Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
If you have an email ending in @hotmail.com, @live.com or @outlook.com (or any other Microsoft-related domain), please consider changing it to another email provider; Microsoft decided to instantly block the server's IP, so emails can't be sent to these addresses.
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
Romania blocks Serbia's entry into the EU
Romania has blocked Serbia from joining the EU at the last minute because the Romanians want Serbia to recognise the Vlachs as Romania despite the Vlachs living in Serbia and it not being known if the Vlachs want to be recognised as Romanian
Comments
Correction: It's not for joining the EU, but achieving the candidate status. Also, more importantly, the Romanians eventually yielded and signed, at least if the most recent news on Serbian sites are telling the truth.
Anyway, we didn't except this from Romania, to which we have the friendliest relations in the region. Also, the Vlachs don't see themselves as Romanians - even though "Romanian" is one of the options at the census, the people from Timočka Krajina (which is the region with a large Vlach population) chose either "Serb" or "Vlach" as their national identity.
Milos, you should post more often about Serbian politics and culture.
@GMH, Thats why I posted it here
> paragraph of Eastern Europe politics
> BUT WHY AREN'T THEY DOING ANYTHING ABOUT THE VAMPIRES
Says man who has to battle crocodiles to leave his house.
Yeah.
The anachronistic Austro-Australian moat was a bad idea, in retrospect.
The drop bears are still worse, though.
It's that interesting? Well, thanks, I feel flattered in some sort of way. We'll have elections in about a month, so I'll make sure to give a deservedly caustic report on the Serbian political system and parties when the elections get closer. In the meantime, here is a great political joke. The worst thing is that it's very, very true.
A mayor of a Serbian town comes to Greece to visit his friend, also a mayor. They meet each other at the airport, and the Greek mayor takes his Serbian counterpart to his estate. Even though the town he is the mayor of is pretty small, the Greek's estate is huge and he lives in luxury. Amazed, the Serb asks him: "It's huge! Where did you get all that money?"
The Greek points towards a range of hills on the horizon: "See that bridge?"
"Yes."
"Well, it was supposed to be 15 meters wide. Now it's finished, and it's 12 meters wide. Nobody notices, or cares. And those 3 meters, they are here", the Greek says, pointing towards his estate.
A few months later the Greek mayor came to visit his Serbian counterpart. When they arrived at his estate, it turned out that it was even bigger and more luxurious.
"How the hell did you manage to buy this?", exclaimed the Greek.
"See that bridge over there?"
"...no."
"Exactly."
I know exactly the same joke, only with a road, and a Polish politician and his Western (was it Eurocrat?) counterpart.
Which reminds me, a lot of political jokes seem pretty much international, nobody knows where they got started.
Oh, man, how could've I forgot to mention this. The Vlachs are famous for their black magic. Traditional occult rituals are a regular pastime for older Vlach women, and manuals on Vlach magic are very popular across the Balkans. It is said to be very potent and potentially lethal, and even people who aren't superstitious might be a bit skittish when it comes to Vlach magic. In practice, it's quite similar to voodoo.
Such a thing happened a couple of years ago in here, on the eastern border: an Orthodox priest died after crashing his car into a water closet. Yeah, the White Ear, standing in the middle of the road. After some time, it came out that two women were in conflict with some guy, over inheritance or something. They decided to deal with him magically, the curse was activated by stealing his personal possession and leaving it at crossroads. For some reason (I personally have a mental pothole to No Kill Like Overkill here) they chose the toilet.
Hm, makes me wonder: why am I compelled to prove my own country is just as crazy (nevermind it pretty much isn't), whenever Milos posts something about Serbia?
Gonna have to call in a Witcher on this one.
(But seriously, that's pretty cool.)
Slavic self-deprecation is best self-deprecation.
Oh, and Alex, my own grandmother had some negative experiences with it. She lives in an apartment buliding full of old people who are bored and retired, so they do nothing but scheme all day long. Being one heck of an extrovert, she can't live without inviting at least one person a day to her apartment. It became really unpleasant when she discovered that wedding photos of her daughter (my mother) are missing. A few days later, she found a boiled egg under the couch. It had a strange hole in it, so she opened it. The yolk was dyed blood-red (dead offspring?). And a month later, she found a strange thing in a corner of the room, while cleaning - a small key with a ring of bread crumbs pasted around it (no house, and no bread?). Creepy.
Creepy indeed, but also nicely folkoric. If you're gonna be creepy, I say do it right.
Milos, you have a source in which Serbia has been recommended to join the EU?
You know what's creepy? When the national healthcare service and national pension fund conspire to off you as soon as you could start receiving your retirement money. Those white marble floors at the fund's office buildings don't come for free, you know. Unless you work for the police, then you can suck cash outta system at thirty, while working as security on the side. A day like any other here.
Don't mind the Google-translated English. >_<
Eastern Europeans bothering you? Report here:
http://www.meldpuntmiddenenoosteuropeanen.nl/index.php/component/content/article/2
The peridox-blonde asshat you might be familiar with has recently shifted his focus from Muslims to Polish peeps stealing our jerbs. The site is filled mostly with trolling, which is why they switched off the ability to view other people's stories. The party in question is going to wave around the number of entries rather than the actual content in order to pretend Eastern Europeans are a significant problem.
/bitching about local politics
REMOVE ROMANIA FROM PREMISES
Concerning Polish workforce, there is a story that I read on the 'Net. So, the teller of the story once got a job in England, through some agency. But they booked him as Norwegian, and told him to not admit that he's a Pole, under any circumstances. The job was killing chickens on some poultry farm, some sort of mandated culling or something, all by hand.
Obviously, he was too curious to let this mystery go.
Before him, as he learned, there were five "Billy Bobs" from somewhere in rural Poland (the name's my attempt at cultural translation). They were left there, with the chickens and the chicken gas chamber. Unfortunately, due to their lack of experience with the machine, they broke it. Then, as it didn't occur to them to ask, they broke the spare parts. They tried to stuff live chicken into the bags for the dead ones, then for some time they were killing those chickens manually, but it was slow and tiring. So they opted for a cigarette break, and perhaps find out some solution.
There's a saying we've got in here, roughly translated: "a Pole can do". Do anything, of course. Make a thing, discover a way out, find a solution.
When a woman who was in charge of things went in to check why there were live chickens in the bags, she found none of the Billy Bobs in the killing room. So she began to search around. As it turned out, indeed did they find a solution. In a shack nearby, the farmer kept his tools. Mechanised scythes, to be precise.
You can guess nobody's happy to walk into a Cannibal Corpse album cover.
And Serbia is now officially an EU candidate.
Oh cool
Sweet, hopefully you guys'll get in before the whole union collapses like a house of cards due to petty politics.*
*Note: uninformed cynicism
Don't worry, I don't think it's overly cynical. See, during the past twelve years we've directed all efforts and resources towards joining the EU as quickly as possible. Thus, a lot of reforms were very quick and hamfisted, ending up completely counterproductive and ruining much of our economy. We're now fueling our economy mostly by foreign loans, the rampant corruption doesn't help and people live in poverty. We got to the point where the standard of living is even lower than it was in the Milosevic era. People are very poor, increasingly Eurosceptical (in 2008, more than 80% of the population supported EU integrations, now it's less than a half), mostly due to Tadic's pro-Western government being the most corrupt and ineffective one for a long time and the whole Kosovo crisis, and intellectuals are leaving the country en-masse. Seeing the EU collapse before we even get the chance to enter it would be tragically ironic.
So I guess my blase attitude towards this whole crisis stems from the fact Poland wasn't in the slightest hit by that recent economic bust, heh heh. I like to joke we're so lame, we can't even do a global economic crisis right.
Biggest lesson gleaned from observing European history:
Everyone hates Poland.
Isn't Poland the butt-monkey of European political history?
If you're undereducated or concentrate on XVIII-XX Centuries, then perhaps. [cut out the nationalist wank]
...
Oh my, I just cut out the nationalist wank! You know what this means? I forgot why I am here!
...in general, it appears to me there are two common ways to look at Poland: either "Butt Monkey of Europe" or "brave little country". Both are gross oversimplifications.