A Traveler in the Foreign Service: Try not to die in Macedonia

by Dave Seminara on

You never forget your first dead body. One Friday afternoon several years ago, my boss at the American embassy in Skopje informed me that a 76-year-old American missionary, whom I’ll refer to as Joe, had died of a heart attack.

When an American citizen dies overseas and has no immediate relatives in the country, a Foreign Service Officer (FSO) has to identify the body, notify their next-of-kin and help arrange for the body to be transported back to the U.S., if that is the family’s wish. Only the gloomiest traveler or expat thinks about these macabre practicalities before leaving the U.S., but if you die abroad, an FSO is very likely to be involved in what happens next.

My boss agreed to make the notification phone call to Joe’s daughter back in Arkansas but said that I’d have to go out to identify his body and take care of the paperwork. This seemed like a good bargain to me, because my only experience with making death-notification phone calls came in a consular training course at the Foreign Service Institute and had been something of a disaster.

There were six of us in the class, five FSO’s and a ditzy civil servant who worked for some sort of governmental public affairs hotline. We were given scenarios and asked to role-play death notification phone calls. Cruelly, the instructor made the ditzy woman go first.

“Hi, my name is Karen Smith and I’m calling from the American Embassy,” she began, promisingly. (not her real name) “I’d like to speak to the next-of-kin of Tom Jones.”

We all burst out laughing before the instructor piped in.

“Ummm, you don’t ask to speak to next-of-kin,” he said. “That kind of foreshadows what you’re about to tell them.”

We had so much fun laughing about the next-of-kin gaffe that none of us could conjure the seriousness that was needed to make the calls and the exercise degenerated into a farce.

So luckily, my boss made the call and reported back that Joe’s daughter wasn’t particularly surprised that he had died. His wife had passed away a few years before and he got involved with a church that recruited him to serve as a missionary in Macedonia. The daughter wanted his body sent back to Arkansas but indicated that they didn’t have much money and thus needed to get a good price.

Ljupka, one of the embassy’s local employees, accompanied me out to an enormous, desolate area of Skopje called Butel to identify Joe. Inside the funeral home, we were ushered into the cluttered office of a pudgy, sweaty man named Stevcho, who ran the place. Stevcho boasted that he personally took care of all the Americans who had the misfortune of dying in Macedonia.He and Ljupka made small talk in Macedonian as reams of documents were plopped onto his desk. I sat impassively and signed my illegible scrawl as Ljupka instructed. Some documents required only my signature, while others also needed a stamp that had my name on it, or various seals and insignias. Paperwork is inescapable, even in death.

Ljupka and I were led into a warehouse to identify Joe’s body. Almost a dozen men, half of them government inspectors in funny looking communist leftover uniforms, stood around the casket. The men were in grand, Friday afternoon moods, and were chatting and joking with each other. I walked over towards the casket and cautiously looked down. The first thing I noticed was his bare feet.

“Ljupka, where are his shoes and socks?” I asked.

She had no idea. Joe was swaddled in a grubby looking, shaggy blanket. It was one of those cheap, cheesy looking blankets that have images of animals, like eagles or brown bears that you see people selling in abandoned gas stations and vacant parking lots. Joe had no shirt on, I could tell.

A sinister cloud of smoke soon hung lazily over the poor man’s coffin as the men lit cigarettes.

“Can you at least ask these guys to not smoke right on him,” I asked Ljupka.

“Dave, he’s dead, I don’t think the secondhand smoke is going to hurt him,” she said.

She had a point. Yet, somehow I wanted the men to be a bit more somber, more respectful. The only photo I had of Joe was his American passport, which was found on his body. In it, he looked very robust, healthy, and, well, alive. But now his face looked incredibly gaunt and shriveled. His mouth was agape and he had no teeth. Had someone stolen his dentures?

A man wearing a stained t-shirt grabbed hold of the top of the grubby blanket, which covered most of Joe, and asked a question in Macedonian that I couldn’t understand.

“He wants to know if he should uncover the blanket, so you can identify him,” she said. ‘He’s naked underneath.”

Naked? No one had told me anything about having to see an old, dead guy naked.

“Am I required to see him naked?” I asked.

Ljupka didn’t think so, so I told them to spare us.

“But where the hell are his clothes?” I asked.

Tomorrow: Part 2 of this story – Even the dead can get bumped from a flight.

Read more from A Traveler in the Foreign Service here.

Image via a.drian on Flickr.

A Traveler in the Foreign Service: the lovesick American who needed a loan. Twice.

by Dave Seminara on

Did you know that the U.S. State Department provides emergency repatriation loans (ERL) for destitute Americans overseas that need help getting home? The loans are intended for Americans who find themselves short of cash or a return ticket home due to some unforeseen circumstance- theft, illness and the like. If approved, the State Department will provide travelers with a one-way ticket back to the U.S. and money to cover their expenses prior to their departure. The rub is that their passport is limited for a single entry back to the U.S. and if they don’t repay the loan, they won’t get a new one.

The State Department doesn’t advertise the program for obvious reasons. In FY 2008, State processed 893 ERL’s worldwide, with a majority coming to assist travelers in Europe and Latin America. From what I gather, most loans are repaid as travelers don’t want to lose their right to get a new passport.

When you work at an American embassy in a country that “normal” American tourists don’t visit, you have an opportunity to meet some, shall we say, unique travelers who often have quite unusual stories of how they washed up in that country. When I worked in Macedonia, we were also responsible for Americans in Kosovo, not exactly a tourist magnet, particularly in the wake of the war there.

Most of the American citizens who came into the embassy for one reason or another were naturalized Americans of Albanian or Macedonian origin, but the American-born citizens who came to Macedonia or Kosovo despite having no connection to the region usually had the most interesting stories. One woman, whom I’ll call Juliet, became such a familiar face that she was practically an honorary member of our staff.

Juliet turned up one day in 2003 at the U.S. Office in Pristina (now an embassy) and fainted after causing a fuss about needing money to get back to the U.S. After helping revive her, local staff there instructed her to visit us down in Skopje.

Juliet told me that she was in Kosovo “just to check the place out.” Her explanation for why she had only a one-way ticket to Kosovo made even less sense.

In order to process a loan for an American traveler, the traveler has to provide the names and phone numbers of three persons who might agree to help them first. Juliet, who was 51 at the time, gave me the contact info for her mother, an adult daughter, and her brother. But she warned that “they ain’t going to give me a dime.”

Nonetheless, I was required to try.

“Good lord, I’m on a fixed income and she is taking years off of my life!” Juliet’s mother said. “Tell me, is she over there screwing around with some young man?”I had no idea and moved on to the brother and the daughter, both of whom told me to get lost.

“She’s been fleecing all of us for years,” her brother said. “She is the world’s biggest 50-year-old child.”

With the three rejections in hand, I was able to process her loan of about $800. When she walked out of the embassy, I assumed I’d never see her again, but about six months later she resurfaced at the embassy.

“What brings you back to the region?” I asked.

“You’re not going to believe this,” she said. “But I fell in love.”

She went on to detail how she’d fallen in love with a handsome 20-year old Kosovar whom she’d met on a website for the band The Doors. As soon as she said this, Jim Morrison’s voice popped into my head. Hello, I love you won’t you tell me your name.

Juliet said she had married the young man and wanted to file an immigrant visa petition to bring her young lover, more than thirty years her junior, back to the U.S. But first she wanted another loan to get home, only this time she said she wanted to go to Hawaii, rather than Tennessee.

“I paid the last one,” she reassured me.

“But why on earth did you come back here with another one-way ticket?” I asked.

“I thought we were going to get married and live happily ever after in Kosovo,” she said.
But her young lover had visions of Hawaiian palm trees dancing in his head and insisted they get out of Kosovo. He was obviously marrying her for the right to live in the U.S. but Juliet seemed to be the only person who didn’t understand this.

I checked with contacts back in Washington and was told that we could give her a loan to get to Tennessee but not Hawaii, since she had no proof that she was domiciled there. I called her mother, brother and daughter again and they told me the same thing as six months before, only more forcefully.

“Hell no!” her brother said. “I’m not paying so she can travel around with her boy toy.”

Juliet got her loan, but this time my boss told me that she wanted me to physically escort her to the airport to make sure she actually left the country. As luck would have it, her flight left Skopje at 7 A.M. on a Saturday morning, so I had to meet her at her hotel at 5 A.M.

I turned up at her budget hotel at the appointed time and asked the reception clerk to ring up to her room. The phone kept ringing but she didn’t answer. I hoped that she was in the shower and hadn’t skipped town. I had her plane ticket, so I assumed she was there, but couldn’t be sure. Eventually, I walked up to her room and knocked on the door. She answered in a bathrobe, looking haggard and un-showered, and I could see her young partner lying on the bed in a pair of boxers. Yikes.

“We’re almost ready,” she said, not very convincingly.

Her husband, whom I’ll call Blerim, wasn’t going to the States, at least not yet. She needed to get her financial house in order to sponsor him, but apparently he was coming along for the ride to the airport.

They eventually emerged from their love nest but resumed their ostentatious cuddling and smooching in the back seat and then in the terminal itself, before she boarded the plane. About a year later, Juliet finally had her paperwork together and Blerim joined her in her new home in Hawaii, where she’d found work as a nurse. I assume that they lived happily ever after, at least until he got his green card and left her for someone his own age.

Read more from A Traveler in the Foreign Service here.

Image via mtarlock on Flickr.

A Traveler in the Foreign Service: go native or go postal

by Dave Seminara on

Have you ever seen an American walking through an airport in a flowing, beaded sari, a colorful African tribal dress, or Afghan shalwar kameez and wondered, what the hell are they thinking? Expatriates who “go native” while living overseas might seem a bit loopy, but “going native” is actually a fairly common way to cope with culture shock.

A traveler and an expat experience foreign cultures in completely different ways. What can appear novel to the traveler can simply be a nuisance to the expatriate.

After an expat has been in their new country for a while, they inevitably confront aspects of the local culture they dislike. Even in the best places, we Americans can find things to complain about. Some cope with culture shock by retreating into a bubble- surrounding themselves with other foreigners and doing their best to recreate the lives they had before they left home. Others go native- completely rejecting their home culture and everyone who isn’t local. And of course, the majority are hybrids who fall somewhere in between.

Nearly every Foreign Service post has people in both extreme camps- let’s call them cowboys and natives for simplicity’s sake. We had one native in Skopje, whom I’ll call Native Neil, whom I really liked, but he was considered highly eccentric for embracing the local culture a bit too warmly. For example, Neil took public buses to get around Skopje while virtually no other Americans did. At the time, one could take a taxi pretty much anywhere in the city for the equivalent of $1. A bus ride cost 20 cents but the buses were extremely crowded and had erratic schedules.

Occasionally my wife and I would see Native Neil waiting at a bus stop and offer him a ride, and I think it embarrassed him to be seen interacting with other Americans. Native Neil didn’t need to save the 80 cents; he just wanted to completely immerse himself in the local culture, which is perfectly respectable. But for other Americans, that immersion made him a bit flaky.I tried to stake out some middle ground between the cowboys and natives, and, over time, I grew to love Macedonia and its people. (well, most of them) But there were definitely elements of the local culture that I could never embrace, even if I lived there a lifetime. Those who read this column regularly might recall that I’m a light sleeper.

Skopje is not a good city to be a light sleeper in. My apartment building was located at a busy intersection near downtown and we had several large garbage dumps just outside the gates of the building. Roma riding horse-drawn carriages would stop by to sift through the bins at all hours of the day and night and would send the neighborhood dogs into a barking frenzy. Frequently, I’d be jolted awake at 3 A.M. by a chorus of baying dogs, who wanted everyone in the neighborhood to know that our trash was being violated.

Because it would take time for the Roma to sift through all the bins, the barking would sometimes go on for 15-20 minutes, maybe more. I was friendly with the buildings’ caretakers, Blagoj and Nikola, who spent the bulk of their days in a windowless room staring at a wall, so I asked Nikola what could be done about the barking dogs. He agreed to speak to the owners and, in my American naiveté, I assumed that they would do something to try to quiet their dogs, who slept outside in front of their homes.

But Nikola’s détente came to naught.

“They love their dogs, there’s nothing we can do,” he reported back.

“But couldn’t they let them sleep inside?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

They were guard dogs and guard dogs belonged outside. I turned to my good friend and neighbor, Georgi.

“Well, Macedonians have a different way of dealing with such problems,” he said.

He went on to tell a story about how, as a youth, a favorite family dog had been poisoned with tainted meat by a neighbor who was annoyed with its barking. So rather than knock on the neighbor’s door to complain, they had simply killed the dog. I was told that this was not an uncommon approach in the Balkans. But I wasn’t about to annihilate the neighborhood dogs over lost sleep, so I just lived with it.

But a bad neighbor whom I dubbed Evil Atso was another matter. Evil Atso was a Mafioso thug who lived directly above us. He and his obnoxious wife used to let their little rat of a dog out into the hallway to piss and shit in the common area and would often park all three of their luxury cars in such a way that they’d block other residents in their spots. No one said a word because everyone was afraid of him.

Evil Atso was doing a major renovation of his apartment, and, despite being very wealthy, was actually doing a lot of the work himself- always at odd hours, like midnight during a work week, or at 6 A.M. on a Saturday or Sunday. The building had a no noise/construction on nights and weekends policy, but everyone was afraid to call Evil Atso on it. Except me. Our bedroom was directly below the room he was renovating and we would often awaken to the sound of jackhammers, literally right above our beds.

At first, I complained to Blagoj and Nikola, who were supposed to enforce such matters, but they were terrified of him.

“He has a lot of money,” Nikola said. “He can do whatever he wants.”

But as an American, I simply couldn’t accept that sort of grim fatalism. No, we Americans think that we can confront any problem, any nuisance, while people in other countries, like Macedonia, just learn to cope.

The first few times I confronted him, I was pretty civil, but that approach didn’t work, so one early weekend morning, when he was jackhammering away above our heads, I went up to his apartment building carrying a big old ghetto-blaster with a Metallica c.d. in it. After I knocked, the noise ceased and he let me in. Rather than start in with my usual complaints, I simply hit play and held up the ghetto-blaster with both arms outstretched just inches from his fat, villainous-looking face. The volume was all the way up and the angry words to “Sad But True” came spilling forth, half distorted, impossible to avoid.

He thought I was nuts and told me that he’d “break my neck” if I came back up to his apartment again. The disturbances continued for a couple more weeks and then, eventually, did cease. All along, the Macedonians had been right. There was no point in going postal over some lost sleep.

Read more from A Traveler in the Foreign Service here.

Photos via Flickr, Todd Huffman, blhphotography, Wonderlane, and B Rosen.

A Traveler in the Foreign Service: where paid time off is taken seriously

by Dave Seminara on

After a long weekend, have you ever thought- ‘if only every work week lasted only four days?’ Flex time and four 10-hour day work weeks are becoming more common, but most of us are still stuck working at least five days a week.

I wouldn’t advise joining the Foreign Service solely because you want more vacation time and travel opportunities, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that these are two of the biggest perks of this career choice. Consider the benefits.

I’m talking long weekends, baby

Most Foreign Service Officers (FSO’s) serve between 50-75% of their careers at embassies and consulates overseas where both local and U.S. holidays are observed. This means double the long weekends, or more in some festive locales. There are 10 U.S. federal holidays this year and some countries have even more. For example, the U.S. embassies in Sarajevo, Port of Spain and Port Louis will be closed for a total of 22 holidays in 2012. Bangkok has 21, and in Athens, Lisbon, Colombo, Berlin, Rome and New Delhi there are 20.

The Christmas season is a joy to behold in Orthodox countries thanks to the fact that the Orthodox, bless them, celebrate Christmas in early January. During the five weekend stretch between Christmas and MLK day, embassy employees this year had 4 long weekends.

Obviously many other posts have fewer holidays and in some of the more holiday-crazy countries, the embassy doesn’t actually close for every holiday due to U.S. government restrictions, which are intended to ensure that FSO’s spent at least some time at work each year.

In some fun-loving countries, the government will declare holidays as a spur-of-the-moment treat to boost their popularity. The pretext can sometimes be flimsy- the national handball team placed third in an obscure competition, or perhaps the country’s second favorite poet just croaked and everyone needs an enjoyable long weekend at the beach to grieve. In some developing countries, there may be no pretext at all, just, ‘screw it, we’re not working on Monday.’ But only a truly skillful U.S. Ambassador will find a way to close the embassy for spontaneously declared holidays.Any way you slice it, the benefits are great, but before you rush off to sign up for the Foreign Service Exam, I should mention that congressional delegations (CODELS) are prone to killing FSOs’ long weekends. FSO’s that are posted to places tourists want to visit can count on at least a few CODELS each year during long holiday weekends.

Why? Well, it certainly isn’t because Representative Cletus Bumblescrew and his trophy wife want a junket in Paris during their long weekend. Oh no, it’s because their constituents want them to know much more about the French trade union leaders and opposition politicians they’ll meet in between shopping trips and visits to the Eiffel Tower.

But wait, there’s more

In addition to the holidays, FSO’s get annual leave as well. For those with 3 years government experience or less, it’s 13 workdays per year; employees with 3-15 years service get 20 days; and employees with more than 15 years get 26 workdays per year.

Another nice benefit for the travel addicted is home leave. After the conclusion of each overseas tour, FSO’s get home leave, which accrues at a rate of 15 workdays per year, giving (in theory) FSO’s a very nice 6 week break at the end of a two-year tour and a very sweet 9 week holiday at the conclusion of a 3 year tour. Home leave is actually mandated by Congress and the intention is to hopefully help Americans who might have gone native overseas to re-acquaint themselves with American culture, and spend time with family members.

The State Department pays to send FSO’s and their families back to the U.S., but in reality, there is no one making sure they spend their time eating apple pies, attending baseball games and watching Judge Judy stateside. So if they want to hit Copacabana Beach in Rio, they’re pretty much free to do so. And here’s the really fun part: you can set up your home leave address pretty much wherever you want in the 50 states. FSO’s are supposed to designate an address where they have the most ties, but I know people who simply used the addresses of friends or relatives in Hawaii, because that’s where they wanted to spend their home leave time.

Now Cletus and his wife can’t take away home leave, but an annoying boss can. Many FSO’s don’t end up getting anywhere near as much home leave as they’re entitled to because their next post always wants them to arrive yesterday. Like many things in the Foreign Service, it’s all about how much values their career prospects. An FSO that really values travel and spending time with their family can usually take all or most of their home leave. But if they want the big promotions, they think twice about maxing out on it.

A look at vacation time around the world

In my opinion, FSO’s deserve all the leave time they get. In fact, I find it very odd that even in an election year when politicians promise voters the sun, moon and stars, none seem to advocate more vacation time for Americans. The U.S. is the only industrialized country with no government mandated paid vacation and Americans tend to take fewer vacation days compared to the rest of the world. Here are the statutory minimum vacation requirements in a variety of countries, according to a CNBC report in 2009.

30 days- Finland, Brazil, France
28 days- Russia, Lithuania, United Kingdom
26 days- Poland
25 days- Greece, Denmark, Austria
20 days- Switzerland, New Zealand
19 days- S. Korea
15 days- Taiwan
14 days- Hong Kong, Singapore
12 days- India (thought they have a whopping 16 public holidays)
10 days- Canada, China

Those figures are what’s required by law, but according to a 2009 Expedia survey, some workers taken even more time off. The French average a staggering 38 days; the Brazilians 34; the Swedes 32, the Germans 27; the Australians 19. And the Americans? A paltry 13 days.

With the American economy still a mess, no serious politician is about to propose government mandated vacation time, but I’m not sure that more leisure would hurt the economy. Think about it- when do you spend the most? Certainly not while you’re at work. 70% of the U.S. G.D.P. is based upon consumer spending, so more time off certainly wouldn’t hurt on that score. It’s not likely to happen, so in the meantime, if you want to party like the rest of the world, think about joining the Foreign Service.

Read more from A Traveler in the Foreign Service here.

Image via cdedbdme on Flickr.

A Traveler in the Foreign Service: A birthday that went up in smoke in Belgrade

by Dave Seminara on

There’s nothing like having a sealed train compartment full of Serbian farmers blowing smoke in your face on your 30th birthday. One of the strangest elements of expatriate life is that you sometimes find yourself celebrating major occasions with people you just met, rather than friends and family.

I had just started a tour as an American Foreign Service Officer in Macedonia right before my 30th birthday and my wife, who was completing a graduate degree in Chicago, hadn’t yet arrived at post. So my options were to spend the auspicious occasion with people whom I barely knew, or spend it alone. I told Marija, one of my Macedonian colleagues, that I planned to take the train up to Belgrade, but didn’t mention that the trip would take place on my 30th.

“Nobody takes the train,” she said. “They gas the compartments and then rob everyone.”

I ignored her and turned up at Skopje’s forlorn train station on Saturday morning November 9, for my birthday trip to Belgrade. I love train travel and thought that it would be a pleasant way to spend the day. I had a compartment all to myself for the first hour of the trip, but shortly after we crossed the Serbian border, a group of four boisterous Serbs barged into the compartment.

There was a teenager named Ivan, two haggard, middle aged women whose names I didn’t catch, and a middle aged man named Slavica who wore a garish jacked with the words CHICAGO HAPPY MEMBER CLUB emblazoned in a huge font across his back. I couldn’t help but note the irony: I was spending my 30th birthday with a member of the Chicago Happy Member Club, rather than with my wife in Chicago.

Immediately after sitting down, Slavica slid the compartment door shut, lit up a cigarette, and blew the smoke right in my face. I pointed to the no-smoking sticker on the door. He gave me a puzzled look and a shrug and kept smoking, so I opened our window. In the Balkans, and in other parts of the world, fresh air is seen as a dangerous thing- perhaps akin to spending a holiday at a leper colony or having unprotected sex with an H.I.V. positive prostitute-which causes all sorts of illnesses.Slavica slammed the window shut and when I protested he got up and crouched over me, menacingly hovering with his rancid breath so close to my face that I noticed he had cat-like whiskers growing implausibly up near his eye sockets. He barked at me in Serbian and then stormed out into the corridor to finish his smoke.

The uglier of the two women, who had greasy spiked hair and wore baggy leather pants, went out, grabbed Slavica’s cigarette from him, came back in, took a puff on it and blew the smoke ostentatiously in my face. Happy Birthday.

My new friends spoke no English, and I spoke no Serbian, but I had a trusty phrasebook. The spike-haired woman wanted to see my passport, in order to determine where I was from. After our unpleasant introduction, the last thing I wanted to do was pull out a black, diplomatic passport from the United States, a country that had just bombed the Serbs only three years before.

In order to confuse and repel them I start speaking Albanian but they refused to believe that I was from Albania. Slavica eventually came back in and tried to make nice by riffling through my phrase book in an attempt to get to know me.

After an enormous amount of phrasebook effort, I gathered that neither of the two women were his wives, although he indicated through various crude pelvic thrusts that he was interested in introducing the less homely woman to the HAPPY MEMBER CLUB, should the opportunity arise. They had all just come from a market town and were headed home to Leskovac.

They were paprika farmers, who had been trying to sell their crops at the market. Slavica wanted to know how much a kilo of paprika went for in the U.S., and was disappointed that I did not know. I eventually admitted to them that I was American and this seemed to please everyone, most of all, spike hair, who seemed to be the only person in the compartment who hadn’t warmed to me.

By the time they departed, we were all old friends- doing shots of rakija, singing songs (them, not me), and giggling about dirty words in the phrase book. Before she alighted onto the platform, the slight-less ugly woman handed me a scrap of paper with a hotmail address on it. We shared no common language, but vowed to stay in touch. Sure we would.

A few hours later, I arrived in Belgrade and after only a few minutes of walking around the town center, formulated a snap impression: Belgrade may have the world’s most beautiful women. After eating a dismal plate of General Tsao’s chicken, I repaired to a crowded basement bar, where I was invited to sit with a group of three twentysomethings who spoke English- brothers, Marko and Nikola, and Nikola’s girlfriend, Tanja.

Marko said they had beckoned me to their table because I looked foreign and they wanted to practice their English. When I told them I was American, Tanja said, “don’t worry we won’t talk politics.”

Instead, we talked about cutlery.

“You probably didn’t know that the Serbs were the first people to eat with knives, did you?” Nikola asked.

I admitted that I hadn’t known that, but Marko quickly corrected his younger brother.

“It was spoons, you idiot, not knives!”

A lengthy discussion ensued in Serbian, and Tanja finally concluded, “we were the first to use knives AND spoons.”

“What about forks?” I asked.

After another lengthy Serbian language discussion, Tanja said, “probably forks too, but we’d have to check about that.” After the cutlery claims, Marko boasted that the Serbs had also founded Paris, and had “given the Romans their technology.”

“Really?” I asked. “What were all of your neighbors up to when the Serbs were doing all these things?”

Not much, according to them. Montenegrins were lazy and would cheat you. Macedonians were country bumpkins and really shouldn’t even exist as a nation. Albanians were sub-human and prone to crime. Bulgarians smelled bad and were ugly.

I tried to change the topic, and was encouraged to “study Serbian history, learn the Serbian language, eat Serbian food and take a Serbian wife.” When I mentioned it was my birthday, Nikola said, “Happy birthday, now buy us some drinks!”

Read more from a Traveler in the Foreign Service here.

Image via Flickr, Velja123.