Guide to life in Serbia for absolute beginners

Etnography is a wonderful science. It allows you to look from a distance, while being on the spot. Ethnology is far harder; it demands that you make sense of what ethnography wrote down, and you don't even get to travel much.

Which is why I prefer ethnography, no scientific method is required. Having been many years in the US, now that I'm back in Serbia I can try to see it through American eyes, and write what I see. Just how I wrote about the US while I was there, it's all about the things you'll never see in movies, even foreign. Imagine you actually watched a foreign movie... not a movie happening abroad, but one made abroad, by natives - well, this covers the things that wouldn't be in that movie, as natives would take them for granted.

A few introductory words on the notation used.

For one, the date format I use is the old Yugoslav dd-RRR-yyyy, where RRR is the Roman numeral for the month. Also, the names of the months in the left frame are in Serbian (which shouldn't be a problem, it's the same Latin), and the day has, quite unbelievably, 24 hours. Not 12+12, but 24. And 14:37 is not military format - 1437 (fourteen hundred thirty seven) is military, this is the simple European civil format (reads "fourteen [and] thirtyseven")

Also, all measures are metric. Nobody knows your bushels, rods, stones, Fahrenheits and pounds.