Christmas, part 2

Usually Christmas anxiety starts to get me a week before Christmas but this year it started in early October. 

Understandable if you take into consideration that Christmas talks with my girlfriend started in late June.

I have never been a fan of that holiday and in the last couple of years I had the opportunity to opt out of it. That will be impossible this year and I don't want to, but I still feel a bit queasy when I start thinking about it. 

In order for you to understand my Christmas dislike i need to explain a bit of Croatian culture. Families in Croatia are very tightly nit and so was mine. Both mine and my ex-wife family live in Zagreb which made seeing each other very easy and it was quite often. My parents would crash at our place every Sunday and we would see her family once in 2 weeks, plus we would talk around twice a week. That was standard through the year. Visits often included lunches or we would just hang out with a coup of coffee or some drinks. In addition birthdays were celebrated as well, all of them, and those were considered as special occasions. Birthdays required something extra; lunch, dinner, booze etc. And then Christmas arrived and we would be bombarded with questions which Christmas lunch are we going to attend. 

What always confused me with Christmas, in a Croatian cultural surrounding was; why all the pressure! Why do I HAVE go to Christmas lunch with any of our families? Have we not seen each other within last 14 days more then once? Shall we not keep the tempo of seeing each other at least once every 14 days? What does make that day soooo different from other days of the year that not seeing your family on that day necessarily results in complete and utter disaster. It is the end of the world as we know it?

Some years later my German friend explained to me what is the deal with Christmas. His parents live in the norther Germany, his brother in western Germany and my friend lives in eastern Germany. He sees his family couple of times per year and Christmas is one of the few holidays when all of them know they will be free and not working. When he told me this the first time it was a Eureka moment for me. Well, ofc! In that setup Christmas makes total sense. You know all of you will be free and you haven't seen them in a while, so it is a happy occasion. After I moved to Denmark time with my family is much more valuable then it was before. Now I have the time to miss them!

http://i.huffpost.com/gen/4892592/images/o-CHRISTMAS-GIFTS-facebook.jpg

Second thing I never grasped with Christmas in general is the presents frenzy. My view of Christmas, in which I had problems fitting myself in, is spending a cozy time with your family and a part of that is gift giving. The purpose of giving presents should be to make someone happy with a gift as a token of appreciation. It should be a happy occasion, both buying/making a present and receiving it. When it turns into bickering about what should be the budget cap for presents, who should buy presents for who and what not, at that point I think that the purpose of whole gift giving for Christmas is misunderstood. 

Think about it, if you take a holiday that should be about spending cozy time with your family and you turn it into stressing over what you should buy to whom for what price, you stress over the event in general, you think about it for the greater part of the year, then I think you are doing something wrong. You knocked out all the spontaneity and coziness out of Christmas.

I don't think I will ever buy into that holiday. Fortunately it is only once per year in the darkest part of the year, so at least it doesn't destroy a nice sunny day.

I wonder if there is more of you out there who share my thoughts? P.S. I like the Christmas decorations :D

New Croatian caste system

Today I read another typical Croatian horror story. A lady works as a cook in a school. Couple of years into her employment a new main cook is employed. After the first year of his employment, sexual harassment starts. She goes to the school principal to report it, and the response that she gets is, that she is making it all up. The school immediately filed a counter lawsuit against her for stealing school property. She won that case and the verdict is final, she was declared innocent of the charges. One time she asks the offender: "but why do you do it? "Because nobody can touch me, I have the school principle under my control". The harassed lady filed the law suit against the harasser and won, but the verdict still isn't final. There is still the right to appeal to the supreme court. Since the harassment began, years have passed. The harasser is still working in the same school - still doing his thing.

Major of Split between 2009 - 2013

This is only one of many stories of the same type from Croatia. The pattern is the following; a person of influence - be it a politician, a business man or their family members - commits a serious crime on the level of; murder in the first or second degree, embezzlement of the huge amount of money, fraud, harassment, blatant ignoring of laws etc. Institutions do the work and file a lawsuit - no need to mention the case is clear as daylight, even to someone with the IQ of the room temperature.

Consequences? None. In most cases years or even decades later, judicial proceedings are still not over, the final verdicts still haven't been reached or the trials have been rolled back to the start. In some cases, there are verdicts with a laughable punishment (fx. one of the former ministers was charged with embezzlement of tens of millions of HRK Čobanković, and the sentence was one year in jail that was replaced with volunteer work). In other cases, people in power just blatantly breach the laws and nothing is happening (fx. second person in command of University of Zagreb refuses to go to retirement after he passed all the legal limits of the age when you must retire by law).

On the other hand, you have normal, every day people that are not in a position of power; that do some minor infringement of the Croatian law, people who suffered injustice, people in need of a special care or just normal young people fresh out of school trying to make a living.

Consequences? Severe! If you live in Croatia and you are not in a position of power, you don't want to be in a situation where you need the "services" of the Croatian legal system. Just to mention some short examples. In 2015, lady in Osijek was arrested and taken to a police station because she crossed a street on a red light. 

Son of a businessman that was financing the strongest political party in Croatia, killed two high school girls because of speeding. After two years and annulled judicial proceeding, the killer got a reduced sentence by six months - that was later reduced even further - that needed to be served in a open correctional facility. Justice for the families of the killed girls? Who cares when they are not coming from a good Croatian family, right?

A number of my friends, fresh out of university, were looking for any jobs for years and couldn't find any. Finally they left and guess what? They got on their feet fast and are living successful lives in whichever country they decided to go - but there was no place for any of them in Croatia. 

Conclusion, when you are not in a position of power in Croatia, legal system will not protect you, police will not protect you and your career opportunities are very limited if you are not from a good family.

All of this made me thinking; didn't Croatia somehow develop a caste system? There is a clear pattern in Croatian society: if you were born in a family with a position of power, all the doors will be open for you and no matter what shit you cause, there will be no consequences. You are just beyond the reach of the law and Croatia is your playground.

On the other hand if you are an average Joe, or God forbid, skilled or talented without connections, your life options are crippled. There are loads of stories of talented Croatians who just would not get the lucky break in Croatia... but when they left all the doors opened for them. The last one I read was about a young opera singer. In Croatia he struggled. After he finished his education he couldn't even get a small and insignificant role in an opera. Then he applied for the scholarship in La Scala, Milan. Now he is singing with the most famous opera singers in the world. At the same time Croatian national opera is in the free fall. Guess what? Talent doesn't matter, but family does. 

I could tell a million similar stories. Is it really surprising that the quality of all institutions is going down in Croatia? Of course not! In a new Croatian caste system, family is all and talent and skill are nothing.

Agency for legalization of illegally built buildings

More then 300.000 Croatians left the country since 2013, all the doors for them were closed. Number of employed people in public and state companies rose since cousins need to work. How will it end? Either it will snap at the point when the money runs out or Croatia will become a pleasant country for cousins and summer holiday. I mean, isn't administrative personnel in Croatia, just a really expensive kind of social support?

But let's end this entry on a positive note. Do you know why there is no sex in Croatian state administration? Because everybody is related.