A Study in Contrasts
There’s a striking contrast between the gloomy economic situation here and the cheerful surface.
M. and I just had a lovely lunch at an outdoors café in the old Turkish quarter, which is just a few stone’s throws (or would that be stones’ throws?) away from our home. The food was great, as it usually is — we eat there probably two or three times a week — and the weather beautiful. It was nice just hanging out without having to rush back to work (today was a slow news day, after yesterday’s hectic activity related to the various elections in the Balkans). This is a very livable place in many ways — and yet we know that we live in a bubble, sustained by artificially inflated fees underwritten by the Western taxpayer and cheap local labor.
Not that I’m complaining.
But nothing gets produced here, and nobody is investing. We live on credit economically and politically. (And I still haven’t cleaned out that newspaper pile in the living room.)
By the way, today is the anniversary of Slobodan Milošević’s fall in 2000. My compatriot Carla del Ponte was in Belgrade these days to wag her finger real strong, and I’m sure they’re all real intimated now and will arrest their PIFWC right away.
Please use the comments section to enlighten me about the plural of PIFWC. PsIFWC? PIFWCs?
