In the city of the European man there is peace. Pollution is kept under control, law is obeyed and authority respected, people are generous and kind to their peers. In the city of the European man inequality does not exist, nor discrimination. Corruption is forgotten. Sound fake yet? Feels even faker writing it.

Let me ask you one question. Have you ever, even for curiosity, traveled by tram? Yes, the light train with rails that runs through your city, the one which people run after every morning of the week to get to their jobs. Well, if you ever used one of those you might have noticed how grim people’s faces look in the morning. Tired, bored, black…black seems to veil everyone, and it’s not because of the season fashion trend. These people don’t care if they are European, I doubt very much that they care about Europe because they’re too busy merely surviving. This doesn’t feel like Europe, not really. Sure, we belong to the same continent, but not the same world. You can see this in every person that has been abroad, especially people who have gone there to work, legally or illegally – this is another matter. It’s simply about the way of life, about the idea of how you should live it, and not just work your way through it. Here people don’t have little tags attached to their skins saying “Citizen of Europe”. Here you might even find, beneath one of these people’s rags, some brilliant professor who has changed your life and has taught you to think. Rags however are a little unflattering for anyone so it’s easy to mistake a person wearing them for a beggar. And, trust me, there are quite a few beggars.

Human rights you say? Where? Because most of the time you can only see a hunger for money. Even in these people, these beggars; they’re usually children coming from rroma families – but not only, or young women carrying babies. Since Christmas is coming, they’ve already started on their annual carols repertoire. Some of them have incredible voices, although their grammar is often terrible. Campaigns made in our country for stopping this phenomenon have put out some numbers which transform begging into quite a thriving business. Education is not that much of a priority. In this part of Europe, it’s not that hard to believe that a beggar with little or no education can win more than a teacher with two university degrees. It’s not that hard to believe that parents leave their children to go work abroad for years in a row, just so that they can give the youngsters a better life. And it’s a bit annoying that you can’t do this in your own country. Just a little bit. It’s not a surprise, then, that you have people who lived under the communist regime saying those times were better. Some still believe they are.

Is there possibility for change then? Are we good? Yeah, we’re good. Despite all this chaos, despite all these problems and despite all this poverty, you can still meet beautiful people, sometimes in the most unexpected places at the most unexpected times. Any if there is something that overcomes the problems of Europe, it is its beauty, the beauty of its people.

Things can change, but it requires lots of energy. It’s elections day on this 6-th of December so let’s hope we will have plenty of energy today. It would be a good thing to see those signs saying “coffins non-stop”, that you encounter in some places here, change into something more cheerful, so that we can all live hopefully ever after.