It's a brand new thing. I mean the warning. The practice of shrinking the product instead of raising price is a traditional practice (in the past quarter century or so) like anywhere else.

FFS

We need a better lingua franca.

 

t. otherwise an anglophile atlantic supremacist (but shit is getting ridiculous, I swear)

 

 

Hungary is an odd place, you can meet the kindest people alongside the rudest motherfuckers (save for S*rbs) to the west of Belgorod in there. Nowhere else have I experienced such a cognitive dissonance (Austria is similar, but there it's more like you expect a mini-Germany and receive a vatnik paradise instead).

comfy

elaborate plox???

People are extremely nasty in attitude (from the clerks, through the cops, to the service sector in hotels, restaurants, shops etc.), like in the ex-Eastern Bloc, there's Russian propaganda everywhere on the TV and in the press, commieblock neighbourhoods at the margins of all cities and towns, trash all over the place. It's like an Eastern European country from the 90s outside the urban centres, in short.

P. S. von Metternich once said "Balkans begin at Ringstrasse" or something along those lines, obviously having the non-German parts of Austria-Hungary in mind, but in my impression this bait is much more applicable to Austria nowadays, lol.

Interesting. Austria was one of the "middleman" capitalist countries for the USSR alongside Finland, but I never looked deep into it and don't understand much when it comes to the reasons of this connection.

Yes, they were "fencesitters" in geopolitical terms throughout the Cold War, but unlike Finland it seems that there was a rather different balance of powers in there. I'm not very familiar with the situation on the ground, so to speak, and my impressions are that of a tourist, but I was kind of shocked by the overall social atmosphere of this country in the middle of Europe, not gonna lie.

Moar liek they were put onto the fence to sit on. In '53 Austria's occupation by the powers (England, France, SU, US) ended, and they basically agreed on that Austria remains neutral. Then Austrians made it part of their new identity, "we are neutral like Switzerland" and since then they still not entered NATO.

a man so based he got banned from his city's bus system

der klassiker :D

I lived there a few years, can confirm. It was during Ibizagate too when the Russians were buying the press in Vienna.

There are still a lot of connections with the USSR because of neutrality, but also the agreements in place with the USSR after Stalin died iirc. Most former Soviet embassies are allowed to actively harass citizens of their home countries for whatever reason too (Belarus threatens refugees all the time in former Soviet Vienna where their embassy is by driving a few black cars at people they identify from protests).