The gym classes are busier too –women who were tied up during the sezona are now free to attend fitness classes and generally think about themselves (to a certain extent, sort of). I walked home from pilates with one of the women in class the other night ¬ - she had always said ‘hi’ with a shy smile but didn’t really say much more – having presumed that she didn’t speak English I was surprised at the conversation that we had walking home in the dark.
I asked what she did for work, and she said that she was a konobarica but that she knew that there was more to her than that. She has been working every day for the last 5 months, with not a single day off. She cannot ask for a day off or extra pay because she knows that there are others lining up behind her who would like her job. She knows that, her boss knows that – an employment issue impasse. She said that the time at the gym is the only thing that keeps her going, that she is tired and her body feels like ‘f***** sh*t’ (see, excellent command of the English language) and that she has decided to move to Zagreb and start some study. I commended her on her attitude and her English, and made the speech about the ‘world being your oyster and believing that you can do anything’. It’s the speech that my children have heard many times…. But maybe it is truer in New Zealand.
Now that the sezona has ended the first cracks of the PSS (Post Sezona Stress) are showing, with marriages falling apart and people needing counseling for depression. You see, it’s the old ‘idle hands’ thing. Having been ridiculously busy for the last three or four months¸ working up to 12 or 14 hours, 7 days a week¸ now there is nothing to do (unless you are a builder or related tradesperson), particularly if you no longer have job . That’s looking down the barrel of a long winter with nothing to do, and no money to do it with.
One thing that we talked about at dinner tonight is the financial cycle -
here’s how it goes. You don’t trust the banks because many of them collapsed during the recent war¸ so everyone deals in cash. Hardly anyone puts money in the bank – this means that not many people pay for purchases in shops by way of debit cards (our EFTpos cards) (because they have cash in the pocket not in the bank account). Shops encourage this by offering a discount for cash. If you have apartments, you make your guests pay in cash, Euros please. None of this goes in the bank, and it simply flows into the hands of builders for more apartments, or new cars, boats etc. If you are accounting for your apartment income to the tax department (a few do, ok, maybe 4 do), you underestimate the occupation rate and the number of rooms that you have – easy to miss that corner apartment. The sum total of this cycle is not very large if you are the government trying to collect taxes to support the infrastructure of the country.
The flow on from that is that if you have a legitimate job, you pay a huge amount of tax to cover the others that dont. The formula is that the population is declining (able bodied men who hadn’t yet gone forth and multiplied were killed in the war, and women are having less children, often only one) plus the high unemployment rate, less the cash society means that those suckers who are doing the right thing are taxed within an inch of their paypacket to ensure that there is money under the government’s mattress to run the country. No mean feat when corruption is high and personal pockets are being lined…
Today was my last day with the rowing kids – just starting the goodbyes.
Had coffee after rowing with a rowing mother who has become a friend - Dinner out tonight with friends… lunch tomorrow with friends…part of me just wants to creep away, jump on a bus and disappear, (I hate goodbyes) but another friend wants to drive me to Split and stay and have drinks until the ferry sales in the evening. I feel privileged to have made such lovely friends and I will miss them. (this is one of my girl rowers!)
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