B92 Blog

Over the past nine months, since I've begun blogging, no fewer than five Western businesses have approached me wondering if I'd like to work for them in their new Serbian office. None of them knew anything about my skills, education, experience, or had even met me in person. They only knew I was an American businesswoman who now lives part of the year in Serbia. They've ranged from bio-tech companies to Internet firms.

Although Western companies do, on occasion, aggressively headhunt top qualified candidates for key positions, pinging random bloggers to see if they want jobs is not remotely normal. So, why is it happening to me? Desperation I suppose.

Companies want Western-educated or at least Western-experienced execs on their teams in Serbia, just simply because they share a common understanding of how business "should" work, plus a common background makes communication far easier. I know from personal experience. In the past, I've hired and managed nat

If you yourself are a Serb expatriot (of which I suspect thousands surf B92 weekly) or you are a foreigner married to a Serb, I've started a new Facebook group for us to gather. It's free, but you must be a Facebook member (which is also free.) I've learned though this blog and my own separate blog that I'm not the only non-Serb out there who is in that crazy world of being married to a Serb. So, I figured, let's make company for each other!

Specific Instructions:

#1. If you are not on http://www.facebook.com already, create a free account for yourself.  You can create a profile of yourself which friends who you've selected can see. You can get emails and other contacts from Facebook members who are your friends.  And you can join groups.

#2. After you log in, click on the left, "applications" list where it says "Groups".

#3. In the search box at the top of the Groups home page, enter the words:  Married to a Serb Expat

#4.  The

I conducted a quick experiment a few days ago. I went to all three of the US presidential candidate's official web sites and searched for any mention of Kosovo or Serbia. Nothing. Next, using their online forms I wrote each a note explaining that I am a blogger covering Serb-American affairs for two blogs and did they have any position on the US recognizing Kosovo's independence that they would like to share with my readers?

Within 24 hours I received form letters, the gist of which was, 'thanks for your interest, but I am too busyto answer your question. Please contribute to my campaign." from the two Democrat candidates (Clinton and Obama). McCain's team didn't send me any email at all, not even a form.

Truthfully, McCain's reaction was the only one that shocked me. (His team should not be breaking email marketing 101 rules.) Fact is, although Kosovo may be the biggest drama of Serbia, it's an unnoticed affair in the American political world. The on

And now for something completely different from current politics... and yet, sadly, just about as depressing. A few B92 blog readers have emailed me asking if I have any tips on teaching their wives/girlfriends/boyfriends Serbian. Here's what I know - if you have any tips to add please do.

#1. Be nice. Serbian is a very hard language to learn.

In the first throes of love or infatuation, your new partner will inevitably volunteer to learn your language. Then he or she will actually try to learn some. Unless he or she is a language-genius or you live fulltime in Serbia surrounded by non-English speakers, the task will soon become overwhelming. Shortly after that, lessons will languish, the promise will be broken. years of bickering ensue.

OK, Serbian is not as hard as most Asian languages are for Westerners. Learning to speak Thai, for example, would crush me into oblivian. On the other hand, it's not easy. Serbian is especially hard for educated Westerners because the R

Yet again Serbia's image -- and much of its political and economic future -- is being decided vividly in headlines in the Western press. For example, the hugely influential and (usually) highly credible Washington Post just ran an editorial headlined, "Serbia's Thugs". 

As if the headline is not bad enough, the editorial is completely one-sided and simple-minded, basically saying Serbs Yet Again Suck, but not giving any reasons why or background into how the US government may have (heartily) contributed to the problems.

My question is, why are almost no Serbs or Friends of Serbs posting comments or editorial replies on the vast majority of these stories???  Almost all the major US, UK and Canadian press now allow online readers to post comments.  You may have to register to do so, but it's free.  It's your chance to fight a the PR battle, and no one on th

This Valentine's Day, I was in Belgrade's Delta City Mall watching dressed up couples cooing at each other in the food court next to McDonalds.  Then we tooka few days off to visit my husband's family in Croatia and now it seems 800 youth are breaking various Belgrade McDonald's' windows. 

Watching events via TV and Internet while temporarily outside the country, I begin to wonder if our Serbia dreams will have to be delayed.  What does recalling ambassadors mean to the ordinary foreigner?  Will I need to get a Visa someday soon to visit my own home in Sombor?  Am I risking being turned away at the border someday soon because I bear a US passport?

The situation makes me think of the other foreign-born spouses of Serbs who want to return to their homeland.  There are plenty of us, I know because many of them email me privately.  I also consider the many young adult Serbs - often aged 22-30 - who were primarly raised and educated outside Serbia, who have been strongly conside

Just got back from Nepal, where I got many emails from Belgrade friends saying if we are going to buy in Belgrade, now is the time before prices go insane.  Belgrade is cheaper now than Zagreb and Zadar where my husband's parents still live.  And what with favorable politics, rich Russians and Kosovo-ites and perhaps loads of East-West spies and diplomats all descending on Belgrade - plus the looming someday maybe of EU membership - I guess we'd be crazy not to buy.

But then I wonder if it's a good investment after all.  Prices seem very high in relation to typical salaries.  Any flat under 50 square meters is wildly overpriced because it's so small it's "affordable" and any larger flat can't be resold in future because no one can afford a mortgage of more than 100,000 Euros... and there's all that new construction going on - thousands of new flats which make older ones, well less exciting for resale too.

 Ok if you were me and you had the chance to buy now

I wanted to title this "An Open Letter to the Serbian Government: Fix Your PR & Branding" but I don't think that many characters will fit in blog posts here. 

I know little about politics and even less about Serbian politics; however, as a 25-year pro, I know heaps  about PR, marketing and branding.  As a PR and media pro who is a big fan and part-time resident of Serbia, it's incredibly painful to see how badly your PR is being bungled, and your story mis-told over Kosovo in the international press.  Knowing a bit of Serb history, it seems this PR bungling is a national chracteristic for at least the past 75 years if not longer.  You are geniuses at math anmd so many other things, but absolutely dreadful at marketing.

Reasons are partly due to the Serb love of Justice.  Serbs seem to think if right is on their side, then somehow so should be world opinion.  When you get hurt again, you say, "Oh I am a victim."  The fact is, the world is a darker place than that

Thanks to the Internet and a forbearing boss, this year I left formal office life behind to live anyplace in the world (with Net access) that my heart desires.  My heart, as it turns out, pretty much desires to live wherever my husband is. 

That said, although I loved our time this summer and fall in his hometown of Sombor Serbia, when he announced we were moving to Nepal for the winter so he could do some trekking, I was So Not Excited.  I bitched, I moaned, I whined, I was not a pleasant person.  I never wanted to own hiking boots and 3rd world countries don’t sound enticing on paper.  But in the end I hung my head, dragged my feet and came along. 

What an idiot I was!  Nepal is fantastic.  I’m having a ball here and highly recommend it as a travel and living experience.  The great part for Serbs is that it’

"Before the 1990s, we were like drunk Americans!" a friend proclaimed in a Sombor cafe to me as he expounded on the history of the area. "We had good schools, free apartments, cars, we could travel anywhere we wanted ... even the cleaning women had $10,000 a month!"

It's a theme I've heard before many times from my husband's lips, although for him the time was the 1970s that were truly golden in Yugoslavia (before he grew up and had to try to find a job in the 1980s that interested him remotely.) He can speak for hours quite poetically about the free apartments, free healthcare, traveling anywhere, etc. My former-Yugoslav friends of that era overall seem to have had far more blissful childhoods than anyone I ever met in the US.

Growing up in the US in the 1970s and 1980s pretty much sucked. Our family life and the economy started getting significantly better just about at the same time Yugoslavia fell apart and your lives went into the toilet for awhile.

According to The Economist's 2008 World Rankings Book, the average Serb (man, woman, and child) smokes 5.8 cigs per day, ranking them as the Top 9 Most Smoking Countries on Earth.  That's a lot of smoking.

Greece comes in at #1 with 8.4 cigs per day; Macedonia is #2 at 7.1 cigs per day, Russia is #3 at 6.8, and Slovenia kicks Serbian smoker ass at #5 with 6.2 cigs per day.  Bosnia is below at #13 (5.2 per day) and Croatia is not ranked on the list.  Yet oddly, Croatia has by far the highest cancer deaths rate of the region at 167 deaths per 100,000 population.  (Serbia spends a far higher percent of the GDP on public healthcare, so that may make the difference.)

OK, one might be tempted to make jokes about the confluence of the Orthodox Church and smoking, or the whole Slavic + Balkans and smoking thing.

Actually because I'm American and as everyone knows, Americans are all about money, I will say that I'm awfully tempted to do the math.  That is ~8 million Serbs times 5.

As the political situation and the economy have eased in the past few years, a trickle of ex-patriots (Serb citizens who moved abroad) have begun to return. I know personally of three families in my circle alone and have received emails from several other returning Serb expats who read this blog. 

I suspect the government would like to see the diaspora reversed even more.  More expat retirees coming home to spend their last years and life savings living well in a land that's pretty cheap (as long as you stay out of downtown Belgrade.)   Plus, more young workers with college degrees and experience in the Western business world who'll help lure more multinational companies to do business in Serbia.   

If you are a former Serb citizen (or Yugoslav from the Serb area), what in your mind would make return-worthy conditions?  Why and when will you move home again?

If you are someone who lived abroad and already returned, what made you come back? 

As a foreigner who lives in Serb

Last week I mentioned here in passing that I liked architecture in Serbia.  A commenter replied, "Architecture? Which architecture? Many years ago famous architect Le Corbusier said about Belgrade that it is the ugliest city built on one of the most beautiful locations". 

This is just one of many times I've heard or read Belgrade-based people use the words Belgrade and Serbia interchangably -- as though they are two words that mean the exact same thing. For example, the Facebook Group Expats in Serbia proclaims, "Let's gather and relish the joys of Beograd together." 

I cannot begin to express how annoying this constant, knee-jerk, unthinking Belgrade=Serbia is for people living outside of Belgrade!  We a

Per our discussion on Serbs in Diaspora that sprang out of comments in my last blog post, I just phoned Ivana Cerovic, who is the Conference Organizer at America's Serbian Unity Congress, for details about the upcoming conference.   In case you're interested, here's what I discovered:

* the 17th annual conference is being held in downtown San Francisco Oct 26-28 (most activities are on Saturday the 27th.)  You can register online.

* Anywhere from 200-500 US-based Serbs will attend.  I'll be there part of the time and blog some notes for B92 of course.  Yes, qualified bloggers can get a press pass! There are

I'm not a Serb myself, just married to one.  So I only understood about 10% of the jokes on these sites... but they seemed fairly funny to me. I showed them to my step-children who laughed hard but wouldn't explain anything, "You have to be a Serb to understand."  Well, ok, you guys are Serbs, so maybe you'll understand.  Are these funny or not?  And are there any better funny sites about being a Serb?  Because, you know, sometimes we just all need a laugh.

#1.  You Know You're Serbian If...  (Note: There's also a Facebook Group dedicated to this list.)

#2.  Uncyclopedia entry about Serbia (this is Wikipedia for people who don't take the facts all that seriously.)   

I  had one the absolute happiest times of my life these past two months in Serbia... the air, the greenmarket, the architecture, the friendly and social people, the air of relaxation (after routine 80 hour work weeks in the US).  Serbia is a wonderful place.  I just wish it was happier for its citizens.

According to a 2004 study (ok it's dated and Serbia has come a long way since 2004) of global happiness, Mexicans were the second happiest nation on the planet.  Surveyed citizens said they were (a) happy and (b) satisfied with the way their lives were going.  America was #15 on the list, Slovenia was #38, Croatia was #42 and Serbia slunk in at #61.  Better than Zimbabwe, but hardly impressive.

If you don't know much about Mexico, you may be surprised to find it has more in common with Serbia than you think.  People don't have much money (except for the uber-rich), there's been quite a bit o

I've been thinking a lot about citizenship recently both because of Serbia's political debate about new citizenship laws, and also because many B92 readers have emailed me letters (thank you!) often mentioning they themselves are citizens of multiple countries.   Many members of my extended family  including my Father, also have multiple citizenships.  I'm not qualified to comment on political debate, but I can extend three practical considerations:

#1. Useful papers vs heartfelt allegiance

I've noticed as people start collecting citizenships, the importance and meaning of each citizenship often lessens in their hearts.  A citizenship which in essence should mean what country you consider yourself to be on the "team" of (sort of like basketball teams, only in this case countries), instead becomes a matter of convenience.  A matter of useful papers.  For example, my Father uses his Irish citizenship pretty much soley for the purpose of getting in shorter, quicker lines

She honestly had no idea what to do online (something unimaginable in a 13 year old US girl but typical of her peers here I've found).  So I showed her B92, Belgrade 2.0 and Krstarica which are about the only Serb language sites I know.  After 20 minutes or so she came out and listlessly joined us again.  The Internet, it appears, was awfully boring for a fashionable Serb 13 year old.  

Challenged, I got up again and this time went straight to YouTube and typed "Serbia" into the search box.  Surely there had to be something of interest.  Well,

This is my first post to B92 (thanks for inviting me Dejan!) and I feel rather self conscious about it. Which proves to be inspirational because that is the way I think most Serbs feel about America. According to most of my Serb acquaintances, America as a country hates Serbia. America is a big mean bully, glittering with gold, nuclear weapons, and Hollywood celebrities, that personally hates Serbs and wants to cause problems for them.

When I married my Serb husband, none of his family and friends from Serbia came to the wedding in the US even when we offered to pay for all travel. People from many other countries, however, happily accepted. When my company in the US hired several Serb-based workers, some refused to come on paid trips to the home office in the US. Others came after much persuading but were terrified when getting off the plane that Americans would be mean to them personally.

The truth is different.

At most, 2% of Americans know what and where Serbia is. Some o