It’s 11.30 on a working day and cafes are full…

Of course this wouldn’t quite so surprising if you didn't know that the average net salary in Serbia was roughly €300 and the unemployment rate around 20 per cent. So with that in mind, spending 250 dinars for a Plasma Shake is actually quite expensive.

So, on a sunny working day morning, I decided to drop by some popular cafes on Knez Mihailova, Obilicev Venac and Strahinjica Bana to find out what everyone wants to know: where do Serbs find the time and money to spend all day drinking lattes and espressos?

My first objective was to find the stereotypical 'whole-day-sitting-in-a-café' individual. I asked a waiter what kind of people hung out in cafes at 11.30a.m. on working days. The answer was simple “everyone”. And indeed this was true: I met students, the unemployed, regular workers taking a coffee break and retirees.

The common reaction was to claim that this was part of Serbian culture, and was simply showing that Serbs enjoy having a good time.

However, whist this was mostly considered something positive, it wasn’t always the case.

A law student in his twenties explained to me that so many employed people are sitting in cafés during the day because of what he said was “low work ethics”.

Most people sitting outside, he told me, are supposed to be working, but they simply take breaks during the day, as they don’t feel any responsibility to their work.

A young Serbian architect went further, linking this attitude to consequences of Ottoman Empire domination and communism. He defined this low work ethics as a post-communist legacy.   

A waiter in a restaurant near Knez Mihailova agreed that this attitude toward work had a deeper meaning. He told me that Serbs were disappointed with the government and the system and that they don’t see why they should work hard for a system they don’t believe in. “Taking long coffee breaks from work is just showing their contempt for this rotten system”, he explained.

But the funny thing was that the ones commenting on poor work ethics were also the ones who were supposed to be working but who were taking coffee breaks instead.

I then turned to students, to find out where they get the money to spend all day long in cafes, knowing that finding the time probably wasn’t a problem for them.

The students seemed quite surprised by my question, and simply answered that drinks weren’t that expensive and didn’t represent a large part of their budget. Back home in Switzerland where I was a student, I know I didn’t have the money to do this, but apparently in Serbia things are different.

It was suggested to me that parents spoil their children and give them a lot of money to enjoy themselves. According to a middle-aged woman I met in Obilicev Venac, this is the case. She told me that in Belgrade a lot of young unemployed and students have the money to spend so much time in cafes because traditionally, parents look after their children until a very late age. 

This she said meant that many of the young unemployed aren’t actively looking for work, as they have enough money to keep up their lifestyles, living in their parents’ apartment and enjoying life. If they did find a job they would have such a low salary that they believe it’s not even worth looking, she told me.  

It was time to get some hard data, I decided to look for some official statistics. I wasn’t wrong: The Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia reports that Serbs spend almost 45 per cent of their incomes on food, alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages, cigarettes and restaurants.

By comparison I checked how much Swiss citizens spent on the same products: It turns out it is barely 15 % of income. OK, so it's well known that richer countries spend less in percentage terms on food and beverages, but even when compared with countries with similar incomes, Serbia’s percentage was way higher.

So, I looked through the receipts I'd been collecting lately to see how I had been doing since I arrived here three months ago and I realised I’m nearer to the Serbian average than to the Swiss average. I guess that means I am well integrated.