The Balkans

Dear Friends,

Would I be able to tell, just by looking at it, how wealthy or poor a country is, if I knew nothing about it in advance? Of course, there is no country that I know literally "nothing" about, but on many I come pretty close. Romania and Bulgaria are among them.

Bucharest (capital of Romania) is often called the Paris of Eastern Europe, for its wide boulevards, delightful parks and gardens, and huge traffic circles like the Etoile. One such circle contains an Arc de Triomphe. The dictator Ceaucescu had ordered many houses torn down to promote the Paris image. It did look something like the Paris I lived in in 1948, but Bucharest, with its gray (dirty) buildings, lacked the charming architecture of Paris. One cannot suddenly re-shape a city to imitate another that has required over a thousand years to build.

We were taken to a dinner in a fancy restaurant, where an superb folk dance was performed. I could see myself, in Arlington Hall, New York sixty years ago, performing the same (or similar) steps. I am not sure how many dishes were served, but there must have been at least twenty (no kidding!) After discovering the endless trays that kept coming, we Americans took a nibble and then turned back our plates. I was dismayed to think of all the underfed Romanians while so much food was wasted.

As we were driving from Bucharest to Constanta (on the Black Sea), I learned that Constanta has a cedilla under the second "t" which makes it pronounced "Constantsa."

On the road to Constanta I watched the cattle, horses, and farms. The cows and horses seemed about as well fed as those in the United States, but often the cows were grazing on a grassy strip between the farm fences and the highway. I could not see why they did not wander on to the highway. (Maybe they were chained and I didn't notice.) The highway was modern, double-lane or four-lane, but most of the side streets were narrow, asphalt, or dirt. Most houses were small, about twenty-five feet square. The roofs consisted of four triangles, joined in a pointed center on top. They were primarily tin, although a few were red tile. The farms were mainly ragged, with weeds cropping out from place to place. I saw no modern farm equipment, nor even a man in the fields with a hoe.

Very few vehicles — mainly trucks — were on the highway, and very few people alongside it. In Constanta, people were casually dressed, mostly as ragged as U.S. college students, but I do not know what alternative clothing they owned. Constanta is a combination of Coney Island and all its glitter (but no roller coaster that I could see), and a commercial port, with cranes and other loading equipment. Occasionally we got a glimpse of the Black Sea, but Robin and I did not walk to the beach. It was too far for elderly cane-hobblers.

We boarded our cruise ship in Constanta and set sail up the Black-Sea-Danube canal. Jetlagged and tired, we immediately dropped off to sleep. When we woke up, we were in Rouche, Bulgaria.

Only one bridge crosses the Danube between Bulgaria and Romania. It is at Rouche, on the highway from Sofia to the northeast. When I asked why no more bridges, I was told they would be too expensive. But my economist mind told me that people and governments spend their money buying what they want most. Apparently the two peoples saw little need to visit each other frequently.

The food on the ship at every meal was almost (not quite!) as plentiful at that restaurant. So much for the poor, starving Romanians! We asked our waiters for small portions, but they politely replied, “Just don’t eat what you don’t want.” At least the excess was fed to the fish (or so I was told).

In Rouche (Bulgaria) we boarded a bus to drive (all day) to Nikopol, farther up the Danube, where we again met our ship. On the map I could see no roads along the river. Anyway, we traveled inland. Again I watched the farms. However, the roads contained even fewer vehicles than in Romania, and these mostly commercial trucks. Very few houses. But all the houses had red-roof tiles (no tin), and I could see no people or farm machinery. Exception: once I saw a man in the middle of the field with a hand-held hoe.

The farms grew mainly wheat, corn, and sunflowers. Last year, on a river cruise through Holland, Germany, Austria, and Hungary, I had been delighted to see the small German villages glide by, although disappointed that they were mainly painted white, without the quaint German designs. In Bulgaria there were vast fields of openness with very few towns. Some passengers noted the emptiness. "Where do the people live?" they asked. (Answer: in the few towns.) They must have had long distances to walk to cultivate the fields. I wondered about the one man with the hoe, and I thought of Edwin Markham. (When I was a child, my mother gave me a framed copy of "The Man with the Hoe," I suppose hoping that I would emulate his work ethic.

The sunflowers were magnificent, but I chided myself for not knowing the agricultural conditions required for them (rainfall, sun, and soil, etc.) I will look them up in my encyclopedia when I finish this letter. (One advantage of bringing my computer is that I have on it the entire Britannica. The ship library has only novels, and little about the countries we are going through.) So, I looked up "sunflower," and learned that the "sunflower plant is valuable from an economic as well as from an ornamental point of view. The leaves are used as fodder, the flowers yield a yellow dye, and the seeds contain oil and are used for food. The yellow, sweet oil obtained by compression of the seeds is considered equal to olive or almond oil for table use. Sunflower oil cake is used for stock and poultry feeding. The oil is also used in soap and paints and as a lubricant." (You didn't expect that from The Quaker Economist, did you?) But it told me nothing about relative costs, or why sunflowers were selected for a given field instead of other crops.

When she read the above, Robin mentioned that she put sunflower seeds in the granola she had been making for years. When I asked the guide what they were used for here, he replied “mostly cattle feed.’ I saw no cattle here, but I let the question drop.

As we approached Nikopol (a Roman town with a Greek name, "Victory Town,") the guide pointed out that many houses were empty. Why, I asked? "Because as the children grew up," he said, "they wanted the excitement of the city." I was not satisfied with this answer. My experience was that if you can't sell your house, you lower the price until the market finds a buyer. But suppose there are many more sellers than buyers at any price, as in the ghost towns of Colorado. If you lower the price to zero, and if no one buys, and you must move, you abandon the building. This would be a sign of poverty — local opportunity was missing — as our guide finally admitted.

At last we had a day of rest, since the distance from Nikopol to Belgrade offered "nothing" but beautiful scenery — no houses, a few open farms, just forests that were not visibly penetrable. I could compare Romania on one shore with Bulgaria, later Serbia, on the other, but I learned little. A Romanian historian gave a lecture on Romania. He was very boring, saying nothing I could not have learned from the encyclopedia, so I decided not to waste time on his remaining lectures.

Belgrade, Serbia, was a "richer" city than Bucharest. Several bridges spanned the Danube, the first we had seen since Rouche. We enjoyed a morning bus tour through the city, and I saw window displays of goods I had not seen since leaving the United States, also one or two skyscrapers. The Serbian guide apologized that there were few tourist items (which didn't bother us; Robin and I are now passing on our "tourist" collection to the next generation) because the country had been rent by war. We passed several bombed-out buildings, which would have reminded me of Germany in 1948, except that they were surrounded by intact buildings. I asked about the embassy of China (which the U.S. had bombed by mistake) and was told it had been torn down and replaced in a different location. No point in going there, but we did see other embassies, including the American.

We also saw the houses of the rich, on larger plots, fenced in and gated. They were mainly gray, tasteless, and unspectacular, distinguished only by their large size and grassy lawns.

Most passengers spent the afternoon walking around and shopping for what they could find. I slept for 2 1/2 hours, after which we continued up the Danube.

Serbia was the only country with a passport check. The immigration officials came on board just before our departure and compared every passport picture with the real person. What a waste of time, I thought! All they accomplished was to disturb my afternoon nap. They left, and we continued to Mohacs, Hungary.

We left the ship at Mohacs and took a bus to Kalocsa, a lovely town in the midst of an agricultural area. The houses along the way were larger, architecturally more varied than in Romania or Bulgaria, and spread out more among the fields. For the first time I saw chimneys (Hungary is colder than countries to the south) and television antennae (presumably a sign of a richer country). The main roads were asphalt, well cared for, and there were more vehicles, especially passenger cars. Side roads were narrow, sometimes paved, sometimes not.

The crops were mainly wheat, corn, sunflowers (not flowering as in Bulgaria, because of the earlier season), and paprika, for which Hungary is famous. Some wheat fields were spacious, obviously harvested by machine, though I didn't see heavy machinery – probably wrong season. But I wondered where the farm machines were kept when not in use and whether they had alternative use to agriculture. Some wheat fields were smaller, obviously harvested by hand. They were more scraggly than the larger ones, with the plants often squashed to the ground and weeds growing among them. When I asked about the difference between large and small, I was told the small were family plots where the owners did not use machinery. (But the large plots were private, family farms. Collectivization had been reversed in every country we saw, when communism ended.) The .paprika plants were very small -- it was early in the season -- and seemed well cared-for. I had the impression that the farther up the Danube we went, the wealthier the countryside.

At Kalocsa I had to go to the bathroom urgently. At the bus stop, I saw a “WC” sign, so I headed for tht door. Inside was a squat, bulky woman who spoke only Hungarian. She pointed to a sign, "100 forints." But I had no forints, only dollars and a credit card. Neither was acceptable. Next to her was an open door, and I could see inside the toilet I wanted. But she stood in the doorway, blocking my entry with arms outstretched. (BTW: Each country had its own currency and would not accept any other, or credit cards either. I wondered how the Balkan countries traded with each other.) The situation would have been hilarious had I not been in a hurry. I ran out to the bus driver, who was accustomed to receiving tips in dollars, and exchanged one for 201 forints. The lady courteously accepted 100 of these, wrote out a receipt, showed me into the room and pointed to the toilet, as if I didn’t know what it was. Then she left me and closed the door (thank heaven!) After I had left, so did she. She picked up the “WC” sign, put it inside, locked the door, and rode away on her bicycle.

We visited a farm in Kalocsa, where trained horses put on an impressive show. The ship had followed us to Kalocsa, where we boarded it again and had supper, followed by delightful Hungarian songs and dances.

"If this is Saturday, this must be Budapest." When I was younger, I looked down on quickie tours. To know a country, you had to live there. (I still think so.) As a student, I lived in families in Paris and Frankfurt, and later I would go abroad only if I was employed abroad. I was fortunate to have long-term assignments in Bolivia, Kenya, Mexico, and the Philippines, and speaking engagements in other countries of western Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. But nothing took me to eastern Europe. That was left to my older age, and to cruises (because I am too tired every day to work and cannot easily walk).

In 2001 I was asked to give a paper at a conference in Heidelberg. A river cruise from Amsterdam to Vienna fit snugly just before the conference, so Robin and I signed up. (The Main-Danube canal took us over the continental divide, which in Europe runs east and west.) It rained all the way, but worse yet, in Regensberg, Germany, the Danube was too high to let the ship under the bridges, so we were bussed the rest of the way. In Regensberg also, "9/11" happened, and my conference was called off. I was invited again a year later, but the German professor in charge of the conference told me what to write in my paper -- something I disagreed with – he treated me like "his" German grad student, so I withdrew from the conference. (When I judged doctoral theses at Colorado, the student would say what he or she wished; the professor would only make suggestions and judge the over-all quality of the argument.)

In 2003, we tried again, this time from Amsterdam to Constanta. But a 500-year drought had lowered the level of the Danube so a pontoon bridge in Serbia was sitting on the bottom, and we could not get beyond Budapest. That was unfortunate, because eastern Europe was what I wanted most to see. This year we started at Constanta and went upstream to Budapest.

Budapest is a lovely city, the combination of Buda, hilly on the right bank, with Pest, flat on the left bank. We took a morning bus tour, first through Pest and then across the river to Buda. Both are from the nineteenth century or earlier, looking much more like Paris than Bucharest did. While there is only one big public park in Pest, the avenues are wide and intersections (many triangular or circular) were surrounded by bits of grass, trees, and flowers. Multicolored buildings of many architectural styles — domes, towers of different sorts — adorned the streets. More than any other city so far, it looked lived-in, but also with an opera house that compares with the old one in Paris; a huge, tastefully ornate Parliament building; and a business district where people also lived in apartments (flats, for British readers). In Pest, we climbed to a castle, which the others visited but Robin and I — too frail for the many stairs — sat in a café guzzling ice cream and looking across at a bullet-pocked building that had been a Nazi military fort, but was later occupied by the Russians. Robin took a walk and discovered some old Roman ruins, now being uncovered.

We returned to the ship for our afternoon naps, and packing.

Now, judging only from what I have written above, what would you guess is the gross domestic product per capita of each country? GDP counts every economic good produced on the country's soil, whereas gross national product consists of all product by residents, whether they are at home or abroad. The difference is mainly foreign investment income.

Romania _________________

Bulgaria _________________

Serbia ___________________

Hungary__________________

Here is my guess:

Romania $1400

Bulgaria 1200

Serbia 1500

Hungary 3000

I looked up the official figures on the web after returning home. My friend Eddie Bernstein, who had worked for the U.S. Treasury, once told me the President wanted to know the per capita income of every country in the world. But the Treasury did not know. So the officers keeping track of each country came up with guesses. Eddie said that these guesses, sometimes revised, were the foundations of reports for many years, including by United Nations. I also recall sitting in the office of Alvaro Sancho, the national accountant in Costa Rica, who told me that when President Kennedy visited, he wanted to know the per capita GDP of Costa Rica. Several officers of the statistical agency sat in a circle and guessed; then they took the average; JFK was satisfied.

Here they are.

Romania $1643

Bulgaria 1751

Serbia 1361

Hungary 4878

Well, that's the last time I will guess. I am glad I am retired.

Sincerely your friend,

Jack Powelson