.

Where we've been

Claudia had to go to Germany for a couple of days, for family reasons.

She took Alan with her, because she didn't want to leave both kids behind, and because Alan has the huge happy crazy wild love affair with his grandmother, and she with him. David stayed behind with me, because flying with a toddler and a baby is a PITA.

Well, the "couple of days" ended up being, like, ten days -- things got a bit complicated up there.

So Claude and I have both been single parents. (Single parents. Single parents. How do they do it? How?)

David and I have been two guys together. We lie on the living room carpet watch the Discovery Channel and eat cereal mixed with yogurt. Actually, we've been having a pretty good time.

Well, except that David got sick -- dry cough and a fever. Nothing too bad, I don't think -- on the whole he's been a pretty sturdy little guy -- but it had us both up a couple of nights. (He seems to be on the mend now, cross fingers.)

So, the time for blogging, she has been lacking a little.

But we haven't gone away. Well, yes, Claudia has, but not away. And she should be back this weekend.

Meanwhile... thanks for your patience.

One year ago today

It was Doug's first day of work and our second day in Bucharest. Happy anniversary to us!

Slovenia's "Erased"

Here's an interesting post and thread on Slovenia's "Erased" people. It's over at Michael's excellent "Glory of Carniola" blog.

-- Okay, this is sort of a cheap way to turn my several long comments on that blog into a post on this blog. But it's late and the baby has a cough and is sleeping restlessly, and I'm afraid too much typing will wake him up. So.

Just plain dumb

EU immigration policy, that is.

Eastern Europe is full of smart, ambitious, hard-working young people who would jump at the chance to move to Germany or France or Britain. In the last three years, we've met engineers, doctors, nurses, software designers, journalists, economists, entrepreneurs of every sort imaginable.

Most of these people are under 35. Over that age, people are usually too settled to seriously consider emigrating (though there are exceptions). Below it, though... well, the younger an educated person is, in this part of the world, the more likely it is that they're at least thinking about leaving. And the converse seems to be true, too: the more educated a young person is, the stronger the pull of the West.

(This makes a lot of sense if you think about it. If you're young but unskilled... well, being a bricklayer in Spain or Germany is not that much better than being a bricklayer in Serbia or Romania. A software engineer in the West, on the other hand, can make quite a lot more money. Even adjusting for the higher cost of living, it's a very rational decision.)

Serbia and Romania are not unusual. There are thousands and thousands of people like this, all over Eastern Europe.

Meanwhile, most of the EU countries are facing a looming demographic crisis. In the next couple of decades, they're not going to have enough people of working age to support the ever-growing ranks of the nonworking elderly. From Italy to Belgium, western Europe desperately needs more hard-working young people.

And now all these new countries -- full of smart, ambitious young people who would very much like to move West -- have just joined the EU. Hungarian electricians, Polish computer programmers, Slovakian mechanical engineers, Latvian health care workers: they're all available now for recruitment to the west.

So, of course, the EU member's response to this is....

...to slam the door shut. Of the 15 old EU member states, every one but Ireland chose to place sharp restrictions on the free movement of people from the 10 new members. The Germans, the Italians, the Swedes and Dutch and French: they're all closing their doors. And in most cases, it looks like they plan to keep them closed for the maximum time allowable -- seven years. So they're not going to take advantage of this opportunity until 2011.

Sympathy for the Devil

The only way to really get to know a city, I find, is to get lost in it. Which is how I found myself walking towards the railyard on Bucharest's inner ring road. Literally kilometers and kilometers of high-rises from the bad old days. I doubt if they've ever been the focus of so much tourist appreciation before.

Now, I am going to be contrary here, and say that by recent global standards of architecture, the Ceaucescu-era buildings are not absolutely horrible. True, they're vast malignant shoddy wastes of concrete. But that was hardly unique to Romania. Consider Governor Rockefeller's showpiece center in New York's state capital, Albany. It's almost exactly contemporary with old Nic's rebuilding scheme. Then turn away, quickly. An eyewash might be indicated.

And in fact, when I saw these remarkably ugly buildings, I couldn't help but imagine them in an American context. So the state television building on the north side of Bucharest, a long low-slung concrete affair tiled several improbable shades of sea-green (and site of some major violence during the revolution; there are memorials), looks almost exactly what an aquarium in Cleveland built during the Johnson administration might look like. The infamous Palace of the People looks strikingly like the world's largest Ramada Inn. And so on.

The real crime isn't that Ceaucescu built ugly junk. Everyone was doing it at the time: east, west, north, and south. It's that he gutted a lovely, perfectly functional city to do it. There's enough left of old Bucharest to figure out what it must have been like. But it's rather like Cuvier extrapolating an extinct mammal from a single tooth.

Interest rates fall! Interest rates rise!

"Official sources quoted by Mediafax said The National Bank would reduce the official rate next week, probably by 0.5%. For the time being, the official rate is 21.25%."

-- From Gardianul ("The Guardian") this morning.

Now that is interesting, and here's why. At the moment, the rate of inflation of the Romanian leu is somewhere around 12%. The National Bank is dealing in leu, so it includes this figure in its interest rate. So the real interest rate is 21.25% minus inflation, or around 9%.

Halfway down the East River

Hi all. This is Carlos, the mysterious fellow who has occasionally been mentioned on the pages of this blog. This is something of a test post, but I'd still like to thank Claudia and Doug for letting me post whatever crosses my mind here. (They may yet regret this.) I'm a first time blogger, but a long time commenter. As you can see from the title of this post, I'm not actually anywhere near the Balkans (or even the Carpathians) at the moment, being in sunny Brooklyn, New York. I have a bunch of terribly obscure hobbies, unkempt hair, no tattoos, I'm an Aries, and my favorite color is blue. And yes, I do drink an awful lot of coffee. Soon I will have a real post.

Charles de Gaulle revisited

Remember, back in November, when we bitched and complained about Charles de Gaulle airport?

I had to go through CdG again only two weeks ago -- the fare was just so much cheaper than flying through Frankfurt. It hadn't improved one bit and I nearly missed my connection because of the endless bus rides they make you take between terminals. The terminals I used were B and E. Little did I know that I was actually lucky not to have the roof falling down on me.

We'll probably just not use this airport ever again.

2007 + x: The water cooler factor

I've always wondered why Romanians were so adamant about their country joining the EU in 2007. Listening to the talk, it appeared as if this date was fixed, absolutely certain. On May 1, the entire city of Bucharest was decked in European flags. For a moment, I was not sure whether Romania hadn't managed to do the impossible thing and make the EU a union of 26. On May 9, Europe Day was celebrated with a giant firework and President Illiescu declared that Romania was a "de facto member of the European Union".

Not so, my friends and I'm not the only one to think so.