PRO #5: Hospitality?

I've been seeing all this praise of serbian hospitality over the internet mostly by foreigners who have traveled here. They usually have some kind of prejudice before coming to Serbia and then end up surprised when they get to know people. Not only prejudice about Serbia, but of the whole eastern Europe, since media portrays the situation here in a bad way most of the time (like we're still in war over here or something). Well the situation isn't all that great, as you've seen from my previous posts, but Serbs have learned to get the best of it sometimes.

So this hospitality thing mostly has to do with interaction with tourists here and the way they're welcomed. But of course, we can be hospitable to each other, although there are so many different kinds of people not only here, but everywhere, that you can't really generalize these things.

I happen to know one guy from Italy who helped me understand this hospitality praise a bit more (since I live here, so can't really notice it). He loves Serbia so much, that he speaks serbian better than most of the people here, I was shocked. But he kept denying it and saying he still has to learn a lot and insisted on talking in english (although we could have easily continued the conversation in serbian). He also looked more like a Serb, than an Italian, which was funny to me, since it looked like he adopted some of the characteristics of serbian people. In the beginning I though it was some kind of joke and that he was actually serbian, but no.

We met in the bus when I was going to Italy to meet up with my boyfriend and he was coming back home from Serbia. I asked him what the reason was for his trip to Serbia on what he replied 'On no particular reason, I just love to spend my time there'. My reaction was something like 'Are you serious?'. He continued talking how much he loves Serbs because of our laid-back and positive attitude and how friendly and easy to talk to we actually are, in comparison to people from many other countries. He proceeded to show me these pictures of serbian flags hung all over his apartment, I almost started laughing. 'Wow, he really does love Serbia', I thought. He told me he even has more friends here than in Italy. I agreed with most of the things he said, but I also told him that maybe he would not like it here that much if he was a permanent resident haha. So we continued to exchange our views on things and he eventually convinced me and opened my eyes a bit. Serbian people can be sceptical at first and stare at you if you happen to be a foreigner, but when they get to know you and vice versa, they really open up. Anyway, we stayed in contact and are good friends to this day.

Also you can see how hospitable we are when this immigrant crisis was in full swing. Serbs really stood up for these people who were crossing and gave their best to help them out. If only we were like that to each other more often, things maybe wouldn't be so bad here after all.