When I returned to university to study history at age 42, some were wondering what the point of studying in mid-life would be. Miguel Castillo is 80 years old and is studying history in Spain. He decided to do so after surviving a heart attack because he wanted to use the remaining time in his life more actively than the average pensioner.
This year, Mr Castillo will go to Verona for an Erasmus semester. Luckily for him – and for me – Erasmus has no age limit.
My biggest problem with Erasmus is actually that I am spoiled for choice with all the countries and universities participating.
The Revolutions Podcast is quite informative, but sadly, I have a very low tolerance towards mispronunciations, especially if every name, place and concept is pronounced as if it was located in Texas. The names of South-American revolutionaries were really not “Bowlivar” or “Sucray”.
Due to the lack of a twin study, I will never be able to discount the possibility that I am smart because I ate a lot of ‘Smarties’ in my childhood.
The theory of relativity is relatively irrelevant.
Who knew that camels also work in the snow?
As an ophidiophobic hiker, I think countries should only be allowed to join the EU once they have eliminated all snakes.
My short story about millionaire translators was quite well received in Montenegro. I was surprised because it was rather long (2350 words) and about a quirky subject.
That made me think about publishing fewer short posts (and relegating more of them into these Random Thoughts) to focus on longer and hopefully better articles.
This is the perfect week for studying:
Chancellor Merkelin a speech: “It’s time to stop mosering around.”
My name has become a verb in German, meaning “to constantly criticize”. Many readers will understand why.
Where have I heard Donald Trump’s claim about his “very good brain” before?
Tivat is different from the rest of Montenegro: more glitzy, more shiny, more expensive, more show-off. All the things I don’t like. I only go there regularly because I am trying to visit the Maritime Museum in Tivat, but it’s closed every time.
The last time, when I had a few hours to kill before the bus back to Kotor (on a nice day, you can also walk across Vrmac), I strolled along the waterfront, looking at boats. In Tivat, they don’t have real boats with cranes and containers and sailors and guns and turrets. No, they just have toy boats. Fancy toys, but no match even for the navies of Austria or Bolivia.
“Who buys such toys?” I wondered, and the answer is the same as for all other toys, like expensive cars, houses, phones and a second handbag: people who have too much money and a boring job. Drug dealers, money launderers, lawyers probably. Then I remembered that I was a lawyer, too, and that having a chat with some of the boats’ owners might be interesting.
Thus, I ventured into one of their bars (again, those in real ports like Monrovia or Dar-es-Salaam are more interesting) and looked for people who look like yacht-owners. Men, their shoes and clothes too white, as if to stress their cultural whiteness, sweaters in burgundy red or navy blue thrown over their shoulders, seemingly captivated by the little screens in their hands, but really bored, because the second I walked through the door, they all looked up simultaneously, hoping to spot an attractive woman. My looks disappointed, I couldn’t help but notice, but I was too quick. Using that split-second chance to build upon the visual connection, I cheerily greeted them: “Good afternoon, gentlemen”.
Two of them looked down on their phones, but the other two were still polite (maybe they had only recently become millionaires), returning a “hello”, even with a smile. Not having thought of a more sophisticated approach, or too occupied by maritime metaphors, I barged right in: “Are those ships outside yours?”, knowing quite well that four guys couldn’t possibly own all 60-or-so boats in the harbor.
“They are indeed,” they replied, not without some pride. Luckily, human beings are simple. If they own stuff, they like to talk about that stuff. So I just needed to ask a few questions, “which one is yours?”, “where do you go with it?”, “how long have you had it?”, “how many people can sleep on it?” and they all got excited enough to tell me everything in exact knots and fathoms and leagues.
I was curious to find out how these guys could afford their boats, so I asked: “What work do you that you can sail around the world all the time?”, although it should later turn out that they mostly sail to Bar or Herceg Novi, which they could more easily reach by bus.
“We are translators,” Marko replied, leaving me stunned, because I am a translator too, and I can’t even afford a bicycle, let alone a yacht. I explained my surprise and Mirko, Marko’s colleague, asked me what languages I translate.
“Only English and German,” I had to admit, ashamed.
They looked at me with pity, as if they were the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra of 1966 and I was a small girl with a flute, knocking on the door and saying “I want to play music too.”
“So, which languages do you all translate?” I asked, bracing myself for a list of five languages each, from Icelandic to Swahili. But like in a play that they had performed many times before, each of them mentioned just one language, fired like four consecutive and impeccably timed shots.
“Croatian.”
“Serbian.”
“Bosnian.”
“Montenegrin.”
Coinciding with the last syllable of the last language, they all had a broad grin on their faces.
“And English, obviously,” I added, for we had been conversing in that language.
“Oh, we also speak German, French and Italian,” Duško added matter-of-factly, “but that’s really not relevant for our translation business. We only translate between Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin.”
“But,” I interjected, because I prepared myself and my readers before moving to Montenegro, “that’s all Serbo-Croatian. Everybody who speaks one language understands all the others. Why …”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Now it was Ivo, the Croat, interrupting me. “Each of these languages is a distinct language. Each nation has its own territory, its own people, its own history and its own culture and language. Until not too long ago,” he added dramatically, “people died while fighting for the right to speak their own language.” Even two of his friends were looking a bit uneasy at this. I, thinking that people often choose to die for rather silly things, but not wishing to upset anyone who lost an uncle or a father or a leg in the many Yugoslav wars, was looking a bit lost myself.
Baaaam!
Ivo slammed his flat hand on the table, breaking out in laughter: “Hahaha, just kidding, man! Sit down and we’ll explain it to you.”
Uff! I was relieved as if we all had just signed the Dayton Agreement.
“Do you smoke?” Mirko asked and slid a pack of cigarettes across the table. In Montenegro, you can still smoke in restaurants and bars. “And take a look at the warning label,” he instructed me, as if I should seriously think about the threat of lung cancer before lighting up.
“Pušenje ubija,” it said, “smoking kills”. But in three languages. Or three times in the same language?
The first one is Bosnian, the second Croatian, or maybe the other way round. Nobody knows. Can you see the difference between the two? No, me neither.
The last one is Serbian, written in Cyrillic, but it says exactly the same: “Pušenje ubija.”
“You are old enough to remember the Yugoslav wars?” Duško asked, kindly overlooking my grey hair.
“Yes.”
“Well, then you know that many people died. Many people lost their homes, many lost families, some even split from their wives or husbands because they were Serbian or Croatian and suddenly didn’t get along anymore. Until a year before, they had all been happy Yugoslavs and one day, whoom, everything changed and they destroyed a beautiful country. But in the end,” he continued, the others lowering their gaze and looking somber, “all the borders remained like they had been in Yugoslav times. Nobody had gained anything.”
“Except independence.”
“Yes, but Yugoslavia was finished anyway, just like the Soviet Union or East Germany. It was economics, nobody needed a war for that. But people don’t fight against inflation or for productivity, they don’t care about trade balances or the GDP. People only fight for concepts like fatherland and mother tongue, although their fathers and mothers had built a single nation with all the other fathers and mothers.”
“It all started with Croatia,” Ivo said, almost proud. “We were the first to ditch Serbo-Croatian, or Croato-Serbian as we had always called it. Of course we still spoke as we spoke before, but suddenly we called it Croatian and pretended that it was completely different from Serbian.”
“And there are some minor differences,” Mirko conceded, “regional variations, like you have between British and American English or between Austrian German and German German. They are mutually intelligible, but during the break-up, nationalists suddenly stressed the few words that were different. It would be like someone arguing that Austrian and German are completely different languages because the Austrians say ‘Paradeiser’ where you say ‘Tomate’.”
I had never heard that Austrians have a different word for ‘tomato’, but I knew that in Serbo-Croatian, the vegetable is called ‘paradajz‘, confirming a long-held suspicion that Austria is actually part of the Balkans.
“But if everybody could still understand everybody else, why would anyone need translators?” I asked.
“Because nationalists are so stupid that they believe the nonsense they sprout. So, suddenly, the Croatian government couldn’t read documents or newspapers from Serbia anymore. Soon thereafter, Bosnia-Herzegovina wanted to be independent as well, called its language Bosnian and couldn’t read or write in Serbian or Croatian anymore.”
“And that’s where we came in,” Marko continued. “We came from different parts of Yugoslavia and were studying philology in Nikšić in the 1990s. We were happy to be in Montenegro because this was really the most relaxed part of Yugoslavia, where no Serb would shoot at a Croat, no Croat at a Bosniak, and nobody even at an Albanian. Maybe it was the Nikšić beer that kept everyone peaceful, I don’t know. But we were close to graduation and we sure as hell didn’t want to die for Vukovar or Sarajevo. Out of pure fun, and maybe desperation, we opened our own company of translators, offering to translate Serbian, Croatian and later Bosnian. It was actually meant as a means of protest, to show how silly that linguistic nationalism was.”
“And, did anyone hire you?” I asked, suspecting the answer as I glanced out at the boats moored in the marina.
“Yes!! Like crazy! We couldn’t believe it! Immediately after we sent out offers to government agencies, municipalities, publishing houses and so on, we got more work than we could handle. Nobody in Croatia wanted to read anything in Serbian anymore, so we had to translate laws, announcements, press releases, newspapers. All we had to do was to transcribe the Cyrillic letters into Latin letters. Of course we outsourced all that work to the younger students at the faculty, whom we paid a little bit.”
“And it got even better when the war moved to Bosnia, because there was suddenly a third language, which was in reality basically identical to Croat. Sometimes we just changed some words to justify our invoices.”
“So if the languages are now really different, it’s actually your fault?”, I joked.
“You could say so,” Mirko smiled. “But we have the same excuse as the people who supplied arms and ammunition: If we hadn’t done it, somebody else would have done it.”
“It got even funnier when IFOR and SFOR came to Bosnia-Herzegovina after 1995. We offered our services as interpreters and they always had to pay at least for two of us, because we would say that only one of us spoke Bosnian and the other one Serbian, for example. We got to ride around in Humvees and sometimes even in helicopters, it was great fun.”
“Until we saw the first dead bodies,” Ivo remarked, and the whole table fell silent.
Trying to cheer things up, Duško said: “Remember that one time when there was a Spanish NATO soldier who had been born in Croatia? He didn’t buy our bullshit, of course. But what was worse, he thought we were nationalistic idiots ourselves, refusing to understand the other ‘languages’. We had to tell him that we were just in it for the money.”
“Luckily, he was a cool guy. ‘Well, the more money these new countries here spend on translators, the less they can spend on landmines,’ he said. But we had to pay him off.”
“So you must have been the only people in ex-Yugoslavia who were not happy when the wars were over?”, I tried to joke.
“Believe me, there were many people not happy about it, and they were earning much more than us.” How naive my question had been, how little I knew and how different our lives had been, just because I had been born 1000 km to the north. They had made millions, but lost their country, their innocence and their belief in humanity.
“And the work was actually not over, because all these new countries needed to renegotiate international treaties and wanted translations of the old treaties concluded by Yugoslavia. Then there was the EU accession of Croatia. And then came the internet and every town wanted to have a website. In Bosnia, this is the best business, because they want to have their websites in Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian and sometimes in English. We can charge for three translations.”
“This is an ongoing business,” added Duško. “We have a contract with the City of Mostar, for example. They have one of those quadrilingual websites. They don’t even realize that it’s exactly the same, because the Bosnian mayor only ever looks at the Bosnian version, his Serb colleague only at the Serbian version, and the Croat one only at the Croatian version. But Bosnia-Herzegovina is a messed-up state anyway. Even if they want to plant trees in a park, they will hire three gardeners from the three ethnicities.”
“And thank God for Montenegro!” Marko explained it: “In 2006, Montenegro was the last state to become independent, and in 2009 they added two new letters to the alphabet and called it ‘Montenegrin’. Of course we were the first to apply for all the ‘translations’, and because we had studied in Montenegro, we got that contract. So now, all we do is add diacritical marks to the S and the Z, and the Republic of Montenegro is happy.”
“Thank God also for Croatia!”, Ivo added. “With Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia applying to enter the EU, guess who insists on all their documents being translated into Croatian? We will have work for years to come.”
“But there is a danger on the horizon!” Mirko sounded worried. “A group of linguists have just published a manifesto, explaining that our four languages are actually just regional variants of one language. They even pointed to the burden of translation costs, directly attacking our business model.”
“And to be honest,” added Marko, “they are right. But luckily for us, such decisions are not made by professors and scientists, but by politicians.”
“Živjeli!” They all raised their glasses, and I was happy about having learned a lot and that at least some of the profiteers of the ex-Yugoslav wars were quite nice guys. But I still didn’t understand what was the point of buying boats if you never used them to go to Fiji or Easter Island. Maybe living in countries that constantly split up makes you worried about being gone for too long.
In Montenegro, hiking trails are not only marked with colors (always red and white, but I am not sure if that means that all the trails are connected). In addition, wherever the path forks, cats are positioned whose job is to ensure that you don’t get lost.
If you take the wrong path, the cat will protest loudly. If the cat realizes that you are new to the area, it will accompany you for part of the way.
Each cat works in a designated area. For example, almost every time I climb to the fortress above Kotor, I meet this cat. By now, it already recognizes me and greets me happily, always walking the same stretch of the way next to me. But never all the way to the top, nor all the way into town on the way back. It has its own territory, for which it feels responsible.
Everywhere in the world, people put up posters and notices when they have lost their own dog or cat.
In Bolivia, when people have found someone else’s dog, they go to great lengths to print color posters and distribute them all over town, in an attempt to reunite the dog and its owner, not forgetting to reassure the unknown owner that they will take care of the dog in the meantime and that the dog is relaxed.
Some clients are better not having. When you find out that someone takes up too much time or causes you a headache, it’s often the best thing to fire that client. Whenever I did that, clients were surprised: “But you can’t fire me!” Of course I can. We have a contract and I can terminate that contract.
Over time, one becomes quite good at spotting these querulous clients and doesn’t take them on in the first place. Let’s look at one such example which conveys a lot of the warning signs that lawyers should be on the look-out for:
From: justizcase@…
That’s a red flag already, an e-mail address just for this case. I have seen e-mails from ilovemybabyboy@… in child custody cases, mrinnocent@… in criminal cases and againstcorruptjudges@… Clients don’t seem to understand that we sometimes need to print out e-mails and submit them as evidence. Oh, by the way, you can’t imagine how many e-mail printouts from sexyvictoria@… and bigb00bs@… I have had to submit in family law cases. And yes, you can reach me at andreas@hot-shot-lawyer.com.
Re: query help with claim to european court and or claim against behorde in Berlin
That’s the biggest red flag already in the subject line!
People who want to go to the Supreme Court or “the European Court” (which one?) or “the International Court” (which one? with even more options) are always wackos and never pay their lawyer’s bill. Yes, always and never.
First, you can’t usually address the highest court without having gone through all lower courts. Second, I always ask clients: “Why do you plan from the outset to go the European Court of Human Rights? You can only do that if you lose at all previous levels. Why would that be your plan A?” It turns out they want to fight against “the system” and give their life a purpose. This seems highly attractive to conspiracy nuts, but I have a feeling we’ll get to this.
dear Mr Moser, I hve been looking for help for some months.
Meaning you have already annoyed dozens of other people.
I have posted on some international law school sites
Ah yes, as suspected. By the way, what’s an “international law school”?
to try and find someone to help with what has amounted to serious breaches of EU law
Of course. Very serious. But not serious enough to quote the law allegedly breached.
involving corrupt Judges, corrupt lawyers that quite frankly stitched me up and their actions left me on the street penniless and nearly dead with lost possessions.
And here we have the promised conspiracy theory. The whole “system” is in cahoots to conspire against the innocent victim, who will relentlessly fight against corruption, or at least relentlessly spam any lawyer whose e-mail address they can find.
at the moment I still am and need to find a lawyer again in Munich. I was in Berlin last year. Unfortunately not having much luck.
Whenever you are the third or fourth lawyer on a case, something is wrong with the client.
my submissions submitted to sz gericht this time, were done on a prono basis and expected a good outcome. the judge however has relied on the fabricated and fraudulent informaton from the jobcenter and ignored our evidence.
Again the conspiracy. Because a judge simply having a different opinion or interpreting the law differently is not enough.
“Jobcenter” refers to the German unemployment agency, so now I know that the case probably centers on benefits denied.
now i have no one representing me and the order made that the sozialamt pay me for two months pending a further decison, they have not even paid that. that happened last year in berlin as well by the way. also the lawyer had asked the court to make an urgent order for a pension for me, and although the court said I should try to sort this out with the sozialamt, nothing has happend and I am still homeless.
That sounds like a problem indeed, but it would just be so much more credible if it could be conveyed in a calm manner and without believing that the justice system of the Federal Republic of Germany is conspiring against a poor lady by not paying her for two months. (Although admittedly, mistakes are made and laws are misapplied by the unemployment agency. But the reason we know this is that courts usually rectify it.)
MY LIFE HAS BEEN PUT AT RISK REPEATEDLY:
I was already worried there wouldn’t be a single sentence in all caps.
the claim to the behorde is an option to the european court
Which European Court? And why would the European Union or the Council of Europe be concerned with a small dispute about unemployment benefits?
but I have suffered so much this past year.. someone has to pay for this unlawfulness.
This is a typical motivation of querulous clients. It’s often less about their own advantage or benefit, but about making someone else pay, and if only by holding up the whole state bureaucracy by writing letters every day.
But remember this: if you are a lawyer and you accept such a case, it’s always yourself who will end up paying.
Ana E[…]
The best way to deal with such requests is to delete and ignore them. The second best way is to quote a fee that you know they cannot pay. So I replied:
Dear Ana,
unfortunately I charge 400 EUR for a consultation.
To which Ana replied:
I see. Can you suggest someeone. surely you could be compensated through the money that I would get from behorde, you could take a fee from that.
Like the previous lawyers?
high prosepct of success.
Ah yes. Hence all the winning.
was told they have to pay the rent that was never paid etc, or can you suggest how I can get referred to a probono firm that does this sort of case, as it could well be a test case etc.
You’ve been looking around the internet for months, e-mailing anyone who can’t run away fast enough, yet you are still asking me to refer you to someone? And why would I burden my lawyer friends with referrals like that? Unlike me, they don’t have a funny blog for which they are gathering material.
When people think their case is important enough to be a “test case” (which contradicts the “high prospect of success”), they almost always overestimate their case. And, either way, even test cases need to be paid for. I may eat a test cake for free, but your case sure doesn’t look like cake to me.
I still not even know what the last decison of the landesozialgericht says and one one will tell me it is bizarre,
Oh. So your analysis of “high prospect of success” is based on a court decision that you haven’t read?
I asked the previous lawyer but lawyers are strange in germany, they feel they do not need to explain or discuss things or tell clients who are non german speaking what is in them.
Yeah, we only work when we get paid. Really strange.
I will do it myself if you would be so kind as to tell me or send me a format template pleaes for claiming against the behorde in Licthtenberg.
Sorry, there are no templates for highly important test cases. Also, a template is not enough to fight a wall of corruption.
I am entitled to those monies in order to get my stuff back from the landlord. that is a serious breach of article 8.
Article 8 of what? Ok, probably of the European Convention on Human Rights (which is not EU law, as claimed above). But if I wasn’t such a hot-shot lawyer, who could guess?
would you be at least willing to tell m ethe paragraph in the decision relating to the money, what it says please ?
I don’t know, I haven’t received or seen any court decision. (None was ever attached.)
But in any case, we had a different problem, which I pointed out to the lady:
No, I can’t do anything unless I get paid.
This was some time ago. I unearthed the correspondence now because I have recently begun to publish more of these stories on my blog. Out of curiosity, I e-mailed justizcase@…, innocently inquiring about the outcome of the case. To which she replied:
none of your business.
fuck off or I will report you.
To whom?
Thank Fck I dont live in Fascist Racist Germany
Well, thank Fck (whoever that is) that I was smart enough not to help.
Sadly, the courts don’t have that choice.
By the way, all the e-mails from people who compare the contemporary German justice system to Nazi jurisprudence would fill another article.
The Happy Hermit 