The phrase “Eastern Europe” calls to most Western minds a certain aesthetic to the environs, namely of dilapidated buildings covered in graffiti and bullet holes, ancient cars, beefy men with short brush-cuts, dance music, and muggings. I must admit that this perception is more or less correct, and as we moved from North to South, from the tidy simplicity of Vienna into Hungary and down to Serbia, the landscapes changed with every passing hour. Abandoned buildings multiplied, cars grew older and more Lada-like, the graffiti shifted to the Cyrillic alphabet, and so on. But the people in Eastern Europe show none of this unkemptness. They are remarkably fashionable and even in the small town of Novi Sad, tremendously lively. We arrived on a Sunday night and found the entire downtown core, a stretch of no more than six square blocks of restaurants and bars, completely packed with strutting adolescence, every bar filled to capacity, teenagers walking around licking ice cream cones while their chihuahuas sniffed each other.

We received a royal welcome from two Serbs, Razkol (?) and Sergey, friends of friends of someone in Toronto. They immediately took us out for a traditional Serbian dinner of… meat, piled on top of additional meat, served with bread and yogurt. The dish we tried (”cevapcici”?) is called “spicy hamburger” in English, and a more perfect translation you could not find, for that is exactly what it was. I’ve become intimately familiar with the ubiquitous Kebab these past few weeks. It is difficult to walk three blocks in any Eastern European city without walking past one of those enormous rotating meat logs being sliced into by a man in a hat. But Kebab is something more like ground meat fashioned into a particular shape, spiced heavily, and set atop a bed of lettuce or a pita round. Anyway, it’s delicious, and probably the most cost-efficient meal you can find out here, meaning that I’ve eaten more than a lifetime’s worth of Kebab in fewer than three weeks.

Sergey and Razkol (I’m calling him Razkol because I read Crime and Punishment a few weeks ago, and the name Razkolnikov is still stuck in my head) are software developers who work in the outsourcing business. Specifically, they are the “outsourcees”, as Serbia is starting to become a major destination for that sort of thing. We talked shop for a little while and they expressed all the same gripes about the software industry that I have (and probably every industry): incompetent management, hostile executives, people getting paid to do nothing, etc.

As is the norm in Serbia, talk turned to politics shortly thereafter, where Sergey related the following story about Montenegro (and the famous Montenegrin highlander temperament), which he claimed is true (further research is needed here):

There was discussion in the Parliament of Montenegro about what to do with their newly won independence, and one MP suggested that they ought to declare war on some other country and lose. His rationale was, look at Germany. They lost the war and then became one of the richest countries in Europe. And Japan, look at them. They lost the war, and now they’re wealthy and their country is booming. So why shouldn’t Montenegro do this?

Therefore it was of immediate importance that Montenegro declare war against the United States. They would lose, and shortly after, they would grow to be the biggest, richest, most powerful country in Eastern Europe.

And another Parliamentarian raised his hand, stood up and said that this was a fine idea, and that Montenegro most certainly should declare war against the USA, except that he held one small reservation: “How can you guarantee that we would lose?”