Mike used to work in the Belgrade Zoo. He and his mother owned a souvenir shop near the elephants. They were called Boy and Twiggy. There was also an old man there who talked to the elephants, but once an elephant picked him up and threw him. I can’t remember why. It sounds like it would have been an awesome job, before Serbia hit their slump.
Now all of Europe seems to be in a slump, but for different reasons. I suppose the end result is the same – the economy sucks, skilled & educated people move away to find better opportunities, people can’t spend as much money, industry slows, unemployment climbs… it’s depressing. Greatly depressing. See what I did there? But seriously, I don’t mean to make light of their situation.
Today Tim and I went shopping. We finished off the city shopping and headed to Haymarket to check out the el cheapo stuff at Paddy’s. On a side note, Tim said that the new Christmas ad for Paddy’s Markets is even more disturbing than the normal green-bag-butt-wiggling one – in the Christmas one, it apparently looks like the dad bag is shooting stars out his ass. 
Also, the ad for Paddy’s says ‘…you haven’t been to markets ’til you’ve been to Paddy’s…’ which is patently untrue. I used to go to the Yamba markets all the time. Sometimes the Maclean ones, but they were held in a car park and once my sister got accused by a stallholder of stealing a ring (she didn’t), so there was always some awkwardness there. Plus, at the Yamba ones, we got little plastic tubes of honey from the honey stall.
Anyway, we stopped off at Morning Glory on our way and they had little pencil case type things which looked like different sorts of currencies. One of the currencies available was Deutschmarks. I commented that Deutschmarks is a defunct currency, and Tim said that it might end up being reinstated if the crisis in Europe worsens. I think that would be worst-case-scenario territory, and Tim agrees, but I never even considered the Euro might be dropped. It would be a huge undertaking, and much worse for some countries than others.
I don’t really know enough about the way it’s structured to say too much more on the subject. I’m sure Tim could enlighten me, but my brain would have to be in optimum order for that to work, and it’s just not happening right now.
Well, the return of deutschemarks is a worst case scenario, and in the parlance of the industry what we would call a tail risk (or long shot for non-financial or statistics types). But the tail is getting fatter…
On other matters, that Paddy’s ad is disturbing, both for the arse-stars and the green bag arse-crack, and also the fact that some sicko came up with that and thought it would be a good way to advertise the markets!