Halfway down the Danube

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.

Now, there are some reasons for this. In roughly decreasing order of respectability, they are:

1) High unemployment in most EU countries. (Why would we want thousands of Lithuanians and Poles coming here, when we don't have enough jobs for our own people?)

2) Fear that the newcomers will go on welfare or otherwise place a burden on the state.

3) Fear that the immigrants will not integrate well. (We already have enough of a problem with the Turks/West Indians/Pakistanis/'beurres'. Why should we bring in a bunch of Slavs too?) This includes fear that the immigrants will bring bad habits or undesirable connections from their home countries.

4) Confusion of the issues; most commonly, a lumping together of legal immigrants, illegal immigrants, and refugees/asylum seekers.

5) Gypsies. I hate to say it, but there it is. It's hard to avoid the impression that "Eas

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%.

Now, this raises a point. Right now Romania is going through a period of disinflation -- falling inflation. Inflation was about 18% in 2002, 14% in 2003, and is expected to drop to 9% by the end of this year.

So -- in order to hold real interest rates constant, the National Bank will have to drop the nominal interest rate. And that appears to be what they're doing, right?

But. If inflation drops from 14% to 9%, this year then the nominal interest rate would have to drop by 5% to keep up. Since we're almost halfway through the year, we would expect the nominal interest rate to have dropped by 2% or 2.5% already.

But so far, that hasn't happened. In fact, this decrease is the first change since December. Although inflation has probably dropped from about 14% to about 12%, the nominal interest rate has stayed steady until this week.

That means the fall in the nominal interest rate isn't keeping up with the decrease in inflation. That, in turn, means that the real interest rate is actually rising -- even though the Bank is announcing a rate cut!

Last week, I speculated that the leu was rising because the Bank's tough talk on inflation was sending a signal that it would raise interest rates to defend the leu. Now, it looks like the Bank actually has been raising interest rates -- though quietly and through the back door.

I wonder if the rest of the government realizes this? -- Because raising interest rates tends to slow growth, so it's not usually something you want in an election year...

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.

The Economist had an article about this very topic just last month.

Romania's pantomime of optimism deters EU officials and visiting politicians from questioning its ambitions, at least publicly. The only blunter message has come from the European Parliament, which said last month that Romania's accession in 2007 would be impossible unless it tackled such issues as corruption, a lack of judicial independence, harassment of the media and police brutality. [...] Romania wants the negotiations concluded by the end of this year, but that looks unlikely. Even the completion of negotiations would not mean that Romania was “ready” to join the EU in any strict sense. Nobody thinks this poor, sprawling country, whose income per person is 10% of the EU average, will have an efficient government, decent judges, a sophisticated market economy and mastery of EU law by 2005, nor even by 2007.

You'd think with the end of 2004 approaching rapidly -- I'm not kidding, it's only six more months, considering that the entire country shuts down in August -- Romanian politicians would do everything to speed up the reform process. But no, they are in fact dragging their feet. Why? Because 2004 is also an election year. Nobody likes to make important and maybe unpopular decisions when at the same time he has to fear for his reelection. It's one of those things that drive my poor husband crazy but it can't be helped, apparently. I myself heard a Minister of Something or Other say "but it's an election year, nobody will do anything". (He didn't say it to me. I overheard him in the buffet line at the Dutch Embassy's celebration of Queen Beatrix' birthday.)

It hasn't helped that Romania sided with the US in the Iraq war. You could argue that Romania is a free country and can choose alliances as it wishes but the truth is, France and Germany were mighty pissed. As questionable as the influence of those two countries may be, one cannot deny that it exists. The EU is nothing without France and Germany. Having them be angry at you is not good.

See - we have a water cooler, and a subscription to a certain amount of water each month. I call, they come and deliver the canisters. Nice people, very quick service. I have to give three signatures on three different forms, every time. There's a lot of money, time, and workforce that could be saved if they only used one form. Multiply that with all the businesses in Romania (because they all use 3+ forms), and you have something to begin with. It's just one small example but it's typical.

The inefficiency in this country is a leftover from the Communist heydays but those are long gone and it should be corrected, and soon. All of my Romanian friends and acquaintances agree on that point -- so why does it seem so hard to change? Crusted structures are hard to break open, especially when people initially might loose their jobs. Walk into any retail store and count the sales clerks there. Count the many construction workers that simply stand around and watch the other construction workers work. Any change that will send countless people on the streets will not be popular, and, as I said, it's an election year.

I love Romania. I want things to be better for all my Romanian friends. I think Romania does belong into the EU, some day. But that day will not be January 1, 2007.

Considering all this, I dare a predicition: 2007 is out. When then? 2009? Even later than that?

I guess we have to wait and see.

In praise of suburbia

Over at Apartment 11D, Laura had an interesting article about raising kids in the city (scroll to Wednesday, May 19). It made me think about what we will do when, one day, we move back to the US. We're very likely going to move to a metropolitan area of some sorts -- international lawyers aren't much in demand in Pierre, North Dakota.

One of the reasons Laura gives for her impending move to the suburbs:

Outdoors. Kids like to be outside. Try carrying a bike, a stroller, and a three year old down four flights of stairs. If the baby needs a nap, then no one goes outside. If one kid is sick, then no one goes outside.

My kids are outside kids, too. They are both full of energy and need to run around all day long.

Now, I do have to say that here in Bucharest, we have it very good. We don't have a yard (or not one that the kids can play in -- the landlords planted a little flower bed) but we do have a fulltime nanny. She takes the kids to Kiseleff park where they stay all day long and get a tan (no mommy police here -- they are staying in the shade). All the nannies of the neighborhood meet there, so there's tons of kids every day. They play together, ignore each other, steal toys from each other. Alan's Romanian is better than his father's and mother's combined. He and his brother develop great social skills.

BUT.

The other day, at our weekly playgroup, I saw the house of my mommy-friend I. for the first time. Boy. Forget the house which is huge and wonderful and has a kitchen with an island. What I really envy her for is that she has a yard. And I mean a big yard. Most of it is covered in downy soft grass, it sports a swing set and a giant playhouse and has space for an entire preschool class. David was rolling around in the grass for hours - no danger of him picking up cigarette butts, crawling into dog crap, reaching into glass shards. It was so... relaxing. I couldn't help myself but thinking: I want this for my boys. It would be so cool if we could just open the door in the morning for them to run out into the yard and play.

That's the stuff my dreams are made of these days.

Don't get me wrong - I like cities. I grew up in a big one (Istanbul, Turkey). But we lived in the suburbs and we had a house with a big yard. We had a swing set, cherry trees, mulberry trees and a tree house. That was great.
I lived in Dupont Circle in Washington, DC, and I loved it there - still do. I'm going back for visits and have pangs of longing. The restaurants, the book shops, the invigorating atmosphere.

I can't imagine moving back there with two kids. Even with an elevator, a dish washer and a park around the corner. The schools suck. Traffic is horrible. Parking is impossible. The air isn't so great, either.

No, I want a suburban house with a yard and enough inside space for rainy days, in a good school district. Of course, the real estate prices in suburban DC being what they are, we can't even begin to think about buying a house there. Earlier this year, we put in a bid on a house which was basically a tear-down. Asbestos siding and in the flood plane, the house really in bad shape. But it was a good location (Falls Hill, in Falls Church, VA). We opted out at $280,000. The buyer paid $350,000 and is now offering it for $449,000. I just checked and it seems not to be on the market anymore, meaning that someone paid that price. How crazy is that?

I guess, in the end, we will have to move to North Dakota after all.

Introducing...

... Carlos!

Carlos, aka Coyu, well known in cyberspace for his erudition, knowledge and lack of patience with trolls, the ill-informed and the stupid, has been our guest (in real life) for the last two weeks. We had a delightful time and he walked miles and miles in the city and found all sorts of interesting things we had no idea existed.

He's back in the US now but he promised to write down his impressions of Bucharest and Romania and guest blog a little for us. I hope you enjoy his contribution. His icon, BTW is this:

(It's a tiny little joke on my part. Carlos is a two-fisted coffee addict.)

OK, Carlos. Now it's up to you. Write, write, write!

Eurovision!

Yes, we watched it. Carlos and I, Saturday night, up past midnight.

If you're an American or something, and you don't know what Eurovision is, A Fistful of Euros has a good description. This Kieran Healy post from last year is also nicely informative.

And how was it, you ask?

It was great. Absolutely fantastic. Three hours well spent. When the acts were bad -- which most of them were -- we had fun discussing just /how/ they were bad. When they were horrible, that was even better. And when they were good...

...well, actually none of them were what you'd call /good/. A couple of them were OK -- the Serbian brass and string group, the Turkish ska band.

As usual, the voting was the interesting part. Some surprises (Albania giving votes to Serbia, and vice versa; Greece and Turkey giving some points to each other). And some complete non-surprises -- the usual exchange of "12s" between Greece and Cyprus, and Russia and Ukraine.

...In case you have been living under a rock, or are American: it came down to a dramatic four-way race between Greece (awful), Ukraine (awful, but very energetic), Turkey (okay) and Serbia (okay). Ukraine won, with a special-effect-and-costume-intensive act that has been accurately described as "Janet Jackson meets Xena and Hercules". The winner gets to be the next host, so it'll all be happening next year in Kiev.

Also fun bits: the announcers of the country votes tend to be very cute young women with perfect teeth (60%), very cute young men with perfect teeth (20%), or aging media stars (10%). The sole exception was Albania, which inexplicably had a podgy sixtyish guy in a bad suit, who looked like he was the Deputy Assistant Minister for Finance. Oh, and the Serbian announcer, -- one of the VCY females with PT -- seemed to be intoxicated to the point of very nearly falling out of her dress.

I staggered into bed around 1 am. That's very, very late for us these days; the kids get us up a little after 6, and that's if they don't wake us up in the night.

My only regret? That we didn't drink more. I'm usually a very moderate consumer of alcohol, but watching Eurovision is one of those rare special occasions that cries out for beer and lots of it.

Next year.

Talking up the leu

A commentor on the last post mentioned the external debt issue.

Romania's external debt has been rising and rising, which should cause the leu to fall at some point. But this hasn't happened yet. In fact, the leu has risen a little bit. (Against the euro. It's risen a lot against the dollar, but so has everyone else.)

I think the reason for this is that the National Bank is talking tough on inflation. That is, they are LOUDLY saying that they won't allow inflation above 9% next year.

What this means -- and what they're really telling the world -- is that if the leu falls, they will raise interest rates to defend it.

Now, as long as investors believe this, they will tend to keep their money in lei. This, in turn, tends to keep the leu strong. In other words, the Bank is "talking up the leu".

The only problem with this is that sooner or later, if the external debt continues to rise, people will stop believing that the Bank will defend the leu. The only think that will convince them will be if the Bank starts to *really* defend the leu -- like, by raising interest rates.

For what it's worth, though, I think that the Bank is doing the right thing. An interest rate increase will tend to slow business activity and growth. So you want to delay it as long as possible. So "talking up the leu" is a good, rational short-term strategy.

As I mentioned a while back, the National Bank of Hungary didn't do this last year. They sent mixed messages. Sometimes they said reducing inflation was their top priority. That's how a National Bank says "we will raise interest rates to defend the currency". But then sometimes they said growth was the most important thing, which sounds more like "we will accept some inflation for better growth, so we probably won't raise interest rates". So they ended up with the worst of both worlds -- speculators attacked the forint, and they had to very suddenly raise interest rates quite sharply (from 9.5% to 12.5% in less than a month).

The National Bank of Romania seems to have been paying attention to this. And that's good.

Of course, if the external debt continues to grow, eventually it won't matter. The leu will fall, and the NBR will have to choose between inflation or higher interest rates.

A cynic might suggest that "eventually" will arrive pretty soon after the election (late November). I guess we'll see.

Good economic news

Romania's economy is still ticking along.

It grew in the first quarter at a rate of about 5.3% (annualized). This means that Romania is heading into a fourth year of respectable growth.

Inflation is falling -- still high, but falling. It was 14% last year, is presently around 12%, and is expected to fall to 9% by the end of 2004. (The National Bank has been talking very, very tough about this.)

Foreign investment is growing quickly, although from a very small base. Lending is growing like mad, around 50% per year.

The biggest flea on the dog is the foreign trade deficit, which is just getting bigger and bigger. I blogged about this a few months back. Not much has changed since then, except that the numbers have continued to edge upwards. Romanian exports are up, but imports are up even more.

Oddly enough, this has not led to downward pressure on the leu... yet. In fact, the leu has strengthened by about 3% against the euro since the beginning of this year. But a developing country can't run a big trade deficit forever. So, unless corrected, this is going to cause problems at some point.

Still, overall it's good news for Romania. Which is also good news for the ruling Social Democratic Party, the PSD. PSD faces local elections next month and then national elections in November. At this point they're expected to coast to a win... though, of course, November is a long way away.

One oddity: after three, now going on four years of good economic news, Romanians seem as pessimistic as ever. Am I missing something? Anyone?

Lost in the Palace (2)

So up and up the little spiral staircase I went.

Up and up again. The Palace is something like 25 stories high. I soon realized that it wasn't such a great idea to do this in a suit while carrying a folder full of papers. Also that I really, really need to start running again.

Still, all staircases end sooner or later. For this one, the end came at a strange low landing under a dirty skylight. I say "low" because there was only about a meter and a half of clearance between landing and skylight, maybe less. Anyone over the age of ten had to hunch or squat.

The skylight itself was propped open; a fat snake of cables ran along the concrete ceiling, up through it, out and away. If I'd been feeling very brave, I could have pushed it open further and crawled out onto the Palace roof. Since this would have involved leaning far out from the little landing over a 20-story drop down the center of the staircase shaft, and then doing a sort of diagonal chin-up and belly-crawling out over the dirty glass, after some consideration I decided that I'd rather not.

At the end of the low landing there was a little metal door. It looked locked, but when I hunch-shuffled over and turned the handle, it swung open.

Beyond was a vast dark space with an uneven ceiling, where a lot of big mechanical things moaned and hummed to themselves. The Palace's heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems? I don't know. In the distance was an area lit by a fluourescent lamp. A man was standing there, doing something to an upright surface -- it looked like he was writing on a whiteboard, but that seems unlikely.

Suddenly self-conscious, I closed the door and turned back down the stairs. I went down a couple of flights, picked a floor and random, and walked out.

Offices and more offices. People walked past me, but nobody gave me more than a cursory look. I went up and down stairs. At one point, I briefly blundered into the "Parliamentary Lounge". It was unoccupied except for a lot of tables, a waiter in a white coat, and an old lady sitting on a couch and knitting -- some Congressman's mother? -- but I ducked out again quickly.

Then I wandered in front of a window that looked out over Unirii Boulevard. It was a vast, spectacular, panoramic view, looking down on the great balcony (big enough for a dres ball) and out along the great tree-lined street stretching far, far across the city. This was the view Ceausescu had destroyed half of downtown Bucharest in order to get. But the fountains along the boulevard were turned off -- they cost far too much to run -- and the boulevard itself dead-ended, two miles away, in a wall of ugly apartment blocks. (Was that end of it left unfinished? Or was this how it was supposed to look?)

Still, it was impressive; and since nobody else on that floor seemed interested, I had it to myself.

Far below me, I saw some guys with weed-whackers mowing the Palace lawn. Since the lawn is the size of several golf courses, they weren't moving very quickly. It occurred to me that, by the time they had finished, it would be time to start over again; they were probably in orbit around the Palace, circling endlessly from April to October.

Eventually, I joined a little knot of people standing in front of an elevator. After some minutes, the door croaked open and we pushed in. The operator didn't look twice at me, and we all rode it down to the ground floor.

A few minutes more of aimless wandering brought me to the Museum of the Romanian Parliament, which meant that I wasn't lost any more -- the Museum, a single room, is quite close to one of the main doors.

-- It was actually pretty interesting, that little museum. (Well, okay, to me. I am a history geek, it's true.) It started with the assembly of boyars under the Russian occupation in the 1830s, moved forward through the 1848 revolutionary assembly to the royal years, and ended -- as a lot of things around here seem to -- just before the Second World War. It had all sorts of odd but interesting items. I particularly liked the royal chairs (not thrones!) in which the Kings sat when attending Parliament.

I was the only visitor.

And that was the end of my hour of wandering around the Palace.

Super speedy

Heh. I guess you thought I'd died or something but no. I was just very busy flying around the globe and dealing with Astral to finally get the cable internet connection installed that we ordered in February. It's a long story and not amusing but in the end, we prevailed. We now have a super speedy 24/7-online-and-not-blocking-the-phone-ever-again internet connection. And boy, does it feel good. OK, so it's not quite as speedy as my friend Natalie's broadband in Bethesda, MD, but it's SUCH an improvement over how things were. I'm so thrilled. Internet is fun again!

It will also be much more fun posting now, since I don't have to wait for two minutes for the interface to open. Happy us.

Lost in the Palace (1)

Okay, not very lost. I just wandered up one of the big staircases when nobody seemed to be looking, then strolled down a hall. I didn't want to use an elevator -- they have attendants, and I was vaguely worried someone might ask me for ID -- but then I noticed an open door that led to a little, dimly lit spiral staircase.

I stepped inside. The stairs went down into obscurity, and up to a smudge of light -- a dirty skylight, many stories above. I stepped inside (making sure the door didn't lock behind me) and started to climb.

It was a long climb. The stairs were very narrow, and made of crumbling concrete, and the railing... wasn't really there, any more. After a couple of floors I paused, puffing a little, to pop my head out of the door.

To my surprise, I saw a floorspace that could have been in any US or Western European office building: a long hallway with faded carpet, punctuated by office doors. I could see people moving around behind frosted glass, and hear a faint murmur of conversation. The carpet was frayed and threadbare, but clean; a couple of artificial plants in black plastic pots stood in front of a door. I breathed deeply and smelled office smells: paper, people, dust. Somehere on the floor, someone was making coffee.

Well, apparently about one-third of the Palace is presently being used: by the Chamber of Deputies, by Romania's Constitutional Court, and as a convention center. Another third is mothballed but still usable. And about another third is going to need serious repair work before it can be used for anything. (If it ever is -- there are some inherent construction problems to be overcome, and then the demand for office space in the Palace may not ever be that great.)

But one-third of that huge building is still equivalent to one or two large Western office buildings. So there are hundreds of people working in the Palace... sitting at desks of varying degrees of antiquity, putting pictures of their grandchildren on the wall behind them, drinking coffee and setting artificial plants in the hall outside their office doors.

Of course, that's perfectly reasonable; but it was still a little... unexpected, somehow.

Anyhow, I popped back into the staircase and continued on up...

Things the EU really needs (in addition to love)

I'm shamelessly lifting this from a recent post at Idle Words, because it's so good. (And a tip of the hat to Dragos' ever-informative Argumente for bringing it to my attention.)

So: Things the European Union Really Needs...

A common foreign policy
Consensus about the proper scope of federal rule
A credible army
Mandatory musical re-education camps
A meaningful role for the European parliament
Decent Mexican food
Reductions in bureaucracy
Agricultural reform
Some degree of sovereign power
A constitution
24 hour convenience stores
Jobs
An increase in the birth rate
A sane immigration policy
Deportation of all Eurovision contestants to karaoke bars in Central Asia
Lower taxes
Aircraft carriers
Air conditioning

Just a couple of notes...

1) What is it with Europeans and Mexican food? Y'all love Mexican food. We know you can cook. Why, in a continent of 450 million people, are there only three decent Mexican restaurants?

2) *A* constitution, but not *that* constitution.

3) I know it's all about antiquated labor laws and all that. But you know you want to go to 7-11 half an hour after midnight to score some Ben & Jerry's.

Ooh, ooh, there's my addition to the list. Really excellent mass-market ice cream. Not pretty good -- you have that -- but incredibly excellent. Ben & Jerry's and Haagen-Dazs. The stuff that makes you eat a pint (or 0.45 liters) at a sitting and then sit numbed, realizing you've just snarfed down something like 1500 calories, but unable to in any way regret it.

You want it. You know you want it. And you want it now... not from 8 to 8 Monday-Friday, 8 to 2 Saturday, and never on Sunday ever. Now.

Read the whole post, BTW. "In the future, every major historical event will have a crap soundtrack." One to watch.

Inside the Palace

I went inside the Palace of the People yesterday.

Although we've been in Bucharest for almost a year now, this was my first time inside. Go figure. We've never gotten around to taking the guided tour (it's a popular tourist attraction), and this happened to be the first time that business took me down there. (A banking conference, and no, you don't want to know the details.)

I came prepared to sneer. As I've said before, the Palace is pretty damn ugly from the outside. So I figured it would be just as bad inside -- either tastelessly overdone, or crass and pompous and massive in a Stalinist sort of way, or both.

I was wrong. The inside of the Palace is actually pretty impressive.

Part of this is because it's just so... damn... big. I mean, imagine the interior of a royal palace, with marble pillars and great high ceilings and of course enormous curved staircases. I mean, really imagine it -- see it in your mind.

Got it? Now scale everything up by a factor of two -- higher ceilings, taller pillars, a hall you could play football in, staircases sweeping up through four or five stories.

So, at just a basic gosh-wow level, you can't help being impressed. But it doesn't end there. The decor is not horrible. I won't say it's great or even good. Actually, it's rather bland... lots and lots of huge columns, vaguely floral giltwork on the ceilings, repetitive geometric motifs on the marble floors, big red carpets. Nothing wow. But nothing yuck, either. That was a pleasant surprise.

I admit, I'd been expecting either "Louis XIV in Las Vegas" ghastly excess, or lots of sterile expanses of Socialist Spartan hideousness But it was not that bad, at all.

Oh, and I was also thinking there'd be either pictures and statues of the heroic workers and revolutionaries of Romania in their struggle to build multilateral socialism, or lots of blank spots where they'd been removed or painted over. Not so. Either Ceausescu never got around to installing those, or they've been very carefully removed. Or replaced -- there is some recent artwork, including some pretty good religious paintings.

Also, I think I was subconsciously expecting more decrepitude. Much of the Palace is not occupied, and never will be -- you can see from the outside that many of the windows, especially on the upper floors, are broken or boarded up. But the Romanians seem to have made a strong effort to keep the inhabited parts in good condition.

Of course, I wandered off from the inhabited parts for a brief exploration...

Microfinance in Romania, again

Here are some numbers from one of the companies providing microfinance services here in Romania.

Taken from the quarterly report:

Total loan volume in quarter: $1,527,750 (women $418,450 – 27%)
Cumulative historical loan volume: $14,192,649
Total number of loans in quarter: 230 (women 78 – 34%)
Number of active clients: 994
Portfolio at risk (> 30 days): 2.4%
Principal Outstanding: $4,785,538
Repayment rate: 99.6%
Write off rate: 0.2%
Loan write-offs during the period: 0

The average loan size is is just under $5,000, and the average term is about 14 months. Interest rates are between 14 and 18 percent, dollar denominated. (Note again those repayment and write-off numbers.)

The total microfinance market in Romania is about $35 million, so this particular company -- with about $4.8 million outstanding -- accounts for about 14% of the market. It's fairly typical.

As I've said before, it's a market that is going nowhere but up. Unless someone does something stupid, of course, which is always a possibility.

Murder in Macedonia

I've mentioned before that Macedonia doesn't seem to get much attention in the world news.

That said, I'm still surprised by the lack of coverage of this story.

Short version: in 2002, officials of the Macedonian goverment murdered seven illegal immigrant workers -- six Pakistanis and one Indian -- and then claimed they were "terrorists" who were planning an attack on the American embassy there.

The point of the exercise? To win favor with the US government, apparently.

(Here's another version with some more information.)

Slovakian Euroskepticism

Just read an excellent article on Euroskepticism in Slovakia, taken from Transitions Online. TOL is an excellent site, highly recommended for anyone interested in the region.

Unfortunately, they move their stuff behind a "Premium Content" wall after a few days. So I'm going to quote at a little length here. (All this is copyright Domino Forum, 2004, authors Robert Zitnansky and Martin Hanus.)

Slovakian politics was dominated for a number of years by an unpleasant character named Vladimir Meciar. Meciar was an excellent example of a type that's been very common across the region in the last fifteen years: an ex-Communist who gained power by turning populist, and who quickly developed an unsavory reputation for authoritarian rule and corruption.

So, write the authors, many people viewed the EU as an antithesis or antidote to Meciar and his ilk, and "many thinkers, intellectuals, and freedom-loving people for years looked forward to the day when Slovakia would become a member of the EU."

"After all these years, however, few of them are now able (or willing) to admit today’s fear, hesitation, and confusion. Although this attitude is understandable, the doubt, confusion, and disappointment won't go away, and it's time we started thinking about it.

"The first serious doubts came not so very long ago, starting in 1999, as Slovakia was getting its first real experience of the European Union. For the first time we saw that there were commissioners in Brussels who behaved as if they belonged in a different time and in a different part of the world than the [way we had envisioned the] West. Every serious political decision was presented in terms like 'an EU requirement,' or 'the EU is worried about it.' Our image of a Europe without barriers to the four former liberties (movement of people, goods, services, and capital) was slowly replaced by demands to regulate everything that could be regulated."

-- I note in passing that this is pretty consistent with my own experience in Romania so far. That is, Romanians are still mostly viewing EU membership as a thing absolutely good in itself; a long-delayed reunion of Romania with Europe, and a tonic that will act against corruption and authoritarian rule.

Where the rubber meets the road, though, there's a lot of "harmonization" of Romanian laws with EU regulations and standards... which sometimes results in positive effects for Romania, but sometimes (maybe often) not. "Paper compliance" is a big problem here.

The Slovaks go on:

"The single European market was (and still is) changing in front of our eyes into a space ever less and less free. Despite the fact that state reallocations, regulations, restrictions, and quotas are increasingly criticized even within the Union itself, the interest groups that benefit from these deformations are still stronger than the voices of economists or a couple of wise politicians.

"And yet, economic regulation could become the first source of serious disagreement--the rhetoric of German or Swedish politicians against lower taxes in the new member countries, hardly imaginable a few years ago, sounds like a sinister overture. It’s like a train speeding the wrong way without good brakes.

-- German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder (who impresses me less and less, the more I see of him) stated last month that Slovakia's low taxes and loose regulations were stealing German jobs. I don't think that much will come of this. But that's only because the EU lacks the power to mandate things like "tax harmonization". If they could, they would.

"The central EU institutions live their own life. The voices of new ideologues with an old ambition to rule the world, or at least a small part of the world, grow stronger and stronger. They are wrapped in new terms: social or regional cohesion, consumer protection, sustainable development, struggle against social expulsion, gender equity, anti-discrimination, coordination of political systems, full employment, harmonization."

-- Personally, I think this overstates; it's the old Hayekian "Road to Serfdom", the idea that bureacracy inevitably turns into tyranny. I don't see it happening. But that doesn't mean that the large and opaque EU bureacracy doesn't present threats of its own.

"In 1989 we thought we were coming back to civilized Europe, happy that the liberal democracies had defeated socialism. Today we are entering an EU that is undermining the parliamentary democracies in its member states. The gradual, creeping shift of power into the hands of Brussels bureaucrats possessing hardly any democratic legitimacy engenders a strong sense of powerlessness, of lack of control and self-will. This was clearly visible during the process of drafting the European Constitution: a small group led by [Valery] Giscard d'Estaing created something in total conflict with the original assignment, something that might easily be called a summary of everything bad the Union had ever seen."

-- While I think this overstates, I broadly agree: the proposed EU constitution is pretty crap, and should be discarded. The fact that several countries are planning to hold referenda on it is IMO a very positive sign.

"Pro-European elites in the member states (without public support but also without public resistance) hand over much of their power to supranational bodies where power must beget corruption because there is nobody to report to...

"We should pay attention to the way in which positive reasons for joining the EU gradually became mere 'necessity.' For many people, entering the EU is not good simply because the EU is good, but because they are convinced there is no other alternative."

-- At least for Eastern Europe, I think this is very true. Nobody in this region can imagine a (good) future without EU membership.

"Two things are worth realizing in connection with the future of the EU. First, the freedom and prosperity praised by the Euro-ideologues are not the results of the Union's existence. They result from centuries-old social development in its member states and the 50-year presence of the Americans in Europe. Second, it is not true that a country in the geographic center of Europe has no other possibility but to join the EU on the grounds that if the country is small, it must adjust. But if the thought of not becoming a member of the Union was unimaginable, then even less imaginable is the thought of leaving it...

"We cannot expect much good even from the last change that looks promising--entering the single EU market. Customs duties will be replaced by less visible but much more dangerous standards that will restrict economic liberty by raising the cost of labor, spurring higher taxes or new ones, enforcing absurd hygienic norms, regulating the details of many production processes, and setting limits to free trade. Just at a time when Slovakia is winning admiration for reforms designed to hasten the coming of prosperity, it will crash head-on into the interests of big, unreformed states and uncompetitive companies. Except that these interests will be hidden under a cloak called "community interests...

"We are free people in an independent country: this should be the starting point for further reflection. We should start thinking about the Union and Slovakia without being fatalistic. We should definitely reject any future shifts of power to Brussels. We should think about our key interests and at least try to reach a quick agreement on a free, democratic political environment and an economics of prosperity. W e should look for allies who are not willing to be manipulated by the "engine of integration" and its demands, allies who want to protect their own interests. And we should protect our country from a situation where aversion to the EU in its present form could be used by primitive nationalists."

-- I particularly like that last part, as it seems to point towards a worrisome future, where "primitive nationalists" co-opt Euroskepticism once the initial flush of delight is past. Bad all around, that would be -- thoughtful criticism of the European project would be discredited by association, but the alternative would be a continued cession of power to a none-too-democratic Brussels.

I'm not seeing debate at this level in Romania, though. (Although it might be that I'm just missing it -- my language skills are still pretty limited.) There is discussion of whether Romania is really ready or not, but that's something else.

Are there Romanian Euroskeptics? Other than primitive nationalists, I mean?

The Legionnaire, cont'd

Five days after surrendering to police, Legija (it's pronounced Leggy-uh, by the way) is still in captivity.

And that's all we know. The news blackout continues.

To paraphrase Dragan Antulov (of Draxblog), the optimists are just glad that Legija is off the street, and hope that he can offer useful information -- more about the ugly nexus of politics and organized crime in Serbia, more about the Djindjic assassination, maybe even something about the whereabouts of much-wanted war criminals Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic.

The pessimists think that Legija's surrender is just the tip of the iceberg. That he had help to stay undercover for fourteen months -- maybe official help. That as an intelligent paramilitary-counterintelligence-antiterrorist-organized crime figure, he'd never have given up without some good reason. They think he surrendered because he cut a deal with Kostunica's government; and that he'll be kept sequestered and and put back into play only when it suits the government (i.e., when he has some particularly damning piece of information about the previous administration, or perhaps some political rival).

"We do know that Legija is not to be believed, that he has outmanoeuvred many people who thought they were a jump ahead of him, and that he has buried many who believed they were better than him," said a former police minister.

Short answer is, we don't know. More on this when there's more to tell.

Romania: Not Competitive?

So there's this outfit called the International Management Development Institute, a business school in Lausanne, Switzerland. And every year, they publish something called the World Competiveness Scoreboard.

I'm sure you can already guess where this is going. For 2003, the IMDI trashed Romania, ranking it 54th out of 60 countries and regions. As usual, this has caused a certain amount of consternation here in Romania.

Me? I'm deeply skeptical.

We've been through this before, just a few months ago. I haven't had time to look at the "World Competitiveness Scoreboard" in detail yet, but what I've seen so far doesn't impress me much. Romania is less competitive than Russia? Than the Philippines? I've been to the Philippines, and I don't buy that for a second.

I'm starting to get really, really dubious about these things.

Single Parent

Claudia is in the US for a few days, so I'm a single parent this week.

The baby-sitter comes around 8:30. Alan and David wake up around 6:00. So I'm definitely getting some time with my children.

And fairly intense time it is too. For instance, this morning...

...Alan went into the bathroom while I was dressing David, and turned on the water in the bathtub. I looked inside, and he was playing with a cup: filling it from the bathtub faucet, emptying it into the bathtub. Fill, empty. Peaceful and harmless. So I went back to dressing David: onesie, shirt, jeans, socks.

Then I put David down and trotted downstairs -- shutting the baby gate at the top of the stairs -- to make a bottle. When I came back, David had crawled into the bathroom; I could hear him in there, with Alan, laughing. Peaceful and harmless, I thought to myself, so nice when they play together and took the opportunity to trot into the bedroom and pull some clothes on...

...and then I thought: laughing?

Trotted back and looked in the bathroom. David was sitting on the floor. Alan was still filling the cup... and emptying it over David's head. The entire bathroom floor was under water. David was drenched to the skin, all his clothes sopping -- onesie, shirt, jeans socks. Both of them were laughing with absolute delight.

Oh, and: the Fontana man showed up at the gate a few minutes later, with this week's bill for drinking water. (I drink Bucharest tap water, but I'm the only one. So we have a water cooler.) When I went out to talk to him, David was in the living room, gnawing thoughtfully on a Lego. So I thought it would be OK to step outside for a minute or so. And it wasn't longer than that...

...but it was still long enough for David to drop the Lego, crawl out of the living room to the stairs, and crawl all the way up the stairs to the top. He's been trying to do that for a couple of weeks now, but we spoilsport parents have been preventing it, because we're a couple of cringing cowardly killjoys who can't get past the idea that our baby might fall down the (tall, steep) stairs and, like, die or something. So he very reasonably waited until I went outside. And then he must have crawled over at top speed, and just gone up those stairs like a rocket.

Okay, I admit it: I applauded. After I had flown up the stairs to where he was wobbling on the top step.

A day and a half down. Five days to go.

We'll see.

Cranes

The machines, not the birds.

I think I mentioned that Oltenita has no waterfront. What it does have, is a port facility. With cranes. Big ones -- like, 30 or 40 meters tall.

The cranes are old, and they show it. They were made by an East German company in 1966 or maybe 1968 -- the nameplate was so rusted that I couldn't be sure. They're powered by electricity, and there are cables as thick as your arm running along the ground.

When we arrived at the port, the cranes were unloading a barge full of corn. The big grain buckets would open, then drop down, down, on their swaying steel cables. Then, clomp, they would shut on a couple of tons of corn. Then up, up, and the crane would swing around, until the bucket was just over one of the big trucks waiting patiently in line. Then the bucket would open and, fwoooosh, out would pour the corn.

We could see all this very clearly, because the port area was pretty open. Actually, it was completely open. We just drove in and parked the car. Some children were playing nearby, and the Danube rolled placidly along at the edge of the parking lot.

I put Alan on my shoulders, and we walked over to the base of one of the cranes. This would, of course, have been completely impossible in the US or Germany -- random strangers with two-year-olds are generally not allowed close to huge, heavy, dangerous machinery. But nobody at the port of Oltenita seemed particularly concerned.

The crane, enormous, swayed slightly back and forth with each swing of the bucket. It was mounted on rails, and the brakes weren't perfectly set -- it would roll an inch or two each way as the weight shifted. The electric motors were almost silent, but the cables and pulleys creaked and groaned. 15 or 20 meters above, we could see the little cabin where the operator was pulling on levers.

Alan was entranced. I mean, he literally went into a trance-like state. He just sat on my shoulders, mouth hanging open, watching the big cranes empty that barge. Squeak, clomp, up comes the bucket. Creeeak, around swings the crane. Fwoosh, schloompf, down the corn drops into the back of the truck... he just sat there, absolutely transfixed, for maybe twenty minutes.

It was a lasting impression, too. This morning, three days later, I said, "Alan, do you remember the cranes?" "Maiz!" he immediately replied -- that's "corn" in German. Or maybe in Romanian. I lose track.

Anyhow, the whole thing was pretty cool. Yeah, for me too. Come on, forty year old East German electric giant cranes. What's not to like?

The Legionnaire Surrenders

Legija "the Legionnaire" is the nickname of the Serbian criminal suspected of masterminding the assassination of Prime Minister Djindjic last March. After fourteen months on the run, Legija surrendered to Serbian police yesterday.

This came as a complete surprise. Several of Legija's associates had been captured or killed in the weeks following Djindjic's death. Legija himself, though, had simply disappeared. The general assumption was that he was living someplace far away -- Moscow, say -- with a new set of papers and possibly a new face.

Not. He surrendered at his house in Belgrade. And while his whereabouts for the last fourteen months remain unknown, it looks like he may have been in Serbia for most or all of that time.

It gets weirder. Legija is accused of some heavy, heavy crimes -- assassination, murder, conspiracy, you name it. Nobody has any idea why he might have surrendered. Belgrade is abuzz with speculation, but nobody yet seems to have any hard facts.

-- For those who haven't been following this story, here's some background.

Legija is a native Belgrader; he was born Milorad Ulemek in 1965. In the mid-1980s he fled to France and joined the Foreign Legion. He stayed with the Legion for several years, fighting in Chad, Libya, Beirut, French Guyana and Iraq (the first Gulf War, 1991). It was this phase of his career which earned him his nickname Legija, the Legionnaire.

Legija returned to Serbia at the beginning of the Yugoslav wars in 1992 and joined the Serbian Volunteer Guard, aka "Arkan’s Tigers". This was a paramilitary group that would quickly become notorious for a variety of war crimes; their leader, Arkan, was for many years a particular favorite of Slobodan Milosevic. (Though Milosevic would eventually turn against him, leading to his murder in 2000.) Legija became one of the Guard's commanders, and fought with Arkan in Croatia and Bosnia.

When the Tigers were disbanded, Lukovic joined the notorious Special Operations Unit of Serbia’s secret police, better known as the Red Berets. The Red Berets were nominally an "antiterrorist unit", but they were widely considered to be Milosevic’s Praetorian Guard. Legija became commander of the Red Berets in 1999.

He is suspected of involvement in the murder of four officials of Vuk Draskovic's Serbian Renewal Movement in a staged traffic accident in 1999. (This was one of several not-quite-successful attempts to kill Draskovic himself.) A few months later, during the war in Kosovo, Legija commanded the Red Berets in the field. As in Bosnia and Croatia, he left behind numerous allegations of atrocities and crimes.

Then came the fall of Milosevic. Legija's role in this remains controversial, but the most generally accepted version is that he met with Kostunica and Djindjic -- who were then leaders of the opposition -- and effectively negotiated a change of sides. The Red Berets would not intervene to save Milosevic. The new government, in turn, would leave them most of their privileges and would not prosecute or even inquire too deeply into their lives and their pasts.

Once the new government was firmly in place, though, this arrangement began to erode. Part of the problem was that the West kept pressing Serbia to cooperate with war crimes investigations. Many of the Red Berets were involved in these investigations, either as potential defendants or as witnesses. Another problem was that the Red Berets had deep links to organized crime on one hand, and the radical fringe of Serbian politics on the other. So the new government began putting more and more pressure on the group -- first disbanding them, and then becoming (from their point of view) ever more hostile and threatening.

In the simple version of the story, this led to Legija eventually organizing the assassination of Prime Minister Djindjic, hoping or believing that this would destabilize the government. Of course, in Serbia nothing is simple, and there are truly baroque layers of conspiracy theory piled upon the few facts that are generally known and accepted. We still don't know what really happened with Djindjic's assassination, and it's entirely possible that we never will. Maybe I'll do a post on that sometime, but maybe not -- it's complicated.

As I mentioned, several of Legija's associates were captured or killed in the weeks immediately following the assassination. Two of his senior henchmen were supposedly killled in a shootout with police. However, last month an autopsy surfaced that showed they had been killed by shots to the back of the head, probably while bound and kneeling. This to give just one example of the fog of fact that surrounds almost every aspect of this case.

Still: Legija has surrendered. And while this is all very strange, it does seem to be better than having him run around free.

More on this in a bit, if anyone is interested.

The Worst Bathroom in the Balkans

Okay, probably not the very worst. But definitely the worst one I've yet found.

It's in the big park just west of the center of Oltenita. Oltenita is a small city on the Danube; we went there this weekend, for no particular reason. It's pronounced ol ten EETS ah -- I don't know how to make the special Romanian "ts" character here.

Oltenita is one of those places that, when you tell Romanians that you're going there, they look at you and say, "Uhhh... why?"

And there's not much there, it's true. It's a town of about 50,000 people. It's on the Danube, but there's no waterfront or anything like that. There are no major tourist attractions except for an archeological museum. Googling "Oltenita tourism" gives you... not much.

But, what the hell. We felt like a day trip, and it's less than two hours from our house.

-- The bathroom, yes. Driving into town from the west -- the road that goes to Giurgiu -- we passed a large park, maybe half a kilometer from the center of the city. We needed to run the kids around, so we stopped.

The park was actually quite nice. Lots of little paths among trees and neatly mowed grass. A small and rather touching war memorial. Little kids chalking hopscotch designs on the asphalt, older kids on roller blades. The whole thing overlooked by a lovely old water tower -- in prewar Romania they put roofs on those, so that they could double as fire-watching stations. And in the back, a very nice playground with swings and see-saws and slides, full of kids playing and yelling and running around.

All good; we stopped, turned the kids loose. Alan began going up and down the slides, David was appropriated by a group of girls who put him on the seesaw. But then I realized that I had been drinking a lot of water while driving -- our car has no aircon, so I open the window, which makes it thirsty work. So I went to look for the toilet.

...Nobody likes a complainer. And I am not squeamish. I've used toilets in the Philippines, in rural Indonesia, in South Serbia. I'm okay with (for instance) Turkish "squat" toilets; I don't love them, but I'll use them. I'm okay with rural outhouses. I'll use the "chemical" toilets in public parks.

But this place was... well, it was a concrete bunker, just a few yards away from the playground. The concrete was crumbling and the whole place looked ready to collapse.

There were two open entrances. No doors. Inside, no light, no running water, no windows. Just a trough to one side, and a squat-hole in a little doorless closet at the back.

And flies. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of fat black flies. They rose up in a buzzing cloud as soon as I entered. A moment later they started landing on me, tickling my skin with their hairy legs.

The smell... well, never mind. What really startled me was that it was obvious this toilet had been used. Recently. A lot.

I backed out, then -- in a tribute to the power of pure curiosity -- stuck my head in the female side. It was exactly the same, except that it didn't have the trench.

What made it shocking was that the rest of the park was so nice. Oltenita isn't a rich town, but you could see that someone was taking care of the park and the playground. (It was better than a lot of playgrounds here in Bucharest.) But either they just didn't care about the toilet, or they'd simply given up.

Yet obviously people were desperate enough to use the horrible, horrible toilets anyhow. So, surely it would be possible to have decent toilets instead. The standard Central and Eastern European solution here -- and it's not a bad one -- is to have a pensioner who collects a few thousand lei (maybe 10 or 15 cents) from each person. If there's a "customer" every few minutes, then in a day the toilet collects enough to pay the pensioner, plus a little left over for cleaning supplies. Result: jobs for a couple of pensioners, and clean public toilets.

I'm guessing that the reason this isn't happening in Oltenita is because the toilets are so horrible and badly designed (no water, no windows, no lights, no doors) that the "pensioner" system won't work; and the city can't pay for new ones.

Well... maybe there's an EU grant that could help? -- I'm serious, and it would actually be one of the more sensible things for the EU to spend money on. The thought of kids going from the bright cheerful playground into that buzzing, stinking darkness makes my head hurt.

(Oddly enough, the Cleanest Toilet in the Balkans is just a few miles up the Danube, across the river in Bulgaria. Go figure.)